by Leo Kessler
‘Boshe moi,’ he cursed, grateful that he need search no longer. ALL the Fritzes were dead. ‘Let me get some air.’ He turned, and keeping his gaze averted, worked his way past the headless horror of the radio operator and was just about to drop out of the door when he heard the soft groan.
He instinctively flashed up his pistol and swung round.
In the gloom of the tail area, a man clad in a thick leather flying suit, his head swathed in a blood-soaked helmet, lay groaning softly. It was a Fritz and he was alive. Hastily the Sotnik slipped his pistol into its holster and bent down to remove the bloody helmet. The young blond German’s eyes flickered open momentarily and he murmured: ‘Danke.’
The Sotnik shook his head ruefully and whispered, as if talking to himself, ‘Don’t thank me German... You’ve got to face Ivan the Terrible now....’
*
Schulze clicked to attention smartly. ‘Beg to report to the Obersturmbannfuhrer,’ he snapped in the old-fashioned style of military address once used in the Kaiser’s Army, ‘Two food bombs recovered containing two hundred and fifty cans of Old Man and eighty-eight packets of hard-tack. One crate of Iron Crosses, second class.’
Peiper grinned and said, adopting the old style too, ‘Pray continue, simple soldier.’
‘A container of medical supplies, with a special compartment, which contained approximately three hundred contraceptives, trademark “Volcano”.’
Next to Schulze, Matz groaned and said in mock anguish, ‘What does the High Command expect us to do — fuck the Popovs to death!’
Again Peiper grinned, while the Little Napoleon at his side looked on puzzled at the too rapid German. ‘Well the Parisians might be useful if you common soldiers do not want to get yon German maiden in good hope.’ He indicated Gerda, again clad in her fighting gear, complete with Army dice-beakers and steel helmet. She simpered and demurely lowered her eyes.
Peiper’s grin vanished. ‘And anything else?’ he demanded, suddenly businesslike again.
‘This, sir. For officers’ eyes only.’ Schulze handed Peiper the small weighted canvas sack which he had concealed behind his back.
Almost greedily, Peiper broke the seal. It was what he had been waiting for ever since he had sent the radio message. He thrust open the neck and pulled out the first object: a small expensive-looking blue box with his name neatly printed on it. He knew what it contained and wasn’t interested. With his thumbnail he ripped off his own name and handed it to Little Napoleon. ‘The German Cross in Gold, Major. For you!’
Schulze winked at Matz. ‘Old Peiper’s got a cupboard full of the Fried Egg Order. He don’t need another one.’
While Little Napoleon proudly pinned the flamboyant medal with its great swastika centre-piece on his chest, Peiper rummaged deeper into the bag until he found what he sought: an operational order, written on the familiar yellow army form.
Hastily he opened it, noting that it bore the normal formula: Geheime Reichssache. His eyes flashed through it, while the others watched him expectantly, noting how the look of excitement on his lean handsome face changed to one of slight bewilderment and finally to a worried frown when he had finished it.
‘Bad news, sir?’ Schulze asked finally when Peiper did not speak after a few moments.
Peiper did not seem to hear.
‘Isn’t my friend the Fuhrer going to help us, Colonel?’ Golden Pheasant asked anxiously.
‘Oh yes,’ Peiper shook his head, as if he were trying to remember exactly where he was. ‘That he is. But not, I am afraid, in the manner we have all anticipated.’ He thrust the message into his blouse and touched his hand to his rakishly tilted cap, as Schulke and Matz clicked to attention. ‘But please excuse me, meine Herren, I have some urgent planning to do now.’
And with that enigmatic remark, he strode back to the shattered HQ, leaving them all staring at his slim back in complete bewilderment....
THREE
Alongside the whole wall of the farmhouse HQ there was the ruins of the New Year feast, a stained damask table-cloth, looted from somewhere or other, hanging to the floor, purple with wine stains. Opposite it, the great old-fashioned fireplace was littered with broken glass, as was the floor in front of it where the officers had missed the fireplace as the toasts had grown more frequent and they had become more drunk.
Now the few survivors of the traditional New Year’s Eve drinking bout swayed visibly in the middle of the room, as Ivan the Terrible performed his last trick of that long boozy night..
Naked to the waist to reveal a chest matted with hair, from stomach to Adam’s apple, he crouched with his knees up to his chin.
A major who had not drunk as much as the rest pushed the stick behind his bended knees. He put his arms around it and clasped his hands so that the stick lay tightly between his knees and elbows. Finally he indicated the major could tie his hands together with a leather Army belt. ‘You can lift me now, and by the Black Virgin of Kazan don’t drop me,’ Ivan the Terrible proclaimed and hawking deeply spat fairly accurately into the glass-littered fireplace.
Half-a-dozen officers took the strain and heaved up the Cossack officer’s massive bulk so that they could prop the two ends of the thick stick on two tables.
The marshal, bald, ugly and barrel-chested like most of his kind, looked with bleary-eyes at his pocket watch. ‘All right,’ he said thickly, slurring the word drunkenly, ‘begin — now!’ Immediately the other officers started to rotate the Cossack on the stick like a wheel. Faster and faster. Time and time again Ivan the Terrible’s head missed smacking into the dirty floor by millimetres. The room whirled around him crazily until he thought the marshal would never call time.
‘Stop!’ the marshal commanded.
Quickly the laughing cheering officers lowered the stick and untied the belt. Ivan the Terrible caught himself from collapsing to the floor just in time.
The marshal laughed. ‘All right, point the Cossack blow-hard in the direction of the vodka.’
Willing hands grabbed Ivan and held him upright, as the world swung by him crazily.
‘There!’ someone cried.
Ivan the Terrible caught a wild swaying glimpse of the vodka bottle and then he was off, staggering madly from side to side, going down to his knees more than once, while his comrades hooted and jeered, wanting him to fail, his face brick-red as if he might have a stroke at any moment, the sweat pouring down his hairy chest and glistening in the thick black hair like pearls. Just before he collapsed on the floor, dragging the table down with him, he grabbed the bottle, but missed the neck, swilling vodka all over his chest to the cheers and applause of the few officers who had wanted him to succeed. He had done it again. He had shown these wet-arsed foot-sloggers what a real Don Cossack was made of.
‘Enough,’ the marshal cried, sick now of games. ‘The party’s over comrades. Pull down the black-out curtains. Let us have light.’
Obediently, several of his staff did as he commanded and the hard blood-red light of the early morning streamed in, making several of them blink and realize for the first time just how drunk they really were.
The marshal raised his glass. ‘Comrades,’ he announced solemnly. ‘Let us drink to 1943. Slava krasnaya armya!’
‘Long live the Red Army!’ a dozen hoarse voices growled and glass after glass flew towards the fireplace exploding with a splinter of broken glass.
‘Voda!’ the marshal commanded, pointing to the Cossack still sprawled on the floor, eyes closed trying to regain his balance. ‘The Cossack stallion needs watering.’
The major laughed and seizing a fire bucket, flung its contents over the big Cossack.
He sat up abruptly, head completely clear once more, coughing and spluttering and glaring angrily at the grinning marshal.
‘All right, Cossack,’ the marshal said, undeterred by the angry glare. ‘Tell your story once again.’
Grumpily, wiping the water from his bearded face, Ivan the Terrible rose to his feet and related th
e same tale he had told the assembled staff six hours before, just before the start of the drunken New Year’s Eve orgy. He told them how the Fritzs down in the besieged town had been ordered to form a column and make preparations for a break-out to the west, as soon as conditions were favourable.
The marshal and the rest of his staff listened in silence, but the looks on their fat soft, rear-echelon faces told the Cossack that they did not quite believe him.
‘But are you sure that this Fritz flyboy was telling the truth, Cossack?’ the marshal asked when he had finished his account. ‘It might have been something the Fritz made up to fool us.’
Ivan laughed maliciously. ‘I doubt it, Comrade Marshal. After they have had a couple of tastes of the knout, Cossack prisoners don’t lie.’
The marshal frowned. In his youth as a revolutionary with Lenin, he had enjoyed that particular pleasure himself more than once when Czar’s Cossacks had charged him and fellow demonstrators. The sudden thought hardened his attitude to the big bastard, who was now pulling on his lice-ridden shirt, pausing only to take a deep slug at the vodka bottle. ‘Your prisoner might have, you know. The Fritzes do not lack courage.’
Ivan the Terrible shrugged carelessly. ‘It’s the truth, Comrade Marshal.’
The marshal frowned and scratched his shaven skull perplexed. ‘But it sounds wrong. Not even Hitler could be that foolish. If we catch them out in the open with the handful of armour at their disposal, the Fritzes will be massacred.’
‘But that’s what the Fritz prisoner said they had been ordered to do by the Fuhrer’s HQ,’ Ivan the Terrible said doggedly, knowing that they were all against him. ‘Horse’s arses,’ he told himself contemptuously. ‘The marshal says crap, and they all bend their knees and crap their britches!’
‘But doesn’t it sound wrong to you, too, Cossack?’ the marshal persisted.
‘No. The Fritzes do a lot of things that no normal person would do — at least a Cossack wouldn’t do,’ Ivan could not resist the dig.
The marshal frowned again and walked to the window, which was covered in glittering leaf patterns with frost. He stared at them, as if they were of great importance before turning and saying: ‘Well, what do you suggest we do, Cossack?’
The big bearded soldier snorted angrily, ‘What Cossacks have always done, Comrade Marshal.’
‘And what is that, Cossack?’ the marshal asked, mildly amused by the other man’s indignation.
‘Ride to the sound of the guns, Comrade Marshal. When the Fritzes come out, we should be waiting for them.’
‘Horoscho. Then that is what will be done,’ the marshal decided.
‘We will march?’
The marshal shook his head and winked at his staff. ‘Not we, Cossack, but you.’ He held his hand in warning, as Ivan the Terrible’s face started to break into an evil smile. ‘But remember, the Fritzes have something up their sleeve. What it is I do not know, but they are not coming out just like that. Not the Fuhrer’s beloved SS....’
*
It was virtually the same thought that was running through Schulze’s brain, as he sat on the straw-strewn floor opposite Matz, a couple of kilometres away from the Russians, while all around them the excited Wotan troopers cleaned and greased their weapons ready for the big break-out, chattering among themselves and discussing Peiper’s announcement.
‘They’re bound to stick one on us, Matzi, as soon as we leave the cover of this place,’ he said to his running-mate, his brow creased in a worried frown.
‘Peiper ain’t the one to just let go out there and get our arses chopped off,’ Matz protested.
‘The Fuhrer commands, we obey,’ Schulze quoted the popular wartime saying.
‘Ner,’ Matz said scornfully, ‘Peiper isn’t like that. There was something else in that message the flyboys dropped. He’s got something up his sleeve.’
‘Yer, his arm, you little peg-legged nit,’ Schulze answered cynically, and reaching out for his machine pistol, settled down to greasing it carefully, telling himself he was soon going to be needing it in perfect working order.
*
Peiper frowned at the map, while Little Napoleon and the Golden Pheasant watched him in worried silence. For more than an hour now since he had made his announcement to the troops that they had been ordered by the Fuhrer to make a break-out to the west and the river line, he had been considering the pros and cons of the daring operation.
Daylight would ensure that the support Hitler had promised him would be present. But how could he ensure that the morrow would not bring snowstorms, fogs, or overcast skies which would make that support impossible?
No, the young colonel told himself, daylight was too risky. Without support, his little force would be massacred by the Ivans within the hour. It would have to be after the sun, what little there was of it at this time of the year, had gone down.
He straightened up and faced the other two. ‘Gentlemen,’ he announced, ‘I have made my decision.’
‘Yes, Colonel?’ the Golden Pheasant asked eagerly.
‘We go out at seventeen hundred hours tonight.’
‘Gott sei Dank,’ the Golden Pheasant breathed fervently. ‘Rescue at last!’
Peiper ignored him and looked at the portly Spanish major, wondering what his reaction would be.
It was positive. Despite his former declaration of making the little Russian town into another Alcazar, the Spaniard agreed. ‘Bueno, hacemosle. But, Colonel, you understand the risk?’ Peiper nodded, but said nothing, wondering what might be coming.
‘We must make a — como se dice en aleman?’ Little Napoleon frowned angrily at his inability to find the right word. ‘How you say — make a feint?’
‘A feint,’ the other two echoed.
‘Yes,’ Little Napoleon said eagerly, taking out the cork once more. ‘Often we made our raids from El Alcazar, we did such things, make the enemy think we were about to do one thing, and then do another, with the Reds completely fooled—’
‘Yes, I know what a feint is,’ Peiper broke in impatiently. ‘But what do you suggest?’
The Spaniard beamed at him. ‘It will cost you your Panthers, querido Coronel.’
‘The Bodyguard never abandons its tanks,’ Peiper began indignantly, and then stopped abruptly. There was only enough fuel for the half-tracks, laden with the wounded, to reach German lines as it was. Somewhere during the break-out he would have to give up the Panthers anyway. But without them he would have no firepower whatsoever, save for the personal arms the men carried. ‘What kind of a feint have you in mind, Major?’ he asked warily.
‘This,’ hastily the Little Napoleon took the cork out of his mouth and launched excitedly into his impromptu plan, while the two Germans listened in tense silence; then finally he was finished, his cork popped hurriedly back into his mouth, chest heaving with the effort of so much talking, staring at Peiper with expectant gleaming dark eyes.
It seemed a long time before Peiper answered, and the two observers could see that his mind was racing, as he considered the bold plan. Finally, he said, ‘All right we will do it. But you realize the men who carry it out are on an Ascension Day mission.’
The Little Napoleon drew himself up proudly. ‘My men will volunteer one hundred per cent,’ he declared, puffing out his chest mightily.
‘Your men can’t drive tanks,’ Peiper answered sourly, asking himself whether that had been the reason the Spanish major had volunteered them so readily, and deciding against the ignoble thought a moment later. ‘They will have to come from our own people.’
‘Your boys are pretty young for a one-way mission like that,’ the Golden Pheasant objected, speaking for the very first time since the Spaniard had outlined his concept of the feint.
‘They’re damned good boys,’ Peiper agreed. ‘But you ‘re right. For this kind of op one needs old heads....’ He thought for a moment and then grinned softly, ‘I know I’ll never hear the end of it from the Vulture, but I suppose it’ll have to be t
hose hairy-assed rogues from the Wotan....’
FOUR
Now all was controlled excitement, as the Spaniards and their German comrades prepared themselves for the break-out, filling their packs with only the most essential items, bedding down the seriously wounded on the straw-covered decks of the half-tracks, sowing anti-personnel mines throughout the ruins, attaching booby-traps to the more attractive bits of personal property they were being forced to leave behind, setting the delayed action fuses to the surplus shells for long destroyed cannon, which were timed to explode twelve hours after they had departed.
Obersturmbannfuhrer Peiper was here, there and everywhere, a dynamo of energy, supervising the operation, urging ever more speed, casting an anxious eye to the threatening sky and telling himself that, as it grew darker indicating the dusk soon to come, there was definitely fresh snow in the air — and that could mean a very nasty hitch in their plans. Task after task was completed and finally Peiper ordered the cooks to bring the last hot meal they would enjoy before the break-out, perhaps forever in some cases.
They huddled in groups, enjoying the steaming hot Old Man stew, complete with chunks of hard tack, spooning it down greedily, as if afraid that someone else might snatch it from their frozen fingers. Peiper ignored his own mess-tin. The morale of his break-out force at this the eleventh hour was more important to him than food. He passed from group to group, offering a word of advice here, making a joke, smiling winningly at the pale-faced Spaniards when they didn’t understand German, reassuring the wounded in the back of the halftracks, the straw already crimson with their blood and stinking of human excrement, emphasizing to the halftrack drivers that they must keep going, stopping for no one, even when and if another vehicle was knocked out by the enemy. The wounded SS were all-important; they couldn’t be allowed to fall into Russian hands!