Operation Vampyr

by David Bishop

  "Whispered conversations with other Stuka pilots, suggestions that my countrymen and I are somehow tainted by evil."

  Klaus gave up trying to rationalise the situation. "Prove me wrong. At dawn tomorrow I dare you to stand in the sunlight. Show yourself in the daytime like any normal person."

  "We are not children. We do not play games of truth or dare," Toma spat, his eyes glinting maliciously. "Tomorrow the Führer himself will publicly thank myself and my brethren for our contribution to the Ostfront, saying we are a vital part of the war against the communists. After that, few will give credence to your tales of supernatural happenings in the sky. Cross us again and I will not hesitate to act against you, Vollmer. Consider this your first and final warning."

  The Rumanian fighter pilot strode away, acknowledging Heinrich with a curt nod as the gunner approached.

  "What was all that about?" Heinrich asked when Toma was out of earshot.

  "Seems one of our fellow flyers has been telling tales to the Rumanians." Klaus did not share the rest of the conversation with his friend, not wishing to worry him.

  "Well, Cãpitan aviator Stefan Toma and his associates won't be our problem much longer. Word among the ground crew is that the Hurricanes leave tomorrow at dawn, heading off to form a new Rumanian Staffel."

  "Good," Klaus sighed, realising he had been holding his breath during the confrontation with Toma. "The sooner they're gone from here, the better." His legs sagged beneath him, so Klaus grabbed hold of Heinrich's arm for support.

  "What's wrong?" the gunner asked anxiously.

  "Tired..." Klaus murmured. "So tired..." Then the blackness had him again.

  "Vollmer? Vollmer, can you hear me?" Klaus felt himself floating upwards through darkness towards a light, the nearby voice guiding him to the surface. He opened his eyes to find Satzinger standing nearby, the major gingerly stroking the black leather patch over his left eye. "Ah, you're awake. Must be on the mend."

  Klaus shuddered, not sure what was real and what was a hallucination. He was still in the field hospital, but he had no way of knowing how long he had been unconscious. "Heinrich. Where's Heinrich?"

  The major frowned, his hands nervously twisting a cap. "Your gunner didn't make it, unfortunately. Seems there was a problem with the canopy of your Ju 87, so when you tried to bail out, he went down with the plane."

  Klaus wanted to grieve for his friend, but instead felt so detached from reality the news of Heinrich's death was hard to grasp. "I don't remember what happened. I don't even remember the mission."

  Satzinger nodded. "The doctors told me you suffered a concussion, along with the damage to your leg and chest. You should recover, given time. When your mind is ready, I'm sure it will recall what happened."

  "I need to know," Klaus said quietly. "Please."

  The major sighed. "Very well. You and the rest of the Staffel were doing night bombing runs above the Uman Kessel - what the tacticians like to call vertical envelopment. But there was a mid-air collision, between your Stuka and the Hurricane of-"

  "Cãpitan aviator Stefan Toma."

  "That's right," Satzinger replied. "How did you know that?"

  "I guessed," Klaus said. "What happened next?"

  "We don't know, to be honest. Other pilots in the Staffel witnessed the collision; said Toma flew into you headfirst, then his Hurricane flipped over on top of yours. We think that's when the canopy jammed. As your plane went down, you were wrenched free. That's probably when you sustained these injuries. Luckily, your parachute still opened. Heinrich wasn't so fortunate." The major rested a hand gently on Klaus's arm. "He would have died the moment the plane hit the ground."

  "What about Toma?"

  "Parachuted to safety, somehow. I swear he has the luck of the Devil."

  More than you can know, Klaus thought. He wanted to share his fears about the Rumanians with someone, but could not bring himself to trust Satzinger. Something the major once said had stuck in Klaus's mind: "I would make a pact with the Devil himself if I thought it could end this war without another person dying. Since the Devil does not grace us with his presence, we must do our best."

  At the time it seemed merely a passing remark, but now Klaus was wondering if the Devil himself was fighting alongside the Wehrmacht.

  "Is there anything I can get you?" Satzinger asked.

  "My brothers. I need you to get word to my brothers that I'm all right. I don't want them hearing about my plane going down and thinking I've died."

  "Of course." The major extracted a notebook and pencil from his pocket. "Where can I find them?"

  "My elder brother Ralf is a tank commander with the 13th Panzer Division. Last I heard he had the rank of Obergefreiter. My younger brother is called Hans. He was still doing basic training when I had a letter from him, but he could be stationed with the Landser by now." Klaus could feel his strength fading once more. "Get them news about me, please. I'd like to see them, but..."

  "I'll do what I can," Satzinger said. "You should rest now. We need all the pilots we can get, believe me. I'll find you a new gunner too."

  Klaus nodded, not wanting to think about Heinrich now - the wound was too fresh, too raw. When he felt stronger, then he might face the loss of his friend.

  Chapter Twelve

  AUGUST 3RD, 1941

  Hans was shocked when he saw his older brothers. It was months since his last meeting with Klaus, when they had parted on good terms. But it was more than a year since Hans and Ralf had spoken and longer since they had sat down together. Then the eldest of the Vollmer brothers had come home on leave from the war, his hair shaved close to the scalp and his skin bronzed by the sun. Hans had spent all his time pestering Ralf to talk about the glories of war, but the Panzer commander had refused. When Hans proudly announced he was getting a promotion within the Hitlerjungen, Ralf had sneered and cursed the Führer's name. Hans had agonised long and hard before deciding against reporting his brother to the authorities, putting the incident down to battle fatigue.

  As Hans walked into the field hospital, he had difficulty recognising either brother. Ralf looked like an old man, his skin lined and leathery, his close-cropped hair now rapidly receding. There was a bitterness about his face, a taciturn set in his features that defied anyone to engage him in conversation. Klaus looked even worse, but at least he had the excuse of being a patient. The flyer appeared feeble in his hospital cot, one leg swathed in bandages, while more bandages circled his chest and dark rings underlined each eye.

  "What a place for a family reunion," Hans said as he approached them, trying to inject some lightness into his voice.

  The previous evening he had been pulled from the frontline and told to report to the field hospital west of Uman, where one of his brothers was a patient. No other details were passed on. It was only after arriving that Hans learned his journey had a double purpose. There was to be a medal-giving ceremony later today and he was among the soldiers getting their citations from the Führer himself. The Uman Kessel battle was all but over, and Hitler was attending a briefing at Army Group South HQ, using the chance to thank some of the Wehrmacht's brave fighters.

  Klaus smiled when he saw Hans coming. "Both of you! This is some sort of miracle, both of you coming to see me on the same day."

  "It's no miracle," Ralf replied sourly. "Hans here is a war hero, so the Propaganda Kompanie thought it was a good idea to reunite us all."

  "A war hero, eh? What did you do?" Klaus asked.

  "Very little," Hans admitted. "I certainly don't deserve a medal. They say I wiped out a Russian patrol almost single-handed, despite having been shot in the leg."

  "So what really happened?" Ralf sneered. "Don't tell me the golden boy is getting disillusioned of his glorious war."

  Hans shook his head. "I can't believe you, Ralf. How can you deride everything we're trying to achieve? Millions of men fighting for the Fatherland and all you do is act like we're committing war crimes."

  "Despite what our gl
orious leader might tell us, there's nothing holy or righteous about this war - about any war," Ralf snarled back.

  A medic shouted at the three brothers to keep the noise down. "You're disturbing the other patients. If you can't be quiet in here, I suggest you take your problems outside. There's a wheelchair over there."

  "That's a good idea," Klaus said, easing his legs over the side of the cot. "I've been dying to get out of this place. You two can take turns pushing me. It might stop you arguing. For once."

  Hans fetched the rickety wheelchair while Ralf helped Klaus off the cot carefully. Once the siblings were outside, Klaus pointed at a nearby tree offering shelter from the sun.

  When all three were beneath the shade, it was Klaus who broke the bitter impasse between his brothers. "Will you stop arguing long enough for me to say what I need to say? Look, there's something I need to talk about and you two are the only ones left I can trust." Ralf and Hans glared at each other, but both nodded their agreement. Klaus sighed with exasperation, then began telling them about his encounters with Cãpitan aviator Toma and the other Rumanians.

  Hans listened with amazement as Klaus talked. "I thought I was the only one of us who had met these monsters," he said.

  "You've seen them, too?" Klaus asked.

  Hans did his best to summarise his brushes with Constanta - the mist creatures at Reni, the tales Brunetti had told him about the Rumanians having a village slaughtered, what the Russian woman soldier had said about garlic and silver hurting them and the pack of wolves that slaughtered the Soviet patrol.

  "That's why I'm getting a medal, for something I didn't do," Hans admitted. "Constanta wants me to have the credit for the killings, but I still don't know why." He glanced at Ralf. "Go ahead, gloat, I know you're dying to. Tell me how you always said there were no heroes in war."

  But the Panzer commander simply shook his head. "You're finding that out for yourself, little brother. You don't need a lecture from me."

  "What about you, Ralf? Do you believe what we're saying about these creatures, these Rumanians?" Klaus asked.

  Ralf grimaced. "Unfortunately, yes. My crew had one of the Transylvanians in our tank for twelve days, so he could learn about armoured warfare." He told of his experiences in the village courtyard, his suspicions about Gorgo attacking the Russian snipers. "What came out of our Panzer, it sounds like the same mist you saw in Reni."

  Hans nodded. "I know it seems insane, but the mist seemed to have a will of its own, an... intelligence. I don't know how else to describe it."

  Klaus had been biting his fingernails while the others talked. He looked up at the sunlight filtering through the leaves and branches over their heads. "These creatures - they only come out at night. We know sunlight is deadly to them, that silver and garlic and religious symbols repel or even harm them and it seems they can transform themselves into mist, or bats, or even wolves. There's a name for things like this."

  "Don't say it," Hans whispered.

  "How can we ever hope to fight such monsters?" Ralf asked. "How can we ever hope to defeat them?"

  "Why should we?" Hans asked. "Aren't they on our side in this war?"

  "Only when it suits them," Klaus said, his voice thick with emotion. "One of them killed Heinrich, my gunner, and they were trying to kill me, too - because we were asking too many questions. Because we knew them for what they were: nightwalkers, the undead... Vampyrs."

  The three brothers looked at each other, letting the name and all its implications sink in. Hans found it hard to believe they were discussing such creatures, monsters he had thought existed only in legends. But he knew all too well everything he had said was true, and he did not doubt his brothers' word. Constanta and his kind were vampyrs.

  "So what do we do now?" Hans asked.

  Klaus bit his bottom lip. "The way Toma spoke before the plane crash, he was suggesting the Führer already knew what the Rumanians were and that Hitler had made some unholy pact with these devils."

  "I can't believe that," Hans maintained. "Why would he?"

  "To win the war," Ralf replied. "But I suspect the vampyrs have greater ambitions, plans for what happens after the fighting stops."

  "We can't know for certain whether the alliance with these creatures was forged in Berlin or with the Führer's knowledge," Klaus said.

  "I could ask him," Hans offered. "I'm receiving my medal from him tomorrow. I could ask him then."

  "Don't be a fool," Ralf snapped. "Do you honestly believe that madman would tell you the truth?"

  "The Führer is not a madman," Hans replied. "He is founding a Reich that will last a thousand years. He is the father of our nation. You'd do well to remember that."

  "The bloody Reich will be lucky to last another thousand days," Ralf spat back.

  "Stop it, both of you. This bickering is getting us nowhere," Klaus protested. He waited until his brothers had calmed down before continuing. "Ralf is right. To even consider talking with the Führer about this is madness. If he is in league with these monsters, you will be taken away and shot, at best. If he isn't in league with them, Hitler will merely think you insane and the consequences will likely be much the same. You must promise not to mention what we've talked about with the Führer."

  Hans frowned. As the youngest, he had endured eighteen years of being told what to do. It went against the grain to keep doing so, now that he was a man. But even his stubborn streak could not stop him seeing the sense in what Klaus was saying. "I doubt the opportunity will arise," he said. "Even if I wanted it to."

  Ralf rasped a hand across the stubble on his chin. "We don't know who to trust when it comes to Constanta and his men, so we can't trust anyone. Hans, you told us how that Italian war correspondent became a lapdog for the vampyrs. And that driver, Cringu, he's another servant of the nightwalkers, doing their will while the sun is in the sky. How many more thralls do the Rumanians have at their beck and call? We have to assume we're on our own. For now, the Rumanians may be fighting on Germany's side, but I believe we must prepare for the day when that's no longer the case."

  "Why?" Klaus stared at his elder brother intently. "What do you think is going to happen?"

  "It was something my driver said, after we saw the vampyrs driving some captured T-34 tanks. Gunther wondered why the Rumanians were even fighting in this war, let alone using armoured vehicles as their weapons. The more I thought about that, the more it worried me. What have Constanta and his men got to gain from helping us?"

  "Constanta said the Russians were as much their enemy as ours," Hans recalled. "That made us allies in this war."

  "That explains how the Rumanians got drawn into the fighting," Ralf agreed. "But what happens after the war? Let's say we defeat the Bolsheviks, push them into the Volga and claim the steppes as our Lebensraum, our living space - what will the vampyrs do then? Go quietly back to their homes in the Transylvanian mountains? I don't think so. There will be a price for their help, and we'll be paying it in blood. These monsters are learning our ways of war, studying the tactics of Blitzkrieg that we developed. What happens if they apply these tactics to their own ambitions? The vampyrs are learning how to fly fighter planes and bombers, learning how to drive and fight battle tanks, learning how to turn their thirst for blood into a weapon of absolute terror. What chance would we have against an army of creatures like Constanta, especially if they were armed with planes and tanks and God alone knows what other weapons?"

  "I hadn't thought of that," Hans admitted. "But Witte thinks Constanta had only a hundred men when Operation Barbarossa began. They can't have created more vampyrs out of thin air." Then Hans remembered something he hadn't told the others. "My sergeant, he burnt the bodies of the Russians slaughtered by the mist creatures. He said they could resurrect their victims, turn them into more vampyrs."

  Klaus shuddered. "There could be hundreds of them, maybe thousands."

  For once, Ralf was more positive than his siblings. "I don't think so, not yet. Constanta and his k
ind have been staying deliberately behind the scenes, not wanting to advertise their presence in this war. The greater the number of vampyrs, the greater the chance of them being noticed by ordinary members of the Wehrmacht, like us. We can't be the only ones who suspect there is something strange about these Rumanians. It's a guess, but I think the vampyrs will not start recruiting men into their ranks until there is a need for them.

  "I hope you're right," Klaus whispered fearfully. The three brothers fell quiet, contemplating all they had gleaned from each other. It was Hans who broke the silence.

  "So what do we do? There are only three of us and at least a hundred of them that we know about. There could be more for all we know. We're guessing at numbers, grasping at shadows, trying to figure out their motivation. Even if we're right, what can we do about them?"

  Ralf undid his tunic to reveal a silver crucifix hanging on a chain round his neck. "For a start, we can protect ourselves. My crew have been wearing these since our last encounter with Gorgo. Gunther figured any kind of protection was better than none. We're safe from the vampyrs during the hours of daylight, but this may not be enough. What we need are weapons that can hurt these monsters."

  "How many crosses do you have?" Klaus asked.

  Ralf shrugged. "Half a dozen, I suppose. Why?"

  The pilot's face was a mask of concentration. "We're of the understanding that silver is actually fatal to these fiends. So, what's to stop us collecting all the silver we can, then turning it into bullets? You could even use silver to coat the shells for your Panzer's main gun."

  "That would take a lot of silver," Ralf replied. "Better to coat the tips instead. But we'd still need a way of smelting the metal."

  "Many villages we've marched through had a smithy for shoeing horses," Hans observed. "The bigger towns and cities probably have foundries."

  Klaus nodded, his smile returning slowly. "We should start stockpiling silver, in case the worst comes to the worst. In the meantime, avoid contact with the Rumanians whenever possible. Get hold of some garlic as protection for when you're asleep. Ralf, your crew already believes in these monsters, that makes your task easier. Hans, you need to find someone you can trust as an ally. What about this sergeant?"