Operation Vampyr

by David Bishop

  Once all of Dumitrescu's fingers and toes were gone, Ralf turned his attention to the Rumanian's wizened, repulsive genitalia. He held them in front of the captive's face. "Now, are you ready to talk or do I feed these to you?"

  The vampyr shook his head, long since past the point of surrender. "I told you an hour ago I would talk," he bleated pathetically. "Ask your questions."

  Ralf grimaced. "I think he's ready. Hans, you start."

  The youngest Vollmer stepped closer to the Rumanian. "How many of you are there on the Ostfront? How many vampyr?"

  Dumitrescu shrugged. "I don't know-"

  "Not good enough," Ralf said, wiping the knife clean on the captive's sleeve before holding the point close to the vampyr's left eyeball. "We want specifics."

  "I don't know the specifics," Dumitrescu protested. "Only Constanta knows that."

  Ralf sighed. "Seems we picked the wrong Rumanian. Everybody, say goodbye to our guest." He pulled back the knife, ready to stab it through the eye socket deep into Dumitrescu's brain.

  "Please, let me finish!"

  Ralf held back the killing blow. "Well, we're waiting."

  Dumitrescu swallowed hard, his gaze fixed on the knife poised before him. "Constanta is our commander, the most powerful of the vampyrs on the Ostfront. He has ten lieutenants, almost as powerful as him, doing his bidding in different theatres of the war. They each have ten vampyrs at their command. Our numbers are divided among your army groups, with Constanta moving between them at will."

  "What's your position in this hierarchy?" Hans demanded.

  "I am one of the hundred. A foot soldier, you might say."

  "A foot soldier without any toes," Gunther observed. A glare from Ralf silenced him.

  The tank commander turned back to their prisoner. "What about the humans who work for your kind, who do your bidding? How many thralls do you have?"

  Dumitrescu smiled. "Each of us has up to ten mortal slaves."

  "That's a hundred and eleven vampyrs, plus a thousand thralls," Helmut calculated.

  Witte shook his head. "These fiends can create whole armies by resurrecting their victims, raising the dead to feast on the living."

  "Only Constanta and his lieutenants have that power," Dumitrescu said.

  "I don't believe you," the sergeant replied. He tipped the rest of the holy water over the vampyr's head, smiling as it made the scalp sizzle and boil. Dumitrescu screamed and screamed again, his voice an eerie, high-pitched wail that nearly deafened his captors. Klaus slapped the Feldflasche out of Witte's hand, sparing the Rumanian more suffering for now.

  "Why did you do that?" the sergeant snarled. "These bastards deserve every second of suffering we can inflict upon them."

  "Maybe," the pilot agreed. "But we need to keep this one alive to find out what he knows."

  Witte glared at Klaus for several seconds, then walked away shaking his head. Helmut took his place beside the prisoner. The radio operator slapped Dumitrescu's face until the Rumanian came round again.

  "How do you communicate with each other? How do you co-ordinate your movements?"

  "By radio."

  "Impossible," Helmut snapped. "We would have heard you."

  The captive smiled thinly. "Vampyrs can hear sounds that humans cannot."

  "Like bats," Martin suggested from a corner. He had taken little part in the torture, watching quietly as the others attacked the Rumanian. "Or dogs."

  Helmut nodded. "That makes sense. You transmit signals at high frequency, beyond the range of normal human hearing. How else do you communicate?"

  "In rare cases we use the thralls as our couriers, to ensure delivery."

  The threat of the blade prompted Dumitrescu to name his personal slaves, Gunther scribbling the names down on a cigarette paper for future reference. After that, silence fell on the room as the captors contemplated all the vampyr had said.

  It was Ralf who spoke first, looking to each of the others in turn. "I've heard all I wanted. Does anybody else have any more questions before we end this?"

  "What about the locations of all the vampyr units?" Willy asked.

  Ralf shook his head. "You heard what he said - more than a hundred of their kind, plus a thousand thralls, spread along the thousands of miles of the Ostfront. If we attack each of those clusters one at a time, word will spread among the others and they will disappear."

  "Or launch a counter-attack," Hans added.

  "Exactly," Ralf agreed. "We can't find them all, we have to bring them to us."

  "Why?" Dumitrescu asked. "What do you plan to do, human?"

  "Wipe you bloodsucking bastards off the face of the earth," Klaus replied. When the others nodded, their prisoner started laughing. It was a chuckle of mirth at first, then a full-throated roar of hilarity, until tears ran down his face. Ralf soon silenced Dumitrescu by slicing off one of the vampyr's ears.

  "You will never succeed," the Rumanian said to them. "Even as you strike us down, more will rise to take our place. Lord Constanta is all but invulnerable; his lieutenants are nearly as strong. We are your allies in this war, but betray us and we shall destroy you all."

  "We'll see," Ralf replied calmly. "Gunther, Willy - let him go."

  "What?" the two men said simultaneously.

  "Let him go," the tank commander repeated. "We've learned all we can from this piece of undead filth. Get him out of my sight."

  Hans and Klaus approached their brother. "Ralf, you can't be serious," the pilot protested. "The moment Dumitrescu leaves here he'll find Constanta and tell him what happened."

  "We'll be dead men," Hans added. "Hunted by the vampyrs for the rest of our lives."

  "Everybody dies of something," Ralf said. "Gunther, Willy, you heard me - get this little Scheisse out of here. Now."

  The Panzer driver and gunner lifted Dumitrescu up to his feet. "Don't think letting me leave here alive will save you," the vampyr vowed. "Your suffering will be ten times what you put me through here today."

  Ralf strode to the door and ripped it open, letting the late afternoon sun flood the room. "I said get him out of here. I never said anything about letting him leave here alive."

  Gunther and Willy exchanged a smile, then propelled Dumitrescu out the doorway into the warm sunshine.

  The vampyr screamed in agony, then collapsed to the ground. His body burnt in the light, his skin peeled away. Fat bubbled and boiled on the bones before the skeleton turned to smoke. Finally, Dumitrescu exploded, a cloud of ash and the echoes of his screaming all that remained in the air. A light westerly blew past and the ash was gone, along with the echoes.

  The eight conspirators had killed their first vampyr.

  "So what do you suggest we do?" Klaus asked his elder brother. Having got rid of Dumitrescu, the eight men sat down again to contemplate their next step.

  Ralf sucked on his pipe and blew smoke rings into the air. "If what that thing told us is true - and we've got no guarantee of that - how can the eight of us take on a hundred vampyrs and a thousand thralls?"

  "We don't have to fight the servants, just their masters," Witte said. "The vampyr are an army, little different from us. Kill the leaders, stop the flow of orders and the foot soldiers don't know what to do next. They lose focus, they lose heart and they give up. The thralls are being controlled by force of will. Eliminate the Rumanians and their slaves will no longer be a threat."

  "I believe the sergeant is probably right," Helmut conceded. "But Klaus's question still stands. There are eight of us, and more than a hundred vampyr. Hardly even odds in a battle."

  "Then we need better odds," Willy said. "Many crews in the 13th Panzer Division are already with us in spirit. If we can recruit a few of those to our crusade, that would make a significant difference."

  "Don't forget all the silver we've collected," Gunther added. "We turn that into bullets, bomb casings and shell coatings, then we've got weapons we can use against the enemy."

  Hans stood up. "Between us, Witte and I
can probably convince our unit to join the fight. There may be more, once word spreads about what happened at the field hospital."

  The sergeant nodded. "We eight are not alone in this fight. We are its generals, that's all."

  "Before the Rumanians took me out of the sky and killed my gunner, I was building an alliance among the pilots," Klaus said. "I can convince at least half the Staffel to help us, but this level of activity will not go unnoticed. Someone will notice if planes, Panzers and infantry disappear off the map overnight."

  Ralf nodded. "So we will form a Kampfgruppen, a special battle group to meet a specific military need. The Wehrmacht does it all the time. Our leaders pride themselves upon the unified structure of the armed forces, how easy it is to transfer whole units from one service to another. We will use that flexibility to create our own private army."

  "How?" Martin asked, his face pale and nervous.

  "Hiding behind the truth is usually the best defence," Witte replied. "We say there is a partisan insurgency operating behind our lines. The Kampfgruppen's stated mission will be to lure the insurgents out into the open, using our superior numbers to trap them in a Kessel and them destroy them. We volunteer for that mission, then use it for our own ends." The sergeant smiled wryly. "I once heard of an entire unit that went missing for twenty-seven days, supposedly going behind enemy lines to destabilise the other side's economy with counterfeit bank notes."

  "What were they really doing?" the young loader asked.

  "Oh, they went behind enemy lines, that much was true. But they were trying to break into a bank vault thought to be full of gold ingots. It would have worked too, if they had figured out a way of getting that weight of gold back home again."

  Klaus waited until the others had finished laughing before speaking. "How long will it take to turn your silver hoard into bullets, shells and bomb casings?"

  Gunther shrugged. "A week, at most. I've spotted an abandoned jewellery maker's factory near our current position. There's a small foundry at the back that seemed to have escaped bombing by either side so far."

  The pilot nodded. "It would probably take as long to get the Kampfgruppen approved. Once that happens, we will have to strike against Constanta and his troops as soon as possible. We've no way of knowing whether any of the men in our units are collaborators with the vampyrs. The faster we act, the better our chances of success."

  "Agreed. We can't expect to lure all the vampyrs from the length of the Ostfront, but we can cleanse Army Group South of these bastards," Ralf said. "This part of the war is their stronghold - wipe them out here and the rest will be cut off from their homeland. We know our enemy only comes out at night, so that gives us about twelve hours to achieve our mission objective: a single battle to secure the future. Is everybody ready for this?" He thrust one hand forward.

  Hans was first to respond. He slapped his hand on top of Ralf's. Klaus joined them, the three brothers united. Gunther, Helmut and Willy added their support. Martin was the last of the Panzer crew to step forward, biting his bottom lip but still pledging himself to the fight. That left only Witte, the sergeant. He was leaning against a wall, staring at the hands Constanta had crushed beneath his boot heel.

  "Well?" Hans asked. "What do you say? Have you got one last battle left in you?"

  Witte held up his plaster-encased forearms, hatred etched into his features. He smashed one arm against the wall, then the other, cracking both casts. The sergeant used his teeth to rip the plaster away from his hands, then used his fingers to remove the rest. When his arms were free, Witte smiled. "Let's wipe these parasite pieces of Scheisse off the face of the earth!"

  Chapter Twenty-One

  SEPTEMBER 27TH, 1941

  It was Witte who chose Ordzhonikidze as the battlefield. He had observed that the surrounding forests would provide cover for the Kampfgruppen's tanks, guns and troops. The town itself was already devastated, with no civilians alive within twenty miles and no military activity any nearer. The only people in danger would be those fighting and no other force was close enough to intercede. Smelting all the silver had taken longer than expected, delaying the conspirators' plans. In the end Gunther sought help from other Panzer crews whose members had experience from working in foundries before the war. Bomb casings and shells had their tips painted with liquid silver, while rounds for rifles and machine guns were dipped in the molten metal.

  Meanwhile Klaus, Ralf and Hans were masterminding the Kampfgruppen's creation, using contacts in other units to establish a plausible basis for its establishment. Feldwebel Erfurth insisted he should lead the Panzer contingent for this important mission, but his intervention ultimately helped confirm the need for the Kampfgruppen. Erfurth never volunteered for a mission unless he felt it was important for the Fatherland and likely to advance his career. Martin and Willy took numerous Panzer crews into their confidence, recruiting twenty tanks for the Kampfgruppen.

  Klaus discovered the vampyr pilots had been less than subtle in his absence, leaving a trail of bloodless corpses at every airbase they visited. He had little trouble recruiting several Staffel to the Kampfgruppen, creating an aerial squad of three-dozen Ju 87s and twelve Bf 109 fighters. Even Major Satzinger admitted he had been wrong about the Rumanians, and volunteered to fill the vacant gunner's seat in Klaus's Stuka. Between them, Hans and Witte enlisted an artillery unit and close to five hundred infantry. In total the Kampfgruppen had a fighting force of close to a thousand men and machines, giving them a ten to one ratio against the vampyrs. They could only pray it would be enough.

  Once preparations were all but complete, Helmut had the job of baiting the trap. Reports from other radio operators along the Ostfront indicated Constanta was visiting the outskirts of Leningrad. Helmut used several unwitting thralls to send a message, supposedly from Dumitrescu, summoning his comrades within Army Group South to a mass gathering at Ordzhonikidze after sunset on Saturday, September 27.

  After twelve days of frantic preparations, the waiting was over. The battle for the soul of the Wehrmacht was about to begin.

  "Where are they?" Hans whispered, binoculars pressed against his face, his eyes searching the main road to Ordzhonikidze from the south. "The sun set half an hour ago, the bastards should be here by now." He was stationed on a hilltop to the southwest, a field radio at his side.

  "Maintain radio silence," Ralf reminded his brother. The tank commander sat inside his Panzer in a small forest outside Ordzhonikidze, patiently waiting with the rest of his crew. A dozen more Panzers were clustered around them, while still more were positioned at other hidden locations around the ruined town. "Klaus will tell us when they're coming."

  High above Ordzhonikidze a Ju 87 was trying to keep out of sight. Klaus watched the sky, looking for signs of approaching aircraft, while Satzinger studied the roads below for evidence of a vampyr convoy. The rest of the Kampfgruppen's planes were still on the ground some twenty miles away, waiting for a signal to get in the air. There was no point burning through precious fuel before the battle had even begun. "Nothing," Klaus muttered to himself. "I don't see anyone else up here. Maybe the message didn't get through? Or maybe the vampyrs realised it was a trap."

  "If you have patience, you will be rewarded," Satzinger remarked. "I see two columns of dust rising from the ground, one approaching Ordzhonikidze from the north, the other from the south. Looks like our friends took the bait."

  Klaus tipped his left wing slightly to see for himself. "You're right." He righted the Stuka. "And there's two Schwarm of Hurricanes approaching, a thousand metres below us. I'll take us up into the cloud cover." The Stuka rose steeply before levelling out. Klaus activated his radio. "We've got guests coming."

  Ralf confirmed the signal from the sky, then reminded everyone to sit tight. "Let them wait. We attack only when they have stopped and their planes are on the ground."

  Cãpitan aviator Stefan Toma could not understand why Dumitrescu had called this gathering. Constanta was not due back for several days
and only the Hauptmann had the authority to summon all the vampyrs together, except in extreme circumstances. Dumitrescu's message had offered no reason for the meeting. It stated a time and a place. Toma had tried and failed to contact Dumitrescu for clarification. Finally, unable to resolve this conundrum, he had gathered his Schwarm of four Hurricanes and flown over the rendezvous location. When he landed, the Rumanian pilot was startled to find four other planes, each bearing the vampyr emblem, already parked outside the devastated village.

  Toma and his fellow pilots landed in the last glimmers of twilight as a column of T-34 tanks also bearing the bat and swastika symbol were arriving, followed by a company of cavalry and at least a hundred infantry. All the men on foot were thralls of different vampyrs. Their masters rode alongside on motorcycles or horses. None of it made any sense to Toma. He hadn't seen so many of his kind gathered in one place since they left Sighisoara a hundred days earlier. The pilot recognised a familiar face and hailed one of the tank commanders as they climbed down from their armoured vehicle.

  "Toma, you old devil," the vampyr responded, his broad smile punctuated by a pair of deadly fangs. "What are you doing here? I thought you were busy tormenting the Russians at Melitopol."

  "We were until Dumitrescu's message came through. Have you any idea why he summoned us here? Explaining our absence will not be easy, especially with the Red's Southern Front launching a new offensive."

  The T-34 commander shrugged. "It seems I know as little as you. Where is Dumitrescu?"

  "Nobody has seen him," Toma replied. "If I didn't know better-"

  But the vampyr pilot never got the chance to finish his sentence. The tanks and guns of the Kampfgruppen opened fire from a dozen positions, raining shells upon the cluster of vampyrs and their thralls.