by Leo Kessler
They pelted across the snow and hit the bunker. From inside came the sounds of men stirring in alarm. The door was flung open. Chink moved first. His knife flashed and the Russian gurgled once as it opened his throat from the jugular to the carotid. He went down, drowning in his own blood.
Schulze sprang over his writhing body. A half-naked soldier ran down the narrow corridor screaming. Schulze ripped off a burst with his Schmeisser instinctively. The man jacknifed, a froth of pink foamy blood spraying from his wide-open mouth. Behind him Chink opened the first wooden door to their right, tossed in a grenade and pulled it closed again. The wooden wall seemed to bulge like a live thing. Abruptly the room was full of screams and wild, agonized yells. In a flash, the whole corridor reeked of cordite, blood and death.
The two of them ran on. Another little room to their right, the door wide open. Legs spread wide apart, big body half crouched, Schulze clutched his machine pistol to his right hip and sprayed its occupants as they still lay in their beds, tumbling them out of the crude bunks like beetles from underneath a suddenly upturned stone. It was a massacre.
Chink came running up to him, chest heaving, his knife gleaming scarlet now. ‘All gone!’ he gasped. ‘Chink fix!’
‘Good for you, you Siberian shit!’ he gasped himself, trying hard to control his harsh breathing. ‘Not bad for an honorary Aryan –’ Suddenly he remembered the sentries. ‘Chink, the other two. Come on!’
Frantically they pelted down the body-littered corridor, out into the open again.
‘Over there!’ Chink gasped.
The two sentries saw them at the same moment. They fired. Their bullets gouged out spouts of snow just in front of Chink. He fired back. Missed! Schulze tried to stop the frantic pumping of his heart so that he could aim correctly. The snarling hiss of his Schmeisser – a full half-second burst – almost ripped the sentry in two.
It was too much for the other man. With a scream of fear, he flung away his rifle and started to run wildly, floundering through the deep snow towards the safety of the trees. Schulze knew he could not let him get away. He pressed the Schmeisser’s trigger. Nothing happened. ‘Shit!’ he cursed bitterly. The magazine was empty.
The Chink raised his machine pistol and tracer-stitched the darkness. Schulze could see the slugs cutting a crazy pattern around the man’s running feet. But they were missing him by a metre or more.
‘Lift your muzzle, Chink, for Chrissake!’ he urged frantically.
But already it was too late The lone Russian was blundering into the firs, crashing into their green gloom and disappearing from sight.
Slowly, very slowly, Chink lowered his machine pistol and looked at Schulze standing there like some ancient Nordic god, turned to stone, oblivious of the wild fire still coming from the Cheeseheads below. ‘You think same me, Sarnt-Major?’ he asked reluctantly.
‘I think the same, Chink,’ Schulze answered equally slowly. ‘That Popov bastard will tell them we’re coming.’
TWO
Dawn. SS Regiment Europa was drawn up on the crest of a ridge, the young troopers drinking steaming hot canteens of Muckefuck1and washing down the hard Army bread, stamping their feet continually on the packed snow of the road trying to drive out the cold.
Chink filled Schulze’s canteen once more with the boiling hot, black brew, and taking the little bottle out of his pocket, poured a quick and generous slug of the fiery Hungarian plum schnaps into the coffee.
‘That’s the stuff to give the troops, Chink,’ Schulze said happily. ‘You’re not a bad sort – for a foreigner.’
The little man beamed. ‘Chink your friend,’ he said.
Schulze moved across the snow to where the Hawk was standing, smoking a cigarette and chatting to Major Kreuz, his second-in-command, a tall, rather cynical veteran with an intelligent face adorned by a monocle.
Once Schulze had joined them the Hawk got to the point at once. ‘Now I know you are worried, Schulze, that the Red who escaped last night might nave alerted his masters that we are on this road.’
‘Sir.’
‘I appreciate your concern for the safety of our mission, but really where could the man have gone to? I mean we are at least twenty kilometres behind their lines by now and there is still no sign of the man who got away or any other Red unit for that matter.’
‘I don’t know about that, sir,’ Schulze answered doggedly.
‘But those fellows in the bunker back there must have had some means of communicating with their HQ.’
‘Agreed, Sergeant-Major.’ Kreuz spoke for the first time. ‘But even if he did somehow manage to get in touch with his people, do you really think that they could do anything to stop us now?’ He pointed an elegantly gloved hand to his right. ‘Look down there.’
Thin, dark, graceful plumes of smoke were ascending slowly to the sky on the far horizon. Occasionally there was a silent pink ripple, which Schulze knew of old was the explosion of a heavy gun.
‘The Viking,’ Kreuz said casually, ‘giving the Reds a taste of their own medicine for a change.’
‘Yes,’ the Hawk said. ‘The lower road is surely in our hands by now and the Reds will have enough to do without worrying about us up here.’
The Hawk seemed blind to the disaster that could overtake them; packed on one tight winding road like this, they were easy meat for a Russian flank attack. The armoured vehicles would have no room at all to manoeuvre.
‘We present more of a threat to them once we’re out of these mountains than does the rest of the Division down there,’ Schulze persisted. ‘Once they find out we’re up here, surely they’ll do their damn best to stop us.’
Kreuz nodded his approval slowly. ‘You are right there, Schulze. There’s obviously a brain working somewhere up there in your big turnip.’ He smiled cynically at Schulze through his gold-rimmed monocle.
Schulze bristled. ‘Some of us sub-human other-rankers have been known to have an idea now and again,’ he retorted acidly.
Habicht intervened: ‘Kreuz, you seriously think, as obviously Schulze here does, that we might be in trouble?’
‘Colonels think, majors carry out orders,’ Kreuz answered and then added hastily,‘Yessir. It is possible.’
The Hawk breathed out hard and made a decision. ‘All right, you are our explosives expert. Where could you block this road behind us and how long would it take?’
Kreuz ran an expert eye down the length of road that lay behind them, checking the steep slope to the near side for the overhang he would need. Then he spotted it. About three hundred metres back. To the right, the mountainside went down almost sheer. To the left, there was an overhang obviously the work of unskilled engineers – some three metres above the road and jutting out a good two metres. The overhang was obviously unstable – a standing invitation for a landslide.
‘There, sir,’ Kreuz said. ‘With a bit of luck, we could sheer off ten metres of that overhang and block the whole damn road.’
‘How long would it take?’ Habicht rapped.
‘We have no power tools. But if I had enough men working in shifts of ten minutes, boring into the rock flat out, probably about three hours.’
The Hawk glanced at his watch. ‘I’ll give you exactly ninety minutes – and you’ve got the whole Regiment at your disposal, save the lookouts. All right, Kreuz, what the hell are you waiting for!
Schulze almost liked the Hawk at that moment.
In spite of the biting cold on the mountainside, the young men sweated as they slammed the heavy sledge-hammers against the chisels held against the rockface. Time and time again, feet braced against the rock, leg muscles screaming out with the strain, of standing at the forty-five degree angle.
But Schulze did not give them an opportunity to slacken off. He was here, there and everywhere, cursing, cajoling, threatening the gasping young men with cries that most of them did not understand. But if they did not understand the words; Schulze’s gestures and grimaces were unmistakable. They toiled o
n.
Now some of Schulze’s own concern had infected Kreuz. Already he had a group of troopers stacking the TNT and nitro-starch blocks under his direction, while the wire, its leads checked for cleanliness, was unreeled along the side of the road, ready for attaching.
An hour passed. Now the holes were about finished. Kreuz began to pass out the charges. The young troopers cradled them carefully to their chests and inserted them delicately into the apertures. Kreuz attached the detonating wire and swiftly checked the leads of the wire with the galvanometer. The little green needle flicked across the dial, swung back and flicked up again.
‘The splices are all right. The whole circuit is functioning.’ Hurriedly he clamped the wires into the detonating apparatus, while the Hawk glanced impatiently at his watch. He screwed the clamps tight, and straightened up. ‘We’re all ready, Obersturm!’ he cried.
The Hawk wasted no time. He clasped his one hand to his mouth and bellowed: ‘All right, all you men back round the curve to the vehicles!’
Kreuz kneeling at the little machine next to Schulze glanced back at them and was satisfied everyone was under sufficient cover. He took a deep breath and seizing the wooden-handled plunger pressed it down with one smooth thrust. For a moment nothing seemed to happen. Then there was a series of sharp cracklings like fireworks exploding. The earth beneath their feet began to tremble and suddenly the whole side of the mountain erupted in volcanic fury, scarlet flame, interspersed by brilliant white flashes shot into the sky, followed a moment later by a great spout of earth and rock.
Schulze opened his mouth to prevent his eardrums bursting and felt the hot wave of blast strike him like a flabby fist across the face. For a fleeting second he closed his eyes. When he opened them again, the explosion was over and its roar, diminishing by the instant, was disappearing down the valley, its echo growing fainter and fainter.
The explosives had clawed the whole length of the overhang down. Now the rocks and boulders ripped from the raw new face of the mountain blocked some thirty metres or more of the road in a huge heap, which would take days to clear.
Kreuz broke the heavy silence. ‘Well, my friend, there is no way up for the Russians now, that is for sure.’
‘Yes, Major,’ Schulze answered slowly, ‘and no way back for us either.’
Note
1. Ersatz coffee.
THREE
Colonel-General Zacharov, Commander of the Fourth Guards Army, was sweating heavily. Every time he attempted to dry himself with his handkerchief, soaked in cheap eau-de-cologne, the field telephone rang and one of the anxious staff officers would pass on the news of the latest disaster. Then the Guards General would break out sweating once more.
Marshal Tolbuchin, Commander of the Second Ukrainian Front, sitting in the corner of the one-time Hungarian villa, which now served as Zacharov’s headquarters in the Battle for Budapest, smoked steadily, his broad peasant face expressionless. But he was thinking hard, undisturbed by the regular thump-thump of a gun less than two hundred metres away.
He knew that the Fritz defenders of the Hungarian capital would never be able to break out now. His concern was the new situation to the west. Where in the Holy Virgin’s name had the Germans found the strength to launch this morning’s surprise attack? What was their objective? Budapest? Or to drive through his axis with the Third Ukrainian Army south of Budapest? Or was it just a spoiling attack – a last desperate attempt by the Fritzes to forestall the Soviet capture of Budapest and the drive into Western Hungary? So many questions, Tolbuchin told himself, and so few answers.
With a heavy groan, he rose to his feet and strolled with deliberate slowness to the centre of the room. The staff officers made way for him like shoals of little fish parting to let some great predatory shark through. Zacharov looked at his superior uneasily, his face ugly and damp with sweat.
Tolbuchin let him wait. The Colonel-General was losing his nerve, he told himself. If he didn’t master this day’s crisis he would sack him…or worse. Marshal Stalin did not take too kindly to Army Commanders who allowed themselves to be defeated. Finally he breathed out a slow ring of blue smoke and said: ‘Well, Comrade General?’
Zacharov jabbed a finger at the big map spread out on the table in front of him. ‘The whole line of my Thirty-First Guards Rifle Corps between Naszaly-Tata and Felsogalla has been broken into, Comrade Marshal. Their objectives seem to be – from north to south – Gran, Zsambek and Bickse.’
‘Bickse?’ Tolbuchin spoke for the first time.
‘Yes, Comrade Marshal. Felsogalla has already been taken by the Fritzes on the road to Bickse. It is obvious that it is one of their main objectives.’
Unceremoniously the burly Marshal pushed the sweating Army Commander out of the way and bending over the map, scrutinized it keenly for a moment. He rose and announced quite simply, ‘Budapest.’
The door at the far end of the big echoing room was suddenly flung open and Colonel Zis, Zacharov’s Intelligence Officer, entered, escorting a private soldier. The man was in a terrible state, his earth-brown tunic was ripped and torn, while there was a dull stain on the right side of his baggy breeches and a ragged hole which indicated that a bullet had entered his leg.
‘What is this?’ Zacharov demanded angrily.
‘Comrade General, one of the retreating units of the Fifth Guards Cavalry picked him two hours ago not far from Zsambek.’
‘And?’
‘Well, Comrade General, he belonged to a small guard unit, whose task it was to cover the mountain road through the Vértes Range. Last night, the outpost was overrun by the Fritzes – SS armour, he thinks.
‘What?’ Zacharov exploded. ‘Not that too!’
‘Vodka,’ Marshal Tolbuchin snapped, clicking his fingers. The ever-present aide produced a silver flask of the fiery spirit and placed it into the Marshal’s waiting hand.
‘Drink a drop, little brother. It will warm you up.’
The soldier blinked his eyes rapidly – a Marshal of the Soviet Union offering him a drink from his own flask and calling him ‘little brother!’ He seized the flask and took a swift, deep slug
Tolbuchin inwardly told himself he must have the flask sterilized. ‘All right, comrade, now tell me what happened on the mountain road last night?’
The sole survivor of Schulze’s raid on the bunker told his story in a hurried, nervous manner.
‘So comrades,’ Tolbuchin said when the man had been dismissed, ‘that confirms it. The Fritzes want Bickse because it is the centre of the road network which they will use to drive on Budapest.’
Zacharov looked at him aghast.
Tolbuchin ignored the look. ‘Now, it is clear that the first threat is this Fritz unit which will spearhead the attack on Budapest across the mountain range.’
‘But we have nothing to stop them, Comrade Marshal,’ Zacharov objected hastily, already visualizing ‘Old Leather Face’ (as the Army called Stalin behind his back) ordering him to one of his Siberian concentration camps for ‘lack of Soviet zeal’. ‘How can one get armour up into those mountains in this kind of weather?’
‘The Fritzes obviously managed to get armour through, Comrade General,’ Tolbuchin said mildly enough. ‘So you’ve got no reserves, eh?’ He considered for a moment and then demanded to be connected with Headquarters, Second Ukrainian Front.
‘Comrade Major Suslov to the phone – at once,’ he commanded.
‘The Grey Eagle!’ Zacharov breathed.
Tolbuchin looked at the heavy-set, sweating Guards Army Commander with undisguised contempt, then Suslov’s cheerful, confident voice was at the other end and he was rapping out his instructions in sharp little staccato phrases.
The Grey Eagle listened in silence, before saying, ‘You realize Comrade Marshal that you are probably condemning about half my Eagles to death with an operation like this in that terrain and in this weather?’
There was no change in the cheerful, confident note in Suslov’s voice. ‘Probably,’ th
e Marshal answered. ‘But they will die for the glory of the Red Army and the Soviet Union.’
The Grey Eagle made an obscene suggestion about what he could do with such glory, and hung up without another word.
For the first time that long grim January day, Marshal of the Soviet Union Tolbuchin smiled.
FOUR
It had been a back-breaking day for the young men of SS Regiment Europa, as they had fought their way through the blinding snowstorms higher and higher into the mountains. Each new curve in the winding road had been a minor engineering feat, as the vehicles, sliding and skidding on the slick new snow, had been dragged round by sheer muscle-power, with hundreds of freezing, cursing, yelling SS men digging a new path for them in the rock and snow.
Now the Regiment was stuck again. At the head of the column, just behind Habicht’s command vehicle which had cleared the corner safely, a halftrack full of grenadiers had begun to slip towards the sheer drop on the far side of the road and the ashen-faced driver had only managed to bring the ten ton vehicle to stop at the very edge of the drop. Behind it the whole Regiment was stalled again, the drivers gunning their engines nervously, while they waited for the obstruction to be cleared away.
Angrily Habicht pushed by the young driver and strode to the side of the road to gaze down at the drop. With his good foot, he stamped on snow-covered ground there, obviously to test the strength of the rock below the snow.
‘Schulze, get a dozen men at each side of the vehicle ready to push when I give the word.’
‘Over the side?’ Schulze asked.
‘No. Back on to the road,’ the Hawk said. He swung himself up into the cab just vacated by the shaken driver. ‘I’ll get the bitch out myself.’
Hurriedly Schulze ordered the men to their positions on both sides of the halftrack, while the Hawk gunned the motor and then gently let out the clutch. The wheel trembled violently in his single hand. With a lurch the halftrack moved forward a little as he put his foot on the accelerator.