by Sam Eastland
Benjamin finished the transmission with a secondary authentication code. Then he picked up the earpiece. As he had learned in his training, he did not press it directly against his ear but rather against his temple. The signal, when it came in, was often marred by interference so that the individual key strokes sometimes appeared to merge together unintelligibly. Pressing the earpiece against his temple allowed him to isolate the message from the interference.
Benjamin did not have long to wait. Through the veil of static, he picked up the shrill notes of the Morse code reply. It was only one word: Understood.
Benjamin wondered if it was Skorzeny himself on the other end. He imagined the giant, safe in the radio room on the second floor of SS Headquarters in Berlin. He wished he was there now. It won’t be long, Benjamin thought to himself. If those Flemish soldiers break through to Rovno, Vasko and I can ride back to Berlin in comfort, instead of slogging our way out through the forest. And then maybe they will give us both a desk job for the rest of this damned war.
The thought of that cheered him up. Smiling, Benjamin leaned forward and turned off the radio. Curious, he thought, as he heard not one click but two.
*
Just before sunrise that morning, a wild dog had picked up the scent of a man moving through the woods east of the village of Misovichi. Most wild animals would have steered clear of a human, but this dog had not always been wild.
It had once belonged to a farmer named Wolsky, who raised goats and sheep and some pigs, whose wool and meat his family had sold at the market square in Tynno for generations.
Wolsky had named the dog Choma, after a local man who once cheated him in a business deal. He would bring the dog to the market place and make the dog catch scraps of meat and bone for the amusement of his customers, and all the while the farmer would call out the name of Choma, scratching his ears and slapping the dog’s shaggy fur.
One day back in the summer of 1941, not long after the invasion had taken place, a truck filled with Ukrainian Nationalist partisans rolled into Wolsky’s farmyard. Among the partisans was Choma‚ the man who had once cheated Wolsky, and who had heard about the naming of the dog.
When Wolsky came out of his house to see what was going on, Choma shot him in the chest and left him lying face-down in the mud. Then he went looking for the dog, intent on killing it as well.
Choma found the dog asleep beside the barn. His first shot missed, gouging a fist-sized chunk of wood from the wooden boards above the dog’s head. By the time Choma had steadied his hand to take a second shot, the dog had already vanished.
It had been living in the woods ever since. In that time, the dog had forgotten its name, and almost everything about its former life, until the day it picked up the man’s scent. More out of curiosity than hunger, it followed the stranger, keeping always at a safe distance, until they arrived at the cabin.
The man went inside the building.
The dog hung back among the trees, sniffing the air for some clue as to what might be happening.
A short while later, the dog heard the muffled thump of an explosion inside the cabin. In a flash of light, the glass window sprayed out of its frame as if it had transformed into water. This was followed by a wave of concussion which sent the dog skittering away, but it soon doubled back, sniffing at the shards of glass which littered the ground, until it came upon the arm of a man, smouldering and severed at the elbow. It remembered the way the old farmer used to throw it pieces of food and how the other people used to clap and cheer when it leaped into the air to catch the scrap of meat. For a second, he remembered his name.
Then the dog picked up the arm and carried it away, deep into the perpetual twilight of the forest.
*
Outside the safe house, the sound of armoured vehicles was growing louder.
‘We must get back to the garrison,’ said Kirov. ‘It’s the only fortified location in town. If we run flat out, we can be there in five minutes.’
Pekkala paused to check that his Webley revolver was loaded. He had forgotten to test-fire the weapon and now it was too late. He would just have to hope that Lazarev had worked one of the miracles for which he was already famous, or else this weapon might blow up in his hands the second he pulled the trigger.
Suddenly, the sound of an approaching vehicle filled the air. The floorboards shuddered beneath their feet. Seconds later, a German half-track rumbled past.
The half-track was followed by a squad of infantry. Some were members of the Flemish SS, identifiable by the three-branched swastika ‘trifos’ on their collar tabs, a yellow shield emblazoned with a black lion on their left forearms and, just beneath it, a black and white cuff title with the word ‘Langemarck’ etched out in silver thread. These were the troops which had been given the task of breaking through to Rovno, although by the time the skeletal rooftops of the town at last came into view so few were left that they had now been reinforced by other soldiers pulled from decimated units in the area, turfed out of their beds at field hospitals or hauled off trains by members of the German Military Police, the Feldgendarmerie, as they made their way home on the only leave some of them had seen in more than three years. Among these Belgians walked men from Croatia, from Spain, from Norway and from Hungary, all of them communicating in some bastard Esperanto, cobbled from their native tongues and the snippets of German they had picked up in their service to the Reich.
With bayonets fixed upon their Mauser rifles, they moved at a slow trot to keep up with the machine. Their clothing was a threadbare collage of the battles they had seen. Some still wore the bottle-green collared tunics in which they had marched into Poland in the autumn of 1939. There were jackboots that had marched down the Champs-Elysées in the summer of 1940, and ankle boots looted from Dutch army warehouses, with laces made from scraps of radio wire and loose heel irons that jangled like spurs as they grazed over stones in the road. Slung from belts, some carried canvas bread bags bleached by the African sun out in the Sand Sea of Calanscio. Their sharply angled helmets hid beneath tattered strips of camouflage cut from old shelter capes, or covers fashioned out of rusty chicken wire, on which could still be seen the traces of white paint daubed upon them when their owners huddled freezing in the ruins of Borodino in the winter of ’41.The faces of these men appeared primordial, their smoke-clogged pores and blistered lips like scraps of leather thrown out by a tanning yard. Their bodies were those of young men, but shrunk to bony scaffolding beneath the patched and filthy grey of Wehrmacht uniforms. Although the shape of them was human, in the hollow darkness of their eyes, and with frost-bitten ears worn down like chips of sea glass, they were no longer recognisable as men. They bore no resemblance to the postered images which had propelled them on this journey, whose only outcome, they now realised, would be annihilation. They were all that remained of their generation; restless husks of who they’d been before they went away, unknowable now to those they left behind and in the ice-filmed puddles where they glimpsed their sad reflections, unfamiliar even to themselves.
Somewhere up the street, just beyond Pekkala’s field of view, the half-track came to a squeaking halt.
‘There are more of them out back,’ whispered Kirov. ‘They’re moving through the alleyways.’
At that moment, Pekkala spotted two soldiers walking directly towards the house. ‘Go!’ he whispered to Kirov.
The two men dashed across the room, slid down the ladder into the root cellar and closed the trap door on top of them, just as the front door blew open, splintered by a rifle butt.
The soldiers searched the house, floorboards groaning under the cautious tread of their hobnailed boots.
Huddled in the darkness, only a hand’s breadth below, Kirov and Pekkala knew that it was only a matter of time before the soldiers discovered the narrow trench which led directly to the root cellar. And when they did, there would be no way out.
*
The first thing Vasko saw when he came in sight of the cabin was sunlight
glinting off the shards of broken window. The door to the cabin was wide open, with one of its hinges torn off. Vasko realised immediately that one of the explosive devices with which he had booby trapped the cabin must have detonated.
Probably that fool Malashenko, he thought, nosing around to see what he could steal. I warned him not to touch things that didn’t belong to him. But, to be certain, Vasko drew his gun and circled around through the trees, searching for any sign of movement as he approached the cabin door.
Picking a stone from the ground, he rolled it into the dark, knowing that anyone still alive inside would mistake it for a grenade. Then he waited, ready to shoot whoever came running out.
But there was no cry of surprise. No sound of footsteps or the chambering of weapons. Only the dull clatter of the rock as it skipped across the wooden floor.
Cautiously, Vasko stepped into the cabin, his gun held out and finger on the trigger.
The breath caught in his throat when he saw the carnage.
By the table, still sitting in the chair, which had tipped back against the wall, was a man without a head and missing one of his arms. The table itself had been broken almost in half, its surface cratered by a large scorch mark.
Vasko’s first guess was that Malashenko had triggered the booby trap in the canteen, but then he saw the canteen lying on the other side of the room. It was dented and the metal blackened by smoke but it had definitely not exploded.
Then, looking up, Vasko spotted pieces of what he realised was his radio embedded in the ceiling. Immediately, he guessed that Malashenko had instead set off the explosive device installed in the radio. Vasko had done the rewiring himself, using the on switch as both on and off depending on which way he turned it and using the separate off switch as a trigger for the dynamite. To lose a radio when in the field was serious, but to have one fall into the hands of the enemy was a capital offence. Vasko was glad that he had taken precautions against losing the device, but it left him without a guide who knew his way around Rovno, as well as any means of communicating with Skorzeny. At least, he thought, I now have a reason for delaying my return to Berlin.
Knowing that this place might be his home for several days to come, Vasko set about cleaning up the mess. Underneath the bunk, he found the man’s head, scorched and disfigured by the blast. He lifted it by the hair, so much heavier than he would have thought, and stared into its sightless eyes.
‘Mother of God,’ whispered Vasko, as he realised that it wasn’t Malashenko after all.
The head fell from his grasp and landed with a heavy thud upon the cabin floor.
‘It can’t be,’ he said to himself.
Praying that he might somehow be mistaken, Vasko stumbled over to the body in the chair. Fumbling with the shirt buttons, he reached under the blood-stiffened cloth and pulled out a flat oval disc made of dull grey zinc, still attached to the remains of a braided black and red cord which had once held the disc around the wearer’s neck. It was a standard German military dog tag, which all personnel were required to carry in the field, no matter what uniforms they wore while undertaking operations. One side of the tag was marked SS-SD. The other side bore a cryptic combination of letters and numbers: 2/4 Hauptamt. Bln. The dog tag had been perforated down the middle and the markings repeated on both sides. In the event that the soldier was killed, one half of the oval would be snapped off for graves registration, the second half remaining with the body. The information stamped into the metal ensured that agents could identify themselves to regular German troops when they crossed back over the lines. He studied the inscription. The word ‘Hauptamt’ stood for ‘headquarters’ and ‘Bln’ was the abbreviation for Berlin. This was the department of the SS to which all field agents were officially assigned. No regular soldier attached to SS Headquarters in Berlin would have found himself out here, behind the lines and wearing civilian clothes. Now Vasko knew that there could be no doubt. The dead man was Luther Benjamin.
Before he left on the mission, Vasko had been informed by Skorzeny that Benjamin had been assigned to rendezvous with him as soon as the mission was completed. But no such signal had been sent. Vasko couldn’t fathom why Benjamin would have set out anyway. That decision had cost the agent his life.
Vasko sat down on the bunk. He felt dizzy and sick, knowing what he had to do next. Abwehr protocol demanded that, in the event of an agent’s death in the field, all evidence of him, his identity and his mission must be destroyed.
Vasko stood, his head still spinning, and reached for a lantern behind the bunk. It had escaped the blast and was still filled with paraffin. Vasko grasped the lamp and raised it above his head, ready to smash it on the floor and then, with a single match, burn the cabin to the ground. But in that moment an idea came to him which focused all the chaos in his mind. Gently, so as not to spill a drop of fuel, he replaced the lantern on the ground.
‘Let him come,’ he whispered to himself. ‘Let Pekkala see what’s left of Peter Vasko.’
*
Down in the musty-smelling cellar, Pekkala was wondering how many soldiers he could take with him before the rest of them riddled the place with bullets.
Then he heard a strange sound, somewhere in the distance, like a big door being slammed shut.
Above them, one of the soldiers swore.
A few seconds later, there was a rumble, like a train passing through the air above them, and the house shook with a nearby explosion.
Two more thuds were followed by detonations.
‘What was that?’ whispered Kirov, as the dirt floor trembled beneath their feet.
‘Mortars,’ answered Pekkala.
‘Ours or theirs?’
‘Either one will kill us if we don’t get out of here,’ replied Pekkala.
Upstairs, the soldiers had reached the same conclusion. They sprinted from the building as more explosions shook the house, followed by a thump of stones and bricks and clods of earth as they rained down over the garden.
A second later, there was a shriek, like metal claws upon a blackboard. Smoke and dust rolled beneath the canvas tarp that separated the basement from the trench outside.
The explosions came so quickly now, one after the other, that they merged into a constant roar. To Pekkala, it felt as if a herd of cattle was stampeding through his brain.
Then, just when it seemed that nothing could survive under this terrible rain, the mortar barrage ceased.
At first, Kirov could barely hear anything above the ringing in his ears but, a short while later, he picked up the sound of the half-track as it rolled back towards the west. Before long, it had faded into the distance. And then there was only the sound of wounded men, baying like dogs beside the smoking craters which would soon become their graves.
‘What should we do now?’ asked Kirov, his own voice reaching him as if muffled beneath layers of cotton wool.
‘I think it might be best to run like hell,’ replied Pekkala.
They climbed out through the trench and sprinted across the snow-clogged grass, heading for the safety of the garrison.
The two men had not gone far when they heard the sound of another engine, this one much smaller than the half-track, but headed straight towards them. Cautiously, Kirov peered around the corner of a building. ‘It’s Sergeant Zolkin!’ Stepping out into the road, Kirov was almost run over by the newly repaired Jeep, which skidded to a stop in front of him.
‘Quickly!’ shouted Zolkin. ‘We’re expecting a counter-attack any minute.’
They piled in and Zolkin wheeled the Jeep around. Crashing through the gears as he raced back towards the garrison, the vehicle slalomed around the shattered bodies of soldiers, some of them blown out of their clothes by the force of the explosions. Outside the old hotel, two soldiers dragged aside a barbed wire barricade just in time to let them pass and the Jeep roared into the courtyard.
As Pekkala clambered out, he stared up at the shattered windows and the bullet-pocked walls. Here and there, he could see
a rifle pointing from a room. Through an open doorway, he watched as wounded men, trailing the bloody pennants of hastily applied field bandages, were being carried down into the basement of the building.
‘They’ve hit us twice already,’ said Zolkin. ‘If it hadn’t been for the mortars, they would have made it past the barricade.’
‘Where did the mortars come from?’ asked Kirov. ‘I don’t see any in position here.’
Zolkin shook his head. ‘They weren’t ours. Those rounds came in from somewhere on the other side of town. We think it might be a Red Army relief column approaching on the road from Kolodenka. Commander Chaplinsky has been trying to make radio contact with them, but so far without success. With luck, they might get here before the next attack.’
He had barely finished speaking when they heard the clatter of enemy machine guns and the monstrous squeaking of tracked vehicles, somewhere out beyond the barricades. The Langemarck Division had returned.
‘So much for the relief column,’ muttered Zolkin. ‘It looks as if we’re on our own.’
Commander Chaplinsky met them in the doorway of the garrison. His face was blackened with gun smoke, making his teeth seem unnaturally white. Behind him, in what had once been a grand foyer, three exhausted soldiers sprawled on an ornately upholstered couch which had been dragged out into the open. Others lay around them on the floor, oblivious to the jigsaw puzzles of broken window glass beneath them. The worn-down hobnails on their boots gleamed as if pearls and not steel had been set into the dirty leather soles.
‘Find yourself a gun.’ Chaplinsky gestured towards a heap of rifles belonging to those who were now being treated in an improvised dressing station in the old luggage room of the hotel. ‘We’re going to need everyone who can pull a trigger.’ As he spoke, some of the more lightly wounded soldiers emerged from the dressing station, took up their weapons and returned to their posts.