It was clear that all activity was taking place in the rear of the hut; and, for the moment, at least, all attention was centered on their horses. There were four men—men larger than the old Kulaks still eking out a living on the permafrost, and considerably larger that the indigenous Yakutsks—all dressed in heavy padded clothing and all carrying Kalashnikovs and swords. This was going to be fight, one that would require more brains than brawn if the two former gulag prisoners were going to survive.
“Out the front. You go left, and I’ll go right,” Antoine said. “We’ll get behind them. They won’t expect us coming from there.”
Each of them was armed with a Kalashnikov, a hatchet, and a machete. The cold was numbing to their bodies and to their minds, but it was a mutual enemy for both sets of combatants.
They outflanked their unsuspecting predators. On a signal from Antoine, he and Michaele screamed the battle cry of their division, “Gott mit uns [God with us]!” and hurled themselves at the unsuspecting thieves.
One of the thieves was able to think very quickly under the stress of the surprise attack.
“Dieu avec uks!” he shouted.
The effect was stunning. All six men stopped in their tracks for a crucial moment upon hearing the same battle cry uttered in French with the clarity of a native-born speaker. Six automatic rifles continued to point at the chests of putative opponents. No one spoke; they hardly breathed during that pregnant moment. The most important thing was that no one squeezed his trigger.
“Wer Sie sind [who are you]?” Antoine asked, breaking the stalemate.
“Charlemagne,” one of the men replied in an unmistakable Parisian accent.
“Driunddrissigsten [thirty-third]?” Michaele asked calmly.
“Oui, trente-troisième, I am Waffen SS-Obersturmbannführer [lieutenant colonel] Serge Alain Rounsavall,” the apparent leader of the four estwhile thieves announced.
The other three men introduced themselves:
“Waffen SS-Sturmbannführer [Senior Battalion Leader] Hugues Beauchamp.”
“Waffen SS-Sturmbannführer [Major] Jean Luc Latendresse.”
“Waffen SS-Hauptsturmführer [Head Company Unit Storm Leader] Jérôme Christophe Mailhot, at your service.”
Antoine and Michaele glanced at each other and gave a crisp nod of reassurance.
“Gruppenführer und Generalleutnant der Waffen-SS Antoine Duvalier.”
“Waffen SS-Oberführer Michaele Dupont.”
In an almost instantaneous semirobotic simultaneous motion, five right hands saluted General Duvalier with the Hitlergruss. Then the six men broke into laughter, grins, and embraces. For each of them, it was the first genuine moment of pleasure they had enjoyed since they were captured and imprisoned in the inhuman gulag.
“I was afraid that I was the only one left from the division,” Latendresse said.
“Until the two of us met and finally, we were able to identify Mailhot and Beauchamp,” said Rounsavall.
“We were of the belief that only the two of us had survived from the entire division,” said Dupont.
In fact, the division numbered only sixty men by May 1945, and less than a third of that number by the time the last German POW was released by the Soviets in 1956.
“You four are four more than we thought existed,” Antoine said. “We should start up another regiment.”
The four newcomers were as healthy, well-fed, and fit as Antoine and Michaele. Serge was the acknowledged leader, largely because of his markedly superior physical strength. He had a heavyweight lifter’s rotund body packed with muscle. He had a peasant’s bland face which belied the fact that he was a professional killer and a survivor against all odds. He had stringy brown hair down to his shoulder blades and a full face beard that made him look like Rasputin. He was dressed in heavy furs—pants included—taken from another pair of old Kulaks. His eyes were squinty and small; in fact his vision was none too good owing to his lifelong myopia [severe nearsightedness] and the nonavailability of suitable eyeglasses. Once the men retired to the warmth of Antoine and Michaele’s cozy cottage, Serge stripped down to his bare chest, which made all the men laugh because his chest and back was so hirsute that he looked like he had simply changed sets of furs.
Hugues was lanky and somewhat awkard. He had large hands and even larger feet. No shoes had been available for him in the internment camp, and he had had to make do with rags and rabbit skins. Now, he wore crude—but adequately fitted—hand-sewn horse hide mocassins lined with rabbit fur. His face was lined with the stresses he had suffered since 1945 when he was captured after the Battle of Berlin, but he had somehow retained his youthful look. His face and his hair did not match. He had turned gray after the end of the twelve-day Battle of Berlin due to having little or no sleep, or food, or relief from the constant bombardment and the accompanying soul-searing stress. He stood six feet six inches tall and changed from the skeleton he was during the camp years into a tall, fit, and rugged appearance. He had a wispy beard and head of hair, unlike Serge; but like Serge, he had never bothered to cut it. He was wearing a Russian peasant tunic and trousers made out of heavy gray wool. His trousers were held up by a four-inch wide black belt that he and his comrades had found in a cabin of an old Cossack whom they had murdered. One holdover from his prison days was a cadaverous gray skin pallor which gave him an almost zombie look. No one could win in a blinking contest with the still surviving Charlemagne soldier.
Jean Luc Latendresse was born a peasant and had resigned himself to grubbing out a meager living from the ground of Alsace-Lorraine. The occupation by the Germans had changed all that. When he was sixteen, his ardent Catholic and even more ardent anti-communist parents had gotten him admitted to the University of Lorraine in Metz to study in the theology department with the hope that he would become a priest one day. He learned Catholicism and the duties of the priesthood, of course; but he learned it from a faculty of rabidly anti-communist, French nationalistic, priests who were dedicated to the destruction of the Antichrists, as they termed the Reds. As soon as he was big enough to pass for eighteen, he traveled with two dozen other young men from his village and volunteered to join the Wehrmacht. In less than a year he was an officer in the SS.
Jean Luc had the great advantage facilitating advancement in the SS of being an indisputable Aryan. Not only was his appearance Nordic—strong-jawed, tall, and straight—but the recruiters were given full access to his family’s eight-generation genealogy—not a hint of any variant in the purity of the Aryan legacy. His face was open and ruddy, rather innocent-looking for all that he had done for the SS. He had no scars; his nose was Frankish and large; but for the first time in his life, that was a plus. At the moment he was dressed in three layers of peasant clothes stolen from farmers’ houses while they were out in their fields. He was still looking for a pair of boots that fit.
Jérôme Christophe was the only olive-skinned man among the four newcomers to Antoine and Michaele’s growing military force. He had Italian blood from two generations previous to him; and, apparently, the genetic marker was a strong one. He had the dark curly hair, fine straight nose, and delicate facial features of his Sicilian ancestors. He had a charm and roguish look that appealed to girls in every village he and his French volunteers had pillaged during their days with the Charlemagne Division. He was not a big man, but he was an agile and almost acrobatic one. He could climb, run, fight, and endure hardships with the best of men. His clothing had been purloined from a peasant woman’s line of washing, and he was wearing her linen blouse covered by two of her sweaters. He was quick enough with a butterfly switchblade knife to discourage anyone from making disparaging remarks about his appearance or choice of clothing.
The four newcomers had met at the tin mine and had become close allies after they were unceremoniously dumped into the unfortunate society of Magadan, Siberia. They took to calling themselves the four musketeers. Serge became Porthos; Jean Luc became Athos; Jérôme Christophe became Aramis by d
efault; and Jean Luc was the consensus choice to be d’Artagnan. Once they got to know Antoine, they occasionally called him by the name of M. de Tréville, captain of the Musketeers. That name did not stick, since Antoine was not much for games and pretenses.
CHAPTER NINETEEN
Magadan, Yakutia, Siberia, late April 1954
The “regiment” proved to be mutually beneficial for all of its six members. They worked together to improve their living quarters, their small vegetable gardens, and when they carried out foraging raids. They saw themselves as being invincible and having the effective power of a small SS independent fighting unit living off the land.
“Wir sind Gebirgsjäger [We are light infantry alpine-mountain troops],” Antoine told his men, harking back to the 6th Waffen SS Mountain Division Nord, an elite unit all of the former POWs admired, holding the unit in almost mythical respect.
That division held the distinction of being the only Waffen SS unit to fight in the Arctic Circle. Their successes and sacrifices in Finland and northern Russia between June and November 1941 were trumpeted by Hitler and became perhaps overrated as Aryan giants to be emulated by all SS troops.
“Ja, es ist wahr, Mein General,” Michaele echoed. “Wir sind die letzten Totenkopfverbände. Es ist unsere pflicht als speerspitze für die neue Vierte Reich!” [Yes, my general, we are the last SS Deaths Head Unit. It is our duty to be the spearhead for the new Fourth Reich].
His enthusiasm was shared by the other members of this increasingly arrogant band of brothers; now they were elite soldiers with a purpose that transcended their current meager status. It mattered little to any of them that the original Gebirgsjägers were drawn from the most brutal and thuggish concentration camp guard troops. The new Gebirgsjägers were also realists about their own situation and recognized that they would fight as a cohesive unit, or they would be imprisoned or killed. There could be no flinching at what had to be done. Every man knew that it was imperative that they leave no witnesses.
Each of them had experienced the terrors of becoming the subject of arrest for crimes against the Soviet Union. They were determined never to fall into the clutches of the only government more brutal and less compassionate than their own SS regiment. Murder of nearly defenseless men, women, and children became a necessary modus operandi as they began to accumulate more resources, including food, weapons, and warm clothing. The six men were fascinated by the fact that many of the former Kulaks had considerable treasures in gold, jewelry, and rubles which they had been able to hoard when they were transported to the northeastern Siberian region of Yakutia—which included Magadan—and had undoubtedly increased by dint of their extremely hard work and frugality.
The six former POWs enjoyed their good life to the maximum. They had good food, even a few luxuries like chocolate. They had all the vodka they wanted, good quality boots, fur caps, parkas, and sturdy woolen clothing. Things went so well that Antoine relaxed his iron grip on his men and began to allow daytime raids and to permit the men to neglect their gardens. One problem that was likely to come to endanger them was the woeful lack of even the most rudimentary intelligence about the area beyond their small isolated rural part of Yakutia. Michaele pointed that fact out a number of times before Antoine allowed two of the men—Hugues Beauchamp and Jean Luc Latendresse—to check out the situation in Magadan.
Hugues and Jean Luc meandered carefully through the muddy streets of Magadan frequently looking over their shoulders or into reflective store windows to see if they were being observed or followed. At noon, they entered a small café and took seats near the rear exit. Both men sat on the same side of the table facing the front door and the main front windows. Hugues ordered reindeer steak, and Jean Luc had a salad and borscht with beef strips. They had a Celta-Pils ale and a large glass of red wine that was not very good. The black rye bread was delicious and still hot from the oven. They smothered their pieces with heavy cream butter and consumed half a loaf each. The salad and the ale were the first they had enjoyed since 1945.
“Don’t be obvious,” Hugues said, “but there are KGB troops in the street. They’re getting out of a troop truck. That can’t be a good thing.”
Jean Luc nodded his head.
“Let’s watch and shovel the food in, leave some rubles, and get out by the back door. Seeing them before they saw us is the kind of intelligence we came for. Antoine will have to decide what our plan will be.”
“Think they’re after us?”
“I doubt it. We aren’t worth the trip from Moscow or Vladivostok or wherever they came from. This must have something to do with the city—maybe some dissidents or suspected counterrevolutionaries. There’s a small army out there, and I see one officer we both know.”
“Which one?”
“There by the Zil. That’s Lieutenant General of Cavalry Grigory Yegorivich Lagounov—the head commissar—or I’ll eat my hat,” Hugues said.
“Is he back to run the SVITL [Russian: Sevvostlag: severo-vostochnye lagerya. English: Directorate of North-Eastern Camps]?” Jean Luc asked quietly, feeling like someone had just walked on his grave.
“Who knows? I thought the Sovs had shut them all down and had repatriated all of the Kriegsverurteilte [German-POWs],” Hugues whispered, his voice also subdued by the presence of the infamous director of the camp system who was reputed to have participated in the shooting contests from the guard towers using random prisoners as targets.
“The man pushed my head into a kanalizatsiya vedro [sewage bucket] and almost drowned me because I ran too slow carrying logs to the stockpile.”
“He killed men for less than that,” Hugues said with a gravely growl, his eyes blazing with hatred.
“He killed men for nothing. Let’s get out of here before he sees us.”
Hugues and Jean Luc set out at a steady lope for the “Gebirgsjäger” camp, leaving all of their purchases behind to freeze in the snow.
They were too late. A Red Army unit surrounded the encampment and had rounded up all of the former POWs, placing them in shackles when the two men got close enough to understand what was going on. Jean Luc shrugged and whispered that they had to get away from there before they were recaptured and joined their fellow Frenchmen/former SS elite comrades in what was obviously a round up to force them back to the gulag. They had been living in a dream, and now it was a nightmare.
They bent low and moved as silently as they could through the snow and into the increasingly dense forest.
It was a futile try. The Red Army sergeants had anticipated that stragglers would try and slip away into the cover of the trees and deadfall. They were waiting and took Hugues and Jean Luc by complete surprise. There was no use putting up a fight; they knew they would be dead before they could raise their weapons; so, they meekly put their Kalashnikovs down and set their faces towards a distant day when they might possibly be free. For the time being, it was enough to be alive. That had been the unspoken motto of all of the surviving POWs while they languished, froze, and starved in the tin mine. At least they were starting out in better condition than they had been in when they first entered the brutal gulag in 1945.
The six totally dispirited prisoners marched through the snow and darkness all the way back to Magadan, arriving there just before midnight. In the Yakutsk, winter lasts from early October into May with temperatures sinking to as low as negative fifty-five degrees. Even in summer, temperatures in the range of thirty degrees Fahrenheit were so frequent as to be the rule. The men were shackled to each other and to steel spikes driven into the frozen ground at intervals. The Soviet soldiers never spoke to them. They shivered and stomped the ground to prevent frost bite and succumbing to hypothermia. Sleep was out of the question. They were famished and exhausted by the time the sun came up in the morning.
They were kicked awake by Soviet enlisted men and forced to their feet—a slow and awkward process owing to their stiffness.
A lieutenant marched stiffly and stood in front of the former POWs.
/> “Vnimaniye sobaki [attention dogs]! I am Lieutenant Sobrieski. It is my honor to present Lieutenant General Lagounov.”
The general stepped in front of his lieutenant flanked by two powerful-looking military policemen. He was slender with a hawk’s face and skeletally slender long fingers. He wore a new and perfectly pressed uniform. His eyes were close set and cruel. He had a carefully practiced efficiency of movement. He did not tolerate the least hint of insubordination as he perceived it. His aide-de-camp, Dimitri Sobrieski, was a short man who justified his manhood by the level of his cruelty. He exercised steely discipline never to smile and never to allow a prisoner to look him in the eyes. He was obsequiously deferential to Gen.
Lagounov and anyone else who outranked him or could give him an advantage in the rank-conscious KGB. He was as clean shaven and neat as his superior officer, and a trifle less Slavic and more handsome in appearance, although he would never have hinted at that fact. He had wideset eyes—his only facial flaw, a perfect Roman nose, thick lips, and unlike almost any other Russian, his teeth were straight, free of cavities and all present. He kept his uniform and boots as near perfectly cared for as the privates he dominated could manage in the mud and filth of the Siberian streets.
Gen. Lagounov spoke up again, “This is a happy day for you miserable sobaki,” he said, “You are to be repatriated back to Germany today. You will have the opportunity to report on the fair and decent treatment you have received while POWs. You will find that the Soviet Union does not take kindly to complainers and those who would criticize or try to undermine the great peoples’ government. We will travel by truck to the railhead, and then you will have the luxury—the undeserved luxury, I might add—of transportation by train the rest of the way west.”
The Charlemagne Murders Page 18