“You have papers?”
“Provisional ones, yes. Not good enough to get us into the airfield, just basic identification documents.”
That devious shit Staverton had let him keep his Reich service papers, Kruze thought.
“Then go down there and requisition a vehicle for your very own KG unit,” Kruze said, the urgency in his voice steel-hard.
“What are you talking about, flyboy?”
“If this place is as chaotic as you said it was, no one’s going to think twice about you stopping a truck and forming your own KG squad — only in this case it will just be you, me and the troops in the vehicle.”
“You think they will obey me, one man against all of them? When I said Germany was the closest thing you would find to chaos, I meant chaos with a capital ‘C They would just shoot us and carry on their way.”
“Not if you stay authoritative, leave them no other choice.” He saw Herries thinking hard. “The alternative is to stay here until those mountain troops hunt us down like dogs.”
Herries suddenly seemed to stir himself into action. “Then we wait for a Wehrmacht truck and pray that it hasn’t been requisitioned by the SS.”
They slid down the last stretch of scree to some foliage beside the road. A heavy six-axle truck rumbled past them every thirty seconds, to their desperate dismay each one bearing the emblem of the 12th SS Panzergrenadiers. Herries bit his lip impatiently, throwing glances alternately between the vehicles and the mountain behind them. They needed a regular army unit, one which would quake at a bit of a typical SS bullying, but they needed it before the Gebirgsjäger came for them.
After half an hour, the Panzergrenadiers gave way to trucks from the 2nd SS Das Reich Panzer Division. Kruze battled to keep his eyes open, but the fatigue of the last few hours began to spread from his limbs to his head, numbing his mind even to the drone and vibration of the vehicles grinding their way along the roadside a few feet from where they lay. He closed his eyes, no longer caring about the Gebirgsjäger, or the rendezvous they had to keep with the watchmaker.
He saw Herries leave the ditch by the road and wave down a truck. He watched, biting his knuckles, as the traitor remonstrated with the driver, but he could not hear their words. At last, the driver nodded, Herries smiled, and then the tailgate fell away and the mountain troops dropped to the road, their machine-pistols unslung, pointing at him. Rough hands pulled at him, while he struggled to find his automatic so as to put one bullet through the laughing face of Herries and a second through his own temple.
The hands shook him until he woke up. Herries’ face was not full of mirth as it had been in the dream, but desperation.
“For God’s sake, wake up, this is it.”
He pulled Kruze from the ditch and into the road. Down the valley, Kruze saw the two slit beams of light approaching.
“The last two trucks have been from the 4th Panzer Training Division — regular army — it couldn’t be better,” Herries said.
Kruze shook the bitter taste of the dream from his head. “As long as they weren’t strays, sandwiched between more SS units.”
But Herries wasn’t listening. “Shut up. Don’t say another word till we get to Munich. If anyone asks about you, or talks to you, leave the explanations to me.”
Herries stepped into the middle of the road and held out his arms. The brakes squealed and the gears crunched as the vehicle slowed. Kruze looked sidelong at the motif on the cabin door, his heart in his mouth: he could make out a crude stencil of a tank and the number ‘4’. Herries’ gamble had paid off.
The driver, a Gefreiter, could not have been a day over seventeen. He blinked every time Herries barked at him and once tried to step down from the cab to verify something with a superior in the back, but Herries was not having any of it. Herries’ was an awe-inspiring performance, his ranting punctuated with words that Kruze could understand, like ‘urgent’, ‘orders’, ‘disobedience’ and ‘reprisals’. He was pure Aryan bully, arrogance itself and utterly convincing.
Herries waved Kruze aboard. The Rhodesian slid up into the cab, next to the driver, while Herries went round to the back of the truck. He saw the youth’s hands tremble as Herries’ orders to whoever was behind them boomed in their ears. No one dissented.
Herries clambered in beside Kruze and hit the dashboard. The driver pushed the gears tick forward and they began the slow turn that would take them into Munich.
CHAPTER TWO
There was a lightness in Malenkoy’s step as he walked from the site of his regular morning ablutions, a backwater of the mountain stream that ran through Chrudim, to his tent, pitched between the sides of two bogus T-34s. As he traced the path through the centre of the town, past the tanks of his phantom army, he kept one eye on the lightening skies and one ear cocked for Luftwaffe reconnaissance aircraft.
In the silence of the predawn and the unnatural tranquillity of the maskirovka encampment, the major’s mood drifted into despondency: there was not an aeroplane engine to be heard; nor was there the buzz of anticipation that usually preceded a new offensive, because his armoured regiments were manned, not by troops charged with adrenalin, but a skeleton crew waiting to offer a realistic response when the Luftwaffe came sniffing.
He fumbled his way past the T-34s that stood like leviathan sentries on either side of his tent, tripped on the guy ropes and groped for the flap. When he pulled it back, the familiar, sweat-soaked smells of the interior mingled with something that had not been there when he had left half an hour ago.
The match flared and illuminated the stubbled face of a man he had never seen before. Malenkoy reached for his pistol.
“There won’t be any need for the gun, Major.”
The voice carried an authority that Malenkoy responded to instinctively.
“Who are you?” he stammered.
“The name’s Shlemov. I’ve come from Moscow.” He lit the lamp and threw the match onto the ground. “I’ve been looking for you all night.”
“What do you want with me?” Malenkoy asked, suddenly afraid. Shlemov didn’t have to say what unit he was attached to, Malenkoy just knew; he reeked of NKVD.
“I just want to ask some questions — routine questions. And Comrade Major, there is no need to stand, we are of equal rank.”
Malenkoy sat at the opposite end of the blanket that had kept some of the ground’s stored coldness off his back during the night, realizing how preposterous it was that an NKVD Major should come all the way from Moscow to ask “routine questions”. Fear clogged his mind. He could only think it was something to do with his parents — perhaps they had been caught uttering anti-Soviet sentiments and now the NKVD were coming to take him away for their sins against the State.
Shlemov put his hands up to the lamp and rubbed them gently. It had been a long night, indeed, especially after the gruelling journey of the day before. Having flown from Moscow to Ostrava in a large twin-engined transport, he had been able to persuade a liaison pilot to take him from Ostrava to a forward airstrip close to the front lines only by showing the man Beria’s warrant.
Upon his arrival at Branodz, late the previous evening, he checked in with the local NKVD detachment and, without divulging the nature of his mission, had found out that Malenkoy was the only local officer, outside his own little group of suspects, with whom Shaposhnikov was known to have made contact. The major of tanks had been spotted with the Marshal “deep in conversation” outside the HQ. It was an encounter that had not gone unremarked among the thousands of troops — and NKVD infiltrators — milling the square outside Konev’s headquarters. For Shlemov, that was a good enough place to start, but it had taken him the rest of the night to make his way to Chrudim and find Malenkoy’s hovel in the maze of dummy tanks.