There was not so much as a forage cap to be found beside the burning chassis of the Hanomag as the officer and his men patrolled around it looking for signs of life.
Dietz had wandered down to the jeep and wasted no time in pulling off the Russian officer’s watch. He then disappeared behind the vehicle and started rifling through the pockets of the inside of the vehicle’s door. He emerged thirty seconds later with a khaki coloured canvas dispatch case tucked under his arm.
The officer walked over to Dietz who was admiring his handiwork with the Mauser.
“A good shot, sir?” Dietz looked up and was grinning from ear to ear, exposing an uneven row of brown teeth. “I keep a few of these beauties for special occasions.” He was holding one of his specially doctored bullets between thumb and forefinger.
Then the officer noticed the dispatch case under his sergeant’s arm.
“It was in the jeep, sir. In a compartment on the inside of the door. It’s sealed.”
“Give it to me.” Dietz hesitated before handing the case to his superior officer. Several other camouflage-clad figures drew round the officer and Dietz, sensing a showdown between the two of them in the air. If they disliked the officer, they absolutely detested Dietz. He was not only their sergeant and superior, but an outsider. Some even thought that he was a Nazi party minder who’d been assigned to their platoon to spy on them.
If the officer’s men had been less intent on the confrontation, they might have noticed a slight movement in the tall grass ten paces away from the jeep. As it was, the twitching arm of the second Russian officer who had been thrown furthest from the vehicle went completely unnoticed.
Major Yuri Paliev had been brought round by the sound of voices nearby. His ribcage felt as if a tank had driven across it and he could taste blood in his mouth. He knew he was dying. Waves of pain were washing over him, but he was fighting them, motionless, except for the twitching movement in his arm, over which he had no control. What bothered Paliev was that his mind was quite lucid, at least he thought it was, yet these men who seemed to be arguing a little way over to his left were not German. At first he thought that they had been ambushed by Slav partisans, who were not uncommon in that part of Czechoslovakia, but he knew some Slavic and he knew some German, and these men were neither.
He couldn’t raise his head, but through the tall grass he could see a group of men. They were soldiers, all right, but whose, it was hard to tell as they wore camouflaged battle gear and even their helmets were covered in grass, twigs and leaves. He couldn’t get a look at the two men who seemed to be arguing, but one of them must be an officer, he thought, from the way he was barking out orders. With all his remaining strength, Paliev craned his neck for a better look. At the precise moment he spotted the peaked cap of the Waffen-SS officer, one of his smashed ribs dug into his diaphragm and he screamed.
Seven heads spun round in the direction of the cry and three machine-pistol bolts clicked in metallic unison as the guns were cocked.
One of the men ran over to the dying Russian and peered at his face. Blood was trickling from Paliev’s mouth, but the soldier hardly noticed it. He was captivated by the quizzical expression, which furrowed the Russian’s brow. It was as if the Ivan wanted to ask him something.
“Over here, sir! One of them’s still alive!”
But it wasn’t the officer who rushed over to the Russian’s side first, it was Dietz.
“Who are you?” Paliev choked out in German. Dietz drew the bolt of his sniper’s rifle back and slipped in a bullet. He cocked it and pointed the gun nonchalantly at the Russian’s head.
“We’re just about all that’s left of the Second SS Panzergrenadier Regiment, Das Reich Division, Ivan, which is too bad for you.” Dietz’s finger tightened on the trigger.
The Russian’s eyes looked imploringly at Dietz.
“What’s bothering you Ivan? Is it the others?” He laughed. “I am German. But these reprobates I’ve mothered for the last fifteen hundred kilometres, they’re not. I’ll show you.”
Paliev could hardly understand a word the Bavarian was saying. He saw Dietz grab the soldier next to him and rip open his camouflaged jacket. The grey uniform underneath was the same as a thousand other SS uniforms he’d seen on dead Germans along the front. The young soldier did not resist as Dietz took off his battle smock. The others had all crowded round and some were laughing. It was as if they were playing a game which had been rehearsed many times before. Dietz grabbed the young soldier’s arm and pointed to a little badge just below the elbow on the field-grey uniform.
“See Ivan? It’s red, white and blue.” Dietz was revelling in the Russian’s confusion. He could not have sounded more mocking. “We’re a Freikorps unit. Very rare they are too. You’re a lucky boy.” He laughed loudly again before reverting to the language which was the native tongue of his officer and those five other young idiots.
“Yes, we’re a British Free Corps unit in the SS,” he said slowly, mocking the aristocratic English accent of the superior officer.
He levelled his rifle once more at the Russian’s forehead.
Paliev closed his eyes before Dietz’s second dum-dum bullet entered his cranium. He died without having a clue what the German had said.
CHAPTER THREE
Although it was raining lightly, Kruze chose to walk from Waterloo Station to the Air Ministry. The journey from Farnborough to the London terminus had taken well over an hour because of an unscheduled stop in a tunnel near Addlestone. Air raid, someone had said, and Kruze had not moved to disagree, even though he knew it was just another false alarm.
The rain fell more heavily as he walked down the Strand. He contemplated calling a cab as he dodged the pedestrians who weaved down the street of theatres and music halls, but dismissed the idea as the familiar sight of Nelson’s column came into view. From Trafalgar Square the Ministry was only a few minutes’ walk.
Londoners seemed to have forgotten the war. The last German air raid on the capital was a distant memory. Although the buzz-bomb threat had been serious enough for the government to consider an evacuation of the city, everyone always referred to it as if it was nothing more than a mild nuisance. In the four years that he had lived among the English he still had not quite got used to their vagaries.
Kruze paused by a crowd that had gathered outside the Rialto Cinema. The proprietor was shouting excitedly at a policeman and pointing at two lower ranking soldiers, who joked and winked at the girls in the crowd when the policeman’s back was turned.
“But I saw them do it!” The proprietor looked ridiculous in bow tie and ill-fitting impresario’s jacket. There was loud laughter as one of the soldiers turned drunkenly and shrugged at his growing audience.
Kruze saw the object of the owner’s displeasure. A poster, boasting the proud, manly figure of Errol Flynn in combat attire, had been defaced in a large scrawling hand with the word “pansy”. The film was Objective Burma and it had caused quite a stir when it had first been released in London, Kruze recalled. It implied that Errol Flynn had captured Burma from the Japanese single-handed. An old woman caught Kruze grinning and frowned her displeasure. Kruze transferred his smile to her, touched his cap lightly and moved on.
He skirted the edge of Trafalgar Square and looked up at the figure of Admiral Nelson. That the Germans had not flattened the centre of London had been a miracle. The great buildings of Whitehall, the nerve centre of the British war effort, bore few scars, unlike Waterloo. There, Kruze had seen workmen pulling down the shell of a huge warehouse, hit by a V2 attack some months before.