Keen to take advantage of the ‘victory’ earned by the sacrifice, Mikenas and Bottomley drove the force on to greater efforts.
The events of that night were slowly pieced together by both sides, who arrived at very different conclusions.
From the Soviet viewpoint, the local villagers had distracted the NKVD guards with their drink, food, and flesh, to permit the Lithuanian partisans to mount an attack.
That the commander of the convoy had arrived on the scene before they were in position and ordered the execution of the villagers had thrown the partisan’s plan completely out, which meant that the guarding troopers were able to protect their charges and inflict a significant defeat on ‘The Shield’, counting fifty-nine dead partisans, whilst sustaining twenty-one dead and an equal number of wounded themselves.
Despite extensive questioning, the old woman and sole surviving man they had captured gave up no significant information, even when roasted alive and skinned.
The report concluded that the loss of one barge was caused by nothing more sinister than an accidental uncoupling of the mooring line.
Most of the load had been recovered, a few cases of food and medical supplies having been washed away.
A nearby Soviet engineer unit was seconded to help with the recovery of some of the barge’s load, and the report initially indicated that ten of the twelve drums were recovered.
An addendum later reported that one of the missing drums was found at the engineer unit’s base, surrounded by dead and dying men.
Volunteers dug a communal grave for the seventy men who died and the corpses were first incinerated before being buried deep and NKVD clear-up teams dealt with the survivors.
One drum was left unaccounted for, and special diving teams were to be flown in to help locate it.
What really happened was different in many ways.
The partisans received word that Audra Karelis and one other had been taken alive, and then accounts arrived of their screams and suffering, before one final message told of their refusal to bend and death under the torturer’s blade.
Partisan stocks of food and medical supplies had received a welcome boost, but less than had been hoped, for which Cookson was eyed with some annoyance.
The SAS had lost no one, but Tappett and Cookson were casualties, whereas the partisans brought home only five wounded, but left fourteen of their brothers and sisters lying in the snow.
The villagers of Pupkaimis accounted for the rest of the bodies in the Soviet report, a total that was added to subsequently, when the surviving villagers were herded into the Neman to die.
The losses had been severe for ‘The Shield’, particularly those of Karelis and Lukša, and even the prospect of some important item falling into their hands failed to raise the collective morale.
Some days later, the story of the Soviet engineer unit reached Pyragius’ ears, and the barrel took on an almost sinister significance.
Without prompting from Bottomley, the partisan leader understood that the clearly dangerous contents of the barrel were suddenly extremely important, and plans were laid to recover it.
0900 hrs, Friday, 7th February 1947, Semipalatinsk-21, Kazakh SSR
At 1500, scientists and engineers at the new secret complex successfully created a ‘rainbow’.
It was an extremely small device, but it proved that they could make a device that would work.
The Soviet Union entered the Atomic age.
The scientists and engineers spread throughout the Soviet Union now had a three-week deadline to satisfy their immediate orders and produce four Izdeliye 500 mini-bombs, exact copies of the moderate yield device that had ravaged the Kazakh countryside, and somewhat longer to satisfy an order for eight Izdeliye 501s, their best effort to copy the US atomic device, based upon their direct knowledge of the Pumpkin bombs.
1759 hrs, Sunday, 9th February 1947, the Neman River, four kilometres west of Pupkaimis, Lithuania.
Cookson dropped into the freezing cold water and immediately found the drum.
The line was still as he had placed it and recovery proved easier than expected.
Inflating the dinghy was swiftly achieved and within ten minutes the barrel was safely in the inflatable and being towed across the Neman to rendezvous with a horse drawn sledge, whilst Cookson, this time properly equipped, exchanged his sodden clothing for warm and dry replacements.
With the barrel safely hidden underneath a load of hay, the old crone guided the bag of bones that could once have been a horse towards the selected hiding place, a small weather-beaten barn just south of Bartiškiai.
Once there, the barrel was hidden in a specially prepared pit, but not before Bouzyk had recorded all the details in a sketch.
At Bottomley’s insistence, a Westland Lysander was dispatched to pick up the vital information.
It didn’t make it, for reasons that would never be known.
Two nights later, another aircraft made the attempt and it arrived safely, dropped off some morphine, and took the sketch and other intelligence materials back with it, its wheels on the cleared field for less than two minutes.
Whilst the Lithuanian group knew the barrel contained something nasty, they had absolutely no idea of the hurricane they had just unleashed upon the Allied intelligence agencies.
So they went about the business of christening the four new arrivals whilst the world changed around them.
Chapter 187 – THE BITCH
The discovery of truth is prevented more effectively, not by the false appearance things present and which mislead into error, not directly by weakness of the reasoning powers, but by preconceived opinion, by prejudice.
1515 hrs, Tuesday 11th February 1947, Chihkiang Air Force Base, China.
Lieutenant General Ennis C Whitehead, C-in-C PACUSA, the unified command group for the US Air forces in the Pacific, watched through the two-way mirror as one of his Colonels went back over the startling information one more time.
His scheduled visit to the headquarters of the 14th US Air Force had coincided with the delivery of the unkempt man sat opposite the neatly turned out USAAF colonel.
Normally he would not have dirtied his hands in such matters, but the Chinese military personnel who brought the prisoner were wholly insistent that a most senior officer should speak with their charge, a man who claimed to be a Japanese officer in possession of important information.
His claim had saved his life, for most Japanese who fell into the hands of their archenemies lived but a few brief heartbeats more.
Yukio Kikutei had been precise in his words, his English impeccable, as befitted a man who had attended Cambridge University.
The information he delivered, all kept in his head, chilled every listener to the very core.
Kikutei, or to give him his full dues, Major the Count Yukio Kikutei, was a former officer of Unit-731 and, as personal aide and confidante of its second commander, Lieutenant General Masaji Kitano, was privy to every little grubby secret and despicable act attributable to the inappropriately named ‘Epidemic Prevention and Water Purification Department’ of the Kwantung Army.
0803 hrs, Monday, 17th February 1947, NATO headquarters, Frankfurt, Germany.