‘We know what to do, but we’re not sure about when. Will you give us some kind of signal?’
‘You won’t need a signal, believe me. Now I’ll wish you all well and I’ll be on my way. I’ll see you back at the rendezvous point in little under an hour.’
And with that, he was gone.
Wilkins was soon outside again.
It felt good to be beyond the imposing enclosure of the castle walls, but unnerving to be out in the open again like this. No cover. No defence. Just him, a handful of Nazis, and the entire remaining undead population of the Polonezköy prison camp.
He’d retraced his steps as best he could, weighed down with the necessary supplies they’d half-hitched from the cellars earlier. Once he’d reached the small enclosed courtyard where Steele had found them, he’d used the grappling hook to scale the castle wall and climb down into the main part of the camp again.
The sun was about to rise. It would be daylight soon: a relentless countdown. If Captain Hunter and his men had managed to hold the airfield, how long would they wait? Every second mattered now. Wilkins knew he was working against an unstoppable clock. It felt like this was an impossible task.
Keep moving.
Never stop.
He had only to remember the responsibility which rested on his shoulders to know that he had no choice. He simply had to keep going.
He used the burned out hut where Lieutenant Henshaw had met his unfortunate end as a marker, then looked up to try and make out the walkway between the castle towers from which he’d observed the direction of the dead a short time earlier. There were only occasional bodies here, and they appeared to have as little interest in him as he had in them. They were distracted instead by the low noise coming from the massive crowd to the east. Although singularly quiet, the cumulative noise was again extraordinary. Thousands upon thousands of slothful, dragging footsteps.
And it was closer to the repellent crowd that he now forced himself to move. Tucked in tight against the castle wall again, he crept slowly around until he found himself mingling with the fringes of the undead hordes; as near as he could get to the festering masses without becoming part of the crowd.
Here goes nothing, he thought. Then he stopped and corrected himself. Here goes everything.
Wilkins pulled the pins of grenade after grenade after grenade and hurled them as far as he could towards the outermost part of the crowd. The first explosion came in seconds, sending bodies flying in all directions, and at the same time causing huge swathes of the dead to surge towards the sudden disturbance, more of them starting to move with each subsequent blast. Their interest in the chaos allowed him to move with a little more freedom and he moved deeper into their number. Using the first detonations as a marker point – similar, he smiled to himself, to when he and the boys played darts in the squadron social club – this time he shifted his aim slightly to ensure the next munitions he threw exploded alongside the outer wall.
In the split-second flash of one powerful ignition he saw that he’d successfully punched a hole through the wall, then he threw several more grenades to make that hole larger still.
Was it his imagination, or was the light improving more quickly than he’d expected? Did he have even less time than he’d originally thought?
In the brief gaps between explosions, he’d thought he’d heard voices. Now he could hear them clearly. It was the Nazis in the hut at the centre of the chaos fighting amongst themselves. Squabbling. Arguing. Some panicking because they thought they were under attack, others doing everything they could to keep the noise down because they recognised the effect it would have on the hungry dead outside.
To Wilkins’ immense relief, however, the first part of his plan appeared to be working. The majority of the dead were continuing to move away from the Germans and towards the epicentre of the blasts. ‘One more for luck,’ he said quietly to himself, and he lobbed his penultimate grenade through the air. This one landed on the edge of the advancing crowd and blew scores more of the abhorrent creatures to kingdom come.
If the Nazis were watching him and trying to follow his plan, he thought, his next move would throw them into even more confusion.
Rather than heading straight for the Germans in the hut, he instead ran in the opposite direction towards the hole in the outer wall. He was moving in the same direction as the dead, but with far more speed and control, and though the ground was increasingly uneven – littered with craters and lumps of burning flesh – his progress was largely unimpeded. A stormtrooper corpse managed to wrap one decaying hand around his arm as he tried to side-step it, but his speed was such that it couldn’t keep its balance and it fell. Wilkins found himself dragging the ghoul behind. Its grip on his sleeve was tenacious, and he resorted to punching it in the face to get rid of it. His hand stung with pain and was drenched with blood and gore.
Made it.
He’d reached the hole in the outer wall, and there he stopped – just for a moment, just long enough to turn back and holler ‘Come and get me!’
He waited as long as he dared, enough time to be certain that enough of the dead had seen him and were now following, hopefully starting a chain reaction, before running along the gap between the wall and the electrified fence. He paused and looked back again, long enough this time to be sure his audacious plan was working. The dead appeared to be flooding through the hole he’d made, and at once the air began to fill with sparks and crackles and foul-smelling smoke as cadaver after cadaver collided with the wire-mesh and began to burn. Those which didn’t reach the fence were now spilling out in either direction, filling the gap between the wall and the fence.
Wilkins crept back into the courtyard, heading straight for the back of the occupied hut. Several of the Nazis had already emerged from their shelter into the space where the dead had been. A sizeable number of rogue bodies remained close, and the Germans were forced to defend themselves from frequent attacks. Wilkins watched in horror as a screaming prisoner was sacrificed in the vain hope of distracting more of the masses – kicked out into the open and made to run for cover. He’d barely made it twenty yards before he was overcome by corpses, unable to defend himself in his miserably weak, emaciated condition. A lone Obergrenadier stranded near to the hut was also caught out in the open, and another pack descended on him and tore him apart. His screams helped divert more undead attention away from his officers and other remaining countrymen who tried to work out what was happening in the midst of the inexplicable chaos. Watching events unfold from on high, Steele put all but a couple of those he could see out of their misery with quick-fire, well-aimed precision shots from a Mauser Kar 98k they’d taken from the keep.
As a result of Steele’s stealthy attack, the remaining Germans retreated back into their hut which was immediately sealed again. Jones and Barton watched events unfold intently, waiting at ground level for Wilkins to give them their signal to move.
One of the Nazis spotted Wilkins as he sprinted towards the lowly building. The German took pot-shots at him from a window and he was forced to zigzag wildly to avoid being hit. He ran straight past the hut and took cover behind another, further confusing the already bemused krauts. Several of them emerged again, only to be driven back by Steele shooting from high in the tower. The soldiers looked up for him, trying to work out the angle of the shot which had taken out their colleagues, then firing up at the castle walls. They missed the window from which Steele had been shooting, but their bullets were close enough to make the Brit pull his head back and duck out of sight.