“Mines!”
Both towers came alive and muzzle flashes illuminated the men that had been concealed behind its wooden sides. Both of MacMichaels’ other men were hit immediately, their reactions dulled by hunger and exhaustion.
The PPSh leapt in his hands, and the Sergeant was rewarded with a reduction in fire from the nearest tower.
A flare rose and cast its illumination over the scene.
Müller shouted his men into a firing position and they too engaged the suddenly wide-awake defensive force.
None of them noticed the soldiers bailing out of the parked lorries until the bullets started to impact.
Forbes turned and got off one shot before the top of his head flew off, a round from an SVT auto-rifle striking him in the forehead at the same time as two from the gate guard’s PPd took him in the side of the temple, splashing red and grey matter all over Müller.
A rifle bullet slammed into Müller’s false leg, sending the wooden limb flying; another struck him in the lower stomach, bringing red-hot agony in immeasurable quantities.
One Soviet soldier dropped from the tower, a single rifle bullet in his brain, as Schultz joined in.
MacMichaels rose, firing first at the lorries, then at the tower, his body blossoming in spectacular red flowers as bullets struck home and he was knocked to his knees.
His screams were more of anger than pain, and the PPSh continued to pluck the life from some of his targets.
In the tower, one Soviet soldier took careful aim and put a single bullet through the Canadian’s throat, dropping him to the snow in a microsecond.
There was only one more shot, and that was fired three hundred metres away, from a distance of two metres.
The Kommandos’ bodies, there were six in total, were laid out by the side of the road. The US engineer having been recovered in stages, and pieces, as the attempt to drag his body out of the minefield set off another mine, wreaking more ignominy on the dead man.
MacMichaels had also come in for extra attention, a number of soldiers who had lost friends to his firing using their rifle butts and boots to take a little extra revenge on the corpse.
That left three men, wounded, bound, and near death, clad only in the thinnest of tunics and trousers, their greatcoats and blankets stripped from them by their captors.
Müller, his stomach wound frozen, was closest to death. His German Army uniform tunic, with its accompanying medals, had earned him a few blows.
Schultz’s Ritterkreuz had been snatched from him and a bayonet wound in the thigh added to the hole in his shoulder gained when the small detachment that had been trailing ‘Bucholz’ came upon him. More than one of the Russian security troops had given him a punch, as no-one soldier liked a sniper, and his GrossDeutschland armband, as usual, was mistaken for that of an SS man.
Willis, a British latecomer to the Kommando, was unconscious, his skull fractured by the rifle bullet that had creased his head and laid him out.
The Soviet ambush force commander, an NKVD Major, decided that the prisoners had no use for him and ordered them to be tied to the barbed wire fence.
Detailing two men to guard the Kommando soldiers, he decided to accept the offer of a drink with the supply officer, and both strolled off to sample the delights of the local brandy.
It was 2136.
By 2139, the last survivors of Kommando Bucholz had frozen to death.
Chapter 132 – THE RETURN
Treachery returns.
Makarenko did not sleep, although he had expected to, as aircraft held no fears for him that he could not conquer with ease, and he was very, very tired.
After a succession of medical supervisions, combined with interviews that were more often unsubtle interrogations, the NKVD and GRU officers had concluded that he had displayed supreme courage and military skill in the course of his mission and subsequent evasion.
Attitudes changed immediately, and he found himself feted as a hero for his survival and subsequent rejoining of the Army, an attitude that progressed to the very top and resulted in his summons to Moscow for a very public demonstration of the Motherland’s joy at his survival, by way of the presentation of the Hero Award from the hands of the General Secretary himself.
A number of senior officers shared the same flight back to Vnukovo, and none of them slept either.
A few were also summoned to the presence of the General Secretary to receive awards for their prowess on the battlefield or in command of their formations. For the most part, their excitement kept them awake.
Others, similarly summoned, understood that a wholly different fate awaited them, for reasons ranging from abject failure to simply bad luck, and they remained awake through fear.
The reason that Ivan Alekseevich Makarenko, Major General of Paratroops, did not sleep would have surprised many of his former interrogators.
It was neither excitement, nor fear.
It was the faces of those who had died, faces that came to him with his eyes shut or open.
‘Piotr Erasov, my second in command and friend. Dead.
Ilya Rispan, old experienced officer and friend. Dead.
Stefka Kolybareva, Doctor. Prisoner at best. At worst…
Egon Nakhimov, superb and loyal NCO. Probably no more.
Alexey Nikitin, sniper and model soldier. Most likely frozen to death in the High Vosges.’
He felt the anger build, as the anger always built when their faces visited him, reminding him of his promise.
‘All those young boys I took to Haut-Kœnigsbourg… betrayed like so many others.’
Quickly recovering himself, Makarenko looked around to see if anyone had noticed external signs of his innermost thoughts.
No-one was paying any attention to the quiet paratrooper.
‘No more betrayal, Comrades.’
The faces faded away and sleep came in an instant, not to be broken until the aircraft approached Vnukovo, and Makarenko’s day of destiny.
Nazarbayeva was at her desk early, a deliberate decision to guarantee her time to read through the final reports on the Haut-Kœnigsbourg operation. A very personal matter for the Nazarbayev family, as it cost them the life of one of their precious sons. She studied the reports in her own time, sipping a morning tea, before embarking on the main business of the day; the thorough examination of a fire-damaged folder recently arrived from one of the GRUs agent
She had read much of the Haut-Kœnigsbourg file previously, shavings of information gleaned from sources on the other side of the frontline, and good quality information from their contacts in the Red Cross.
The file now boasted the most complete account yet available, that of the recently returned commanding officer of Zilant-4, Ivan Alekseevich Makarenko.
His recall of those hours was excellent and detailed, and Tatiana quickly found the sections that dealt with the death of her child, finding some strange comfort in the words of the Paratroop commander, as he described the actions of her son, Vladimir, on the lead up to and then the assault on the chateau proper.
Closing up the report where it started into Makarenko leading the survivors off into the High Vosges, she finished the second slice of rye bread and downed the last of her tea.
Unusually for her, breakfast had not satisfied her hunger and so she rose to cut two more rough slices of bread, grab more butter, and refill her mug, before reseating herself.