“Take over the machine gun!” He snapped the words at the nearest soldier on the ground beside his vehicle and jumped down. Then he pointed at two men from the crew. “You and you. Follow me.”
He repeated the same process with the three surviving gun crews. That gave him seven men including himself, all armed with assault rifles. A dozen men were left to man the remaining artillery positions. It was thin but he hoped it would be enough. Then, he took his squad behind the parked guns and worked his way towards the burning gun. A quick burst of fire from right next to it showed him that his fears were already well on the way to being realized. The Russians had taken the position and were holding it, positioning themselves dangerously close to the destroyed self propelled gun in order to take advantage from the smoke. That could work against them as well, they had to be ducking to avoid the wreckage being flung around by the secondary explosions.
He took aim and his seven men raked the position with fire from their rifles. Then, they ran forward, their snow shoes helping them glide over the piles of frozen snow and ice that lay between them and the Russians. Two of his men went down. One collapsed in a bloody heap as a PPS-45 burst ripped him up. The other, Heim couldn’t see. A grenade fragment? Or a rifle bullet. It didn’t matter. He and the four others jumped into the Russian troops. They flailed with their rifle butts and stabbed out with bayonets. A frantic, chaotic slaughter that Heim couldn’t understand or follow. He beat one Russian down, bayoneted him, then fired his rifle so that the recoil jerked the bayonet out of the body. When he ducked, he felt a slam on his side. A butt strike from a Russian who held an StG-44 identical to Heim’s own. The blow took his breath away but the Russian fell also, shot down by the one surviving man who was with Heim.
There were five dead Russians in the pit by the burning self-propelled gun and three more dead Germans. Heim looked across, another group of partisans were already approaching, attempting to regain the self-propelled gun position. Heim did a quick count. Eighteen, perhaps twenty?
“How many rounds have you got?”
“One magazine. And Shultzie has two. Here.”
The soldier handed the extra magazine over to Heim. With two magazines each, the two of them couldn’t hold this position. The best they could do was hope that they could delay the Russian assault long enough for somebody to think of something. He took aim at one group and squeezed off a quick burst. They scattered, leaving a figure laying still on the ground. That was good, but the burst of return fire wasn’t. It seemed as though every gun in the Russian army was firing on his little position.
Across from the cover, another group of partisans rushed forward. Suddenly, they were intercepted by a burst of fire that felled four of them and sent the remainder scuttling back to cover. Heim looked over to his left. A group of German troops, almost twenty of them were moving in to the gun positions and along the line. A part of them were heading this way. Heim watched them, with shock recognizing the figure that led the section.
“Sergeant, your men told me you were here. Situation?”
“Enemy in the woods over there and around our flank. They got this gun but we pushed them out again. There’s a lot of them, a hundred or more. All with a automatic weapons and there’s ski-troops mixed in with them.” Heim looked at Captain Lang with amazement. Despite everything, the man’s silk scarf was still snowy, unstained white.
“Well done. I’ve got 22 men with me. I’ll leave six with you and disperse the rest between the remaining guns. That should hold this position.”
There was a note of query in Lang’s voice, as if he was expecting approval. Heim appreciated it. “That’s good, but there’s our friend overhead to worry about.”
“Ah yes, the Night Witches. We’ve run out of our Fliegerschrecks. We will have to hope that they will not do us too much harm. Hope is about all we have left right now.”
Heim nodded. The reinforcements Captain Lang had brought would help hold the area here. But what was happening on the flanks? And how long would it be before the Ami Jabos turned up in strength.
Heim got one answer to that question almost immediately, the sight of a blue flare that turned red streaking up from the Russian positions.
The flares arched up, out of the pine forest and down, changing from blue to red as they burned. They formed a box, defining three of the edges with the front edge of the trees making the fourth. In between them was their target. Its location was marked by a plume of black smoke rising from the trees. That could only be a vehicle burning and the vehicles down there were all German. Lieutenant Quayle swung Evil Dreams around and headed for the defined area. He’d already fired his rockets but he still had six five hundred pound bombs and his guns.
“We’re coming in from the east.” That made sense, if any of the bombs hung up on the racks, they’d land clear of the Russians closing in on the German unit. Bombs often hung up and released late, Quayle had never known one release prematurely. “Donnie, the turret guns are yours, open up on anything that fires on us. Be generous guys, we’re going home soon and we don’t want to take anything back with us.”
“Situation Evil Dreams!” The voice crackled over the radio unexpectedly. “This is Night Mare.”
“Welcome to the party Night Mare. Watch our run, that’ll mark position for you. You have rockets?”
“Sure have Evil Dreams. And thousand pounders.”
That was a problem, thousand pounders were all very well when the Night Witches were behind enemy lines with nothing friendly around but they were too big for this situation. “Hold off on the bombs Night Mare, we’re hitting a confined area here.”
“Roger. Watching your run now.”
Evil Dreams had finished her long turn and started her run towards the area of pine forest marked by the flares. Quayle added power to the engines and started the Black Widow in a shallow dive, her nose pointing straight at the edge of the pine forest. The black stain of the burning vehicle was on the left as she swept down and released her bombs into the treeline framed by the box. Behind her, Night Mare followed the same path. She released her bombs a fraction of a second later. They exploded in the open, a few meters beyond the edge of the pine trees.
“Neat job Night Mare.” The explosions from the smaller bombs had raked the trees with fragments but the blast from the thousand pounders had leveled the tree edge. “And what do we see down there?”
The explosions from the big bombs hadn’t just knocked the trees down. It had exposed at least one German vehicle. It was an eight-wheeled armored car with a large gun fitted. One of the 75mm-armed tank killers. Quayle brought Evil Dreams around and swept down again. He’d selected his 23mm cannon this time. He walked the burst along the ruined treeline until the armor-piercing shots tore into the armored car. The 23mm V-Ya wasn’t much good against tanks, unless the crew were lucky. It was very good against thinly armored vehicles. What had once been an armored car tank destroyer was now a burning pile of wreckage.
Lieutenant Kolchek pulled himself out of the debris thrown around by the bombs. Through the blast-induced confusion he tried to get a grasp on what was happening around him. The rising sun was warming the ground and trees, causing threads of mist to form. He knew what would happen over the next few minutes, as the sun rose further, the mist would grow, the threads would coalesce into a ground fog that would last until the sun grew hot enough to burn it off. Before then, visibility limited by the trees would shrink to a few meters. That loaded the dice in favor of the attackers.