“What’s the colors? For God’s sake hurry!”
“Green to white.” The voice was unidentified, unidentifiable in the roaring noise of the inferno that had engulfed the shunter and its consist.
Perdue grabbed the flare gun and rammed the correct flare into it. Time was short. The Black Widow would already be turning for another pass at the trains underneath. The flare went skywards; burning green, then turning to white. Even before it had completed its burn, Perdue fired a second, then a third. It must have been enough because the Black Widow thundered a few feet overhead without firing.
Quayle was lining up on the remaining parts of the train group when the flare exploded almost in front of him. At first he’d thought it was a spiral but it had burned green, turning to white. Two more had followed it.
“Don’t shoot Boss! It’s one of ours.”
Morton’s scream of warning stopped Quayle just in time. As Evil Dreams flashed over the trains, he saw the two great guns in their carriages. “Jimmie, that Navy train; was it railway guns?”
“Sure was, Boss.”
“Well, it isn’t far to the west of here. We just shot the holy living shit out of it. We’d better warn control, we’ll radio it in.”
The shunter and its consist were a write-off. Eighteen Americans and six Russians had died with it. Perdue was already having their graves dug beside the tracks. It was hard to tell which corpse was which, the combination of diesel fuel and propellant had charred them beyond recognition. Perdue knew he was probably burying Americans in a Russian grave and vice versa, but he guessed it didn’t matter too much. They’d fought together, died together, did it really matter which was which?
The bang and roar shook Captain Christian Lokken out of his uneasy sleep. For one hideous moment, he thought he was back on his shattered Gneisenau, experiencing again the merciless pounding from the Ami jabos. Then he saw lights above him and the instructions on the cabinets. The gray paint; the stenciled note ‘Property of the U.S. Navy.’ Almost as soon as it registered there was another bang and roar directly overhead.
“Noisy aren’t they Captain?” The voice was professional-cheerful, the one doctors used to critically ill patients whose chance of survival was still in doubt. “Aircraft taking off. We’re launching strikes, hitting targets around Londonderry. Especially the SS barracks and training center there.”
“A carrier? How?”
“You were transferred over from the Charles H. Roan last night. The destroyers are doing what they can, but they’re just not equipped to handle casualties like this. You’re a very sick man, Captain.”
Lokken slumped back into his cot. “My crew, how many survivors? Do you know?”
“We think a total of fifty three. There may be more in the Faroe Islands; three of your ships made it there. Two destroyers and a cruiser. We think there may be between 2,000 and 2,500 survivors on board them.”
“And you will be bombing them again.” It was a flat statement. After the nightmare of the day-long assault, Lokken couldn’t believe the Americans would leave those ships afloat. A thought that was emphasized by another bang and roar over his head.
“I don’t think so. We sent a photo-Corsair to have a look. The cruiser’s on the rocks, finished. The destroyers are Free British prizes. Anyway, Captain, you’ve got pneumonia, frostbite and Lord knows what else. Rest for a while; later I’ll give you some exercises to get the fluid out of your lungs. If you want to survive, it’s critical you follow the instructions I give you. Another thing, don’t even try to leave the sickbay. The change in temperature will kill you. Going for a walk is literally more than your life is worth.”
The doctor left the sickbay, nodding to the two Marines on guard outside. His words to Captain Lokken had been the absolute truth but not for the reasons he’d given. A lot of Gettysburg’s crew were Irish. The majority of them reckoned they had scores from ‘the old country’ to settle with a convenient German. There was another bang and roar from overhead. More Corsairs on their way to pound the SS units headquartered around Londonderry.
CHAPTER TEN: ALL THINGS MUST PASS
“A Hitlerite battle group.”
Knyaz surveyed the railway junction with his binoculars. A few feet away, Noble Sniper Irina Trufanova was doing the same using the PMU telescopic sight on her rifle. At the moment she was under orders not to fire. This was a covert scouting mission after all. If the patrol was spotted, her first job would be to drop anybody giving orders. Still, no sign of that yet.
There were half tracks scattered around the buildings. Instinctively Knyaz counted them. Almost enough for a full battalion of Panzergrenadiers. There probably had been enough once but there were six bomb craters in the middle of the building cluster and at least two burned-out vehicles. That had to be the work of the Night Witch whose report had caused his patrol to be diverted here.
“What do you think they’re doing here?” Captain John Marosy was watching as well; rather hoping the force gathered around the junction was too strong for the ski unit to take on.
“There is one of your naval gun trains west of here.” Knyaz spoke slowly. He hadn’t told the Americans of the radio messages he’d received that morning. A Russian officer told nobody any more than he had to, a hangover from the bad old days. Ski units were more closely knit than most. Even so, operational security was paramount. Not because Knyaz didn’t trust his men; because lifting a man from a unit and getting him to tell everything he knew was a past-time both armies practiced. A few carefully-chosen barbarities and that man would tell whatever he knew. What he didn’t know, he couldn’t tell. Which could be very tough on the captured man, of course. “It is trying to escape to the North. The original line was cut by bombing, now it must come through here.”
“So the unit is trying to block it. Can they stop the train?”
“They do not have to. This junction splits the line two ways. A line to the north that takes the trains, eventually, to Murmansk. The other line goes east but eventually curves back south. Would you like to guess which way those points will have been set?”
Marosy didn’t like the way this was going. “They’ll be set so the train goes south.”
“That is so. The combat group is set up so it will stop anybody changing the points. If the train stops, it will be captured. If it does not, it will curve south, go deeper into enemy territory and still be captured.”
“So we will have to capture the points and change them. Put the train on the right track.” Neither comment was a question, much as Marosy would have liked them to have been. He was very unhappy about this. He’d heard of the horrors of infantry fighting on the Russian Front and that was quite enough.
“An easy thing to say, Tovarish Captain. Look at what we have down there. At least three mechanized infantry companies, an artillery battery, a platoon of armored cars with 50mm guns in turrets and another with 75mm anti-tank guns. That is much more than a battalion; far too much for a full-strength infantry platoon. And we will be under strength for I must send men to warn the train of what awaits it.”