Casca 42: Barbarossa Read online

  The other two backed away, clearly out-matched. Other panzers were coming forward now, adding their shots to the combat, and the last two Soviet armored fighting vehicles vanished in a multitude of explosions.

  They clattered across the dry landscape under a big yellow sun, half obscured by palls of smoke and rising dust, making for the railway than ran in a straight line east-west. No rolling stock was visible, which was just as well, and Gus climbed the embankment and straddled the wider gauge of the Russian rails. A few clumps of trees could be seen scattered here and there, and in the distance what may or may not be villages.

  “Get off the horizon, Gus, don’t want to present a target to some mad Soviet hero,” Langer said, swinging his sights left and right.

  “Oh, don’t fret, my sweet,” the giant German said, conversationally. “I’ll take care of you, my pet.”

  “Don’t think you’ll find those terms in the army manual, Gus,” Langer replied. “Normally I’m Herr Feldwebel. Carl will do, though. I’m not your pet, however!”

  “Jawohl, Herr Feldwebel!” Gus roared, causing the others’ eardrums to shrink in reflex.

  “Are we being bombed?” Felix asked, wincing.

  Langer smiled briefly, then resumed concentrating on looking for threats. The Soviets had around twenty thousand tanks, a staggering number, but most were the T26s or BT tanks, and their mark IV was superior to either of those. The Stukas and other ground attack aircraft were hitting the rear areas, spreading havoc and carnage, disrupting the enemies’ efforts to counter.

  They stopped in a hollow and the other tanks of the company came rattling to a halt all around. Two were showing signs of having been hit, but were still useable. Langer cautiously flipped open the two lids of the hatch – another development on this model from previous ones where the hatch was of one solid piece – and took a look round. He was glad to pop his head up and get some fresh air.

  “Where are we, Carl?” one of the other tank commanders called across, wiping the sweat from a dirty face.

  “Dunno – somewhere south of Brest. The captain will pass on orders in a few minutes, no doubt. Did you see Haller get it?”

  The other commander nodded solemnly. Haller had caught a shell as they had plowed through the front line. An anti-tank gun had taken him out from point blank range. The next tank had ridden over the crew, squashing them to a pulp. “Don’t think any of them got out.”

  Langer nodded slowly. It had been a mark III, but at that range the shell would have punched even through his IV. “Seen any Russian aircraft?”

  “Nope – think Hermann’s lot have caught them with their arsches hanging out!” the commander chuckled, then gratefully accepted a cup of water passed him from below.

  “Hope we don’t get surprised by a Russian aircraft,” Teacher said. “What a target we’d present!”

  Langer glanced down and saw the turret side hatch open and Teacher leaning out, gazing across the wide expanse of the plains. The slight hollow they were in wasn’t that deep and the horizon was visible, a long, flat line. Smoke drifted up from scattered locations, and overhead the black shapes of Junkers and Heinkels droned towards new targets.

  “All tanks, listen in,” Heidemann’s voice cracked in Langer’s ears. “We’ve broken through their front lines but their reserve lines are ahead. We must be through them by nightfall. Our destination is the town of Baranovichi to the north-east.”

  “Ah,” Langer nodded in understanding. “So we can cut off Brest from being reinforced.”

  “Did you know, Gus,” Teacher said conversationally, “that the English word ‘breast’ means woman’s chest?”

  “Does it, by God?” Gus’ head shot out of his suddenly open hatch and he turned round in surprise, peering up, his face an impossible collection of angles and blobs. Someone had begun trying to design his face but had given up halfway through. Big, beefy and intimidating, Langer knew Gus as a loyal and faithful friend, someone to have by your side when the going got hard. “Then we should give it a proper examination!”

  “We did that two years ago, remember?” Langer said.

  “Yeah, that brothel!” Steffan said.

  Felix and Teacher hadn’t been there at the time – that was when Carl, Gus and Steffan had been the crew of the mark II light tank. Gus guffawed, “and that tart – what’s her name? – gave you that blow job to keep you occupied when those Soviets marched past our tank!” He doubled up, vanishing back down his hatch.

  “Natalia,” Langer said wistfully. “Hmmm.” Heidemann’s voice crackled once more. Langer listened intently, then nodded, turning to see the captain’s command tank and waving in response. “Right you lazy lot, let’s get going once more – we’ve had our rest. Back to the shift work.”

  “You’re a hard taskmaster, Herr Feldwebel,” Gus groaned. “Sure we can’t pop into woman’s boob and reacquaint ourselves with a company of big-breasted Polish girls?”

  “I’m sure there are plenty up ahead, Gus, even for your appetite. Shut hatches and let’s get going.”

  The panzers roared up and out of the hollow, using the railway track as cover for a few minutes, then the line curved away north towards the burning city of Brest. Behind the panzers the infantry were mopping up the stunned Russian frontline troops, and piling back into their trucks, wagons and half-tracks. Most, though, were on foot and would do their best to keep up with the panzers, although it was likely they’d be left far behind.

  “Oh, I do like a nice mystery tour,” Gus said, staring through his observation slit, his Neanderthalic brows knitted with concentration. “I love the army – you can visit new places you’ve never seen before, encounter new people you’d never otherwise meet – and kill them!”

  “Alright Gus, enough. I can’t hear myself think,” Langer said.

  “Why would you want to do something risky like that?” Gus demanded. “It’d give you headaches and make you worry unnecessarily. You’d get wrinkles – you’d look like a testicle.”

  “Shut it, Gus,” Langer said, staring left. From there any forces protecting Brest would come at them. Any Russian force there would be trying to stop the city being cut off. From both sides of the fortress town the panzers would be sweeping round to meet behind it, and once that was done the defenders would be doomed, to be dealt with by the infantry. “Baranovichi is our destination, Gus. North-east.”

  “Never heard of it, Carl,” Gus announced. “Sure they haven’t made it up? Maybe it doesn’t exist and they’re only trying to fill in the huge gaps on the map?”

  “Let’s find out, shall we?” Langer grinned.

  They roared on across the flat, dusty plains, a mass of armor, dragging in their wake a motley collection of support vehicles and infantry, pushing through the ever-widening rip in the Soviet front lines.

  That evening they had pushed in fifteen miles and, apart from token resistance in the form of isolated pockets of soldiers, had cleared the frontier region. Brest was isolated and the town of Kobrin was close. They had halted next to a small watercourse and were refilling their flasks and bottles from it. The tanks needed water, too, and instead of looking for the water trucks that were somewhere to the rear, the tankmen were using the water from the small river.

  Fuel was another matter. The bowsers were making their way around the stationary panzers and topping each one up. Repairs were being made by the crews, or in the case of the more severely damaged vehicles, by the company repair crews.

  Langer sat against the wheels of his tank, slowly sipping a cold flask of water. It was too hot for anything else, and his shirt was unbuttoned halfway down, exposing his chest to the warm air. It didn’t cool him that much, but it was better than nothing. A few scars were visible but the others didn’t ask – he had made it clear he didn’t wish to discuss how he got them, and they had honored that request.

  As for the eternal mercenary, he had shut his eyes and was thinking. His mind went back a hundred and twenty years when he had been part o
f Napoleon’s Grande Armee. That had been one huge mess. An army over half a million strong had been whittled away to something less than two thousand by the time they’d gotten back to Vilnius. His thoughts were still vivid about that, not least because he’d only recently fulfilled a promise made immediately prior to that campaign. The other members of his crew had been puzzled over the diversion he’d insisted they make, but had gone along with it. It had been a minor detour and Gus had conveniently made himself free with Konigsberg’s women of loose morality while Langer had retrieved two icons from the cathedral there. He’d put them safe way back in 1813 after ‘deserting’ the French army – deserting would have been a very loose term, since he’d been shot by firing squad for killing a fellow soldier.

  From Konigsberg they had gone south-east to an abandoned village, now no more than a collection of ruins. The wars since 1812 had finished off the place since Langer – then known as Longue – had been there. Poland had been mostly under Russian rule in that region, and what had happened then and later during the Great War had probably done for the place – he recalled it as being Mala Wolka or something like that. No map ever identified it as it was too small, and its passing would never be remembered by anyone.

  Anyone, that was, except for him. He’d deposited the stolen icons under the soil where what had once been the church once stood. A promise was a promise, no matter how long it took. The village was just another place that had vanished, and only he and the ghosts could talk about it and remember now. Just like Helsfjord.

  Ah, Helsfjord…..he smiled sadly. So long ago, so many of his happiest memories of the last two thousand years came from that place. If only he could go back….. Lida. Glam. Sifrit. Holdblod. He looked deep into the surface of his drink and imagined those people there; their faces, their mannerisms. Maybe they weren’t exactly as he imagined after all this time, but he cared little.

  He wondered what his memories of Gus, Teacher, Steffan and Felix would be long after this little fight was gone and consigned to books on shelves in libraries. He glanced over to where Gus was concentrating on stirring a pot of stewing mutton and vegetables, the giant’s face half-lit by the flickering fire that was heating it up. Maybe memories would be much better than the reality! As he looked, Gus lifted the iron ladle he was using to his lips, tasted it, and nodded in satisfaction. “Suitable for a king’s table,” he announced.

  “I’m no king,” Felix grinned, throwing down a once-white cloth he had been wiping oil from his hands with, “but it looks good enough for a humble mechanic.”

  “Or an ex-teacher and a boy not old enough yet to shave,” Gus smiled his gap-toothed grin at Teacher and Steffan. “Hey, Carl, you coming over?”

  Langer nodded, heaving himself up. I was once a god, but hell, good food is good food no matter who it’s for. The crew gathered round, their tin plates in hand. He waited for the others to have their share; he knew Gus wouldn’t favour anyone and would be fair to all. Of course, he would have three times their portion but he was an insatiable eater and needed more to keep going – or at least that was what he maintained.

  He was happy to wait his turn, unlike some cases in the past where he would have muscled to the fore and taken his share first before the others – but these people he’d trust with his life, and they would do the same with him.

  He reckoned that was what may well happen in the next few months.

  CHAPTER THREE

  The crisp, clean air of Switzerland bathed the dazzling white peaks of the Alps, the sun reflecting off the rocks, making anyone who stared at them cringe away from the brightness. The slender, curvy blonde woman walking down the main street of Davos in the east of the alpine nation wore sunglasses, attracting admiring looks from male passers-by as she went on her way. She was aware of their looks but ignored them. She was not interested in their thoughts or wishes. Besides, she had an appointment, an urgent one.

  She was twenty-two, smooth-skinned and carried herself about with an air of confidence and assurance. Nobody in the town knew what she did, and nearly all had no idea what her name was, only that she was one of the refugees from Nazism who had crossed over from Austria in the years since the Anschluss of 1938.

  She walked along the neat, carefully tended path up to the front door of the huge wooden chalet-style building on the outskirts of the town and used the ornate door knocker shaped like a ram’s head. She turned about briefly, her long locks swinging round, tied at the nape of her neck with a single band and then allowed to hang down to the middle of her back.

  The door opened and a large, matriarchal figure appeared, glaring down at her. “Yes?”

  “Isabella, to see Herr Longini,” she replied, removing her sunglasses.

  “Ah, yes,” the housekeeper’s face softened slightly from that of the north face of the Eiger to that of granite. “Please do come in and wait.”

  Isabella passed into the gloom of the house and stood silently, looking round at the large, airy space, around which a staircase was arranged, rising up in two places, one to each side, to a landing and balcony ahead and above the hall. Wooden doors led off to either side before the stairs began, and underneath the balcony was a paneled door with another door set in the center. Hanging from the walls were heads of animals hunted and killed in the area; rams, deer, and one particularly ugly looking beast Isabella couldn’t identify.

  “Ah, Isabella!” a man’s voice broke her reverie. She looked up and saw a grey-haired man descending, his arms outstretched. He was lean, well-built, sun-tanned and dressed conservatively. She stepped forward and they embraced, kissing one another three times on the cheeks. “How delightful of you to see you. Sadly, it is not a social occasion I have summoned you, but business.”

  “Isn’t it always these days, Uncle?” she replied, her voice husky, the type to send men curling their toes and wondering if their wives knew where they were.

  “Regretfully, yes. But perhaps afterwards you might like to stay awhile?”

  “Of course, Uncle. It is seldom we see one another.”

  The man sighed and nodded. “Commitments, my dear, and responsibilities. No matter, let us get the disagreeable part over with and then we can sit in the sun and talk about Austria.”

  Isabella agreed and was allowed to precede her uncle up to the balcony and then was shown to the right and through the first door to the left. The room beyond was square and had windows that overlooked a valley with a view of over twenty miles to the far side where a tower of rock shot to the heavens. It was a view an estate agent would sell his first born for.

  Three other people were seated around a table in the center of the room, two men and a woman. They all stood at her entry, and her uncle came in, shut the door, and did the introductions. “Herr Franz Schuller, a banker,” he pointed to a small, grey-dressed man with thinning hair and round-rimmed glasses. “Frau Herta Denzler, my personal secretary and organiser,” he smiled briefly, “and Herr Lichtenberg.” He did not elaborate on the last, a tall man with a serious angular face and a pair of deep blue piercing eyes. Herta was a middle-aged woman with a slender build and her hair short.

  “Isabella Longini, my niece and until recently working in gestapo headquarters, Berlin.”

  The three regarded Isabella intently. Schuller looked faintly alarmed. “Gestapo? Are you sure she is trustworthy, Herr Longini?”

  The uncle nodded emphatically. “She is one of my family – we are utterly opposed to the Nazis for many reasons. She was my spy there.”

  The two men looked at Isabella with renewed interest. Frau Denzler knew already and sat patiently, awaiting the start of the discussions. Isabella’s uncle indicated a seat for the newly arrived woman to use, and once all were seated, he began the meeting.

  “Today’s news of the German invasion of Soviet Russia comes as no surprise to me, and I suspect to either of you,” he looked at Schuller and Lichtenberg. “The worry of course is that Hitler’s armies may be triumphant. If they are I doubt it would be ve
ry long before the rest of us have to obey the fascists. We are surrounded and our only hope is for either the British Empire to prevail – not a likely occurrence given her performance so far – or for Stalin and his thugs to win over Hitler. I, for one, have no wish to see either dominate the world, and it is no small conceit of mine to want both to destroy each other.”

  “What of the Americans?” Schuller asked. “They are funding the British already and supplying much material aid to them. Would they enter the war on the allies’ side?”

  Herr Longini spread his hands wide. “I do not know that for sure. Roosevelt is making some encouraging noises but he’s loath to get his nation involved in what is essentially at present another European war. We shall see. For the moment we must do our bit. As a member of the Bureau Ha, Herr Lichtenberg, you will have to keep on supplying the intelligence to our friends in Lucerne. Perhaps Comrade Stalin will take more notice of us now our warnings about the Nazi invasion have come true.”

  “He does not believe anything the decadent capitalist west has to say,” Lichtenberg said dryly, lighting up a cigarette in a long, thin black holder and leaning back, shutting his eyes. “However, as you say, I shall keep on passing intelligence onto Lucerne. Now, what of your niece? Why is she here?”

  “She will soon embark on another task I have for her,” Longini said, smiling gently at Isabella, “but she must know of the background. Herr Schuller, you will still provide funds for our project, I trust?”

  “The bank is happy to do so. Our investors wish for the end of fascism and will continue to bankroll your schemes, provided,” he tapped the table gently, “you show results.”

  Longini nodded. “I am aware that I must keep on getting results. Was not the setting up of the Lucerne net evidence of this?”

  Schuller nodded heavily. “That is a start, but it will only last for so long. Please keep me updated.” He stood up, gripping a black briefcase. “I must be getting back to Interlaken. Such a shame as I would dearly like to get to know your charming niece better. But needs must.” He bowed formally and was shown out by Frau Denzler.