Blitzfreeze (32 page)

A line of T-34s move out of the shop on their own tracks. We catch the tow hooks and pull ourselves up by the infantry grip. At the doors NKVD men shout at us and threaten us with their machine-guns. We wave them off with the casual Russian gesture you use when you’ve got authority behind you.

Two NKVD people try to mount the tank we are on, but the T-34 increases speed and doesn’t stop until we reach a side road. A colonel goes down the column counting the tanks. We disappear quickly down a narrow passage which leads us to a large open square.

Porta sits down on a gun carriage and lights a cigarette.

‘I think things are getting dangerous,’ he says, with a forced smile.

‘In three minutes time the first caps’ll blow and the whole bloody knocker’ll crack open.’

‘Got
your
shit in place?’ asks the Old Man, coming over to us from the armaments shop.

‘You’ll find out soon enough,’ grins Porta. ‘Hold onto your pants, Dad, or you’ll get blown clean out of ’em.’

‘Let’s get out of here,’ snarls the Old Man. ‘It’s getting too warm.’

We jump a passing wagon train and roll out of the great factory. By the ruined flak-tower we drop off. Some of the others are already there.

Tiny shows us a cap with the green NKVD star and a colonel’s gold braid on it.

‘This’ll fetch a packet on the Reeperbahn,’ he says happily.
‘Eighteen gold teeth, too. The last six I ’ad to smash ’is face in to get!’

‘You push deep in snow hole,’ says Vasilij, with an Asiatic grin. ‘Vasilij set bomb. Chemical grenade. Hold tight to snow. You no want fly Hong Kong, get eat for German puppy-dog in “Little Hen”.’ A siren sounds alarmingly and NKVD troops swarm suddenly onto the thick walls above our heads.

‘
Stoi koi
,’
²⁵
comes confusedly from the factory streets.

‘What the devil are they up to, now?’ enquires Porta fearfully, looking up at the high wall.

‘Got all yours?’ the Old Man asks the Brandenburger Feldwebel.

‘Any of you shit missing?’ snarls the Feldwebel to his men.

‘All here,’ comes the reply after a quick count.

‘
Mon Dieu
, something must have happened to make them sound the alarm,’ says the Legionnaire, nervously.

Shots crash suddenly from the walls. Violent explosions can be heard from the town.

The firing increases. The night is ripped open by an intense, crackling sheet of fire.

‘To the river!’ screams Barcelona, excitedly.

‘
Njet, njet!
’ shouts Vasilij, warningly. ‘Back railway. Shitty NKVD all run river! Hell much danger meet there! NKVD much annoyed now!’

A flare bursts over our heads and illuminates the scene with a ghastly blue-white light.

Porta drops into a deep bomb crater.

‘Lie still!’ he whispers warningly to me. ‘Don’t move!’ The flare seems to last for ever. I get cramp in one leg, but daren’t move. Finally it dies. I dig myself down into the snow with both hands and feet. A Brandenburg Obergefreiter rolls panting down to us. His face has been slashed open showing his teeth in an unnatural grin.

‘Why did
you
volunteer for the Crazy Club?’ asks Porta, giving him a suck at a grifa.

‘We were told to,’ answers the Obergefreiter. ‘It was in Poland. We were only a battalion then.’

‘We’re always “
told
” to do everything,’ sighs Porta tiredly. The whole of the western sky flames a blinding yellow-red. A long thunderous roar, followed by a colossal blast of air, rolls over us, blankets us! Three more explosions follow in quick succession. Then comes a wave of heat like a breath from hell’s ovens. Then all is quiet. A whole row of searchlights go up on the walls.

Countless beams wander nervously over the terrain. An LMG hammers long bursts towards the big sewer where the Old Man wouldn’t let us take cover.

An automatic cannon starts up, spitting tracer shells over towards the hospital. They have obviously no idea of where we are.

‘Two minutes!’ whispers the Old Man. ‘Get your hands down! It’ll be like a volcano erupting!’

The Brandenburger Feldwebel scratches himself nervously under the arm.

A long string of orders can be heard through the firing. Vasilij listens in a half-crouching position.

‘NKVD no shoot more! Saboteur pigs caught! Better we go dam quick! NKVD much annoyed now! More annoyed when we blow factory!’

‘Stay down!’ snarls the Old Man furiously. ‘Don’t move!’

A new order comes from the tower.

‘Him commander say, they no shoot more, go get crazy dam Nazis, shave balls off slow,’ translates Vasilij, casually.

A squad of NKVD soldiers doubles out of the gates. Only a few of the guard have emerged when the blow comes. A hollow long drawn-out explosion sounds inside the factory and suddenly the night is light as day. A blinding fountain of flames flashes up towards the sky. For a fraction of a second we see the NKVD soldiers silhouetted against a fantastic blue backdrop. Then they’re gone but only to appear again against the background of an even greater white glare. All other
sounds are drowned in a long series of thundering explosions. A giant hand seems to lift the ground and a rose-red mushroom cloud roils up and spreads out above the factory. In only seconds everything is changed. We are thrown through the air like leaves and whirled down the slopes leading to the Moscow river. None of us can grasp what is happening. Sobbing, deafened, blinded and with blood streaming down our faces we slowly find one another again.

The first I see is Tiny. He is digging the Old Man out of a giant snowdrift. At first we think the Old Man is dead, but, thank God, he is only knocked-out.

‘Some bang!’ gasps Porta, crawling out of a deep hole. A shell splinter has cut a permanent parting straight across his thick red hair.

Tiny nearly goes mad when he finds a hole in his water bottle. All the vodka has run out.

Down by the river, and over by the hospital, we find most of ours, but eight Brandenburgers are missing. We find one of them smashed to pieces under an ice-floe. Gerhard, one of ours, a farmer from Friesland, who’d been promised leave when we got back, has disappeared completely. Caught in the final blast wave, probably. All that’s left of the Zim factory is a black smoke-cloud rising, thick and choking, from a jumble of concrete blocks and twisted girders. The torpedo factory across the street is a volcano of flame. The snow around us begins to melt, and water floods down from the heights. The heat is almost insupportable. The whole top floor of the hospital has been shorn away as if by a giant knife. The railway station is gone and a telegraph pole has driven through the roof of the ferry-house and down into the ground like a giant spear. We can see no people. They must have been pulverized. Our marzipan has started a terrible chain of explosions. The action has been more effective than could ever have been imagined.

‘What in the world happened?’ asks the Old Man quietly.

‘
Merde alors!
We must have set off some ammunition stores,’ guesses the Legionnaire. ‘But there must have been
highly inflammable material there as well. That chalky-white fire on the other side of the river looks like phosphorous.’

‘Poor bastards,’ says Barcelona. ‘I’m sorry for them. They never wanted this lousy war any more than we did.’

‘We bang factory good!’ says Vasilij, with a soft chuckling laugh. ‘Me see inside. All kaput! Shitty T-34 gone. Railway gone. Biggest boom Vasilij ever hear in life! Get maybe big Order for big boom!’

‘Order,
mon camarade
!’ snarls the Legionnaire. ‘I’ll be more than happy to get back alive! Let’s get moving! They know we can’t be far away.’

‘Bye-bye, chums!’ shouts Porta. ‘Must rush!’ He’s already on his way in a cloud of snow.

As we cut across the Danilovskaya Quay, air raid sirens begin to howl. Hundreds of searchlights rake the sky, and anti-aircraft guns begin to bark viciously.

‘Crazy Commie think we air-raid,’ grins Vasilij unworried. ‘Best for shitty NKVD it not Brandenburger make big boom!
Natschaljniks
²⁶
in Kremlin annoyed with crazy NKVD, they let factory go boom under nose! Hard find good excuse save turnip!’

‘Listen!’ says Porta, stopping abruptly.

‘JU 87s, Stukas,’ says Tiny.

‘No, Heinkels,’ contradicts Stege. ‘They don’t knock like JU 87s.’

‘Jesus’n Mary!’ says Barcelona. ‘There’s a hell of a lot of ’em. It won’t be pleasant being where they drop their load!’

A fiery umbrella of explosions raises itself above the Kremlin. Most of the AA seems to be placed there.

A nerve-tearing howl splits the night.

‘Stukas, all right!’ says Porta.

Bomb explosions sound from the northeast.

‘Move!’ the Old Man hurries us.

‘Past Danilov churchyard best,’ suggests Vasilij, ‘so we come Serpukhovsky Boulevard. Go down to Krovjanka river,
so straight home! Gorky Park much shitty Commie soldier! Best not see us. Vasilij think we home morning night. If not, we dead with NKVD! Great
Kunfu
know! Him say, maybe: Shitty Nazi soldier go home, not leave pretty head Ljubjanka.’

‘All very simple,’ sighs the Old Man tiredly. ‘With God’s help and a little sweat you can manage most things.’

We lose our way and suddenly find ourselves in the middle of Smolenskaya Place and can see right down to the Kremlin.

For a moment we stand in amazement and look at the bulbous towers, shining like diamonds in the winter morning sun.

‘Looking at that could make a man almost want to be a Russian,’ says Porta, enchanted.

Vasilij is suddenly nervous. He has the Mongol’s sure instinct for danger.

‘Not look shitty Kremlin too much! Dam dangerous! There all half-Commie chop to dog meat! Big tricky Commie NKVD sit there, warm arsehole! We get shitty quick out here! Chita man say: See Kremlin no see much more in life!’

We cut down to the Moscow at the Borodinsky Bridge. A whole line of lorries filled with prisoners is standing there. They’re obviously emptying their nets here. There are quite a lot of uniforms among the prisoners on the vehicles.

‘Shitty dam NKVD HQ,’ says Vasilij, ‘not good go there! Them arrest general if no like face! Vasilij lousy captain! Kick arse captain like butcher kick stray dog! Vasilij shout, wave them! You run dam fast Smolensky Street! Them think we chase bad men! No lose turnip, maybe!’

We run as fast as our legs can carry us down the narrow street. Vasilij is just behind us, running as if his feet had wings.

‘Quick into yard,’ he shouts. ‘Shitty NKVD come with machine-gun. Not think we chase bad men!’

We rush madly through a yard and swing over a series of fences. A policeman shouts at us and draws his pistol, but
before he can pull the trigger the Legionnaire’s steel wire is round his neck and the life is choked out of him.

We push the body into a dustbin out of sight of passersby. Tiny wants to try on the uniform.

‘I’ve always wanted to be a pavement admiral. Now I got the chance over ’ere with Ivan and you won’t let me! Call yourselves mates! I could spit in your bleedin’ eye, every one of you!’

‘You crazy take shitty policeman coat,’ says Vasilij. ‘Policemen pigeon-shit on Red Square, say NKVD man. You be glad you green on uniform. In Soviet paradise, green only colour. No green on shoulder soon no turnip!’

One of the Brandenburgers goes mad suddenly. He runs in circles screaming in German.

One of his own party is on him like lightning and slashes his throat open. Screams die away in a hideous rattle.

On Suvorovsky Boulevard we go into an Intourist office, the door of which is standing invitingly open.

‘We’re closed,’ says a tight-lipped elderly woman with hair tied in a bun at the back.

‘
Je te pisse au cul!
’
²⁷
snarls the Legionnaire wickedly, bringing the back of his hand across her face.

‘
Germanskij!
’ she whispers hoarsely in terror, falling back into her chair so hard that it cracks warningly. ‘Germanskij,’ she repeats, staring at us with bugging eyes.

‘No, love, we’re the last of the Mohicans,’ grins Porta, ‘Come to take your scalp!’ He chucks her under the double chin. ‘A well-upholstered overweight sow like you is just what I need. It’ll feel like a great gate pressing down over you, and I can assure you, my dear, that the key’ll find its way into the keyhole every time!’

A BT-5 tank with the characteristically high turret stops outside. The Commandant tries to see through the almost frozen windows.

‘Watch it!’ warns Barcelona. ‘If he gets suspicious he’ll put a banger into us!’

The tank backs onto the pavement with a scrabbling of tracks. The wind pleads at the frozen windows, powdering them with snow. The tank’s engine roars and it scrapes noisily along the wall.

A piercing scream from the fat woman makes us jump with shock. She vaults amazingly over the counter, slides across the floor and bangs into a cabinet, which falls, spreading papers all over the floor. She screams, terrifyingly, again.