Blood and Ice (5 page)

The Grey Eagle listened in silence, before saying, ‘You realize Comrade Marshal that you are probably condemning about half my Eagles to death with an operation like this in that terrain and in this weather?’

There was no change in the cheerful, confident note in Suslov’s voice. ‘Probably,’ the Marshal answered. ‘But they will die for the glory of the Red Army and the Soviet Union.’

The Grey Eagle made an obscene suggestion about what he could do with such glory, and hung up without another word.

For the first time that long grim January day, Marshal of the Soviet Union Tolbuchin smiled.

It had been a back-breaking day for the young men of
SS Regiment Europa
, as they had fought their way through the blinding snowstorms higher and higher into the mountains. Each new curve in the winding road had been a minor engineering feat, as the vehicles, sliding and skidding on the slick new snow, had been dragged round by sheer muscle-power, with hundreds of freezing, cursing, yelling SS men digging a new path for them in the rock and snow.

Now the Regiment was stuck again. At the head of the column, just behind Habicht’s command vehicle which had cleared the corner safely, a halftrack full of grenadiers had begun to slip towards the sheer drop on the far side of the road and the ashen-faced driver had only managed to bring the ten ton vehicle to stop at the very edge of the drop. Behind it the whole Regiment was stalled again, the drivers gunning their engines nervously, while they waited for the obstruction to be cleared away.

Angrily Habicht pushed by the young driver and strode to the side of the road to gaze down at the drop. With his good foot, he stamped on snow-covered ground there, obviously to test the strength of the rock below the snow.

‘Schulze, get a dozen men at each side of the vehicle ready to push when I give the word.’

‘Over the side?’ Schulze asked.

‘No. Back on to the road,’ the Hawk said. He swung himself up into the cab just vacated by the shaken driver. ‘I’ll get the bitch out myself.’

Hurriedly Schulze ordered the men to their positions on both sides of the halftrack, while the Hawk gunned the motor and then gently let out the clutch. The wheel trembled violently in his single hand. With a lurch the halftrack moved forward a little as he put his foot on the accelerator.

‘Put yer backs into it!’ Schulze yelled, as the troopers took the strain. They heaved. The halftrack moved forward a little more, its rear tracks throwing up a shower of stone and snow. Another lurch. Abruptly the track hit ice or hard-packed snow. The vehicle lost traction. The tracks whirled furiously, the Hawk gunning the engine all out.

‘
Pass op!
’ one of the men on the sides yelled in panic.

The Dutchmen jumped clear as the halftrack began to swing to one side,

‘Get back there, you Cheeseheads!’ Schulze cried in dismay, as the men scattered out of the path of the vehicle which was sliding sideways towards the edge of the road, the Hawk fighting the wheel crazily.

Schulze jumped out of its path just as Habicht regained control of the halftrack, preventing it from sliding that last couple of paces on the treacherous granulated snow.

‘Get out, sir!’ Schulze yelled from where he lay sprawled in the snow. ‘Let it go over the side. The bastard’s not worth –’

The words died on his lips. Quite deliberately the Hawk rammed home first gear again. Gently, very gently, he let out the clutch, the engine whining in protest as he did so. The halftrack lurched forward again. Schulze held his breath. If it slipped now, the Hawk would not have a chance. His face showed no fear, just anger that this piece of metal would not obey his commands. He increased his pressure on the accelerator, thick clouds of blue smoke pouring from the halftrack’s exhaust. Still the vehicle did not respond. Schulze watched, his mouth wide open, his heart beating frantically in an onslaught of panic.
Would he do it?

Suddenly the track caught. Habicht did not hesitate. He swung the wheel a half turn to the left. For a moment he thought he had done the wrong thing. Desperately he gave the vehicle more power. The halftrack jolted forward. He swung the wheel round. The tracks answered readily. A moment later he was away from the danger of the mountainside, the vehicle righted and pointing up the slope once again.

On the ground, Schulze breathed out hard. The Hawk might be out to kill them, with his blind belief in Germany’s cause, but he was a damned brave man all the same.

But there was no time for congratulations. For in that same instant that Habicht sprang lightly from the halftrack’s cab as if nothing special had occurred, there was the faint throb of a light aeroplane’s motor, increasing by the second, coming towards them from the east.

‘It’s a sewing machine all right,’
1
Kreuz said, shading his eyes against the angled yellow glare of the dying sun.

Crouched behind the cover of the leading halftrack, the Hawk and Schulze watched the little biplane coming ever closer to their positions. ‘With a bit of luck, Schulze,’ Habicht said, ‘he might not spot us. It’s already getting dark and those firs up there cast quite a bit of shadow over the road.’

A moment later the Rata was over them, trailing a gigantic black shadow behind it over the snow. Swiftly the two men rolled over and saw it disappear over the nearest peak. Habicht breathed out a sigh of relief. ‘The Red didn’t –’ He stopped short. Behind the peak there was the sound of the little reconnaissance plane turning. ‘It’s coming back!’

‘He’s spotted us!’ Schulze cried in alarm. ‘You flak gunners get on to him!’

Desperately the crew of the quadruple flak, mounted on one of the halftracks, scrambled for their gun, just as the Rata appeared from behind the mountain, coming in very low. At a hundred metres, it began to fly the length of the column, while the frantic-fingered gunners fumbled with their gun. Angrily, Schulze let fly with a futile burst from his Schmeisser. Suddenly the four slim barrels of the 20mm flak opened up with a tremendous burst. White tracer slit the blue sky furiously. The Russian pilot reacted at once. His speed rose as he opened up the throttle. Suddenly he banked to the left, leaving the angry stream of shells to hiss by him harmlessly, some twenty metres away and a moment later he was gone, leaving the furious sweating gunners firing purposely at the empty sky.

The firing died away and there was no sound save the soft throb of the plane’s engine to the east, getting fainter by the second.

Schulze broke the silence: ‘Looks to me like trouble, sir. If they can’t come on up after us because of the road block, they can plant a nasty surprise for us at the other end now they definitely know we’re here.

‘Yes, I suppose you’re right, Schulze,’ the Hawk said a little wearily. ‘But we’ll face up to that particular problem when we come to it. Tell the men to mount up again, would you please?’

But before long Sergeant Major Schulze was going to be proved wrong, very seriously wrong indeed.

Note

1.
  German soldier’s name for the Rata reconnaissance plane, given to it because of the noise its engine made.

‘
Helmets on!
’ Major Suslov barked above the roar of the towing plane.

Suslov, a tall dark officer in his late twenties, looked along the dim, green-lit length of the big glider and nodded his approval. His Grey Eagles, not one of them over twenty-five and virtually every one of them decorated in combat, looked fit and confident in spite of the terrible danger of their bold mission.

‘Check equipment!’ he snapped.

With the precision of machines, each man turned to his neighbour and checked his equipment – Machine pistol, ammunition, grenades, smoke and high explosive, pistol, emergency rations – before reporting ‘All correct’.

‘Comrade Major.’ Suslov turned. It was the young glider pilot, who like all the pilots in the Grey Eagle Battalion had been a pre-war Soviet champion in the
Komosol
Youth Movement.

‘Yes?’

‘The tugs are preparing to drop the tow now.’

Suslov swung round and faced his men. ‘Prepare for landing!’ he ordered.

Veterans that they were, the young men adopted the landing posture – hands clasping the metal spars behind their heads, feet raised slightly from the floor – immediately. There was a light tug. The glider shuddered slightly as the pilot brought up the nose in order to brake. Suddenly there was silence as the towing plane broke off in a great curve and began heading back east. All noise died away. The January dawn seemed suddenly unbelievably calm and peaceful. Now the Grey Eagles could do nothing but wait and rely on the pilot to put them down safely on the difficult terrain.

Major Suslov had been instrumental in setting up the first experimental glider company of paratroop volunteers, from which the Grey Eagles had sprung. From the war against Finland right through the terrible battles against the Germans in ’41 and ’42 on to the great victories of the last two years, the Grey Eagles had always been in the forefront of the action. Time and time again the Battalion had been decimated in some desperate action behind enemy lines, but always there had been more than enough volunteers to fill its empty ranks again. Suslov and his Grey Eagles were, after all, the idols of Soviet youth. Had not Stalin publicly embraced Suslov at a Kremlin reception in front of the newsreel cameras and called him ‘the boldest of the bold?’

Suslov, however, was not a reckless commander. It was only because of the desperate situation of Zacharov’s Guards Army that he had allowed himself to be talked into landing his Eagles on the most difficult type of terrain possible – the mountains.

Anxiously he pushed his way down the littered gangway to where Boris, a flaxen-haired Ukrainian crouched over the controls, swinging the glider round in a huge circle to lower its speed, prior to landing.

On the western horizon the darkness was breaking up, turning to the threatening opaque grey, which he knew was snow falling far away. But Suslov had not eyes for the horizon. His gaze was fixed on the ground below, it looked far from promising. Long stretches of dark green, which were firs, broken at regular intervals by sharp, naked peaks. ‘What do you think Boris?’ he asked, after glancing upwards to check that the rest of the Battalion’s gliders were there.

‘It’s not good,’ the pilot answered, not taking his eyes from his controls.

Suslov could see the faint line of sweat fringing the pilot’s hairline and knew that if one of the Soviet Union’s most experienced pilots was beginning to sweat, they were in for trouble.

Boris straightened the big glider. There was no sound now save the hiss of the wind, as the glider came down at speed. The nose-dive brakes were applied and the fuselage trembled violently. The ground loomed up ever larger, steep and littered with what seemed gigantic snowballs. ‘Boulders!’ Boris cried in alarm.

‘
Crash landing!
’ Suslov yelled back into the plane. The Grey Eagles tensed their bodies, but their young faces showed no fear.

The ground was racing by them now at a tremendous speed. Boris flung up the nose and the next instant, two thousand pounds of glider and men hit the snowy slope. Snow sprayed up on both sides of them higher than the cockpit, in a blinding white stream. Wood and canvas splintered and tore. The barbed wire they had wrapped around the skids to shorten the breaking distance snapped like bits of wet string as it hit the boulders concealed beneath the snow. The skids squeaked shrilly, as the glider slewed towards the edge of a precipice. Boris, fighting the controls frantically, brought the glider round just in time. The glider slithered away, lurched against a huge boulder and came to an abrupt stop.

‘Good man, Boris,’ Suslov cried and slapped him on the back. ‘All right, my Eagles –
out
,’ he yelled.

At once the glider’s interior was transformed into a frenzy of movement. The Eagles sprang to their feet. With their heavy boots, those who were too far from the open door smashed through the canvas, as they had been trained to do, and stumbled out into the cold dawn air, to form a defensive perimeter.

Suslov checked his positions and stared up at the sky. The others were coming in now, ten gliders bearing the rest of the Battalion. The first one hissed over his head. It came into a perfect landing, nose held high, brakes screaming in shrill protest as it shrieked to a stop in a gleaming white flurry of snow. An instant later his Eagles came tumbling out. The second one followed closely but number three hit the ground hard and began to slide across the hard-packed snow. Brakes screaming all out, trailing a great wake of snow behind it, the glider shot helplessly over the edge of the precipice and fell over one thousand metres, a broken-off wing falling behind it to its death like a lone leaf.

All the others landed safely after this disaster. The Grey Eagles had pulled off the most difficult landing in the history of gliderborne operations. They had landed on a snow-covered mountain range, some five thousand metres above sea level!

‘It looks as if we’ll go down in the history books after the war, Comrade Major,’ Boris commented as the Grey Eagles began to form up.

Major Suslov looked up from his map for a moment, and grinned. ‘We’ve got to survive it first, Boris.’

Thirty minutes later, the men of the Soviet Union’s élite unit had disappeared into the firs on their way to their confrontation with
SS Regiment Europa
. Soon the battle of the giants would begin.

As the morning of the second day in the mountains progressed, the snow steadily began to fall more thickly. The wind increased too. Now the long line of vehicles, crawling through the Vértes Mountains, battled against a veritable blizzard, the lookouts’ faces stung by the flying snow, their eyebrows white with the bitter crystals. The road ran through steep-sided gorges, its edge hanging vertiginously over the valley below.

Despite the treacherous conditions
Obersturmbannführer
Habicht was exceedingly pleased. It was over fifteen hours since the little Russian reconnaissance plane had spotted them. By now he could have expected the first Red attack from the air. But in this weather the Reds would not be able to fly. And even if they could, their pilots would have a devil of a job spotting the convoy on this particular stretch of the road, with the great sheer mountain side giving them the cover they need.