The Division of the Damned (34 page)

He decided to bluff it out.
"Have you got a phone so I can speak to Heinrich?”

Weiß was unperturbed by the use of Himmler’s first name. "I’ll try and get a line to Berlin, but unless I get the say-so from above I’m not letting any prisoners go.”

Michael shrugged and nodded to the phone. "Well then, let’s get this line to Berlin.”

It took a while but finally an irate Reichsführer SS answered the phone
.
"Yes! What is it
,
von der Heyde? I hope this is important.”

Michael decided to make it sketchy and keep it
brief. "It’s about the
prisoner
—
”

“In Dachau
—
yes, well, what is it? Speak up
,
man.”

Weiß couldn’t make out what was being said but he heard the short, staccato bursts coming from the earpiece and he knew that Himmler was in a bad mood. His unease grew as he listened to von der Heyde explaining, as best he could, the situation.

"Yes, Herr Reichsführer.
Exactly.
Well it seems that because I don’t have the nece
ssary paperwork that I won’t be
—
”

"What paperwork? There is no paperwork for this sort of mission. Is there some imbecile holding things up? Is it Weiß? Right, put him on the line this instant.”

Michael held out the handset straight-faced. "He wants to talk to you.”

Weiß blanched and gulped audibly. With an unsteady hand he took the handset and held it to his ear. "Sturmbannführer Weiß here, Herr Reichsführer," was all he managed to say before Himmler ripped into him. He held the earpiece away from his ear as the high-pitched screaming crescendoed and began to diminish in volume again.

"Do I make myself clear, Weiß? He is to be helped in any way possible. Right, that’s enough on this matter. My stomach is upset and I need to lie down. Now stop bothering me.”

Weiß raised his dark bushy eyebrows and exhaled loudly. "Things seem to be in order, then. Shall we go and collect your men?”

Chapter 41

Michael walked into the canteen with Von Struck and his men in tow. Smith and Inselman said nothing as the men arranged their chairs in a half circle around them.

"Major Smith, let me introduce Standartenführer Von Struck and his men. They will be accompanying us back to Romania.”

Smith took them all in. He recognised the officer and the scarred NCO from the journey.

"Hello, Tommy
.
” Rohleder
said and
smiled. Nau and Gruhn snickered loudly.

Smith studied them openly but he didn’t sense any animosity so he ignored their curious stares and wondered how much Michael had told them.

"Gentlemen,” Michael
said to
start the proceedings
.
"I’ll make no bones about it. If we fail in our task in Romania, it could be the end of our species.”

Rohleder rolled his eyes at the dramatic statement but the rest took in what he said without blinking. They had all seen with their own eyes what was happening in Transylvania and not one of them, Rohleder
included,
thought otherwise.

"So what’s the plan,
b
oss?" Rohleder was determined not to let the seriousness of the task get him down.

Michael leaned back on his chair and crossed his arms. "We will travel together to a castle in the west of Germany where we will train you all to fight the vampires. Then we’ll take a train down to Transylvania and defeat the Dracyl. Has anybody any questions?”

Nobody did. The speed of the recent turn of events had robbed them of any conscious direction.

"Right, then
.
I suggest we get somebody to look at your man’s leg, Standartenführer, and, in the meantime, I will be sorting out some form of transport to get us there.”

Chapter 42

Mordechai, Reuben and Stephanie sat in the canteen. It wasn’t really a canteen but that was what Mordechai and Reuben had come to call it after their first meal together and the name had stuck. I
t was in fact the kitchen. The c
astle was deserted and it seemed to the three of them that they had been forgotten. Even Rasch never came down to the laboratory anymore, preferring to spend his days mooning around Iullia.

"Well, that’s the last of the fresh rations," Stephanie said, ladling out a watery cabbage soup.

"What have we got left to eat at all?” Mordechai was very stomach-orientated and the recent improvement in the food had rejuvenated his appetite.

"More canned food than you can throw a stick at but no fresh vegetables,” she answered.

"I can’t say that I’ve ever thought of cabbage as being fresh. In fact, I hate cabbage. If I never see a bowl of cabbage again for the rest of my life it will be too soon,” Reuben put in before slurping down a spoonful of soup.

"Rasch loves it. It’s all he eats. That’s why we had so much of it in the first place," Stephanie said to nobody in particular.

"That figures. If I was in charge here I’d eat steak every day. What does he eat? Cabbage! What a putz!”

"Now, now, Reuben, he did save us and give us valuable work, and what a chance, a chance to work in a laboratory again," Mordechai lectured him.

"Ha, saved us?
Saved us?
We saved us, Mordi. We did
—
”

Stephanie left them to their quarrels to take Rasch his meal. Smiling as she listened to their petty arguing, over the past couple of weeks she had grown very fond of the two 'grumpy old men', as she called them. They had accepted her straightaway, had supported her and now she was glad of their companionship through these, the strangest of times.

They were also Jewish. It was odd being able to talk to Jews again and she had found a new strength in the awakening of her Jewish identity. For years she had buried her true name under a pile of forged documents. Her first boyfriend, and later her husband, Wolfgang, had spent a fortune acquiring them on the black market. Wolfgang, for all his cruel vices, was clever. He knew what would happen to the Jews when the war started because he had read 'Mein Kampf', Hitler’s autobiography and Party manifesto all in one. It was written clearly in black and white that the Jews would be exterminated and he was not going to sit back and let them take his wife away.

The documents were good because they were genuine, from a
gassed inmate in a mental asylum. There would be no comeback because the family had been given the forged papers and who doubted the identity of the deceased?

So for years she had been Stephanie Raabe, wife of Wolfgang and mother to Paul. The hardship involved had been in breaking all contact with her family. To this day she didn’t know what had become of them. The last she’d heard was that they were on a train to Lodz, the huge ghetto in Poland. After that she knew no more, though of course she had a good idea about what might have happened to them.

When they entered the resettlement program in the Ukraine they went with a mixture of trepidation and hope. The Reich was desperate for people, and though t
he qualifications were strict
—
bot
h racially and professionally
—
the actual control of the requirements was lax. The apprehension was natural for nobody knew what would happen, but for Stephanie there was hope, the hope of a new beginning. Their smallholding was outside of the Lemberg city limits but the address was still Lemberg.

The Ukrainians hated them and security had to be very tight, but their small set of German friends stuck together and they all made a go of it.

When the first crop only managed to produce half of what was expected, Wolfgang took to the bottle. The pressure of raising a family in the war-torn, hate-ridden Ukraine proved to be too much and gradually he sank into a trench of self-pity. After a while, as self-pity turned to despair, he started to pin their misfortune on her. It was her fault that they had to leave Germany. If they hadn’t left, they wouldn’t have been put in this God-forsaken backwater. After a while the beatings started and then, almost thankfully, the Russians came.

They shot Wolfgang, raped the women and moved on. She left Lemberg with the other women and the old man, and hadn’t looked back since. That whole period in her life, from the leave-taking of her family to the nightmare at the cave, had been mentally compartmentalized and locked away. For Stephanie there would be no going back to that sad box of unfortunate memories, well
,
maybe to visit Paul when she was strong enough but that would be all.

She took the pain and the ordeal of rape, using it
to make herself stronger, and made two solid vows: the first vow, to take care of Paul regardless of what might befall her, had been cruelly bankrupted by the Dracyl’s vampires; the second vow was that she would never let a man take her by force again
.
She would rather suffer death than degradation.

The pledge was the only remnant of that distant life as a wife and mother, and she knew that if she was taken to task, she would stay true to that oath or die trying.

She knocked on Rasch’s door. As ever, she received no answer, so she lay the tray down outside his door and left.

Chapter 43

Back in the canteen they talked about how they would proceed.

"The only way forward, as I see it, is for us to go to the Russians,” Mordechai suggested for the thousandth time.

"Pah! The Russians, always the Russians with you. Are you a Communist now?” Reuben had no love for the Russians.

"No, but
—
”

"No buts. The Russians hate us just as much as the Germans do, and what of the child?” He indicated Stephanie. "What do you think they’ll do to her?”

Stephanie inwardly shuddered but kept listening. She knew she would go either with these two or with Rohleder if he came for her. It was a long shot but somewhere deep within her she knew he’d come. She was definitely not going to stay there and wait for the Russians.

"I say we move southwest towards Italy. We’re bound to meet the Americans somewhere along the line.”

"And the retreating German army,” Mordechai reminded him. "Not to mention the Hungarians and Romanians who are, in case you’ve forgotten, my dear Reuben, not on friendly terms with the Jews either.”

"Why don’t we wait to see what will happen?”

"What do you mean? We can’t wait here to be slaughtered by the vampires. We have to go, and soon,” Reuben explained patiently.

"The question is which way.”

It was Stephanie who shut them both up. Normally she said nothing while she listened to their plans and quarrels, so her delivery was doubly shocking. "Then let’s make a decision. Either we go or we stay here. Let’s decide now what we’re going to do and act on it. If we are leaving, we must pack clothing and rations, and steal horses. I don’t know but we’ve got to do something. Arguing about it won’t help.”

Mordechai sat back in his chair. "Then which way do you suggest?”

She looked at them both and laid out her plan. "We steal horses from the stables and head north, back into Germany. When we get far enough
north
, we head for the American lines.” She stood back from the table to cross her arms. "Well?”

"I can’t ride
,
” Mordechai objected. "And which horses do you want to steal exactly? If the
c
ount finds out we’ve stolen his horses, we’ll be dead within the first night.”

"I can’t ride
,
either." Reuben looked apologetic. He’d come to admire Stephanie over the last weeks and this had been her first real input into their discussions. "But it was a good idea with the horses.”

However
,
S
tephanie wasn’t finished. "The c
ount has no idea what horses he’s got. Rasch has been riding around on one of his best horses for months without his permission. Furthermore, I don’t even
think he knows we exist. Have you ever seen him
?” She stopped to look at them.
Mordechai gawped while Reuben smiled.

"I haven’t. Not once, only that creepy Iullia," she continued, without waiting
.
"I can teach you to ride. We only have to get away, nothing fancy. Go forward and stop, what could be simpler? We’re not breaking horses in here. They’re used to being ridden.”

Reuben looked over to Mordechai
,
who seemed far from convinced. "What do you think
,
Mordi?”

"To be honest, I still say that we should go over to the Russians. They may not like us but they’re not going to feed us to the vampires, are they?”

"Well whatever you both decide, let’s decide soon,” she answered testily. "We’ve only got enough tinned food for the next three years. Do you think you’ll reach an agreement before then?”