Sam Eastland - The Beast in the Red Forest

‘Let him come,’ he whispered to himself. ‘Let Pekkala see what’s left of Peter Vasko.’

*

Down in the musty-smelling cellar, Pekkala was wondering how many soldiers he could take with him before the rest of them riddled the place with bullets.

Then he heard a strange sound, somewhere in the distance, like a big door being slammed shut.

Above them, one of the soldiers swore.

A few seconds later, there was a rumble, like a train passing through the air above them, and the house shook with a nearby explosion.

Two more thuds were followed by detonations.

‘What was that?’ whispered Kirov, as the dirt floor trembled beneath their feet.

‘Mortars,’ answered Pekkala.

‘Ours or theirs?’

‘Either one will kill us if we don’t get out of here,’ replied Pekkala.

Upstairs, the soldiers had reached the same conclusion. They sprinted from the building as more explosions shook the house, followed by a thump of stones and bricks and clods of earth as they rained down over the garden.

A second later, there was a shriek, like metal claws upon a blackboard. Smoke and dust rolled beneath the canvas tarp that separated the basement from the trench outside.

The explosions came so quickly now, one after the other, that they merged into a constant roar. To Pekkala, it felt as if a herd of cattle was stampeding through his brain.

Then, just when it seemed that nothing could survive under this terrible rain, the mortar barrage ceased.

At first, Kirov could barely hear anything above the ringing in his ears but, a short while later, he picked up the sound of the half-track as it rolled back towards the west. Before long, it had faded into the distance. And then there was only the sound of wounded men, baying like dogs beside the smoking craters which would soon become their graves.

‘What should we do now?’ asked Kirov, his own voice reaching him as if muffled beneath layers of cotton wool.

‘I think it might be best to run like hell,’ replied Pekkala.

They climbed out through the trench and sprinted across the snow-clogged grass, heading for the safety of the garrison.

The two men had not gone far when they heard the sound of another engine, this one much smaller than the half-track, but headed straight towards them. Cautiously, Kirov peered around the corner of a building. ‘It’s Sergeant Zolkin!’ Stepping out into the road, Kirov was almost run over by the newly repaired Jeep, which skidded to a stop in front of him.

‘Quickly!’ shouted Zolkin. ‘We’re expecting a counter-attack any minute.’

They piled in and Zolkin wheeled the Jeep around. Crashing through the gears as he raced back towards the garrison, the vehicle slalomed around the shattered bodies of soldiers, some of them blown out of their clothes by the force of the explosions. Outside the old hotel, two soldiers dragged aside a barbed wire barricade just in time to let them pass and the Jeep roared into the courtyard.

As Pekkala clambered out, he stared up at the shattered windows and the bullet-pocked walls. Here and there, he could see a rifle pointing from a room. Through an open doorway, he watched as wounded men, trailing the bloody pennants of hastily applied field bandages, were being carried down into the basement of the building.

‘They’ve hit us twice already,’ said Zolkin. ‘If it hadn’t been for the mortars, they would have made it past the barricade.’

‘Where did the mortars come from?’ asked Kirov. ‘I don’t see any in position here.’

Zolkin shook his head. ‘They weren’t ours. Those rounds came in from somewhere on the other side of town. We think it might be a Red Army relief column approaching on the road from Kolodenka. Commander Chaplinsky has been trying to make radio contact with them, but so far without success. With luck, they might get here before the next attack.’

He had barely finished speaking when they heard the clatter of enemy machine guns and the monstrous squeaking of tracked vehicles, somewhere out beyond the barricades. The Langemarck Division had returned.

‘So much for the relief column,’ muttered Zolkin. ‘It looks as if we’re on our own.’

Commander Chaplinsky met them in the doorway of the garrison. His face was blackened with gun smoke, making his teeth seem unnaturally white. Behind him, in what had once been a grand foyer, three exhausted soldiers sprawled on an ornately upholstered couch which had been dragged out into the open. Others lay around them on the floor, oblivious to the jigsaw puzzles of broken window glass beneath them. The worn-down hobnails on their boots gleamed as if pearls and not steel had been set into the dirty leather soles.

‘Find yourself a gun.’ Chaplinsky gestured towards a heap of rifles belonging to those who were now being treated in an improvised dressing station in the old luggage room of the hotel. ‘We’re going to need everyone who can pull a trigger.’ As he spoke, some of the more lightly wounded soldiers emerged from the dressing station, took up their weapons and returned to their posts.

Kirov and Pekkala each picked up an abandoned rifle and made their way along the hall until they found an empty room. The windows had been smashed out and furniture lay piled into the corner. Spent rifle cartridges and the grey cloth covers of Russian army field dressings littered the floor where a man had been wounded in the last assault.

‘From the look of things here,’ said Kirov, ‘this might not be the best place to make a stand.’

‘If you know of a better one, go to it,’ answered Pekkala.

With a grunt of resignation, Kirov sat down on the floor with his back against the wall.

Pekkala stared through the empty window frame, eyes fixed upon the horizon, where dust churned up by the fighting dirtied the pale blue sky. ‘He’s out there,’ Pekkala said quietly.

‘Who?’ asked Kirov as he checked his rifle’s magazine to see if it was loaded.

‘The assassin,’ replied Pekkala.

‘And so is half the German army, Inspector. Are you trying to tell me you’re still fixated on arresting a single man?’

Pekkala turned and studied him. ‘That is exactly what I’m telling you.’

‘You’re going to get us both killed,’ said Kirov. ‘Do you realise that, Inspector?’

‘If we worried about the risks every time we set out to find a criminal, we would never arrest anyone.’

Kirov laughed bitterly. ‘Elizaveta was telling the truth.’

‘The truth about what?’ asked Pekkala.

‘About you! About this!’ He kicked out with his heel, sending spent cartridges jangling across the floor. ‘Wherever you go, death follows in your path.’

‘She said that?’

‘Yes,’ answered Kirov.

‘And you believed her?’

‘I just told you I did.’

‘Then why the devil did you come out here to find me?’ demanded Pekkala. ‘To prove that she was right?’

‘I didn’t come here because of what she said!’ shouted Kirov. ‘I came here in spite of it.’

There was no time for Pekkala to reply. He ducked for cover as a stream of tracer fire arced towards them from a gap in a stone wall across the street. Bullets spattered against the walls, raising a cloud of plaster dust.

‘Here they come,’ muttered Kirov.

*

Malashenko approached his cabin in the woods. After finding the cabin deserted, Malashenko had returned to Rovno, intending to meet Pekkala at the safe house, as he had promised to do. But no sooner had he reached the outskirts of the town when an attack began from the west. With machine gunfire whip-cracking in the air above him and mortars falling in the nearby streets, Malashenko realised that the enemy must have broken through and that he had wandered right into the fighting. Leaving Pekkala and the commissar to fend for themselves, he ran for his life back towards the cabin, the only place he could think of where he might be safe.