Ian Slater - Rage of Battle

“Actually,” put in the English lieutenant, “I think they’re from the Territorials.”

“Who are they when they’re at home?” asked Waite in his cockney twang.

“Reserves,” the lieutenant replied. “Damn well trained, too. Not frontline troops, of course.”

“Like us!” said Brentwood. It got a good laugh.

“Touché.” said the Englishman. “No, what I mean—”

“ Schweig dock!” one of the four guards called out.

“Up your doc, too!” said Thelman.

The guard began shouting again, but the British lieutenant ignored him, as the other three guards didn’t seem to care one way or the other.

“Bundeswehr Territorials,” the lieutenant continued as the truck skewed dangerously on a patch of black ice before straightening. “Territorials were assigned to man and maintain all NATO transport in Northern Command. Unfortunately, they ran out of gas — thanks to our SPETS friends, who got behind our lines and cut both Amsterdam and Rotterdam pipelines. Ergo — the Territorials in our midst.”

“Like Doug Freeman did in Korea,” said one of the Americans.

“He didn’t use enemy uniforms,” said David.

“Well,” said the English lieutenant wryly, “I don’t think Americans look much like North Koreans, do they?”

“Suppose not,” answered David, not quite knowing whether the Englishman was being sarcastic or merely gently matter-of-fact.

“How do you know he didn’t put South Koreans in gook uniforms?” asked a disgruntled signaler.

David felt the man was less interested in finding out than in venting his spleen against the SPETS who’d deprived him, like David, of his uniform and who’d left him near death with cold.

“He knows,” Thelman said, pointing to David. “He was there.”

“Really?” asked the Englishman somewhat haughtily.

“Yeah, really,” replied Thelman. “Silver Star.”

Brentwood was acutely embarrassed, but the Englishman’s voice lost any trace of haughtiness. “I say, well done! Brent-ward, isn’t it?”

“Brentwood,” said David, feeling conspicuous.

“Silver Star and no fucking brains, right, Brentwood?” an American ribbed him. “Signed up again.”

“Right!” said David boyishly, grateful for the laughter that swept through the truck and started the guards shouting again. This time all of the guards were joining in, one of them waving the AKM as the truck slowed a hundred yards from the main entrance to the fuel dump, which was almost obliterated in the swirling snow as lines of prisoners carried 160-liter drums on stretcherlike pallets to waiting trucks on the opposite side of the road. A Stasi oberst approached the truck, tiny balled snow bouncing off his uniform like fine hail. “English? Amerikaner!”

“Yes,” answered the lieutenant, being the most senior rank.

“You will be issued with armbands, which you must wear at all times.”

“When are we to dine?” asked the Englishman.

“Who are you?” asked the oberst.

“Lieutenant Grimsby, Royal Engineers. And you are?”

“Oberst Hotter.”

The lieutenant jumped down from the tailgate and gave a snappy salute. “Very well, Colonel Hoffer. I must request that these men be fed as soon as possible. We’ve been traveling all day and, as I’m sure you’re aware under the rules, specifically agreed to by both NATO and Warsaw Pact under the Gorbachev Protocols—”

David wasn’t listening. He was far more interested in the fact that the fuel dump wasn’t in the old NATO prepo site after all but had been cunningly moved. No wonder the NATO bombers had been unsuccessful in penetrating the old prepo sites.

What would Freeman do? Not sit on his ass whining about the next meal, that’s for sure. It was a God-given opportunity. The idea literally caught his breath for a moment, the row developing between the Stasi colonel and the disdainful Englishman over the issue of “appropriate apparel” and “victualing “ passing over him. Why hadn’t he thought of it earlier? he wondered. But that was easy. His only concern, like everyone else in the truck, had been to survive. “Defensive driving,” Freeman used to call it derisively drilling them that defensive thinking was “a disease for the timid… defensive tactics excuses for not attacking. A goddamn torpor looking for reasons to fail.”

David could still see him aboard the chopper carrier before they’d lifted off on the Pyongyang raid against “Kim Il Runt,” as Freeman had called the dictator Kim Il Sung. David hadn’t known what torpor meant until he’d heard the general use it.

There was a sudden crack, silence, then bedlam in the truck, the guards outside firing into the air. “What the—” began David. In the pale yellow light of the tailgate, he could see the Englishman spread-eagle in the snow, a dark pool round his head, a look of utter amazement on his face.

The oberst slapped the pistol back into his holster. “ Ja! — ” he was saying, a smile on his face that David recognized immediately as the mad look spawned of sustained battlefield stress. “Ja— now you see. You will do as you are told.” He turned to the guards, one of whom looked as astounded at what had happened as the dead Englishman, and rattled out a series of sharp orders. Turning to the prisoners in the truck, he informed them, “You will go over to the depot. Two men to each drum, and you will load them back into this truck. Is this understood?” No one answered, and as the guards motioned them out and they dropped down to the snow, one by one they looked down at the dead Englishman, no one speaking out of respect and fear.

In the distance, muffled by the snow, they could hear the steady crump of Marshal Kirov’s thousand guns that kept pounding away in a massive creeping barrage through the DB pocket, to stun the already battle-weary Americans and British, as the Russian advance moved inexorably westward. Now and then the sound of the guns would change as the creeping barrage shifted, when the Russian gunners, after having “bracketed” an area, laid the shells down in a different sector to confuse and undo any of the defenders’ attempts to predict where they would be hit next.

David, clutching his blanket and shivering, plaintively held up his hand, reminding Thelman of a timid student asking for permission to go to the washroom.

“Ja “ asked the oberst brusquely.

“Sir — may I bury him?”

“You want his clothes, his boots, ja?”

David shrugged ingratiatingly. The oberst nodded to one of the guards and then told Brentwood, “Be quick. We must be loading the trucks in twenty minutes.”

“Could I have a spade?” asked Brentwood.

“Use your hands,” said the oberst.

“But, sir,” David started to protest, then stopped himself. “Thank you, sir.” The oberst had turned away from him, heading across the road toward the entrance to the dump.

“Schnell!” said the guard whom the oberst had ordered to follow Brentwood, waving the machine gun toward a ditch and the snow-covered field across from the truck in the opposite direction to where the prisoners were being marched.

David motioned to the guard that he needed help carrying the lieutenant off the road across the ditch. The guard obviously understood his gestures but wasn’t going to help, instead indicating brusquely that Brentwood should hurry up.

By the time Freeman was out of the field hospital’s OR, the advancing thunder of the Russian guns was barely twenty miles away east of Bielefeld, the Russians having already penetrated the defenses south of Bielefeld beyond the Weser River. Simultaneously other Soviet tank and helicopter surges out of Frankfurt-am-Main to the south were hammering at the fragmented NATO line, forcing what was left of the Belgian Sixteenth Armored, Bundeswehr Second Mechanized, and the American Third and Eleventh Armored to try to contain the ever-widening arrowhead of the enemy advance swelling and curving north from Fulda in a left hook encircling movement, heading toward Krefeld and Gelsenkirchen.