Ian Slater - Rage of Battle

David cupped the barrel in his hands, letting what warmth he had in them thaw the snow that now might be ice inside. He’d come too far to kill himself. If he was to die, they were going to have to do it for him. Far over on his right, down the road, he heard the trucks starting up, the convoy, he expected, warming up, getting ready to head back to the front as soon as loading was completed. He flipped up the rear tangent sight, set it for fifty meters, aligned it with the front protected-post sight, and moved the bayonet scabbard from where it was digging into his belly.

When the first man filled the sight, David squeezed off a burst. Snow fell from a branch overhead from the air vibration and he shifted the AKM to the right, firing again. The first man was already down, the second thrown back till the safety bindings gave on the skis and he toppled into the snow. The other two were down, returning fire, bullets thwacking into the timber above and around him, but so high and wide, he doubted they had any precise idea of his position. Getting up behind the cover of the branches, sticking a twist of handkerchief into the barrel, he headed through the wood toward the dump — if he was still within the dump’s precincts. He was making much better time now, the snow in the woods nowhere as deep as in the field behind him.

In a few more minutes, having left the sporadic fire well behind him, he saw the trees were thinning. He was out of the wood.

“Halt!”

The Stasi trooper had his rifle up. David dropped to the ground as he fired a wide, sweeping burst. The man’s legs buckled, snow flicking up around him, and David felt his left shoulder stinging like crazy. He heard a loud panting noise coming out from the wood — too close for the other two to have caught up with him.

Then he felt the hot rush of air, a flurry of snow. Instinctively his left hand flew up, but the Doberman had it between his teeth, fangs crushing through the thick coat, crunching to the bone. David reached for the AKM but couldn’t find it. He tried to roll the dog over, but the Doberman had him pinned. His left arm bleeding profusely, David shoved his right into the coat’s right hand pocket, felt the lighter, and grasping it with all his strength, flicked the flint. The blue-orange propane flame shot up, and David pushed it at the dog’s eyes. Astonishingly, the Doberman hung on, jaws still clamping down on David’s arm, trying to shake the life out of him. Then suddenly the dog jumped back, skittering a short distance away, his paws frantically wiping his eyes. David saw the stock of the AKM and pulled it toward him. Its barrel was jammed with icy snow. Getting up, he flipped the butt down, lifted the gun by the barrel, and felled the dog.

The voices in the wood behind him were getting closer now. Stumbling through the snow, David reached the dog’s handler, who was making a noise as if he were snoring, something wrong with his breathing. David, almost passing out from the pain in his arm, removed the two M42 screw-threaded stick grenades from the man’s belt, as well as two banana clips of 7.62 millimeter, stuffing them into his coat’s pocket, then headed toward what looked like a barn fifty yards away, a horse trough nearby congealed with ice.

Then, beyond the barn, he saw what he’d been after from the moment he’d seen the Englishman dead in the snow and had asked the oberst permission to bury him. For once the snow was helping, firm underfoot, packed down, presumably by the boots of prisoners as they’d marched in from the trucks. The huge, snow-laden, camouflaged canvas-and-netting roof formed a strikingly beautiful and symmetrically scalloped pattern like the awning of some vast, expensive garden party marquee. Behind him he could hear the two men crossing the field and was about to turn to see if he could spot them when, seventy yards in front of him, away to the left, he heard a truck slowly coming to a stop, and the sound of more dogs. Without hesitating, he fired the whole magazine at the truck, the barrel so hot, the steam rose all around him. The truck’s engine was now in the high whine of reverse. He knew that now was his only chance. The AKM slung over his right shoulder, he ran the fifty yards toward the black wall of fuel drums. Kneeling, unscrewing the stick handle from two grenades, screwing them together, forming a demolition charge, he pulled both pins and threw them as far as he could into the gap between the canvas roof and the stacked fuel drums.

Running fast through the blinding snow, he estimated he would have five seconds. He was wrong. On a three-second fuse, the grenades blew, and the next instant he was lifted off the ground, the force of the explosion throwing him forward at least twenty feet, behind him a mountain of orange fire and dense, black smoke, the air like a desert wind, fantastic shadows playing across the snow, men running farther down the road from rivers of lighted fuel spewing out into the snow like molten lava. David dragged himself up, stumbled and fell, rose again, not knowing where he was heading so long as it was away from the fire. He heard screams and the futile spinning of truck tires trying to grip on snow that in seconds had become a bubbling sludge. More men somewhere off to his right were running, throwing weapons down, clambering aboard what looked like half-tracks in a desperate exodus as more and more of the drums exploded, adding to the towering flames, leaping hundreds of feet into the air, visible to NATO positions as far south as Bielefeld.

Hauling himself to the wood’s edge, it was not until about a quarter hour later that David realized the back of his head had been singed and the coat covered with the burns of airborne cinders. He knew he could run no more. If they got him — the best he could hope for was that he’d make them pay. He put the AKM across his lap and felt for the other two grenades, making sure no snow had iced up on them. Last thing he needed was the pins to freeze.

The German Army would call it the “Time of Deliverance,” the Americans, the “Bust-Out,” the British, “About Bloody Time.” But whatever name they gave it, the American-driven counterattack was something to behold.

Ironically, the first man to witness its beginning was not a combat soldier at all but a Bundeswehr surgeon. Assigned to the field hospital west of Munster, the surgeon had always admired the Americans for their inventive know-how, especially the revolutionary MUST — Medical Unit, Self-Contained — hospital that had been first designed in the 1980s. Seemingly rising out of nothing, inflated within twenty minutes by sterile compressed air from portable generators, and air-conditioned throughout, the fifty-two-foot-long, twenty-foot-wide, and ten-foot-high ward of six operating tables and inbuilt equipment had greatly reduced the fatality rate. The only fault the German surgeon found with it was that, as in all American installations, the thermostat was set way too high.

Stepping out at around 1600 hours on the day of the convoy’s arrival in Brest for a blast of cold and invigorating air between operations, he heard a thunderous roar overhead in the blizzard that had blanketed the front from lower Saxony as far south as Heidelberg. He hoped it was an American plane, for if not, there was nowhere to go for shelter — the slit trenches dug earlier in the day were now snow-filled, every available man having been sent to the perimeter in the desperate last-ditch attempt to stop the Russian advance. The roar of the aircraft had barely abated when out of the blizzard he saw a dark square the size of a house descending several hundred yards away above the airstrip designated “Minister 1,” but dubbed by the Americans “Monster 1.” As he watched the object, a vinelike mesh dangling from it, and saw the four ghostlike chutes above, he realized the mesh was the cargo net about a resupply palette.