Gavin Smith: Special Purposes: First Strike Weapon

“Your father?” Skull asked.

“He wasn’t even a fighting man. A cowardly Totenkopf SS.”

“Which camp?” Vadim asked.

“Ravensbrück, one of the women’s camps.” She shook her head. “She almost did it as well. Almost turned me. She spun all these lies that she’d convinced herself was the truth. An unrepentant SS widow. I found out, though; found out who my father was, what he’d done. Why he’d been hanged.”

The screams had died down. There was a knock on the Saracen’s armour.

“It’s me,” Gulag said. Vadim opened the rear hatch just long enough for him to climb in. The captain tried to ignore the sound of the dead feeding outside. Gulag sat down and looked around, picking up on the atmosphere.

“What’d I miss?” he asked. They ignored him. The Fräulein was still brooding. Gulag shrugged and inspected the weapons they had taken off the fake SS patrol. “This’ll do.” He picked up an MP-40 submachine gun. Vadim couldn’t help but think it suited him.

VADIM AND PRINCESS had stolen a flat-bottomed dinghy, to present the smallest target. Vadim found himself having serious misgivings about its seaworthiness as they drifted across the channel towards the island. He and Princess were lying down in the dinghy, and there was a deepening puddle of water in the bottom of the small craft.

They had started just north of the heavily fortified area on the opposite bank, which Princess said could be crossed at high tide. They drifted north, occasionally leaning over the side of the boat to guide it with a paddle. The small village just north of the heavily-defended shore was dark, though there was smoke coming from some of the chimneys and candlelight shining through gaps in the curtains. They heard, but didn’t see, a vehicle on the island. Vadim assumed it was one of the motorised patrols Princess had told them about.

There were hands waving in the water, zombies who had become stuck in the mud and left there for high tide. It lent their brief voyage an even more surreal feel.

Vadim and Princess were to make a reconnaissance before the squad made plans. Vadim would have preferred to do this with Skull, but the other sniper simply couldn’t keep up on his leg.

They dragged the dinghy ashore into some nearby trees that bordered an airfield. There was little point in hiding; there were dozens of similar craft moored up and down the channel.

Vadim had left his AK-74 in the Saracen, which they were using as a mobile base; Princess had left her empty AKS-74, and the Dragunov, to preserve what little ammunition she had left, taking instead one of their stolen SLRs.

Vadim and Princess had crept back south, picking their way along the shoreline to the edge of the village.

“What now?” Princess whispered. “Go into a house?” Vadim was concentrating on the village, trying desperately to ignore Princess’s proximity, the vibrancy of her life.

“How much were you taught about the British in your assassination squad?” he asked.

Princess gave the question some thought. “A bit,” she said, “they were a potential target.”

“Where’s the best place to find British people,” he asked, “even after World War Three?”

VADIM FELT THE atmosphere in the pub as soon as he walked through the door, even before the clientele had the chance to work out who and what he was. He could feel the anger in the room, and had seen the bodies hanging from the unlit lampposts outside. The people were frustrated, helpless.

Two men in SS uniforms stood at the bar laughing. Vadim was surprised by his own fury as he laid into the first man with his saperka . The man was screaming. Vadim felt the warm blood splash on his face, and it took every last ounce of self-control he had not to fall on the fake-Nazi and feed. He didn’t even hear Princess shoot the other man in the head with her suppressed pistol.

“Boss,” she said in Russian. His victim was a red mess on the bare wooden floorboards. Drool dripped from Vadim’s mouth. He straightened up and looked around at the room as Princess closed the door behind her and leaned against it. With the burning log fire, he suspected it was the warmest she had been since they’d abandoned the Dietrich .

The pub was small, cramped, bowed and blackened; the modern furniture and fittings looked strangely incongruous. The clientele were mostly middle-aged men clearly used to life working outside. Rough hands ingrained with dirt told Vadim the kind of people he was looking at. They were all staring at him, horrified.

“Fools!” the woman behind the bar spat. “They’ll kill us all.” She was a plump lady, in her mid-sixties or so. Vadim turned to look at her and she took a few steps back. He reached down, removed the weapons and the ammunition from the dead SS men, and placed them on the bar. The room watched, silent.

“My name is Captain Scorlenski—”

“You ’ere ’a finish t’ job?” a red-faced man in his forties demanded. Vadim had to play the sentence back in his head to work out what the man had actually said.

“Everyone thinks we dropped the bombs ourselves,” Princess muttered in Russian. A few faces turned to her.

“I’m here to kill Nazis,” Vadim finished.

“You can’t!” the bar woman cried. There were tears in her eyes.

“We have to do something , Denise!” another man shouted.

“They’ll kill them all!” the bar woman, presumably Denise, protested.

“Kill who?” Vadim asked with a sinking feeling.

“They took all the woman of a certain age, and all the children,” said another man in the corner. He had the same build as many of the people in the pub: reasonably powerful, but running to fat. All of them looked like people who did hard, physical work but enjoyed their food and drink. Vadim guessed he was in his seventies. Something about him made Vadim think that he’d served in the military. He was old enough to have fought in the last war; if so, he couldn’t have been pleased to see two men wearing SS uniform in his local pub. “They said the children were to be indoctrinated. That lunatic they have in charge is calling them the Stevie Jugend , but they’re just hostages.”

“The women?” Princess asked, her voice like ice.

“For their Joy Division,” the old man said. Vadim went cold.

“They’re not from here, are they?” he asked. “Why did you let them across the bridge?” It was out of Vadim’s mouth before he could think. It was just frustration, it wouldn’t help anything.

“’Tweren’t us,” the old man said. “They turned up a few days after the dead came, after we saw the flashes and the fires from Manchester and Liverpool. The way we heard it, they threatened to shell Vickerstown with the tanks, so they lowered the bridge.”

They weren’t to know that the main guns on the tanks weren’t working.

“Why are you telling him anything, Bill?” a short, hatchet-faced man at a different table said. “He’s one of them, look at him.”

“The Russians fought against the Nazis, Sam,” Bill said.

“I don’t mean Russian. He’s dead,” Sam said. There was a collective intake of breath and some shuffling away from Vadim. Princess rolled her eyes.

“Can’t be,” someone else said. “He’s talking, he’s not trying to eat us.”

“He’s not breathing. Look at his colour,” Sam persisted. Vadim caught a glimpse of himself in a mirror behind the bar. They were right. He didn’t look human anymore.

“Yes, I’m dead,” Vadim said. “But the Nazis have our people. We have a common enemy, that’s all that matters.”

“You people did this!” spat the red-faced man who’d first spoken. “You destroyed our cities, killed millions of people, brought this disease, turned our families – our friends – into cannibals!” He was on his feet, tears in his eyes. The men at his table were reaching up for him. Denise’s hand was over her mouth. It looked as though they expected Vadim to kill him. Vadim took a step towards him, and he held his ground, shaking off his friends’ hands. It was clear he’d had enough.