Gavin Smith: Special Purposes: First Strike Weapon

“So you cut his ears off?” Vadim asked, looking at the grisly necklace around Kerrican’s neck. He could hear the sound of an engine now. Shouting from the gate. Kerrican glanced in that direction and then back, apparently unconcerned. He noticed Vadim looking at his necklace and held it up. Two of them, presumably Schiller’s, looked very fresh, the rest were blackened and old.

“You like that?” Kerrican asked grinning. “Just like Vietnam, yeah? See I was 3 Para, proper green-eyed-boy me.” Vadim had no idea what the colour of his eyes had to do with it. Kerrican was shaking the necklace of ears now. “Mostly Argies on here, but some of these belonged to American mercenaries. There’s even a couple from Ulster.”

“3 Para?” Vadim said, wracking his brain. Kerrican and Ralph were looking at his face, not his hand, and he slowly cocked the lever on the right hand side of his concealed knife’s hilt. He’d heard the gates creak open. “Didn’t they very bravely fight at Arnhem? Operation Market Garden?”

“Yeah, so what?” Kerrican said.

“And were nearly wiped out by the 10th SS Panzer division?” As Vadim clicked the knife’s safety off he saw it in Kerrican’s eyes, just for a moment: guilt. Then it was swept away by the excuses, the hate, the fantasies that had twisted the young man’s mind.

“You are a disgrace,” Vadim told him. “You deserve to wear that uniform.” Outside the office, he heard the Saracen drive into the compound. There was no cry of warning. The fake SS soldiers were too stupid to make sure that it was their own patrol returning. “This is going to happen very quickly,” Vadim told him.

0019 GMT, 25th November 1987

Vickerstown, Walney Island, North-West England

VADIM HEARD THE rockets in flight. The building shook, windows shattering, as the two Tiger tanks exploded, destroyed by the squad’s remaining RPG-18s. The world turned orange. The fragmentation grenades were almost lost among the noise.

The explosion, not surprisingly, distracted Kerrican and Ralph. Vadim raised his left arm and pulled the trigger on the NRS-2 knife, firing the 7.62mm bullet out of the blade’s hilt at Ralph. The recoil drove the blade into the dead flesh of his forearm, but a small hole appeared in Ralph’s forehead and he started to fall back. Vadim grabbed his saperka from the desk with his right hand, swung round and threw it at the other guard. The sharpened edge of the entrenching tool caught him in the shoulder and he stumbled back, dropping his shotgun.

Vadim swung back to find Kerrican hooking the Hitler Youth knife in towards his head. More out of instinct than design, Vadim stabbed out with his own blade and caught Kerrican’s knife arm with it, driving it back against the wall. Vadim tore the blade along the arm, opening it up, and the Hitler Youth knife dropped from nerveless fingers. Kerrican howled.

The door to the external walkway was kicked open and the guard with the SLR came through firing, almost hitting the screaming Kerrican. Vadim threw himself sideways as the rifle stitched a line of holes in the wall. He landed on Ralph’s corpse, scrabbled for the shotgun and rolled over. The guard fired the SLR again, hitting Ralph’s body; Vadim let him have both barrels, driving backwards out of the doorway and over the rail, into the pit.

“I’ll fucking have you!” Kerrican screamed as he clawed awkwardly for his holstered Walther with his left hand. Vadim heard gunfire outside as he rolled to his feet. He hit Kerrican in the face with the butt of the shotgun, breaking his nose.

“Ow! You cunt! ” he screamed, but it distracted him long enough for Vadim to grab the pistol and toss it away.

He retrieved his knife, stabbed it into Kerrican’s leg and tore it downwards. The so-called Hauptsturmführer sat back down hard in his chair, trying to hold the wound in his leg together, shouting obscenities. Ignoring him, Vadim holstered and sheathed his weapons, before grabbing the StG 44 and the pouches of spare magazines. The guard with the saperka in his shoulder was trying to crawl through the doorway. Vadim crossed the room, kicked him screaming onto his back, tore the entrenching tool out of his shoulder and brought it down on his skull, almost bisecting it. He dropped the dripping saperka back into its loop on his webbing, then turned toward Kerrican.

“What are you gonna do?” Kerrican demanded. He was wary but not exactly frightened. Vadim strode back across the room, shoved the desk out of his way and picked Kerrican up. The Englishman thrashed ineffectually with his left arm as the captain carried him out onto the walkway.

Vadim took in the scene. Next to the gate he could make out the gutted remains of one of the Tiger tanks, torn open by the explosion. It looked like the 40mm fragmentation grenades he’d heard going off had hit the tops of two of the guard towers. Skull was limping as fast as he could towards the lorries parked against the rear wall, looking for higher ground to shoot from, and Gulag was running towards the prefab building that held the child-hostages. Once this would have worried Vadim, but not now, after what the Muscovite had done for Gloria and the Carlsson boy.

He caught a glimpse of Princess disappearing into the Joy Division prefab. The Fräulein was firing the MG 34 machine gun into the stands, using the Saracen for cover, belts of ammunition draped over her right arm. Nazis were tumbling into the pit, and Vadim saw tracers spark off the metal scaffold poles and fly into the night air. Such had been the ferocity of the attack that the re-enactors hadn’t even started firing back yet.

Vadim dragged Kerrican to the edge of the walkway, over the zombie corral. The dead were already in a frenzy, feeding on the men falling to them under the Fräulein’s onslaught. The so-called Hauptsturmführer could see what Vadim was about to do.

“I’m gonna come back!” he screamed. “I hate, like you do!” Vadim threw him down into the corral. Kerrican didn’t even try to save himself; to hold onto him, or grab for the rails.

The zombies descended.

“You’re nothing like me,” Vadim muttered, even as bullets impacted all around him. He could see Harris and New Boy in the makeshift arena. They had harvested weapons from fallen Nazis; New Boy was dispatching the injured.

At last the fake SS started returning fire, if only sporadically. Bullets sparked off the Saracen’s armour as the Fräulein took cover behind the APC. The shooters were on the ground floor of the hall beneath Vadim and in the prefab housing the barracks. The Fräulein turned the MG 34 on the prefab as Vadim shouldered the StG 44 and headed back into the office, in time to see the interior door opening.

Vadim dropped to one knee next to a filing cabinet, and watched the barrel of a rifle slowly push the door open. A stray bullet flew in through the window behind Vadim and put a hole in the interior wall. The door opened enough for Vadim to see another SS uniform; the man’s eyes widened as he saw Vadim, and the captain squeezed the trigger on the StG 44. The rifle hammered into his shoulder, the recoil worse than an old AK-47, making the barrel climb as it stitched three neat holes in the enemy rifleman’s chest and face. He fell back, and Vadim heard panic on the other side of the door. He could use panic.

He crossed the office in a few strides, and was through the door onto a mezzanine floor above a large hall stacked with looted supplies. He saw leather sofas, huge televisions and stereos, VCRs, crates of alcohol, fridges and freezers, all presumably powered by the as-yet-unseen generator.

There were about twenty of the re-enactors down in the hall, firing through the windows facing into the compound. They were probably all aiming for the Fräulein, but their inaccurate, undisciplined fire would be sending stray rounds into the prefab huts where the refugees and the local women and children were. There were three other SS men on the stairs up to the office, and they had been smart enough to have another two covering them from the floor of the hall.