Peter Cave - Invisible Enemy in Kazakhstan

He stared blankly across his office at the closed door through which Leveski had exited, racking his brain for a single optimistic thought. There was nothing. One realization swamped everything else. War, or at least his kind of war, was coming to an end, and a completely new kind of war was about to begin. With a terrible sense of resignation, he knew that he had little if any part to play in the waging of it. fn1

Berlin – June 1945

The two jeeps zigzagged through the rubble-strewn streets on the outskirts of what had once been the thriving city of Berlin. Another brilliant innovation from David Stirling, who had created the concept of the SAS in 1941, the small, nippy and versatile American vehicles were ideal for the war-torn terrain. Gutted, smashed and burned-out buildings formed an almost surrealist landscape which could have come straight from the tortured imagination of Hieronymus Bosch.

Corporal Arnold Baker, known affectionately to his comrades as ‘Pig-sticker’, or usually just ‘Piggy’, in tribute to his prowess with a knife, surveyed the dead city from the passenger seat of the leading jeep.

‘Jesus, this was some savage fucking war,’ he said gravely, shaking his head as though he still could not quite believe the evidence of his own eyes.

His driver, Trooper Andy Wellerby, sniffed dismissively. ‘Save your bleeding pity, Corp. When was the last time you saw London? Or Coventry, for that matter.’

‘Yeah.’ Piggy took the point, tearing his eyes away from the desolation and concentrating once more on the road in front of him. ‘What’s that up ahead?’

Wellerby waved his arm over the side of the battered Willys jeep, signalling for the vehicle behind him to slow down. He tapped lightly on the brake and squinted into the distance. Just over a quarter of a mile further up the long, straight road towards Brandenburg, a line of military vehicles sealed it off. Wellerby could make out a line of about a dozen uniformed figures standing guard beside the vehicles. He groaned aloud.

‘Not another bleeding roadblock? Bloody Yanks again, I’ll bet. It’s about time somebody told those bastards that it was us Brits who invented red tape.’

Piggy was also concentrating on the grey-uniformed soldiers. He shook his head slowly. ‘No, they’re not GIs, that’s for sure. Uniform looks all wrong.’

Wellerby let out a slightly nervous giggle. ‘Maybe it’s a bunch of fucking jerries who don’t know the war’s over yet.’

It was meant to be a joke, but one hand was already off the steering wheel and unclipping the soft holster of his Webley .38 dangling from his webbing. At the same time Piggy was checking the drums on the twin Vickers K aircraft machine-guns welded to the top of the jeep’s bonnet. In the utter chaos of postwar Germany, just about anything was possible. All sorts of armed groups were out on the streets, both official and unofficial, from half a dozen nations which had been caught up in the conflict. Quite apart from regular soldiers and covert operations groups, there were resistance fighters with old scores to settle and ordinary citizens with murder in their hearts. Even a shambling line of what appeared to be civilian refugees or released concentration camp prisoners might conceal one or two still dedicated and still fanatical Waffen SS officers who would kill rather than surrender.

‘Damn me. They’re bloody Russkies,’ Piggy blurted out, as he finally recognized the uniforms. He sounded indignant rather than surprised.

‘What the hell are the Russians doing setting up roadblocks?’ Wellerby wanted to know.

Piggy shrugged. ‘Christ knows. Everyone’s getting in on the act. And I thought we had enough problems with the Yanks, the Anzacs and our own bloody mob.’

It was the light-hearted complaint of a fighting soldier increasingly bogged down in the problems of peace. The war might be over, but Berlin was still a battleground of bureaucracy, with checkpoints and roadblocks everywhere and dozens of garrisons of different military groups still waiting for Supreme Allied Command to work out a concerted policy of occupation. For the time being, it was still largely a policy of ‘grab something and hold on to it’. Or just follow the orders one had, and muddle through.

But even so, it did not pay to take chances. The intensive training, both physical and mental, which any potential SAS trooper had to undergo did more than just produce a soldier whose reflexes and abilities were honed to near-perfection. It developed a sixth sense, an instinct for trouble. And Piggy Baker had that instinct now. There was something not quite right about the situation – he could feel it in his bones.

‘Pull up,’ he muttered to Wellerby out of the corner of his mouth. As the jeep stopped, he turned to the second vehicle as it, too, came to a halt some six yards behind.

Behind the wheel, Trooper Mike ‘Mad Dog’ Mardon looked up with a thoughtful smile on his face. ‘Trouble, boss?’

Piggy shrugged uneasily. ‘I don’t know,’ he admitted. ‘But something smells.’

Mad Dog grinned. ‘Probably just our passenger. The little bastard’s been shitting himself ever since we picked him up.’

Piggy glanced at the small, bespectacled civilian sitting stiffly and uncomfortably in the rear of the vehicle. Stripped of its usual spare jerrycans and other equipment, the jeep was just about capable of carrying two passengers on its fold-down dicky seat. Just as he had throughout the journey, the German looked blankly straight ahead, ignoring Trooper Pat O’Neill, who guarded him with his drawn Webley held across his lap.

‘Pat, I need you up at the front,’ Piggy said. He nodded at the jeep’s own pair of Vickers guns. ‘On the bacon slicer, just in case.’

O’Neill glanced sideways at his prisoner. ‘And what about Florence Nightingale here? Little bastard might decide to do a runner.’

‘Improvise,’ Piggy told him.

‘Right.’ O’Neill cast his eyes quickly around the jeep, finding a length of cord used to lash down fuel cans and fashioning it into a makeshift slip-noose. Dropping it over the German’s neck, he pulled it tight and secured the loose end to the mounting of the spare wheel. Satisfied with his work, he crawled into the passenger seat and primed both the Vickers for action.

Piggy felt a little easier now, but there was just one last little precaution to take. He reached to the floor of the jeep and hefted up his heavy M1 Thompson sub-machine-gun. Slamming a fresh magazine into place, he slipped off the safety-catch and leaned out over the side of the jeep, jamming the weapon into a makeshift holster formed by the elasticated webbing round the spare water cans. The weapon was now concealed on the blind side of the Russian troops, and ready for action if it became necessary.

There was not much more he could do, Piggy thought. He glanced sideways at Wellerby. ‘Right, take us in – nice and slow.’

The two jeeps approached the Russian roadblock at a crawl. Despite Winston Churchill’s eventual conviction that Stalin was one of the good guys after all, there was still a deep-seated mistrust between the two armies.

As Wellerby brought the leading vehicle to a halt, Baker studied the line of twelve Russian soldiers some ten yards in front of him. They stood, stonily, each cradling a PPS-41 sub-machine-gun equipped with an old Thompson-like circular drum magazine. If it had not been for the uniforms, they would have looked exactly like a bunch of desperadoes from a Hollywood gangster film.

There was something about their stance which made Baker feel even more uneasy. In the heady aftermath of victory, most Allied soldiers had tended to let discipline relax, and embrace a general feeling of camaraderie. These Russians looked as though they were fresh out of intensive training and ready to ship out to the front line.