1945 (10 page)

The yellow light started to blink.

"Ten seconds!"

He turned back and leaned out the door, hands braced on both sides.

The Me-264E transport, coming in at treetop level, went into a steep climb as it reached the edge of the compound, now clearly illuminated by the burning buildings.

The green light flashed on.

"Go!"

He flung himself out the door and into the blast from the transports six engines.

His static line snapped and he felt the gut-jarring blow of his harness as the canopy popped open. He looked up to check the lines.

Full deployment, good.

For a moment he was over Leningrad, experiencing again that cold moment of fear as he struggled to cut away the collapsed chute and deploy his backup with only seconds to go before crashing down into the square behind the Hermitage. In spite of the broken leg he'd still completed his mission, taking Koniev alive and then spiriting him out in a
Fiezler Storch.

But that was then. Now—the ground raced up and he hit hard, rolling over with a grunt. For several seconds he lay stunned, then rose and tested his leg. It was holding up.

Skorzeny got up and hit the chest-release on his harness and peeled out of the gear. Others were doing the same as the rest thumped down.

Already Karl was by his side.

"Your leg all right?" Karl shouted, worrying as always.

"Fine! Get them moving!"

Karl unhooked the flare gun strapped to his side, raised it straight up and fired. The yellow star shell detonated overhead, marking the rally-point for the headquarters team.

Another transport soared overhead, its belly and the stick of paratroopers streaming out illuminated by the ground fires. The night-drop chutes came down like a rain of black flowers, spreading out in a line across the open field of the compound. But. . . the drop was taking too long. The last man of the stick descended straight into a burning building, his screams almost immediately drowned out by the staccato roar of his igniting ammunition.

One of the new gunships came in a thousand feet high at nearly a right angle to the approach of the transports, barely missing a stick of paratroopers. The aircraft seemed to explode as the battery of automatic cannon in its belly began to rake a line of buildings.

The six guns were fixed to fire downward at a 45° angle. A heavy bomber would rip its wings off if it attempted to pull up from an attack like a fighter strafing targets on the ground. By mounting guns on the underside of the fuselage at a forward slant, an aircraft with a bomber's range and payload could fly straight and level while supporting troops with concentrated gunfire.

That gunfire was devastating. Each of the four revolver-breech MG 151/20s spat out over a thousand rounds a minute. Their tracers cut solid lines through the night. The sleet of 20-mm shells tore roofs and cinder-block walls to splinters in a dust cloud.

The pair of 30-mm MK 103s were slow-firing by any standards; lucky bomber pilots had managed to fly between successive rounds from an attacking German fighters guns. Where the 20-mm rounds chewed their target, though, whole buildings exploded at the touch of one of the lazy green balls spitting from the MK 103s.

The gunship stopped firing as it reached the end of the line of buildings. The pilot banked right, exiting the target area to the north according to plan. A cloud of powder smoke, slowly dissipating in the light of the flames below, marked the firing pass.

Skorzeny hadn't noticed the noise until it stopped. This close, the muzzle blasts of the automatic cannon had overwhelmed all other sound. Now that he could hear again, he shouted impatiendy to his second-in-command for data.

"Second Company reporting in," Karl announced over his shoulder as he consulted the headquarters radio operator. "They're moving on objectives now. Third Company reporting . . . they've dropped at least two kilometers wide of its target."

God in Heaven, what a zoo! "All right then. Let's go."

Karl hesitated. "Sir, we missed our drop zone too. We should have been placed in the next field over. We'll have to go straight through the target area for the gunships."

"Scheisse!
Tell them to hold back while we get in position! Let's go! We have got to keep on schedule!"

The team spread out into a wide skirmish line and started to race toward the burning buildings. As they swept past, several of the men slowed momentarily to throw thermite grenades into the open windows of structures that had not been hit by the bombers or gunships, then sprinted to regain position. The skirmish line, having done its worst, loped into the next field, on the other side of which was their primary target.

Skorzeny looked back over his shoulder and saw a gunship come out of the darkness, aimed directly at them. Karl was frantically shouting into the radio. A platoon sergeant stood and fired a white signal flare straight at the plane. Like a demon raptor deprived of its prey, the gunship pulled up and disappeared into the night.

The headquarters platoon swept across the field on the run. Straight ahead a heavy machinegun opened up from the doorway of a concrete bunker. The lead points of his team swept to either side of the building and closed in for the kill. The high-pitched stutter of a
Schmeisser
cut short the deeper rattle of the heavy machine gun.

Skorzeny sprinted up to the bunker and kicked open the back door. Several bodies were sprawled in grotesque postures around a fifty-caliber Browning machine gun. Puddles of blood oozed from under the olive-drab uniforms. In the corner of the bunker a phonograph was monotonously repeating "Pardon me, boys, is that the Chattanoo—"
skip.
Skorzeny kicked the phonograph over and stepped back outside.

The edge of the field they had just crossed abutted a car-lined street. He rushed up to one of the vehicles for cover, crouching down by its front hood. It was a Ford ... or was it a Studebaker? Hard to tell. There was a street sign to his left. He pulled out a pocket flashlight and snapped it on. Main and Georgia.

"Our target is one block up!" he shouted as he sprinted up the street, his men fanning out beside him.

More firefights were flaring up. To his right he saw several people darting out of a barracks, attempting to flee. Civilians. None survived the attempt.

Up and down the street men from the third platoon of the first company were already smashing the driver-side windows of the cars parked along the street, leaping in and 
tearing open the ignition switches to hot-wire the vehicles.

A building to his right flared up in a fireball as an assault team barely made it outside. Off to his left a gunship came roaring in low across the field he had just crossed, hammering the burning buildings with incendiary bullets.

In the glare of the fires he finally saw his objective—the Administrative Records Building. He led the way in a sprinting crouch, his team pelting along behind him. Suddenly bursts of semiautomatic fire came from the building. His platoon, crouched behind the parked cars on the near side of the street, returned fire.

"Smoke grenades!" He raced for the main door. One of his men lunged ahead of him and slammed into the main door with such force that it burst off its hinges. There was an answering burst of fire and the man spun around screaming and collapsed. Cursing, Skorzeny leveled his Schmeisser and let off a burst into the darkened interior as the rest of his team stormed into the building, racing down the main corridor and into the side rooms.

"In here!"

Skorzeny followed the voice into one of those side rooms. In the glare of a flashlight he saw that several large safes lined one wall. A few seconds later the safe-cracking team had pushed past the assault unit and began placing their explosives. In less than a minute the team hurried back out into the main corridor and crouched down. A concussion shook the building. The team went back in through the smoke and started to pry the doors open while Karl, radio operator in tow, called for the intelligence and photography squad.

From across the street, men burdened with heavy leather bags rushed into the building. Part of the team set up their portable lights and tables while others went into the safes and started to tear open the file cabinets inside, looking for scraps of paper that could decide the fate of empires.

Karl came up to Skorzeny's side and waited.

"Twenty-one minutes since drop!" Skorzeny snarled. Too long!" 

"Only six minutes behind our goal."

"Too long! Everything is off schedule. The jumps were in the wrong zones. What if there had been serious resistance?"

Karl nodded, knowing it was best not to reply.

"Second and Third Companies?" Skorzeny asked.

"Second is starting to move, but it will be another twenty minutes before Third is ready to hit their objective."

Skorzeny walked back down the smoke-filled corridor and out into the night. The vast compound area was ablaze, echoing with the steady drone of bombers, gunships, and transports rumbling overhead. Out on the street, several dozen cars and six trucks were waiting for the evacuation to the landing strip.

"Our air support?"

"Ten bombers and all the gunships are circling in position. Our air coordinator is calling in the strikes."

"Pick-up field?"

"Secured."

This is ridiculous. We screw up left and right and still it's easy."

The night rumbled with the sound of another gunship dropping into position to fire. It took Skorzeny a fraction of a second to realize what was wrong.

"Joachim! Down!" he shouted as he threw himself on the ground. "Everybody down!"

"Scheisskopf!"
Karl cried. "He's coming from the north! We'll be in his—"

A second gunship, this one on the proper course, was approaching the target as well. Both pilots were concentrating on keeping their aircraft level despite the updrafts from fires in the target area. The copilots acted as gunners. Bent over their offset sights, they saw nothing whatever outside the glass frame and the buildings on the ground which slid toward their cross hairs.

Only when the gunships began firing did the muzzle flashes alert the crews to one another's presence. Both pilots banked to starboard, but by then it was far too late.

One wing of the eastern aircraft sliced through the fuselage of the idiot who'd confused his- approach. High-octane avgas and thousands of rounds of cannon shells exploded an instant later in a fireball.

The shock wave flattened, then fanned, the flames of the burning houses. Sprayed fuel enveloped not only the target but several closer paratroopers.
Their mothers will get closed caskets full of sand,
Skorzeny thought. The gasoline explosion slapped his face like a hot towel reeking of burned flesh.

Most of the second gunship crashed a quarter mile away and began to burn. The outer thirty feet of the port wing cartwheeled into the trees at the edge of the field where Skorzeny lay.

"Stop the exercise!" he snarled to Karl. He stood up, then flung his helmet to the ground. "Idiots!"

A siren sounded in the distance, whistles echoed across the compound as floodlights snapped on, illuminating the former concentration camp located on the Polish border.

Skorzeny turned around and looked at the man who had been "killed" crashing through the doorway. The paratrooper was standing up, laughing with the man who had "shot" him, pointing at the fake blood on the "American's" jacket. Both of them suddenly realized that they were being stared at, who was doing the staring, and snapped to attention.

"Very dramatic. Perhaps you would rather be an actor than a soldier of the Reich?'

"No, Herr Colonel," the frightened paratrooper replied nervously.

"Been in combat before?"

"No, Herr Colonel."

"Get out of my sight."

The boy turned and fled into the building, the suddenly resurrected "American" at his heels.

Karl quietly came up to Skorzeny s side and pointed.

A Mercedes limo had turned at Main and Georgia, and was slowly moving up the street, followed by a half-dozen staff cars. Paratroopers lining the street snapped to attention as the cavalcade neared.

"Now what?" Skorzeny muttered. Retrieving his helmet he set it back in place and went down to the curb. As the vehicle eased to a stop Skorzeny too came to attention, as protocol demanded.

Ignoring Skorzeny, a Luftwaffe colonel hurriedly exited from the front passenger side and opened the back door, thereby revealing the rotund form of Hermann Göring, gorgeous in his medal-bedecked, sky-blue uniform. Emerging, with only a few stifled grunts to mark the effort, he too ignored Skorzeny as he took a moment to observe the burning wreckage of the two planes. Only then did he slowly turn back and barely acknowledge Skorzeny's long-held salute with a twitch of his Marshals baton. Skorzeny found it passing strange that this fat residue of a man had once been a first-rate fighter pilot, an ace several times over and heir to von Richthoven's Flying Circus.

"Two of my latest planes were destroyed in this asinine exercise," Göring said without preamble.