Impasse (The Red Gambit Series) (68 page)

The two Shturmoviks, IL-2
’s of some age, recently recommissioned to try and make up the shortfall in Soviet striking power, drove in side by side and opened fire, each of them field modified to take improvised mounts for RS132 rockets.

They
carried sixteen each, putting thirty-two in the air, targeted on an area some three hundred by four hundred yards.

Hardegen gritted his teeth and kept the .50cal going, walking his tracer stream into the left-hand aircraft without noticeable effect.

The rockets started to arrive amongst the American force.

Higgins
’ halftrack took a direct hit, killing the valiant artillery officer instantly.

One rocket seemed intent on coming down the barrel of
his machine-gun, and Hardegen felt panic rise.

He controlled it and watched as the thing flew past and exploded behind his tank.

Swiveling the gun, he saw his bullets strike home behind the cockpit of the foremost Shturmovik.

Other rockets exploded, obscuring his view of the enemy aircraft, but he knew he had wounded it badly.

Something flew across his line of vision, this time from right to left, his imagination suggesting that more enemy aircraft had arrived, until the sight of a mangled body skidding across the snow told him otherwise.

The rockets had knocked the stuffing out of the defenders
, and caused many casualties in the tight packed ruins and gardens.

The two Illyushins turned lazily and commenced a bomb run.

Each carried four hundred kilos of bombs, the leader four one hundred kilo general-purpose weapons; the second aircraft bore eight, each fifty kilos fragmentation bombs.

It was immediately obvious that the leading aircraft was using
‘Bismarck’ as an aiming point.

“
Toss red smoke,” Hardegen shouted to anyone in range; some even heard him and complied.

Blue smoke rose from the Soviet positions, showing that the man in charge there knew his job.

Another pannier of ammo had been passed up and Hardegen slapped the top of the .50cal down hard, having slipped the new belt home.

“
Get out now! Quickly, boys! Move!”

His crew needed no second invitation and quickly evacuated the tank, seeking safety as far away as possible.

The Browning machine-gun started flinging lead into the air but, whether it was the increasing volume of snow in the air, nerves on the part of Hardegen, or good flying by the enemy pilot, no hits were apparent.

Two bombs dropped from the mounts, followed by two more a second later.

A bullet clipped his right arm, the enemy infantry bringing him under fire. They were champing at the bit to get at the Americans, once the aircraft had done their work.

The first bomb struck the road and deflected into the ruined artillery halftrack.

The second bomb hit dead centre of ‘Bismarck’s’ glacis plate.

Neither exploded.

Neither did the third or the fourth, although the final bomb did kill three GI’s as it wiped through their snowy redoubt like it wasn’t there.

The inexperienced ground crew had failed
to remove the safeties from the weapons, and the pilot, the Regimental Commander, a Colonel with a fearsome reputation, promised retribution for the risks he had faced; all for no reward. That he should have checked too did not occur to him.

He banked away hard, avoiding the tracers rising from the American position, the snow obscuring critical data
for the briefest of moments, but sufficiently long enough for his misjudgement, brought on by his anger, to condemn him.

A wing tip clipped the tree
tops on the hill and the Illyushin wobbled, dropping lower still.

The next tree top proved more of an obstacle and the impact knocked the aircraft into a nose dive, the Shturmovik instantly burying itself in the snow.

There would be no retribution for the ground staff back at his base. Neither would there be any aircraft for them to work on this day, as four Mustangs arrived and smashed the surviving Soviet aircraft from the sky, but only after he had added his own bomb load to the mess below.

The fragmentation bombs wreaked havoc amongst
the armored infantry, but completely missed the ad hoc infantry force to the west.

The Soviet infantry charged forward.

“Urrah! Urrah!”

They were met with stiff fire
, but it was much reduced, and the casualties they took did not deflect them from their purpose.

Close quarter fighting ensued and crept ever closer to
‘Bismarck’.

Hardegen did what he could
with the MG, but the ammunition was soon gone.

Pausing only to slap his tank
’s side as a farewell, he strode towards the position to his front.

DeMarco
lay in the ruined entranceway, shivering in the cold, part of his stomach deposited on the ground beside him, the thin sheet a medic had thrown over the desperately wounded man already moved aside by the growing breeze.

Morphine coursed through his veins, more than was necessary for pain relief, the medic deciding that he could but ease the gunner
’s suffering on his journey into the next life.

Shouting drew Hardegen
’s gaze from the dying man, and he tried to focus his eyes on the men running at him.

‘
Jesus!’

He brought up the Colt 1911
A and put the leading Soviet engineer down hard. The second man had a flamethrower.

Hardegen
’s second and third shots spun him round as he fired, and two of his comrades took the full force of the flames.

The screams were awful as three
of the Soviet engineers were consumed by fire.

A burst of
submachine gun fire, originating from the Soviet side, dropped all three to the snow and ended their suffering.

Hardegen saw friendlies off to his right and moved towards them, firing off another two rounds at indistinct movement near the burning corpses.

He dropped into a position and lay on the icy floorboards, gasping for breath,

The men around him, all armored infantrymen
, except for an old German in a Pickelhaube, poured fire in all directions, as the isolated post fell under determined attack.

Whilst the old German cut a comical figure in a white fur coat and with the stereotypical pointed German helmet atop his head, he clearly had seen action before
, and kept his rifle firing steadily.

At least one other flamethrower was closing in, the hiss as its flame
melted snow bringing fear to those who could hear its malevolent approach.

The position
’s commander slapped a Sergeant’s shoulder, directing the man’s attention to the threat.

The shot was clearly successful and the Captain moved away.

In a calculated fashion, the Sergeant took two more shots, the last of which sent a fireball through the attacking enemy engineers as it exploded the dead man’s flame thrower tanks.

Hardegen was noticed and the Captain moved quickly over to his side.

“You ok, Major?”

His minor wounds had transformed his tanker
’s uniform into a mass of red spots, misleading the Captain into thinking that Hardegen was badly wounded.

“
Fine, Captain. Are we secure here?”

“
No Sir. They're all over us like a nasty fucking rash. I have a man checking out a route so as we can bug out. ‘Til then, we gotta hold, Major.”

“
Ok. I could use another weapon. Whatcha got for me?”

“
Plenty, Sir. They’re lying around everywhere here. Help yourself. I recommend their wooden submachine gun with the round mag. Fucking lethal thing.”

“
OK, Captain. My tank’s still running if we can get back to it. I can drive and we can ride rather than walk.”

“
Sounds like a plan, Major. But the commies may have their own ideas.”

The officer rolled away and then scrabbled to his feet, moving off towards the farthest part of his defence.

Hardegen returned the nod from the Sergeant as he went in search of weapons.

He found them in the adjacent
space; US weapons stacked on one side, Soviet weapons the other.

He took the Garand instead of the recommended PPSh
, and selected ammo for both the familiar rifle and his Colt.

Against his wishes, he forced himself to
pick up a bayonet and clipped it to the Garand.

Returning to the first room, he found the sergeant lying flat on his back
in a pool of blood and the position now occupied solely by the comical German.

The Sergeant had no face
, and the bloody mess on display grinned with bared teeth exposed where the soft tissue had been stripped away by the impact of something very solid.

The bubbles of blood showed that the horribly wounded man still lived.

Shouting something in German, the old man gestured at Hardegen, bringing him into the adjacent firing position.

Grinning as he selected a target amongst the attacking Soviet soldiers, Hardegen spoke in the old man
’s language.

“
Ja, ich kann es ertrangen, alten Manne!”

The old soldier laughed.

He had ribbed the American officer in German, asking him if he could bear it as he brought him up into a firing position.

“
Yes, I can bear it, old man,” had been Hardegen’s response.

The two stood side by side and shot down enemy after enemy, despite a close bullet dislodging the ridiculous Pickelhaube from the veteran
’s head.

The German language conversation continued, almost isolating the two from the events around them.

“Where’d you learn your soldiering then, Grandad?”

“
Tannenberg, boy. My first battle. Now those Russians could fight. Then the British. Hard men, they were too. This lot are easy.”

As if to mark his words, the Mauser spat another bullet into the body of a crawling Russian.

“Mind you, boy, there are a fucking lot of them!”

And then he was dead.

Neither of them had seen or heard the grenade that exploded behind them, leaving one man untouched, except for ringing in his ears, the other peppered with death-dealing shrapnel.

Seeing the explosion, a group of previously
unnoticed engineers rose up and charged.

The Garand
contributed one bullet before the charger leapt out, the metallic sound spelling doom for Hardegen.

He had no time to reload.

Ducking down, he avoided a burst of SMG fire by rolling to his left, over the dead body of the old man.

The first engineer lost his footing as he launched himself over the wall and dropped heavily onto the brickwork.

Hardegen lunged and the bayonet slipped into the soft flesh easily, but refused to slide out.

The bayoneted soldier provided a barrier to those following, at least long enough for the Colt to come
to hand.

The next two faces that appeared got a round each, dead centre.

Another grenade was dropped over the wall, rolling alongside the corpse of the old German.

The explosion defiled his corpse but did not harm the tank officer.

A movement up high betrayed an attacker, and the Colt pumped out bullets as a shape flew through the air.

The soldier had climbed up onto the porch and thrown herself down on the American below.

Her dead weight struck him and knocked him to the floor.

The Colt was empty and there was no time
for a new magazine. The old man’s Mauser rifle was too far away so Hardegen grabbed what he could and defended himself.

A
rifle butt slammed into his upper right chest and knocked the wind from him momentarily, but not enough to stop him flailing with the sharpened spade he had taken from the dead woman.

It cleaved the
man’s face to the bone and stuck in his neck for the briefest of moments.

Hardegen was becoming frenzied.

The spade came away and he lashed out at the engineer, whose weapon strap had become entangled in the ruins, depriving him of its use.

The soldier ducked and moved left, receiving a slash across the shoulder blade.

He went down as two bullets hammered into him.

The Captain had arrived with a hard-faced corporal and they shot down the remaining attackers.

Hardegen dropped to his knees, gasping, his exhaled breath almost like a cloud of steam.

The Captain unravelled the PPSh
’s strap from a protruding metal stanchion and handed it to Hardegen.