The Beast in the Red Forest (21 page)

When the signal eventually came through, ordering him to proceed, the Flemish Grenadiers were still heavily engaged west of Rovno and it was unclear whether the hoped-for breakthrough would come about. At the time Benjamin set out, the Langemarck Division was at a standstill outside the village of Yaseneviche, still some distance from its intended destination.

When Benjamin read that he was to return alone if Vasko was not at the meeting place, he suspected that something must have gone wrong, but he had no choice except to go through with the mission.

In spite of the dangerous situation, Benjamin succeeded in making his way through the lines, carefully noting the territory as he moved along, in preparation for his return journey.

Benjamin had been on the point of giving up when he finally spotted the cabin, almost hidden among the trees. Pausing a short distance from the structure, he unbuckled his rucksack, which contained ammunition, a radio and medical supplies in the event that Vasko might be wounded. Benjamin hid the rucksack in a hollow in the ground, where a tree had been uprooted long ago, then drew his sidearm, a Walther P38, and advanced towards the cabin.

Cautiously, he peered in at the window. In the gloomy light of the interior, he could see a table in the centre of the room and a bunk in the corner. A blanket crumpled on the bunk was the only sign he could detect that the cabin might be occupied.

Benjamin crept around to the back and tried the door. It was unlocked and swung open with a creak. He could smell the smoke of a recently extinguished fire. Standing to one side, he whispered Vasko’s name into the gloom.

There was no reply.

Benjamin could feel the stillness of the place, as much as he could see it with his eyes. Slowly, he stepped into the cabin, his gun held out. A single glance told him that the place was no longer occupied, although it was clear that someone had been here recently. Lying on the table were a few dried pieces of black Russian army bread, as well as a Soviet military canteen in its primitive cloth cover.

As Benjamin inspected the contents of the room, he discovered a small radio of the type issued to German field agents, hidden under a tarpaulin. Then he knew he had found the right place. Although his orders were to return immediately if Vasko was not at the rendezvous point, the presence of the radio was a clear indication that Vasko had been there. Faced with the thought of abandoning his friend, Benjamin decided to wait a while and see if Vasko showed up.

Benjamin sat down at the table, picked up a piece of the Russian bread and gnawed off a mouthful. After chewing for a couple of seconds, he spat it out on to the floor, wondering how humans could subsist on food like that. Then he reached for the canteen, intending to wash out his mouth. He was just about to unscrew the cap when he felt something underneath the canteen cover which made him pause. It might just have been a twig that had worked its way between the metal and the cloth, but something about it made Benjamin uneasy. Gently he shook the canteen. Water splashed about inside. Then he undid the single metal button which held the cloth cover in place and removed the canteen. As he held up the metal flask, he spotted what he had originally mistaken for a twig. It was a thin copper wire, soldered to the base of the canteen and running all the way up to the cap. The wire had been taped to the metal with black electric tape.

Benjamin held his breath. With acid slithering in his guts, he carefully replaced the canteen on the table.

He recalled the moment in his training when he and the other agents had been shown various items of sabotage which they might one day be required to use. There were pieces of plastic explosives, shaped and painted to look like coal, which could be thrown into the tenders of trains and would detonate when shovelled into the engine. There were hollowed-out books with spring triggers fitted into the covers which, when opened, would detonate enough explosives to blow the roof off a house. There was even a slab of explosives designed to look like a chocolate bar. The explosives had been covered in real chocolate and wrapped in paper with the brand name ‘Peters’ on the outside. If a piece of the chocolate was snapped off, it would trip a detonator located inside the bar. And there were canteens, just like the one before him. Explosives were packed into the lower section, with a thin metal panel fitted into the upper section to allow it to hold water. The two pieces were then soldered back together and a copper wire strung between the cap and a detonator lodged inside the lower portion. The suspicions of any soldier would be set aside when he heard the water in the canteen, but unscrewing the cap would trigger the bomb in his hands.

Benjamin sat back and stared at the canteen which, he now realised, Vasko must have brought with him from Berlin when he first set out on the mission. ‘You bastard,’ he whispered, closing his fists to stop his fingers from trembling.

Outside, it began to rain. Benjamin listened to the rustle of droplets coming down through the trees. A moment later, it was pouring.

Steering his mind back on course, he remembered that his first task once he reached the rendezvous point was to establish contact with Abwehr in Berlin. Rather than get soaked retrieving his backpack, Benjamin picked Vasko’s radio set off the floor and brought it to the table, where he set it down and checked that the battery was charged. He set the small Morse code pad in front of him and turned on the radio, which came to life with a faint hum. Then he plugged the earpiece into the machine. After entering his identification code as a prefix to the message, he typed out:
Expect contact shortly. Will advise.

Benjamin finished the transmission with a secondary authentication code. Then he picked up the earpiece. As he had learned in his training, he did not press it directly against his ear but rather against his temple. The signal, when it came in, was often marred by interference so that the individual key strokes sometimes appeared to merge together unintelligibly. Pressing the earpiece against his temple allowed him to isolate the message from the interference.

Benjamin did not have long to wait. Through the veil of static, he picked up the shrill notes of the Morse code reply. It was only one word:
Understood
.

Benjamin wondered if it was Skorzeny himself on the other end. He imagined the giant, safe in the radio room on the second floor of SS Headquarters in Berlin. He wished he was there now. It won’t be long, Benjamin thought to himself. If those Flemish soldiers break through to Rovno, Vasko and I can ride back to Berlin in comfort, instead of slogging our way out through the forest. And then maybe they will give us both a desk job for the rest of this damned war.

The thought of that cheered him up. Smiling, Benjamin leaned forward and turned off the radio. Curious, he thought, as he heard not one click but two.

Just before sunrise that morning, a wild dog had picked up the scent of a man moving through the woods east of the village of Misovichi. Most wild animals would have steered clear of a human, but this dog had not always been wild.

It had once belonged to a farmer named Wolsky, who raised goats and sheep and some pigs, whose wool and meat his family had sold at the market square in Tynno for generations.

Wolsky had named the dog Choma, after a local man who once cheated him in a business deal. He would bring the dog to the market place and make the dog catch scraps of meat and bone for the amusement of his customers, and all the while the farmer would call out the name of Choma, scratching his ears and slapping the dog’s shaggy fur.

One day back in the summer of 1941, not long after the invasion had taken place, a truck filled with Ukrainian Nationalist partisans rolled into Wolsky’s farmyard. Among the partisans was Choma‚ the man who had once cheated Wolsky, and who had heard about the naming of the dog.

When Wolsky came out of his house to see what was going on, Choma shot him in the chest and left him lying face-down in the mud. Then he went looking for the dog, intent on killing it as well.

Choma found the dog asleep beside the barn. His first shot missed, gouging a fist-sized chunk of wood from the wooden boards above the dog’s head. By the time Choma had steadied his hand to take a second shot, the dog had already vanished.

It had been living in the woods ever since. In that time, the dog had forgotten its name, and almost everything about its former life, until the day it picked up the man’s scent. More out of curiosity than hunger, it followed the stranger, keeping always at a safe distance, until they arrived at the cabin.

The man went inside the building.

The dog hung back among the trees, sniffing the air for some clue as to what might be happening.

A short while later, the dog heard the muffled thump of an explosion inside the cabin. In a flash of light, the glass window sprayed out of its frame as if it had transformed into water. This was followed by a wave of concussion which sent the dog skittering away, but it soon doubled back, sniffing at the shards of glass which littered the ground, until it came upon the arm of a man, smouldering and severed at the elbow. It remembered the way the old farmer used to throw it pieces of food and how the other people used to clap and cheer when it leaped into the air to catch the scrap of meat. For a second, he remembered his name.

Then the dog picked up the arm and carried it away, deep into the perpetual twilight of the forest.

Outside the safe house, the sound of armoured vehicles was growing louder.

‘We must get back to the garrison,’ said Kirov. ‘It’s the only fortified location in town. If we run flat out, we can be there in five minutes.’

Pekkala paused to check that his Webley revolver was loaded. He had forgotten to test-fire the weapon and now it was too late. He would just have to hope that Lazarev had worked one of the miracles for which he was already famous, or else this weapon might blow up in his hands the second he pulled the trigger.

Suddenly, the sound of an approaching vehicle filled the air. The floorboards shuddered beneath their feet. Seconds later, a German half-track rumbled past.

The half-track was followed by a squad of infantry. Some were members of the Flemish SS, identifiable by the three-branched swastika ‘trifos’ on their collar tabs, a yellow shield emblazoned with a black lion on their left forearms and, just beneath it, a black and white cuff title with the word ‘Langemarck’ etched out in silver thread. These were the troops which had been given the task of breaking through to Rovno, although by the time the skeletal rooftops of the town at last came into view so few were left that they had now been reinforced by other soldiers pulled from decimated units in the area, turfed out of their beds at field hospitals or hauled off trains by members of the German Military Police, the Feldgendarmerie, as they made their way home on the only leave some of them had seen in more than three years. Among these Belgians walked men from Croatia, from Spain, from Norway and from Hungary, all of them communicating in some bastard Esperanto, cobbled from their native tongues and the snippets of German they had picked up in their service to the Reich.

With bayonets fixed upon their Mauser rifles, they moved at a slow trot to keep up with the machine. Their clothing was a threadbare collage of the battles they had seen. Some still wore the bottle-green collared tunics in which they had marched into Poland in the autumn of 1939. There were jackboots that had marched down the Champs-Elysées in the summer of 1940, and ankle boots looted from Dutch army warehouses, with laces made from scraps of radio wire and loose heel irons that jangled like spurs as they grazed over stones in the road. Slung from belts, some carried canvas bread bags bleached by the African sun out in the Sand Sea of Calanscio. Their sharply angled helmets hid beneath tattered strips of camouflage cut from old shelter capes, or covers fashioned out of rusty chicken wire, on which could still be seen the traces of white paint daubed upon them when their owners huddled freezing in the ruins of Borodino in the winter of ’41.The faces of these men appeared primordial, their smoke-clogged pores and blistered lips like scraps of leather thrown out by a tanning yard. Their bodies were those of young men, but shrunk to bony scaffolding beneath the patched and filthy grey of Wehrmacht uniforms. Although the shape of them was human, in the hollow darkness of their eyes, and with frost-bitten ears worn down like chips of sea glass, they were no longer recognisable as men. They bore no resemblance to the postered images which had propelled them on this journey, whose only outcome, they now realised, would be annihilation. They were all that remained of their generation; restless husks of who they’d been before they went away, unknowable now to those they left behind and in the ice-filmed puddles where they glimpsed their sad reflections, unfamiliar even to themselves.

Somewhere up the street, just beyond Pekkala’s field of view, the half-track came to a squeaking halt.

‘There are more of them out back,’ whispered Kirov. ‘They’re moving through the alleyways.’

At that moment, Pekkala spotted two soldiers walking directly towards the house. ‘Go!’ he whispered to Kirov.

The two men dashed across the room, slid down the ladder into the root cellar and closed the trap door on top of them, just as the front door blew open, splintered by a rifle butt.

The soldiers searched the house, floorboards groaning under the cautious tread of their hobnailed boots.

Huddled in the darkness, only a hand’s breadth below, Kirov and Pekkala knew that it was only a matter of time before the soldiers discovered the narrow trench which led directly to the root cellar. And when they did, there would be no way out.

The first thing Vasko saw when he came in sight of the cabin was sunlight glinting off the shards of broken window. The door to the cabin was wide open, with one of its hinges torn off. Vasko realised immediately that one of the explosive devices with which he had booby trapped the cabin must have detonated.

Probably that fool Malashenko, he thought, nosing around to see what he could steal. I warned him not to touch things that didn’t belong to him. But, to be certain, Vasko drew his gun and circled around through the trees, searching for any sign of movement as he approached the cabin door.