The Beast in the Red Forest (22 page)

Picking a stone from the ground, he rolled it into the dark, knowing that anyone still alive inside would mistake it for a grenade. Then he waited, ready to shoot whoever came running out.

But there was no cry of surprise. No sound of footsteps or the chambering of weapons. Only the dull clatter of the rock as it skipped across the wooden floor.

Cautiously, Vasko stepped into the cabin, his gun held out and finger on the trigger.

The breath caught in his throat when he saw the carnage.

By the table, still sitting in the chair, which had tipped back against the wall, was a man without a head and missing one of his arms. The table itself had been broken almost in half, its surface cratered by a large scorch mark.

Vasko’s first guess was that Malashenko had triggered the booby trap in the canteen, but then he saw the canteen lying on the other side of the room. It was dented and the metal blackened by smoke but it had definitely not exploded.

Then, looking up, Vasko spotted pieces of what he realised was his radio embedded in the ceiling. Immediately, he guessed that Malashenko had instead set off the explosive device installed in the radio. Vasko had done the rewiring himself, using the on switch as both on and off depending on which way he turned it and using the separate off switch as a trigger for the dynamite. To lose a radio when in the field was serious, but to have one fall into the hands of the enemy was a capital offence. Vasko was glad that he had taken precautions against losing the device, but it left him without a guide who knew his way around Rovno, as well as any means of communicating with Skorzeny. At least, he thought, I now have a reason for delaying my return to Berlin.

Knowing that this place might be his home for several days to come, Vasko set about cleaning up the mess. Underneath the bunk, he found the man’s head, scorched and disfigured by the blast. He lifted it by the hair, so much heavier than he would have thought, and stared into its sightless eyes.

‘Mother of God,’ whispered Vasko, as he realised that it wasn’t Malashenko after all.

The head fell from his grasp and landed with a heavy thud upon the cabin floor.

‘It can’t be,’ he said to himself.

Praying that he might somehow be mistaken, Vasko stumbled over to the body in the chair. Fumbling with the shirt buttons, he reached under the blood-stiffened cloth and pulled out a flat oval disc made of dull grey zinc, still attached to the remains of a braided black and red cord which had once held the disc around the wearer’s neck. It was a standard German military dog tag, which all personnel were required to carry in the field, no matter what uniforms they wore while undertaking operations. One side of the tag was marked SS–SD. The other side bore a cryptic combination of letters and numbers: 2/4 Hauptamt. Bln. The dog tag had been perforated down the middle and the markings repeated on both sides. In the event that the soldier was killed, one half of the oval would be snapped off for graves registration, the second half remaining with the body. The information stamped into the metal ensured that agents could identify themselves to regular German troops when they crossed back over the lines. He studied the inscription. The word ‘Hauptamt’ stood for ‘headquarters’ and ‘Bln’ was the abbreviation for Berlin. This was the department of the SS to which all field agents were officially assigned. No regular soldier attached to SS Headquarters in Berlin would have found himself out here, behind the lines and wearing civilian clothes. Now Vasko knew that there could be no doubt. The dead man was Luther Benjamin.

Before he left on the mission, Vasko had been informed by Skorzeny that Benjamin had been assigned to rendezvous with him as soon as the mission was completed. But no such signal had been sent. Vasko couldn’t fathom why Benjamin would have set out anyway. That decision had cost the agent his life.

Vasko sat down on the bunk. He felt dizzy and sick, knowing what he had to do next. Abwehr protocol demanded that, in the event of an agent’s death in the field, all evidence of him, his identity and his mission must be destroyed.

Vasko stood, his head still spinning, and reached for a lantern behind the bunk. It had escaped the blast and was still filled with paraffin. Vasko grasped the lamp and raised it above his head, ready to smash it on the floor and then, with a single match, burn the cabin to the ground. But in that moment an idea came to him which focused all the chaos in his mind. Gently, so as not to spill a drop of fuel, he replaced the lantern on the ground.

‘Let him come,’ he whispered to himself. ‘Let Pekkala see what’s left of Peter Vasko.’

Down in the musty-smelling cellar, Pekkala was wondering how many soldiers he could take with him before the rest of them riddled the place with bullets.

Then he heard a strange sound, somewhere in the distance, like a big door being slammed shut.

Above them, one of the soldiers swore.

A few seconds later, there was a rumble, like a train passing through the air above them, and the house shook with a nearby explosion.

Two more thuds were followed by detonations.

‘What was that?’ whispered Kirov, as the dirt floor trembled beneath their feet.

‘Mortars,’ answered Pekkala.

‘Ours or theirs?’

‘Either one will kill us if we don’t get out of here,’ replied Pekkala.

Upstairs, the soldiers had reached the same conclusion. They sprinted from the building as more explosions shook the house, followed by a thump of stones and bricks and clods of earth as they rained down over the garden.

A second later, there was a shriek, like metal claws upon a blackboard. Smoke and dust rolled beneath the canvas tarp that separated the basement from the trench outside.

The explosions came so quickly now, one after the other, that they merged into a constant roar. To Pekkala, it felt as if a herd of cattle was stampeding through his brain.

Then, just when it seemed that nothing could survive under this terrible rain, the mortar barrage ceased.

At first, Kirov could barely hear anything above the ringing in his ears but, a short while later, he picked up the sound of the half-track as it rolled back towards the west. Before long, it had faded into the distance. And then there was only the sound of wounded men, baying like dogs beside the smoking craters which would soon become their graves.

‘What should we do now?’ asked Kirov, his own voice reaching him as if muffled beneath layers of cotton wool.

‘I think it might be best to run like hell,’ replied Pekkala.

They climbed out through the trench and sprinted across the snow-clogged grass, heading for the safety of the garrison.

The two men had not gone far when they heard the sound of another engine, this one much smaller than the half-track, but headed straight towards them. Cautiously, Kirov peered around the corner of a building. ‘It’s Sergeant Zolkin!’ Stepping out into the road, Kirov was almost run over by the newly repaired Jeep, which skidded to a stop in front of him.

‘Quickly!’ shouted Zolkin. ‘We’re expecting a counter-attack any minute.’

They piled in and Zolkin wheeled the Jeep around. Crashing through the gears as he raced back towards the garrison, the vehicle slalomed around the shattered bodies of soldiers, some of them blown out of their clothes by the force of the explosions. Outside the old hotel, two soldiers dragged aside a barbed wire barricade just in time to let them pass and the Jeep roared into the courtyard.

As Pekkala clambered out, he stared up at the shattered windows and the bullet-pocked walls. Here and there, he could see a rifle pointing from a room. Through an open doorway, he watched as wounded men, trailing the bloody pennants of hastily applied field bandages, were being carried down into the basement of the building.

‘They’ve hit us twice already,’ said Zolkin. ‘If it hadn’t been for the mortars, they would have made it past the barricade.’

‘Where did the mortars come from?’ asked Kirov. ‘I don’t see any in position here.’

Zolkin shook his head. ‘They weren’t ours. Those rounds came in from somewhere on the other side of town. We think it might be a Red Army relief column approaching on the road from Kolodenka. Commander Chaplinsky has been trying to make radio contact with them, but so far without success. With luck, they might get here before the next attack.’

He had barely finished speaking when they heard the clatter of enemy machine guns and the monstrous squeaking of tracked vehicles, somewhere out beyond the barricades. The Langemarck Division had returned.

‘So much for the relief column,’ muttered Zolkin. ‘It looks as if we’re on our own.’

Commander Chaplinsky met them in the doorway of the garrison. His face was blackened with gun smoke, making his teeth seem unnaturally white. Behind him, in what had once been a grand foyer, three exhausted soldiers sprawled on an ornately upholstered couch which had been dragged out into the open. Others lay around them on the floor, oblivious to the jigsaw puzzles of broken window glass beneath them. The worn-down hobnails on their boots gleamed as if pearls and not steel had been set into the dirty leather soles.

‘Find yourself a gun.’ Chaplinsky gestured towards a heap of rifles belonging to those who were now being treated in an improvised dressing station in the old luggage room of the hotel. ‘We’re going to need everyone who can pull a trigger.’ As he spoke, some of the more lightly wounded soldiers emerged from the dressing station, took up their weapons and returned to their posts.

Kirov and Pekkala each picked up an abandoned rifle and made their way along the hall until they found an empty room. The windows had been smashed out and furniture lay piled into the corner. Spent rifle cartridges and the grey cloth covers of Russian army field dressings littered the floor where a man had been wounded in the last assault.

‘From the look of things here,’ said Kirov, ‘this might not be the best place to make a stand.’

‘If you know of a better one, go to it,’ answered Pekkala.

With a grunt of resignation, Kirov sat down on the floor with his back against the wall.

Pekkala stared through the empty window frame, eyes fixed upon the horizon, where dust churned up by the fighting dirtied the pale blue sky. ‘He’s out there,’ Pekkala said quietly.

‘Who?’ asked Kirov as he checked his rifle’s magazine to see if it was loaded.

‘The assassin,’ replied Pekkala.

‘And so is half the German army, Inspector. Are you trying to tell me you’re still fixated on arresting a single man?’

Pekkala turned and studied him. ‘That is exactly what I’m telling you.’

‘You’re going to get us both killed,’ said Kirov. ‘Do you realise that, Inspector?’

‘If we worried about the risks every time we set out to find a criminal, we would never arrest anyone.’

Kirov laughed bitterly. ‘Elizaveta was telling the truth.’

‘The truth about what?’ asked Pekkala.

‘About you! About this!’ He kicked out with his heel, sending spent cartridges jangling across the floor. ‘Wherever you go, death follows in your path.’

‘She said that?’

‘Yes,’ answered Kirov.

‘And you believed her?’

‘I just told you I did.’

‘Then why the devil did you come out here to find me?’ demanded Pekkala. ‘To prove that she was right?’

‘I didn’t come here because of what she said!’ shouted Kirov. ‘I came here in spite of it.’

There was no time for Pekkala to reply. He ducked for cover as a stream of tracer fire arced towards them from a gap in a stone wall across the street. Bullets spattered against the walls, raising a cloud of plaster dust.

‘Here they come,’ muttered Kirov.

Malashenko approached his cabin in the woods. After finding the cabin deserted, Malashenko had returned to Rovno, intending to meet Pekkala at the safe house, as he had promised to do. But no sooner had he reached the outskirts of the town when an attack began from the west. With machine gunfire whip-cracking in the air above him and mortars falling in the nearby streets, Malashenko realised that the enemy must have broken through and that he had wandered right into the fighting. Leaving Pekkala and the commissar to fend for themselves, he ran for his life back towards the cabin, the only place he could think of where he might be safe.

He did not expect to find Vasko there. By now, Malashenko was convinced that the Abwehr agent had already gone, having accomplished what he came to do. The thought that he had been cheated out of his bar of gold filled Malashenko with barely containable rage.

But when Malashenko arrived at the little shack, with its mildewed log walls and crooked tar-paper roof, he was stunned to discover that, in the few hours he’d been gone, all the windows had been knocked out. ‘Vasko!’ he shouted. ‘Vasko, are you there?’

‘Yes,’ said a voice behind him.

Malashenko spun around as Vasko stepped out from behind a tree, a Tokarev pistol in his hand.

‘I didn’t think you were coming back,’ the partisan remarked nervously.

‘Then you were mistaken, Malashenko.’

‘What the hell happened to my cabin?’

‘Somebody touched something they shouldn’t have.’

‘Well, it wasn’t me!’

‘I know,’ Vasko said calmly. ‘Because if it had been, you would be the one lying in pieces on the floor instead of somebody else.’

‘Pieces?’ Malashenko glanced in through the cabin’s open door. A headless body slumped in a chair against the wall. The walls were painted with blood. With nausea rising in his throat, Malashenko backed away. ‘Listen,’ he told Vasko. ‘There is something you should know. Pekkala is looking for you. Pekkala, the Emerald—’

Vasko cut him off. ‘I know exactly who Pekkala is.’

‘Then you know it’s only a matter of time before he finds you.’

‘That is exactly what I intend for him to do.’

He’s gone mad, thought Malashenko. Maybe he was from the start. Malashenko would have shot Vasko by now, but his sub-machine gun was slung across his back and he knew he’d never get to it before Vasko pulled the trigger on his pistol. Instead, he tried to reason with the man. ‘And when he does catch you, after what you’ve done—’