“I believe it is, Comrade Admiral. Informants are telling us for the first time that there is enormous internal pressure on the saboteurs to give themselves up for the sake of any further hostages. I believe it is only a matter of days before-”
“Captain Malkov,” Brodsky cut in, “I am officially taking over this operation.” He looked at his watch. “Sixteen forty hours. From now on it will revert to GRU jurisdiction under my command. You will be reassigned to Riga headquarters.”
Malkov waited for more details, but Brodsky had nothing further to add.
When Malkov stormed out to his half-track in front of city hall, his mouth was set grimly, eyes brimming in such temper that his driver could tell it was going to be a bad day, or rather, what was left of it. He hesitated to say anything at all to the captain, but a call had just come through on the radio from the docks.
“What’s it about?” snapped Malkov.
“I don’t know, sir. The lieutenant asked me to—”
“All right, all right,” growled Malkov, “give me the phone.”
“Lieutenant — Malkov here. What is it?”
“Sir, it seems that your hostages are cracking the silence. We received an anonymous message this morning from number three shipyard. Six men are willing to talk, but only on condition that we will recognize them as members of the Estonian Liberation Front. That is, they want us to treat them as prisoners of war. And no more hostages are to be shot.”
Malkov sat back in his seat, the driver, having overheard the conversation, equally relieved.
“Tell them,” said Malkov, “we will agree to that on one condition. We want
“Yes, sir.”
Beaming, Malkov handed his driver the phone. “To barracks, Igor. It’s time for a drink.”
“Yes, sir.”
The following morning at number three shipyard, fourteen men and five women gave themselves up, but Malkov did not get the credit for it, as the official documentation showed he had been relieved of his assignment at 1640 the day before the surrender was made, under Brodsky’s reign of authority. Furthermore, Malkov’s agreement that they would be treated as POWs had no legal standing under military law — not that he had intended to keep his word anyway.
Brodsky fed the prisoners well and told them he expected a full list of all saboteurs in three days, or five hundred hostages he had ordered rounded up would be shot along with the nineteen.
The dam broke and over fifty names were presented to Brodsky. One day later, Brodsky signed an order that the saboteurs be sent to the shale oil fields around Kohtla-Jarve, ninety miles east of Tallinn.
“I made at least twenty duds on the day I gave up,” declared an old man defiantly as they were taken on their way. “I scratched ‘MJ’ on them, too.”
The others obviously didn’t know what he was talking about. “That women who shot that corporal bastard. Her name was Malle Jaakson — MJ, see?”
“Huh,” grunted one of the others, his tone surly. “A lot of good it’ll do her.”
“Or us,” added another. But soon the tensions among them and the animosities over whether or not they should have surrendered after all were lost beneath the overwhelming fact that they’d had no choice but to give in if they didn’t want to see the slaughter go on. The emotional strain had been tremendous, and to revive their spirits, some of the oldest aboard the trucks began singing the Estonian national anthem. The convoy stopped for a while in the forest outside the city of Rakvere, and the prisoners were machine-gunned.
As Brodsky asked to sign the death warrant for the murderer of the MPO corporal and unscrewed the cap of his gold Parker pen, he noticed the first name of the woman was Malle. When he turned the page in the file and saw her photo, his hand froze. “Has this woman been interrogated?” he asked his aide.
“Oh, she confessed,” the aide assured him. “There’s no doubt about it, Admiral. Claims it was rape, of course. Trouble is, she was apparently having it off with the corporal for sometime.”
“Where is she?” Brodsky asked curtly.
The aide was confused — where else would she be but here? “Here, sir. In cells.”
“Bring her to me.”
“It wasn’t a forced confession, sir. The woman fully admitted to having—”
“Bring her to me!” Brodsky repeated.
The aide had never seen him so agitated. The admiral rose and seemed to grow angrier by the second. “Don’t you understand a simple order?” he shouted.
“Yes, sir.”
“Immediately!”
“Yes, Admiral.”
The aide was utterly perplexed. It was a shut-and-closed case. No matter what the circumstances, it was murder. The penalty — death.
CHAPTER THIRTY-TWO
Preceded by a barrage of over a thousand guns for two hours, the Soviet divisions under Marshal Leonid Kirov led the attack on a hundred-mile front against the north-south sausage-shaped pocket. Surging ahead with their four-to-one advantage, the tanks converged in thousands, refugees and tens of thousands of farm animals scattering pathetically before them.
With only twenty miles to go, Marshal Kirov estimated that if all went well, his forces would reach the outer defenses of the DB perimeter in the next two hours. The British and Americans, Marshal Kirov assured the Russian premier, would be dug in, in defilade positions, and with thermal imagers in addition to their laser range finders, would take a heavy toll of Soviet tanks. But dug in, the NATO armor would be loath to risk leaving their defilade positions and revetment areas in deference to the sound military axiom that defense was easier than attack — especially in such foul weather. On the other hand, the only pause his armor had to make, reported Kirov, in the sudden change in the Arctic front from heavy rain to snow, was for some of his most forward tanks to make the switch from summer thirty-weight oil to winter ten-weight.
This was achieved with remarkable efficiency by the crack Soviet armored divisions coming down on the Dortmund-Bielefeld pocket from the north and those coming from the far south, where the Tyrol was already blanketed by early snowfall.
The very mention of snow, even to those Russian troops in the green flats of the Palatinate, was welcome because, except for the odd Canadian contingent in the pocket, it was more their element than the Americans’ and
