Even so, the Russians did not find it a walkover. Fighting continued to rage from 5 July to 22 July as the salient became a charnel house. The casualties on both sides were enormous. Medical personnel on the German side described their field hospitals as slaughterhouses.
Throughout the long days and nights the sound was deafening as the artillery continued to pound, the tanks to fire and the bombs to fall. The earth was desecrated, turned into a desert – a desert littered with shattered planes, tanks, and men.
Colonel Jaeger survived the holocaust – and saved Schmidt. Two Panthers had been blown up under the Colonel and he was in the turret of the third in the midst of chaos and milling confusion when he saw Schmidt, hit by a sniper's bullet, topple over the side of his turret.
'Halt!' he ordered.
Clambering down onto the churned-up earth he ran across as Schmidt's tank detonated a mine. A huge length of track splayed out and slapped, onto the ground. Schmidt, sprawled on his side, looked up.
'Get out of it, Chief! The medics will come for me…'
'Shut up and keep still!'
Jaeger gathered up Schmidt in both his arms and carried him to his own tank. He had reached the Panther when he felt a thump against his leg. He ignored it, hoisting up Schmidt as his wireless operator reached down to grasp the injured man.
'Colonel! Your leg!' the wireless operator shouted to make himself heard above the mind-numbing thunder which never ceased.
'Get Schmidt inside! I can get up myself. That's an order…'
Blood had soaked through the trousers covering the upper part of his leg and the pain was starting. There was a ping against the side of the Panther. That damned sniper again! Gritting his teeth, Jaeger hauled himself rapidly up to the turret, inside and closed the lid.
'There is a bloody spy at the Wolf's Lair – and I'm going to track the bastard down when I get out of here.'
Jaeger was talking to Schmidt in the next hospital bed a week later. By using the Fuhrer's name the SS colonel had managed to get them both transported to a hospital in Munich. He had a definite purpose in choosing this location for their recuperation.
'Why are you so sure now?' Schmidt enquired. 'Kursk!'
'So, we lost the battle – it doesn't mean we lost the war..
'I fear, my old friend,' Jaeger said sombrely, 'it means just that. At Kursk, history – it is not an original phrase – trembled in the balance. We should have won, but the Bolsheviks knew our order of battle in advance. I forced my way into the presence of Field Marshal von Kluge afterwards. He agreed with me. The Fuhrer was right, there is a top-level Soviet spy at the Wolf's Lair.'
'Well, there's nothing you can do about it,' Schmidt observed.
They occupied a small two-man ward and both were recovering from their injuries. Jaeger had been shot in the upper right leg, the bullet embedding itself only a few centimetres from the place where he had been shot during the final stages of the 1940 campaign in France.
The doctor had suggested he be invalided out of the army when final recovery took place. He was exhausted by his exertions in so many campaigns. Jaeger's reaction had almost put the doctor into one of his own beds. Grabbing the walking-stick by his bedside the Colonel had thrown back the bedclothes and rested his good leg on the floor.
'You may be a good doctor but you're a bloody lousy psychologist!' he had roared. 'I have a specific job to do – and by God I'm going to do it!'
He waved the stick in a threatening manner. Hauling the bandaged right leg out of bed he stood up, supporting himself by the stick as he hobbled forward menacingly. The doctor backed away from him until the wall stopped his retreat.
'Colonel, you should be in bed…'
'I should be in the Cauldron – searching for a lead to the man who put me here, who left so many thousands of my comrades dead amid the flies and dust of Kursk. I have only one instruction for you, Doctor, get me mobile at the earliest possible moment.'
'I can only do that if you rest, stay in bed…'
The doctor's face had lost its normal colour, confronted by Jaeger who was the picture of ferocity. Holding on with one hand to the bottom of Schmidt's bed, Jaeger raised his stick with the other to emphasize his command.
'Agreed – on one condition. Each day a little more exercise so I can be discharged at the earliest possible moment. There is a war on, hadn't you heard…'
'The same request applies to me,' Schmidt interjected.
'You're to discharge me on the same day as the Colonel leaves…'
'That may be possible,' the doctor agreed cautiously. 'Your chest wound is healing nicely. It was fortunate the bullet passed right through, missing all the vital parts…'
He broke off in mid-sentence as a nursing sister entered, stopped and stared in bewilderment. She was not a particularly attractive woman, arrogant by nature, and on the first day of his admission Jaeger had had to speak severely to her.
'We are holding an important conference,' he informed her with a straight face. 'No bedpan interruptions at the moment.'
'You have a visitor, Colonel. A Mr Maisel. He says you are expecting him…'
'And he speaks the truth, so usher him in at once, please…'
'Is everything all right, Doctor?' she asked.
'He's not feeling too good this morning,' Jaeger replied in his most jovial manner. 'You can see he's lost his usual colour. I prescribe rest, possible a short period in bed.'
'Is it correct that you wished to see me, Colonel?' enquired Willy Maisel.
The thin-faced Gestapo official with a thatch of dark hair was dressed in a well-fitting navy blue suit and his shrewd gaze switched backwards and forwards between Jaeger and Schmidt. He made no reference to their state of health.
'Where the hell is that Englishman, Wing Commander Lindsay, at this moment?' Jaeger rasped.
Willy Maisel was sitting down on a chair drawn up close to the Colonel's bedside drinking a liquid the hospital hopefully termed 'coffee'. Jaeger had winkled out of him the reason for his initial distant manner. Gruber.
The Gestapo chief, still based in Vienna, was being driven mad-by a constant stream of phone calls from Martin Bormann at the Wolf's Lair. Regardless of the normal person's routine he was plagued with these calls from the Reichsleiter at all hours. Three o'clock in the morning was one favourite time and Gruber by now felt he was one of his own suspects in the cells where sleep was deliberately denied.
'He is worn out,' Maisel explained. 'When he heard that you wanted to see me he swore foully. He was terrified that I might pass on any information to you.
'Why?'
Jaeger was intrigued. There was something very odd going on. Maisel, a shrewd man, seemed relieved to be away from Gestapo headquarters – thankful to talk to someone in the outside world.
'Because Bormann is venting his spite on him, preparing him as a potential scapegoat would be my guess…'
'A scapegoat for what?'
'The inability of anyone to track down the Englishman, Lindsay. At times Bormann seems petrified at the idea Lindsay may reach London. Jodl and Keitel, too. They have both phoned Gruber at different times about the same subject, which I find odd.'
`Any idea why?' Jaeger asked.
'The Fuhrer wants to see Lindsay again, I gather. After Kursk, I suppose. There are constant rumours Hitler is desperate to do a deal with Churchill:…'
'So the more people who are after Lindsay the better the chances of locating him?' Schmidt intervened.
Jaeger smiled to. himself. In all apparent innocence Schmidt had laid a trap – and Maisel walked into it. The way was now being paved for Jaeger and Schmidt to join the search for the fugitive.
