scattering the unit. One of them had been hit and wasn’t moving.
The fighter banked hard, swinging around for another run, the pilot visible, adjusting his sights.
Kravchenko dodging the ammunition crackling all around him, pulled the dead bodies out and sat into the anti-aircraft gun. Knowing absolutely nothing about it, he managed to crank the barrels upward and point roughly in the direction above the carriage.
Fumbling and squinting through the sights, he found and squeezed the trigger. The ME-109 swept into the hail of bullets, shuddering under their impact. Gracefully it began to pitch upwards, smoke billowing from the engine housing. Moments later gravity took over and the plane descended without the pilot baling out. The dull thud of metal hitting earth and a plume of black smoke marked the plane’s end.
The flying boat was now airborne, its immense skis jettisoned onto the ice below. They landed like giant’s footsteps. It banked gracefully to the right like an albatross, followed by the swift fighter aircraft protecting it. Lenin was leaving his motherland on the first stage of his journey to Berlin.
Kravchenko stood watching the flying boat gradually shrinking in size. He cut a piece of white cloth from the winter tunic of a dead SS trooper and, wrapping it around the muzzle of his machine gun, he slipped down the bank onto the ice, waving it as a flag.
Brandt and Kant walked out to meet him, Brandt motioning Olga not to shoot.
Kravchenko could feel sniper's eyes on his face, chest and legs. Death would be instant, painless and, at this moment, almost welcome.
They stood facing each other Putting his machine gun down slowly, Kravchenko reached into his tunic and produced an ornate gold cigarette case. He offered it out to the two haggard-looking Germans who accepted two cigarettes and lit up. They then offered him a light.
The erstwhile enemies stood without saying a word. In the space of three hours Kravchenko had lost his unit and his mission at the hands of these men. For their part, the Germans had been cruelly betrayed, now isolated, and they were all thousands of miles away from home. The snowfall was getting heavier, muffling the sound of the burning half-track.
Kant broke the silence. ‘What do we do now?’
Kravchenko didn’t speak German, but got the gist.
Brandt inhaled the strong tobacco and reached out to shake the Russian’s hand. ‘Danke,’
Kravechenko just nodded.
Chapter 11
During his time in the Spanish Civil War, Kramer had learned Russian as a Brigade Commander. He translated for Kravchenko as he spoke to Brandt. In three hours every Russian soldier within a hundred mile radius would be descending on this location. Then he’d be hunted down along with Brandt’s unit. The Russian High Command would not look kindly on their prize possession being snatched so easily.
Brandt studied the man opposite him. The Russian was unusually tall with tightly cropped red hair, deep-set brown eyes and a few days' stubble. He was in his late-thirties, possibly early forties. The slashes and chevrons on his tattered uniform told him that he was Special Forces — NKVD. He would be formidable if he decided to up and leave and take them on as a guerrilla. He was professional enough to accept that a few hours earlier his unit had been killed and lucky to be alive.
Brandt admired this, the Russian quality of accepting the worst at face value and moving on, his priority now being to stay alive which was Brandt's priority too. His hand had a make-shift bandage over a deep cut and he was suffering from lacerations and small burns to his face. In the half-light he looked like a heavy-weight boxer who’d gone ten rounds with Joe Louis and lost. Brandt, Kant and Bader sat in the carriage with him and Olga. She regarded him with barely disguised contempt. ‘Why did you save us?’ she asked.
Kravchenko paused. Her accent was Chechen and he noted her eyes blazed with hatred. He had to turn this back to his advantage. He was gambling on the Germans wanting to square the ambush with the SS Captain and the civilian with the flying boat.
‘I was tempted, very tempted to let you finish each other off, but I thought the only chance of getting out of here alive is with us working together. To be honest, it all happened so fast I wasn’t really thinking, luckily for you,’
Olga’s steely glare didn’t waver. She didn’t trust him. She would watch and wait, then strike. Until Chechnya was free she made it her mission to hunt every Russian down she met and kill them. She recognised Kravchenko’s rank and unit. Her mother had been raped in the 30s by the NKVD hunting down local insurgents. During her ordeal the woman had hidden Olga and her sisters under the living room floor. Her father, returning from the market, had beaten the woman in rage and humiliation. The elders of the village convened and the option of stoning her to death for adultery was suggested before Olga’s grandfather intervened. He took Olga, her sisters and mother up into the hills to his village and gave them sanctuary. As soon as she was able, Olga had mastered her sharpshooting, learning from her grandfather, spending days in the surrounding forests hunting. She discovered she had a natural talent for taking life. As soon as the opportunity arose she was going to cut the Russian’s throat. Looking into her coal-black eyes, Kravchenko knew this also. He gave her the slightest of nods —
Brandt felt cut adrift with no role in the army any more as, for all intents and purposes, his unit had ceased to exist. That chicken farmer Himmler’s SS could make up any story they wanted. He felt spent. The past few weeks he had witnessed professional soldiers cracking under extreme pressure. He himself had noticed a shake developing in his hand after a mission to take a village a week earlier. It had not gone well and his unit had taken heavy casualties. The Russians had fought bravely even through heavy artillery shelling and JU 87 bombardments. One of his junior officers, Peter Schelling, a former sales clerk from Bremen, had blown his brains out in his quarters to be found by Brandt a few hours later, an empty bottle of vodka lying by his side. It was becoming a common occurrence. Russia was sucking in the German army and grinding it into the snow beneath its heel.
He knew also this situation they were in was payback for what had happened in Norway four months earlier where an SS officer had lost his footing during an ascent, dragging Brandt’s unit almost off a cliff-face into the fjord below. Brandt cut the man’s rope, saving his comrades and spilling the officer over the side. Himmler hadn’t liked that. Within a week they were on the Eastern Front fighting on the frontline.
Brandt stared out through the carriage door. Absent-mindedly he wound his father’s wrist watch, his thoughts drifting to home. Every day through his childhood he would cycle out to the veterans' hospital where his father, Michael, lay twisted and broken. A Captain at Verdun, he was a strong physical man, an accomplished rower who had been in a trench heavily shelled by the French Army in April 1917. The sole survivor, he had been buried for days under the mud before being recovered. His two arms had had to be amputated from the elbow and his spine was mangled, yet his desire to survive drove him. As he lay motionless in the sheets, he kept his mind active. He learned to play chess and would call out moves to the other veterans in the ward. Within a year all the men were holding tournaments in their heads playing against each other. Brandt admired his father and came to love his flattened features, a portion of the man who went to war. He admired the way he accepted and adapted to his circumstances while others in the ward had lost their minds or attempted suicide. Despite Brandt missing out on a place in the 1936 Olympic squad, Michael in turn admired his son's stoicism and encouraged him to keep going.
‘In the end that’s all there is,’ he’d say. ‘Be like a shark, Nicky. Never stop, ever. If you stop, you sink and drown,’
He had to keep going. His team needed it. They, including the Russian, were now his responsibility. He had to lead them out of this mess. This new situation presented an opportunity for operating with greater latitude. They were, in the words of the Russian, ‘walking in dead men’s shoes’. He liked him not as an efficient enemy soldier but as a man. There was as simple solution: they had to move quickly to keep Lenin in Russia.
The carriage had sustained heavy damage from the fighter attack. Outside, Uwe Koheller lay dead. Brandt had removed Koheller’s dog-tags then had his body carefully placed alongside Schultz away from the SS troopers. Brandt recited the snatches of a prayer he’d remembered over his two fallen comrades. ‘When these days are forever past, please bring to all a peace to last. When the sun shines through the rain, thy weary heart shall bear no
