Chapter 373
One thing that Korolev noticed almost immediately was that the two British Officers were scarily calm this entire ridiculous situation, giving him the distinct impression that they had either done this before or that they had no emotions at all. The latter couldn't be true of course, since the older one was whistling something even as they raced through night-time Germany. He didn't know then that Ian had recently seen a production of HMS Pinafore produced for Allied troops and had taken to whistling bits of it when he was nervous, a habit that would keep up for the rest of his life and that would drive his family crazy.
In the end they made it to the camp without any further diversions. There was any number of reasons why they were not pursued, though Ian knew that they couldn't count on it staying so. He jumped from the car before it had fully stopped and ran towards Major Gordon who didn't even need to hear the orders after taking one look at the Bullet holes.
"Captain Carlile, stand the men to!"
"Sir!"
The scene instantly dissolved into organized Chaos and Korolev watched with keen interest. He had seen a great many soldiers, especially over the last two years, but most of them had been NKVD or GRU. Against what he saw here the former were little more than well-armed thugs. Axis propaganda portrayed the British, and especially their Colonial troops as wantonly cruel, barely civilized barbarians, but this was far from the truth here. With a minimum of fuzz and shouting they broke up the little camp they'd made and packed all but a few heavy machine guns on those boxy vehicles.
"What troops are these?" he asked Felix who had taken over guard duty from Ian after changing back into his British battledress. "Gospodin Engineer, these are the South Essex Light Infantry, some of the best light troops in the British Armmy."
Korolev knew that the Allied Light units were similar to their Soviet and German counterparts and from what he'd heard, that meant that they were not the most heavily armed but would fight all the harder for it if they had to.
Felix was about to say something more when Ian, having changed back as well, and the Major came walking over. Introductions were exchanged and then the crucial question was asked.
"Do we move now, or do we wait a few hours until it's dark?"
There good points for both. If they moved now they stayed ahead of certain pursuit and would still reach the point where they planned on crossing the leaky front during the dark hours, while if they waited they could do the same, but mask as an Axis convoy far more easily.
Korolev stood a few steps to the side, strangely fascinated by the display of disagreement between the tall Naval Captain and the Major. For all their reputation for clinging to aristocratic structures, these people were a lot less top-heavy than the Red Army. The Germans were said to be similar, but he didn't know for sure. He had never seen something such as this, because the 'do as I say or else' that the NKVD and the Red Army seemed to be operating on nowadays would have ensured long ago that someone such as the Major would, best case, be sent to a non-sensitive posting in the Central Asiatic Republics or Northern Siberia. If he was lucky. In some ways it reminded him of his Science Collective when the Party stooges and the informers were out of earshot, yet there was clearly military discipline, because after a minute or two the Major came to attention, saluted in the odd British manner and went about his duties.
The Captain on the other hand turned on his heels and came back towards them with a grin. "Well, it seems that Major [NAME] has made the right call."
"Why that, Ian?" asked the other.
"While we were on our little sojourn into the German countryside the SELIs watched a good half-dozen armed German and Soviet patrols drive by on the road the three of us came in on."
Korolev's puzzlement was obvious, so he went on:
"We have to go in the other direction, but we have come too far to risk this on my ego. If there's one thing I've learned in this damn war then it's when to take a step back and listen to others. Hell," he said andd grinned, "my wife probably taught me that years ago, before we were married and this madness got started."
Now that they were back in their own country's uniforms, both seemed to be a lot less tense. To Korolev, it seemed as if they dismissed the danger the entire force was in as something trivial, but he knew from very recent experience that those two men were anything but ignorant to it. It completely went against the picture of the tall, stuffy, aristocratic and incompetent British officer that he had seen on his side of the war, though he was realist enough to know that the Allies too had their own herd of black sheep.
"So what will we do?" he asked, "Stay or go?"
"We go." the Captain replied, "risk or not, I'd rather not be caught sitting still. We're best at this on the move, and the closer we get to the front before they catch us, and they will, the better a chance we have."
Korolev was again mystified. He had seen next to nothing of the actual frontlines of this war, but others at the rocket programme had, and he suspected that it was hard to go 'through' a front held by some of the largest armies known to man.
"Besides, we do have a little surprise laid on for later. We can make it even if we wait, but if we go now, we have a lot more wiggle room."
Korolev nodded. "One must allow for the unforseen, Gospodin Captain."
He liked the apprechiative nod he got for that. Then everything moved with lightning speed. He was seated in a ca..r..
Landrover in-between the two officers he knew as Fleming and Leiter (who had returned to the Kübel for a momentt), with three soldiers joining them, one to drive, one to use the wireless and one to serve the heavy machine gun on the roof. Less than half an hour after they had arrived, the left the camp, leaving behind little but the hulk of the car they had arrived in and, oddly enough, a calling card nailed to a tree.
For the first hour everything went perfectly.
~**---**~
For Reinhard Heydrich things could not have gone any worse in the last four days. He had chased the running Soviet traitor through all of the Reich, only to end up in a clearing looking at the remains of the NKVD guard detail. Well, so much for the idea of NKVD defectors, that was something at least. Judging from the quick survey he'd made they had been executed without mercy, and with British weapons. If the cartridge casings were anything to go by the enemy had used Sten-type machine carbines.
Here he was again, looking at another clearing and at the burning remnants of a Kübelwagen surrounded by the remains of four of his men, thanks to the hand grenades with which it had been booby-trapped.
"Sir, we found this on one of the trees."
One of his flunkies walked up, threw in a snappy salute and handed him what he had been expecting. The card hadn't changed and neither had the white-hot fury their impertinence awoke within him. Months of work, and he had barely managed to confirm that it always was the same unit that did this to him. No leads on who the leaders were, from where they were based, which units they drew their Infantry from... nothing. Oh, a few of them had to have died, but so far none had fallen into his hands, dead or alive.
He knew that it was an obsession of his and eating up more and more of his time, but unlike the late Admiral Canaris he had underlings he could trust, and thankfully the Führer agreed with him on the importance of smashing this unit. Unlike Hitler and Göbbels he didn't dismiss the British as a bunch of race traitors and their colonial troops as uncivilized savages. He knew from bitter experience hard won in the field that the British were anything but. Most of the British units now in the line were Veterans, colonial and white alike.
And so the British had any number of units to choose from...
One thing he had been able to confirm definitely was that the unit was a white one, probably even from the home counties. That narrowed it down somewhat, but nowhere near enough. The unit was also not from Scotland or Wales, but that was more of a hunch than anything like firm intelligence.
"Sir, Hartwig reports that he has been informed of an unidentified vehicle convoy moving south. They broke through one of his roadblocks and moved off without stopping, Vehicles tentatively identified as English! He is in pursuit and requesting reinforcements."
"Get them to him, man! Everyone, MOUNT UP!"
~**---**~
The sound of gunfire shattered the gathering darkness so suddenly it managed to catch Korolev asleep. He shot up and turned in his seat towards the back of the convoy where the methodical 'thud-thud-thud' of a British Browning .50 calibre machine gun was audible.
"What the hell is going on back there?"
It was the Ian, yelling into into the handset of a wireless. As it turned out, it was a limousine belonging to the
Geheime Feldpolizei, for all intents and purposes the Gestapo's military counterpart. They had seen a convoy of allied vehicles but gotten too close. For that they had been rewarded with half a dozen rounds from the rear-guard's .50. That meant that the convoy had been caught, but luckily for the British it was getting dark, and they were almost two-thirds of the way towards the point where they planned on crossing the front, and judging by the flashes on the horizon and the louder than usual rumble the diversion the General and the Royal Artillery had promised was well underway. Trading so many shells for one man was expensive, so the Russian rocket scientist better be worth it.
Five minutes later that the Germans sprung their ambush. Heydrich was still five kilometres behind, but he had competent people working for him, and so one of them had set up an Ambush. Truth be told, the Germans wasn't all that interested in getting Korolev back in one piece so long as he didn't fall into the hands of the British. The massive British air-raid on Peenemünde had reinforced the Führer's belief that rockets were the weapons of the future to the point that he had issued a
Führerbefehl, ordering all efforts to be made to disrupt the British rocket programme.
Fifty men, mostly Heydrich's roving patrols and a few Wehrmacht soldiers they had poached from units assigned to assist them.
They had only two Machine guns, and the both of them concentrated on the forward few vehicles. The leader was hit in the engine block and came to a shuddering halt, almost instantly followed by the ammunition cooking off. Luckily Ian, Felix and Korolev were in the third Landy and so escaped injury, even though a Panzerfaust projectile flashed overhead, missing by inches. All the vehicles were damaged, but the Germans had failed to destroy more than the first. The last had the attention of several soldiers with machine carbines, but managed to get out of the immediate ambush area. Here the experience of the drivers payed off, as the convoy raced forward as fast as they could, spraying the undergrowth on both sides of the road with all the weapons they had.
On Ian's Landy the roof gunner fell back dead into the cabin with a ghastly head wound. Felix didn't hesitate, shoved the body aside and took over the gun.
Countless bullets thudded into and through the reinforced metal of the landys, shattering men and equipment.
A second landy fell out of line, running into the ditch and exploding as a case of hand grenades exploded. Even as they went and he fired a Sten through the shattered window, he wondered how the Germans had managed to lay this on.
He couldn't know that it was more or less a coincidence, the roving patrols had heard the report on the spotted convoy by pure chance, and th CO had guessed that they might be coming his way. He had fought with the Brandenburger units in Poland, the Low Countries and France, and he knew almost as much about Operation Paperclip as Heydrich did. He had decided that anything but a straight dash for the front was madness. A few men, four or so, could easily make it to Switzerland from where they were now, but for anything more than that the chances, as tiny as they were, were far better if they tried to go for the front. He had had little hopes of catching them on this road until a report had come through on the wireless that they were indeed coming this way, and this was one of the few roads around here that led anywhere. He had laid out the ambush and waited for ten minutes.
Yet now he saw that he had underestimated his opponent, as only two vehicles had been disabled outright. Oh, he doubted that some of the others would make it very far, but he expected to find their abandoned at burnt out remnants a mile or two down the road.
What was more, yet again they hadn't managed to take any prisoners even though he'd had standing orders to get some. There was a chance that the Soviet engineer was among the dead, but he doubted he would be that lucky. Heydrich's wrath would be furious, but at the very least he had followed the book on an ambush exactly and several British troops had been killed, so at the worst he would have to pack winter underwear, as he'd heard those Murmansk winters were bad indeed and the unofficial penal units there always needed 'support' by the RSHA.
But until then he had a job to do, and within less than five minutes all his unwounded men, save for a few to guard those less lucky until they could be picked up, were back on the lorries that had brought them here, chasing off in futile pursuit of the enemy troops.
The first sign that his men had been better shots than first expected was encountered when the lead vehicles came around a corner and found a wrecked and abandoned Landy, riddled by bullets and burning furiously. This happened less than three kilometres from the ambush site, so his hopes rose slightly. There was nothing to be gained from this fire, so he had his patrol drive past without stopping, though he did note the blood stains on the ground nearby.
But his optimism died shortly thereafter. A further two kilometres down the road his lead elements ran into a hail of machine gun and small arms fire, but before he could deploy his units to deal with that rear guard before it was over. The British raced down the road after killing eight of his men and destroying two vehicles, one with one of those accursed PIAT launchers. The danger they had run did it's job too, as he was now forced to act more cautiously. In the fading light ambushes became more likely, not less, and he now knew that his enemy wasn't routed, they were withdrawing, and with order.
~**---**~
To Korolev this all consisted of gunfire and explosions to the rear, but it seemed that that last outbreak was the last of it, as it stayed silent then except for the sounds of the car.
"What will we do now, Captain?"
Ian smiled. "We will go for the back roads. Your former friends don't have the troops to spare to patrol everything now that the Field Marshal has counter-attacked, and our friends from the 14th Bengali have layed on a surprise for..." he checked his watch in the light of a torch for a second, "just about now."
As if on que, the horizon to their right lit up with the first of a series of flashes, and the general rumble of the front increased. Thirty miles away the Bengali gunners served their guns with speed. They didn't know why they were shelling the living daylights out of the German Division to their front, only that it was 'imperative' and 'vital' to fire as quickly as they could. Minutes later they were joined by others, and within less than five the Artillery of two entire British Division was shelling the enemy lines to both sides of the breach the convoy hoped to exploit. To some of the older German troops under the fire it reminded them of the British and French fire from the last war, and the comparison was apt. The British were following the standard doctrine for a preparatory bombardment, expertdly walking the barrages up and down the enemy lines. No one but their Divisional commanders knew anything about why they were doing it, and even they didn't know the whole story, and if they had they might have questioned the expense in ammunition and wear and tear on the guns, but Field Marshal Alexander happened to disagree.
With a comfortable lead on their pursuers, all his vehicles in reasonably good nick, Ian began to feel slightly less nervous, so he switched to whistling 'A British Tar' instead of one of the other tunes. Vigilance had to be maintained, so Felix stayed on the gun.
They encountered no more resistance that evening. Ian would never find out, but it was because their pursuers had taken a wrong turn and were now heading diagonally away from them, straight into the rear areas of their own lines. When two more rear-guards re-joined without having seen even a hair of the SS he began to feel cautiously optimistic.
It took them only a few more hours to reach the British lines.
tbc
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