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No, for three reasons:
1 - Writer's block; there are a handful of scenes of the confrontation between Skorzeny and Zhivago that look great in my head but I cannot get out on paper.
2 - Number one led to the Lion and the Lily over in EU3.
3 - I'm moving from Texas to Virginia, so I'm not writing much of anything until the move is completed.
I promise I haven't forgotten the AAR, but at the moment, it's just not working for me.
1 - Writer's block; there are a handful of scenes of the confrontation between Skorzeny and Zhivago that look great in my head but I cannot get out on paper.
2 - Number one led to the Lion and the Lily over in EU3.
3 - I'm moving from Texas to Virginia, so I'm not writing much of anything until the move is completed.
I promise I haven't forgotten the AAR, but at the moment, it's just not working for me.
Well do what I did when I was faced with Skorzeny fanboy. Have him be shot in the face by the creator of James Bond.
Meaning take any random character, think of the most awesome thing possible that could happen and then write that. Self-indulgence often enabled me to go around writers block.
Meaning take any random character, think of the most awesome thing possible that could happen and then write that. Self-indulgence often enabled me to go around writers block.
Oh no, I have several scenes that individually work very well, but I cannot bridge together.
Recognise the problem c0d, I usually have more potential scenes floating through my head than ideas to link them together.
I hope than you manage to continue the story.
I hope than you manage to continue the story.
Relax, not abandoned - I've got ISP problems right now, I think I know how to proceed from Otto Skorzeny's breakfast to the slow-motion flying wood splinters. The fact that Lion and Lily is also set for flying (albeit bodkin-pointed) wood splinters helps.
115. Slouching Toward Bethlehem
Command Post, Kampfgruppe Skorzeny
Shkotovo Crossroad, Russian Socialist Federative Soviet Republic
20 February 1946
Otto Skorzeny squatted on a felled log, a mess kit balanced on his knee, contemplating the mess tin with a mix of confusion and sorrow. There was no cooking fire, because it would give away their position, and the new "Russianized" heating tabs issued with the ration cans were simply not up to the task. Instead of being below freezing, or hot enough to be palatable, the cans of dog-food-quality stew were merely lukewarm. Congealed grease and mysterious chunks of meat were soldier's fare no matter where, but this particular morning, they just refused to go down. Having eaten the heel of a frozen-hard loaf of black bread merely complicated affairs, since it had instantly expanded the moment it had thawed, and sat in his stomach like a lead ingot.
Gamely, he unfolded his fork and stabbed what he thought was a chunk of potato, shoving it into his mouth and chewing vigorously. It was about as much fun as eating a sock, but it would keep everyone else eating if they saw him doing so. His senior noncommissioned officer, Hauptfeldwebel Jungling, elbowed the watch Gefreiter and grinned. "Bastard can eat anything, if he can get that down." Skorzeny suspected he was not supposed to have heard, but he called loud enough to be heard at the perimeter, "Damn right I can, if we get out of this I'm eating a White princess." Laughs greeted the joke, poor as it was, and he returned to shoveling the hideous mess into his mouth.
One of the field telephones ringed around him flickered; the croaking buzzers had all been pulled out in favor of very dim red bulbs, again to reduce the chances of observation. The mess tin slid aside, whether out of relief or neglect it was hard to say. "Go ahead," he growled into the mouthpiece. "Sir. Observation post Anton-3. Reds are moving past us. Looks like... battalion-plus strength. They're all the way around the bend." He grunted in acknowledgement. "Excellent. Do not engage unless engaged. If you think they will find you, bound back on the Two line. Skorzeny out." Without waiting for acknowledgement of the order, he broke the connection and picked up another field phone. "Anton-2. This is Skorzeny. Anton-3 reports contact front. Do not engage until they are parallel, do you understand? When they are parallel, use the Schardins. Soon as they detonate, bound back. Don't even search the bodies, do you understand? Just break them up and fall back on the One line." The voice at the distant end, foggy and distorted by the sound-powered connection, repeated the order back and he grunted in assent. Similar orders went to the other five outlying observation posts each in the Three and Two rings, then he called over Jungling. "Get the One ring squad leaders in here, put One at stand-to, and tell the demo teams to check the triggers. Get the reaction platoon ready and make sure they're locked and loaded. Copy?" Jungling nodded and grunted, scribbling with the stub of a pencil on a brown notepad before touching the pencil's tip to his forehead and scrambling away, staying bent low behind the log breastwork.
Within minutes, the German position was a well-concealed beehive, paratroopers slumped forward against the breastwork dropping their magazines, working their bolts to keep them frost-free, and re-seating their magazines once more. Helmets appeared as if by magic, replacing soft caps, their outlines broken up by brush stuffed into chicken wire so that if a head appeared above the breastwork, it would not draw the eye immediately. Demolitions teams checked the trigger wires on the Schardin mines, malevolent rectangles of plastic explosive sandwiched between armor-grade steel on one side, and centimeter-wide ball bearings on the other that stood upright on prongs driven into the permafrost at great effort. The marksmen did their utmost to ensure that their scopes were frost-free, and the loopholes they had worked in the breastwork were concealed from the coming Russians. It was no more than a formality for most of them, the well-worn rites before battle, practiced again and again over years of training and combat. They were as relaxed as it was possible to be in the face of an oncoming Russian force that every single one of them expected to outnumber them by at least three to one.
---
Yevgraf Zhivago had been awake for two days now, and the fatigue was just starting to creep up on him. He wiped one half-frozen hand across his face to wake himself, the sting of the cold against his stubbled cheek keeping him alert. In the course of multiple corrections, his corps had become spread out over multiple roads and paths, and he knew the various columns were not advancing at the same rate. There was no way they could be; he was only in reliable contact with one of them. For all the chances since Bonaparte, he might as well have been Marshal Suvorov, he reflected bitterly. Command and control was restricted almost to his field of view. At this point, he walked, like every one of his soldiers. It was not that he wished to share their sufferings. Most of these boys had been born after the Revolution, and if they remembered the misery and hunger of the 1920s, it was as children - not as a grown man, part of the forces holding back the twin rising tides of the Whites and the anarchy following the end of the Civil War. It was that there simply was no fuel to be had at any price. Before things went mad in Vladivostok, they were actually using vodka to power what few vehicles were left. Vodka for trucks, not for men, in Russia? Even in his exhausted state, the thought was amusing.
A runner scrambled toward him, panting and near exhaustion, chest heaving and his worn-out boots flapping around his feet. His Mosin-Nagant was slung haphazardly across his shoulder, his pack askew from its weight. The Germans had another advantage there. Their rifles were lighter than the ancient bolt-action rifles with which the Red Army breathed its last gasp. The Germans controlled the sky, the oil, the roads, the rails, and on top of that, their damned weapons were lighter, faster, and easier to use! The one thing the Mosin-Nagant had in its favor was that a trained monkey could clean it. Rumor was that Stalin had tried to do exactly that in the 1920s...
Zhivago was snapped from his reverie by the runner's breathless report. "Serving the Soviet Union! Comrade Commissar, Polkovnik Konovalov reports that there is a column of trucks... our trucks... moving parallel to him along the coast road, and that there is firing between the trucks and what should be our advance guard." The runner braced his hands against his knees and dry-heaved, and Zhivago pulled his own canteen from his belt. "Here. Drink, and find a walking horse for a few minutes. No reason to race back to Viktor Klement'ch, is there?" He patted the runner on his shoulder as the man nodded weakly, then turned back towards the front of the column. The NKVD troops continued trudging toward Shkotovo.
---
Oberst Adrian von Folkersam's column had been in a running gunfight with Zhivago's Cossacks - the men who otherwise would have been screening his troops as they went towards Shkotovo once more - for more than twelve hours now. The Cossacks would close in a desperate charge, taking potshots at his column, and be beaten back by machine-gun fire. He had been amused; he was now worried, as the belts were shortening dangerously on the guns. He had had to shift ammunition from the front of his little column to the rear twice, and if he ran into any trouble to his front, he was dead. That was, he thought in amusement, the life of a Brandenburger: Fix one problem by making three more, and hope no one notices.
At least they could hardly be attacked from the east; they were racing up the coast road, with the Pacific beneath them on that side. He saw exhaust plumes across the water, probably German forces cracking the last ring of defenses. That was where he had to go. Folkersam jumped down off the back of the truck, swinging into the cab and slapping the side. They were tired enough that none of them spoke much; the truck merely rumbled forward once more, tires spinning occasionally on the icy dirt track. This was a Russian "road," he thought sourly. When the war had started, all the maps had said they were paved, surfaced, and metalled. Idiots upstairs had dropped the ball on that one, and it had been left to Fritz in the field to keep the war moving.
The column kept rolling north-northeast along the coast, the rear gunners on edge for the inevitable Cossack attack. Trigger fingers twitched, usually exposed and covered by fewer layers than the rest of these freezing, miserable, exhausted men. Where they swung on their pintles, the machine guns were coated in a thin layer of frost, the result of half an hour of not firing. They would thaw, drip, and steam soon enough. To the east, the sun hung just above the horizon, tepid and weak in the Siberian winter. By the evening, Folkersam thought, running a hand over his stubbled face, they would be back in "Germany," or they would be dead.
---
"Herr Major," the voice in the phone croaked, "we have vehicle contact at Gustav-3. ZiLs, a bunch of them. Haven't seen many on the road recently. They're not looking eyes-front, and everyone's got a '43 cap on. Could be infiltrators. Wipe them?" Skorzeny growled in frustration, fist balling to punch his own thigh. "No, damn it. Let them in the Two ring before we make that call. Skorzeny out." He slammed down the phone, spinning on his hapless radio operator. "Get on the horn with Papa Rendulic, see if his intel staff knows what's going on." His stomach knotted; he had a feeling that this sudden appearance heralded some sort of interruption in the plan, and the Hutier troops were already in a precarious position as it was.
He distracted himself by stalking along his own lines, ignoring good sense and self-preservation alike by staying upright, strutting like a rooster behind the chest-high breastwork and grinning and nodding down at the men who were leaning into it, still at stand-to after an hour. "Stay awake," he growled. "Anyone who decides it's naptime, I'll send forward with a white flag. You know what Ivan does to white anything." The paratroopers nodded grimly, eyes staying forward and out. He continued reaffirming their training. "Work in pairs if you can. Don't let them catch you going dry and reloading, they'll bound over you. They get in ten meters, grenades. They get in five, switch to auto. Assistant gunners, keep the belts going. 'Werfers stay with the platoon leaders, you hear there's a Red on the wall, you burn him off." The litany of advice kept them level, reminded them of their training, and maintained a semblance of normalcy.
He could hear the chatter of machine guns nearby - the Gustav segment of the line, where the trucks were supposed to be. What in God's name was going on over there? He went back to the command post, angrily dialing Gustav-2. "Gustav-2, what the fuck is going on?" he demanded. "Sir," came the subdued response, "the trucks are firing over their shoulders. Looks to be an Ivan horse battalion behind them giving 'em trouble." It was time for a decision. "Horses? Well then," he said, voice deceptively even, "Ivan wants to fight the Crimean war over again, let him in the Valley of Death. Small arms only, no Schardins."
---
The forest on the inland side of the road erupted above Folkersam. This was the end of the line, apparently. Fire lashed down - the higher, metallic chatter of full-automatic short-charge eight-millimeter mixed with the lower knocking of a full-sized eight-millimeter... the Kaiser's guns. The curtain of bullets swept over Folkersam's column, a gray hail unleavened by tracers. Every instinct told Folkersam to throw himself flat, and he obeyed, covering Molotov's body with his own. When the fire slacked, he straightened, looking around at a miracle. The column of trucks had been pinged and dented by stray rounds, but the target was clearly the Cossacks who had made their last thrust. Behind, the horses screamed, and blood hissed out in hot puddles into the icy road. An occasional PPSh would lift its muzzle, but the men dressed as Russians, save for their caps, scrambled down and did what Ivan himself would have done: ended it with a knife where needed. Folkersam was just sentimental enough that his men shot the horses; the men died harder.
Down from the slope came what looked like a cross between man and tree, the beetle-shape of his coalscuttle totally obscured by pine branches and his black-and-brown-painted face barely visible between the boughs strapped to his shoulders. "Oberleutnant Kempowski. You lot are?" he demanded of the first roughly-dressed Brandenburger he found. "Talk to the Oberst," the man grunted, thumb jabbing toward the column's head. At least the answer was in German. Folkersam landed lightly on the balls of his feet. "Thought you had us there, O'leu'n. Oberst von Folkersam, from the construction directorate. Can you take us to your commander?" he asked conversationally, almost jovially.
Kempowski barked over his shoulder. "Müller! Guide these... pioneers... back to Otto der Grosse." Kempowski swigged from his canteen, then spat. "Anybody else following, Herr Oberst?" Folkersam shrugged. "Bound to be, only so many roads headed north. What's left of the Red Army's moving this way." The paratrooper grunted, already headed back into the woods. "Reset for ambush," he called out, voice surprisingly soft as he spoke to apparently no one in the woodline. He stood still for a moment, a dark shape silhouetted among dark shapes. "Tell the Major, sir. He'll want to know about the Reds. We'll call ahead to let him know you're coming. Meanwhile, get your asses back inside the perimeter."
---
Skorzeny continued pacing, sharklike. No one had any idea who these "construction directorate" men were. That had been a typical Brandenburger cover before the war, so chances were that was where these men had come from, but they were one more needless complication to the plan. He knew already that he was badly outnumbered, and he knew that he only had to hold long enough for those exhaust plumes to the east to reach him - then the shoe would be on the other foot. Survival, though, relied on being more fearsome than Ivan when the moment came.
---
More to come, it's just that I'm getting leery of trusting the autosave and this is as good a cliffhanger as any.
Command Post, Kampfgruppe Skorzeny
Shkotovo Crossroad, Russian Socialist Federative Soviet Republic
20 February 1946
Otto Skorzeny squatted on a felled log, a mess kit balanced on his knee, contemplating the mess tin with a mix of confusion and sorrow. There was no cooking fire, because it would give away their position, and the new "Russianized" heating tabs issued with the ration cans were simply not up to the task. Instead of being below freezing, or hot enough to be palatable, the cans of dog-food-quality stew were merely lukewarm. Congealed grease and mysterious chunks of meat were soldier's fare no matter where, but this particular morning, they just refused to go down. Having eaten the heel of a frozen-hard loaf of black bread merely complicated affairs, since it had instantly expanded the moment it had thawed, and sat in his stomach like a lead ingot.
Gamely, he unfolded his fork and stabbed what he thought was a chunk of potato, shoving it into his mouth and chewing vigorously. It was about as much fun as eating a sock, but it would keep everyone else eating if they saw him doing so. His senior noncommissioned officer, Hauptfeldwebel Jungling, elbowed the watch Gefreiter and grinned. "Bastard can eat anything, if he can get that down." Skorzeny suspected he was not supposed to have heard, but he called loud enough to be heard at the perimeter, "Damn right I can, if we get out of this I'm eating a White princess." Laughs greeted the joke, poor as it was, and he returned to shoveling the hideous mess into his mouth.
One of the field telephones ringed around him flickered; the croaking buzzers had all been pulled out in favor of very dim red bulbs, again to reduce the chances of observation. The mess tin slid aside, whether out of relief or neglect it was hard to say. "Go ahead," he growled into the mouthpiece. "Sir. Observation post Anton-3. Reds are moving past us. Looks like... battalion-plus strength. They're all the way around the bend." He grunted in acknowledgement. "Excellent. Do not engage unless engaged. If you think they will find you, bound back on the Two line. Skorzeny out." Without waiting for acknowledgement of the order, he broke the connection and picked up another field phone. "Anton-2. This is Skorzeny. Anton-3 reports contact front. Do not engage until they are parallel, do you understand? When they are parallel, use the Schardins. Soon as they detonate, bound back. Don't even search the bodies, do you understand? Just break them up and fall back on the One line." The voice at the distant end, foggy and distorted by the sound-powered connection, repeated the order back and he grunted in assent. Similar orders went to the other five outlying observation posts each in the Three and Two rings, then he called over Jungling. "Get the One ring squad leaders in here, put One at stand-to, and tell the demo teams to check the triggers. Get the reaction platoon ready and make sure they're locked and loaded. Copy?" Jungling nodded and grunted, scribbling with the stub of a pencil on a brown notepad before touching the pencil's tip to his forehead and scrambling away, staying bent low behind the log breastwork.
Within minutes, the German position was a well-concealed beehive, paratroopers slumped forward against the breastwork dropping their magazines, working their bolts to keep them frost-free, and re-seating their magazines once more. Helmets appeared as if by magic, replacing soft caps, their outlines broken up by brush stuffed into chicken wire so that if a head appeared above the breastwork, it would not draw the eye immediately. Demolitions teams checked the trigger wires on the Schardin mines, malevolent rectangles of plastic explosive sandwiched between armor-grade steel on one side, and centimeter-wide ball bearings on the other that stood upright on prongs driven into the permafrost at great effort. The marksmen did their utmost to ensure that their scopes were frost-free, and the loopholes they had worked in the breastwork were concealed from the coming Russians. It was no more than a formality for most of them, the well-worn rites before battle, practiced again and again over years of training and combat. They were as relaxed as it was possible to be in the face of an oncoming Russian force that every single one of them expected to outnumber them by at least three to one.
---
Yevgraf Zhivago had been awake for two days now, and the fatigue was just starting to creep up on him. He wiped one half-frozen hand across his face to wake himself, the sting of the cold against his stubbled cheek keeping him alert. In the course of multiple corrections, his corps had become spread out over multiple roads and paths, and he knew the various columns were not advancing at the same rate. There was no way they could be; he was only in reliable contact with one of them. For all the chances since Bonaparte, he might as well have been Marshal Suvorov, he reflected bitterly. Command and control was restricted almost to his field of view. At this point, he walked, like every one of his soldiers. It was not that he wished to share their sufferings. Most of these boys had been born after the Revolution, and if they remembered the misery and hunger of the 1920s, it was as children - not as a grown man, part of the forces holding back the twin rising tides of the Whites and the anarchy following the end of the Civil War. It was that there simply was no fuel to be had at any price. Before things went mad in Vladivostok, they were actually using vodka to power what few vehicles were left. Vodka for trucks, not for men, in Russia? Even in his exhausted state, the thought was amusing.
A runner scrambled toward him, panting and near exhaustion, chest heaving and his worn-out boots flapping around his feet. His Mosin-Nagant was slung haphazardly across his shoulder, his pack askew from its weight. The Germans had another advantage there. Their rifles were lighter than the ancient bolt-action rifles with which the Red Army breathed its last gasp. The Germans controlled the sky, the oil, the roads, the rails, and on top of that, their damned weapons were lighter, faster, and easier to use! The one thing the Mosin-Nagant had in its favor was that a trained monkey could clean it. Rumor was that Stalin had tried to do exactly that in the 1920s...
Zhivago was snapped from his reverie by the runner's breathless report. "Serving the Soviet Union! Comrade Commissar, Polkovnik Konovalov reports that there is a column of trucks... our trucks... moving parallel to him along the coast road, and that there is firing between the trucks and what should be our advance guard." The runner braced his hands against his knees and dry-heaved, and Zhivago pulled his own canteen from his belt. "Here. Drink, and find a walking horse for a few minutes. No reason to race back to Viktor Klement'ch, is there?" He patted the runner on his shoulder as the man nodded weakly, then turned back towards the front of the column. The NKVD troops continued trudging toward Shkotovo.
---
Oberst Adrian von Folkersam's column had been in a running gunfight with Zhivago's Cossacks - the men who otherwise would have been screening his troops as they went towards Shkotovo once more - for more than twelve hours now. The Cossacks would close in a desperate charge, taking potshots at his column, and be beaten back by machine-gun fire. He had been amused; he was now worried, as the belts were shortening dangerously on the guns. He had had to shift ammunition from the front of his little column to the rear twice, and if he ran into any trouble to his front, he was dead. That was, he thought in amusement, the life of a Brandenburger: Fix one problem by making three more, and hope no one notices.
At least they could hardly be attacked from the east; they were racing up the coast road, with the Pacific beneath them on that side. He saw exhaust plumes across the water, probably German forces cracking the last ring of defenses. That was where he had to go. Folkersam jumped down off the back of the truck, swinging into the cab and slapping the side. They were tired enough that none of them spoke much; the truck merely rumbled forward once more, tires spinning occasionally on the icy dirt track. This was a Russian "road," he thought sourly. When the war had started, all the maps had said they were paved, surfaced, and metalled. Idiots upstairs had dropped the ball on that one, and it had been left to Fritz in the field to keep the war moving.
The column kept rolling north-northeast along the coast, the rear gunners on edge for the inevitable Cossack attack. Trigger fingers twitched, usually exposed and covered by fewer layers than the rest of these freezing, miserable, exhausted men. Where they swung on their pintles, the machine guns were coated in a thin layer of frost, the result of half an hour of not firing. They would thaw, drip, and steam soon enough. To the east, the sun hung just above the horizon, tepid and weak in the Siberian winter. By the evening, Folkersam thought, running a hand over his stubbled face, they would be back in "Germany," or they would be dead.
---
"Herr Major," the voice in the phone croaked, "we have vehicle contact at Gustav-3. ZiLs, a bunch of them. Haven't seen many on the road recently. They're not looking eyes-front, and everyone's got a '43 cap on. Could be infiltrators. Wipe them?" Skorzeny growled in frustration, fist balling to punch his own thigh. "No, damn it. Let them in the Two ring before we make that call. Skorzeny out." He slammed down the phone, spinning on his hapless radio operator. "Get on the horn with Papa Rendulic, see if his intel staff knows what's going on." His stomach knotted; he had a feeling that this sudden appearance heralded some sort of interruption in the plan, and the Hutier troops were already in a precarious position as it was.
He distracted himself by stalking along his own lines, ignoring good sense and self-preservation alike by staying upright, strutting like a rooster behind the chest-high breastwork and grinning and nodding down at the men who were leaning into it, still at stand-to after an hour. "Stay awake," he growled. "Anyone who decides it's naptime, I'll send forward with a white flag. You know what Ivan does to white anything." The paratroopers nodded grimly, eyes staying forward and out. He continued reaffirming their training. "Work in pairs if you can. Don't let them catch you going dry and reloading, they'll bound over you. They get in ten meters, grenades. They get in five, switch to auto. Assistant gunners, keep the belts going. 'Werfers stay with the platoon leaders, you hear there's a Red on the wall, you burn him off." The litany of advice kept them level, reminded them of their training, and maintained a semblance of normalcy.
He could hear the chatter of machine guns nearby - the Gustav segment of the line, where the trucks were supposed to be. What in God's name was going on over there? He went back to the command post, angrily dialing Gustav-2. "Gustav-2, what the fuck is going on?" he demanded. "Sir," came the subdued response, "the trucks are firing over their shoulders. Looks to be an Ivan horse battalion behind them giving 'em trouble." It was time for a decision. "Horses? Well then," he said, voice deceptively even, "Ivan wants to fight the Crimean war over again, let him in the Valley of Death. Small arms only, no Schardins."
---
The forest on the inland side of the road erupted above Folkersam. This was the end of the line, apparently. Fire lashed down - the higher, metallic chatter of full-automatic short-charge eight-millimeter mixed with the lower knocking of a full-sized eight-millimeter... the Kaiser's guns. The curtain of bullets swept over Folkersam's column, a gray hail unleavened by tracers. Every instinct told Folkersam to throw himself flat, and he obeyed, covering Molotov's body with his own. When the fire slacked, he straightened, looking around at a miracle. The column of trucks had been pinged and dented by stray rounds, but the target was clearly the Cossacks who had made their last thrust. Behind, the horses screamed, and blood hissed out in hot puddles into the icy road. An occasional PPSh would lift its muzzle, but the men dressed as Russians, save for their caps, scrambled down and did what Ivan himself would have done: ended it with a knife where needed. Folkersam was just sentimental enough that his men shot the horses; the men died harder.
Down from the slope came what looked like a cross between man and tree, the beetle-shape of his coalscuttle totally obscured by pine branches and his black-and-brown-painted face barely visible between the boughs strapped to his shoulders. "Oberleutnant Kempowski. You lot are?" he demanded of the first roughly-dressed Brandenburger he found. "Talk to the Oberst," the man grunted, thumb jabbing toward the column's head. At least the answer was in German. Folkersam landed lightly on the balls of his feet. "Thought you had us there, O'leu'n. Oberst von Folkersam, from the construction directorate. Can you take us to your commander?" he asked conversationally, almost jovially.
Kempowski barked over his shoulder. "Müller! Guide these... pioneers... back to Otto der Grosse." Kempowski swigged from his canteen, then spat. "Anybody else following, Herr Oberst?" Folkersam shrugged. "Bound to be, only so many roads headed north. What's left of the Red Army's moving this way." The paratrooper grunted, already headed back into the woods. "Reset for ambush," he called out, voice surprisingly soft as he spoke to apparently no one in the woodline. He stood still for a moment, a dark shape silhouetted among dark shapes. "Tell the Major, sir. He'll want to know about the Reds. We'll call ahead to let him know you're coming. Meanwhile, get your asses back inside the perimeter."
---
Skorzeny continued pacing, sharklike. No one had any idea who these "construction directorate" men were. That had been a typical Brandenburger cover before the war, so chances were that was where these men had come from, but they were one more needless complication to the plan. He knew already that he was badly outnumbered, and he knew that he only had to hold long enough for those exhaust plumes to the east to reach him - then the shoe would be on the other foot. Survival, though, relied on being more fearsome than Ivan when the moment came.
---
More to come, it's just that I'm getting leery of trusting the autosave and this is as good a cliffhanger as any.
Nice cliffhanger...so what do (did) you need to capture in game to annex the Soviet Union?
Tim
Tim
A comeback cut short by the difficulties of the auto-save feature. I'd gotten so far as triggering the 2-ring ambush before I just cut it here.
Skorzeny is growing old: almost no swearing.
Oh, I don't know, Skorzeny's mostly been a side character in this timeline, so he's not a vastly too-junior-for-his-rank general, so his reputation is mostly of his own manufacture, and hasn't spread that far.
Nice update.
You're allowed to post again!
Vladivostok. It really is the last gasp of the Soviet Union. As I've said, the cliffhanger was only half intentional; auto-correct truncated what would have been a rather dry description of the function of a Schardin mine. I've only actually seen one detonated once live, but it was a hair-raising experience (though not as much fun as blowing up a car with an M203...).
The lack of a Bitter Peace event is the reason why I could never really warm up to that mod, though without Generalplan Ost in it's RL form and someone with brains holding the reigns in Berlin this should be at least somewhat plausible.
I believe there is a Bitter Peace event, though, since I'm posting from work, I can't check that. However, by the time it could trigger, I was releasing Byelorussia and the Ukraine, which might have made it not fire. Basically my strategy was to release puppet governments as I worked my way east. Russia, because Russia would have included everything from Transuralia to Primorsk, got released last. More on that later. It'll be a shift to go from writing warfighting posts back to writing diplomatic conferences.
Yes, I am. Have been for awhile, but been plotting my own bit of trou-fun... Check my sig
116. The Aristeia of Otto Skorzeny
Command Post, Kampfgruppe Skorzeny
Shkotovo Crossroad, Russian Socialist Federative Soviet Republic
20 February 1946
Skorzeny paced and swore, swore and paced, behind the shoulder-high log revetment. Snow had already banked against the glacis side, and the men had stood-to for most of the morning since occupying this position. The preparations were, in short, all in place for when the Reds came. Instead, he had warning that some Brandenburger colonel would be arriving along the coast route. The last thing he wanted was to turn this from Kampfgruppe Skorzeny to Kampfgruppe Oberst von Preussens, he thought, taking a certain savage pleasure in imagining ways for the almost-certain Prussian aristocrat colonel to meet his demise between the Two ring and here.
He had little time to wait; the dying-tubercular coughing of Soviet-built trucks gave away the approaching Brandenburgers long before he saw them. When they spluttered up behind the barricade, he was deliberately at the other end of the line. Thus, when he dismounted, Oberst von Fölkersam had to traverse the entire length of Skorzeny's position to find the Austrian. He was already tired and edgy after a morning of being chased by Cossacks. Having to hunt for the commander of this band of men did not sit well with him. When he finally found Skorzeny, the air thickened, as if charged with static electricity. The dapper, slender East Prussian aristocrat and the hulking Austrian giant turned toward each other, warily sizing up their respective opposition, and Skorzeny mulishly stayed silent. Finally Fölkersam broke the silence. "Oberst Adrian von Fölkersam, Infanteriedivision Brandenburg, Sondergruppe Peipus. I understand we have you to thank for our lives." He pulled off his right glove, ignoring the risk from the cold, and thrust it toward Skorzeny, who, looking down, considered for a moment not acknowledging the courtesy, or even out-Prussianing this man by clicking heels and saluting. Instead, he grinned, pulling off his own glove and squeezing Fölkersam's hand in his own massive paw. "Major Otto Skorzeny. Regiment von Hutier, Kampfgruppe Skorzeny. Didn't expect anyone from inside the Red perimeter. Walk with me."
The two of them moved down the line, each measuring the other. Fölkersam noticed the easy way Skorzeny nodded and grinned at his troopers, who glanced back at him and gave the occasional obscene gesture. For his part, Skorzeny saw that Fölkersam was equally determined not to put his head above the parapet. East Prussian he might be, aristo he might be, but he apparently knew his way around a rifle line. "I've got a hundred and sixty effectives between here and my forward observers," Skorzeny explained. "Here, I have a hundred and twenty on this line. Do you know what the Reds have forward of us?"
"Only a hundred times that, give or take," Fölkersam said, waving airily, voice heavy with irony. "Comrade Commissar Zhivago isn't Generalfeldmarschall von Lettow-Vorbeck, but he's solid."
"Mm. And this crossroad is the gate to Vladivostok."
"Exactly, Major. You can expect all of dear Yevgraf's men to call upon you."
Skorzeny came to a halt. "I had considered waving you back toward Moustache Rendulic." Once more, Fölkersam was struck by the tremendous informality of this Austrian - most majors did not call their marshals 'Moustache' in the hearing of anyone who outranked them. "But... I will be honest with you, Herr Oberst... I need those men on this line." Skorzeny hesitated. "I don't have enough bodies to hold this crossroad forever. What I do have... is enough heads." Skorzeny tapped his temple. "I can't make you stay. I'll ask you to, so we can kick Ivan in the teeth a little harder. But if you stay, this is my show."
"This is... complicated, Major. I have Molotov." That stopped Skorzeny completely. "And I am under orders to get him clear alive." Fölkersam noted with grim satisfaction that Skorzeny had no convenient response to that. "I will put it to my men - who wants to fight Ivan, who wants to finish the mission and go home. You've got... I'd say even odds of convincing them."
Before Skorzeny could respond, or pitch into the Prussian, the woods to the front of their line erupted in an explosive roar.
---
The Schardin mine was, at its heart, a curved rectangular hardened steel plate, half a meter on the side that ran parallel to the ground, half that tall, that set on two sets of stilt legs that resembled an engineer's compass, down to their pointed ends. On the concave side of the plate was printed the phrase "Front nach dem Feind" in letters generally thought too large to miss, though training had shown soldiers incredibly still missed them. On the opposite side was a four-centimeter paste of plastic explosives and three-millimeter stainless steel ball bearings, a thousand of them in total. On the convex side of the plastique-ball mesh was printed "FRONT" in even larger letters. A thin metal case surrounded the whole, pierced at the top with two holes for the insertion of blasting caps. The blasting caps were wired back to a device that had almost instantly gained the name "the clicker," a handheld trigger activated by squeezing it between thumb and palm to produce a clicking sound. The clicker could be rigged either to tripwire or for hand detonation. Skorzeny's orders had specified only hand-detonation - he wanted no accidents such as had happened in training, where a Hutier trooper had gone to urinate and had tripped over the tripwire on his way back. That had been an unpleasant letter for him to write to the parachutist's mother.
Skorzeny had put half of his Schardin mines with his forward outposts, in his Two ring, with scout-sniper teams forward of them in the Three ring. The mines were placed in the trees to maximize their killing effect, firing down and across into their killzones rather than merely across them. Thus, throwing oneself flat on the ground to escape the explosion actually increased the lethality of the mines by providing a larger target area. A lucky mine trigger could destroy a company as combat effectives; one merely well-timed would eliminate a platoon if they were not adequately spaced. Ivan never adequately spaced his men.
Thus it was that, along the Dora approach, the first Soviet soldiers crossed Skorzeny's Two ring. The section leader at Dora-2 mashed down on a set of four clickers, triggering the entire array at once. The previously still forest erupted. The explosions achieved two effects, scattering ball bearings down into the head of the Soviet column and cutting the trees off at roughly head level. Men were perforated from scalp to calf by flying steel balls, shredding meat from bone and opening viscera to the air. As soon as the explosion died and they could thrust their heads upward, the "mad minute" began. The German section opened fire on the space that had been a Soviet company moments before, round after round crossing the kill zone and striking down any Russian who dared to thrust his head up. Each German magazine held thirty rounds, giving them a long window in which to fire; as soon as a magazine was empty, its bearer broke from his position, bounding back toward the One ring, slotting a new magazine, and setting up in overwatch to allow his comrades to fall back. It was a perfect ambush, save that the Reds simply outnumbered them and could overrun them easily if they were not stopped continuously.
The falling trees helped with that, blocking the Soviets' easy advance, and the constant fire from men falling back allowed the rush back to the barricade. "Hutier! Hutier! Hutier!" the section sergeant bellowed as his men broke cover into the fire zone before the breastwork, sprinting across the gap madly. A handful of Nagant rounds snapped overhead angrily, but Zhivago's men were too confused to react adequately to this first contact. The rout of the Cossacks along the coast had left them blind. The sound of firing reached Yevgraf Zhivago far back up the column and Skorzeny in the breastwork roughly in parallel. Fölkersam's men tumbled from their trucks to form around their prisoner and their commander, who barked out that one squad would sprint for Rendulic in a truck, the rest, himself included, would act as Skorzeny's reserve. The Austrian nodded and thumbed them back over his shoulder to the log shelter containing his radios.
On the other side, Yevgraf Zhivago rushed forward, trotting along toward the head of his column. Along the rest of the approach to Shkotovo, his force continued to butt up against the Two ring. Explosions sounded to left and right, shattering the forest. As runners came in, a picture emerged, radiating from Shkotovo crossroad, angry circles appearing as Zhivago penciled his map with each new report. Whatever German force was to his front was concentrated there. For the thousandth time this war, Zhivago prayed to Mother Russia to provide artillery that Father Stalin had lost west of the Urals, and knew that instead it would be rifles and bayonets. Even grenades were too precious to waste except once atop the enemy's defenses, and most of their machine guns, thanks to their wheeled carriages, had been abandoned on the long, long retreat from the Ukraine to this frozen hell.
---
The German line leaned into the breastwork, almost to a man, as Skorzeny dropped back to the radio hut, yelling at the hapless radioman. "Get Rendulic on the line. Tell him to pull his guns out of his ass, and when they're set, to start firing six hundred yards southwest of our position. If he doesn't have rounds in the air in fifteen minutes, I'll be back there for his gunners' balls. Go!" he shouted, slapping the man on the back of the head as he picked up the handset, then vaulting back into the clear.
Forward of the breastwork, he could see smoke rising from the forest to his front, and the men scrambling back over the kill zone from the Two ring. Those men, when they returned, would be thoroughly blown and would need a few minutes to rest after scrambling back the eight hundred meters of broken ground from the Two ring to here. As they came back in, he greeted them at the wall, slapping backs and punching shoulders, congratulating them and directing them back on Fölkersam's position to gulp down water and recover their breath. The first screams began to reach him, the terrible wailing of men whose death had not yet come, from the ambush sites to his front. Men and the wrecks of men lay in the verge of the forest, blood freezing on the snow and steaming as it seeped from them, frantically trying to scoop lengths of intestine back into their stomachs even as the icy weather did its work on their innards. The terrible reek of a battlefield began to spread despite the cold.
When he reached this point, Yevgraf Zhivago frowned, eyes transforming from their usual sleepy-dog relaxed look to the icy hardness of a man who had been a Chekist since the Revolution. He had seen and done terrible things, but these men were his, not enemies of the state. The crossroads loomed ahead, apparently unoccupied. It was too sweet a prize, he thought, too obviously undefended. He made a snap decision, turning to bark at Polkovnik Konovalov. "Send in a battalion on the run, fixed bayonets. Whoever you can get in the treeline may fire to support, but don't waste time, Viktor Klement'ch." The colonel gulped, saluted, and spun on his heel, racing to his unit, and the first charge began.
The Soviet troops bunched in the woodline, teeth chattering in a mix of cold and fear. They were all veterans, and most of them knew that their odds of surviving the first charge were slim. They were the last resource the Soviet Union possessed in abundance, and knew they would be used as such. They flipped their bayonets down, snapping them into place on the ends of their rifles, and waited, hunched and shivering. On Skorzeny's side, they leaned into the breastwork, safeties flicking off and machine-gunners bracing their left hands across the stocks to reduce muzzle climb. Both sides held their breath, then a thin, high-pitched whistle shrilled and the killing began.
The Soviets rose in a long line, yelling out their "URRAH!" battle-cry and stumbling forward across the open space before the crossroad. The assault battalion barely had a chance. They outnumbered the Germans in the breastwork four to one, but their weapons were semi-automatic or automatic, and they had machine guns, where the Soviets had bolt-action rifles that had to be fired from the hip on the charge, and Hutier training had emphasized swift, accurate marksmanship, where the Red Army had never been long on marksmanship training. Skorzeny crouched behind the barrier until the assault battalion was halfway across the killzone, then bellowed out, "FUCK 'EM!"
The terrible ripping-canvas howl of the FG42s drowned out the Soviet roar, and the German line was almost instantly wreathed in a thin wisp of smoke. The gunners methodically worked their guns from ankle level to shoulder, left to right, as they had been trained to do for years. It was easy to tell where one burst began and ended by looking at the bodies: early in a burst, the target would take a round in calf, shin, or thigh, drifting upward to hip and groin, and then by burst's end, they would be opened in abdomen, chest, and shoulder. Then the gun would walk back down to the next target. At this range, a hundred and fifty meters, a well-trained, well-armed company in a good position could shatter any charge that lacked tanks. It was not war, it was purebred slaughter, and Skorzeny stood tall, glorying in it even as the few Soviets who could flicked rounds past his head. This was what he had been born to, and he laughed at the sight of Konovalov's assault battalion in its death throes.
Zhivago, though, had what he needed: he knew where the German position was. His lips tightened, and he snapped for a runner. "Tell the mortars to set up," he ordered before stalking to the treeline. He only had a handful of rounds for those mortar crews, but they were massive 160-millimeter breech-loaders, and because of endless ammunition shortages, the crews that had survived this long were the so-called mortar snipers. Everyone else had become a rifleman. They could drop rounds in an area the size of a farmhouse from five thousand meters... and he could set them up within a fifth that from the German lines. "And send forward the snipers," he added as an afterthought. Men began to squirm and wriggle forward into no-man's-land, peering through their scopes for the Germans behind the breastwork. To his west, he shook out an additional regiment of infantry, with the goal of creating a noose around Skorzeny. He did not know how many Germans there were, but he had no intention of letting them escape, even though everyone here knew the Soviet Union was dying around them. Here, today, he would make the Germans bleed.
Zhivago's strategy was simple: the forces to the front would continue with their concentric-wave attacks, imitating Suvorov at Ismail. He had no great expectations there; he had fought in the Great War, and knew that men stood little chance against superior fire in open charges. His goal was to distract, not to overwhelm. There was little room to infiltrate between Shkotovo and the sea, but on the landward side, his men could easily outflank the German force, and he was puzzled by the lack of response as he probed on that side. By the time he was gnawing on a hard chunk of black bread at noon, word came that the flanking force was ready. He nodded absently at the runner and continued eating, apparently unconcerned for the brutal battle unfolding to his front.
For his part, Otto Skorzeny, too, concealed his worry with a bluff, cheerful exterior. His men could not continue firing endlessly. Machine gun barrels could not easily be swapped, because placing the hot barrels on the ground would supercool and warp them, and the belts were getting shorter. Of the five meters or so of machine-gun ammunition on hand for each gun, they were down to about two meters a gun, and the sun was at its weak and watery noon high. Riflemen were not as badly off as the gunners, but they too were beginning to feel the pinch. How many Russians were there out there? he wondered. Fölkersam answered for him again. "Zhivago had a rifle corps, and from the sound of it, that's what he's pitching in at you. Good news is he's only pitched a third of it at you so far," the Prussian announced with a smile. The good news was their losses thus far: men who had burned themselves on casings, and a nasty gash from a round that had peeled a strip off a log to scar a man's cheek, but nothing that pulled them off the line. Skorzeny guessed, but only guessed, that they had killed, wounded, or disabled roughly eight times their weight. Eight times was fine, but if Fölkersam's estimate was correct, that was less than a tenth of Zhivago's force.
Rendulic had not shaken his artillery loose as hoped, either. Word was that the advancing Germans were ten crow and thirty road kilometers out, and pushing forward at five kilometers an hour. At that rate, the sun would be setting before the Hummels could set up and fire, and that was if Rendulic had lost his mind and put his artillery at the leading edge of his advance. For the moment, the only angels who might hear his prayers were the Luftwaffe - and they had thus far been remiss in answering. It never hurt to put in another call, though.
Thus it was that as Zhivago positioned a regiment to attack Skorzeny's exposed flank, a flight of Arado bombers came roaring in low and slow, a series of malignant olive-colored lozenges under their wings. They were bound for the known positions to the front of Skorzeny's force, still heavily wooded and bare of foliage. When their munitions tumbled loose, they flipped end-over-end before bursting above the trees and spraying burning, jellied petrol over the forest below. Ice evaporated and trees exploded as their internal moisture transformed the wood into splinters, covering the Soviet force with burning shrapnel and setting up a broad, burning slick to the Germans' south. Skorzeny stood erect, whooping and cheering, and even his soldiers let up a faint, tired cheer. On the Soviet side, Zhivago's attention was distracted by the need to recoil from the burning land between him and the German position.
Skorzeny had found his angels.
They would fly in constant rotation throughout the day, the whole of Kampfgeschwader 76 devoted by Rendulic to keeping the Crossroads in German hands. They took on fuel and incendiaries, then roared back over the battlefield, in carousel rotation. Zhivago could not approach across the lake of fire created by the bombing, and he shifted his entire force slowly over to the planned infiltration assault. Finally, all was ready, and they began to creep forward, hoping to close on the Germans and take them by storm without being spotted.
It almost worked. They were within a hundred meters of the logs, and could see the end of Skorzeny's line, when an Arado pilot winged over them and called in their position to Skorzeny. The Austrian swore and spat, yelling at Fölkersam. "Herr Oberst, I would appreciate support on the west end." The Brandenburger nodded and whistled for his men, who had for the most part sat out the encounter thus far. They scrambled low across the snow before dropping into place on Skorzeny's exposed right. They did so just in time, because the Soviets had guessed at the airplane coming overhead's importance, and sprung to their feet. These men, unlike the first assault wave, had been handed PPSh-41s, perfect for close-range assault work. The Brandenburgers were similarly equipped - just outnumbered, ten or fifteen to one by Fölkersam's guess. He grimly lay across the ice, greatcoat fanned around him, and worked the submachine gun, tuning out the thought of their impending deaths.
Their presence did just enough, spoiling the Russian attack, which had expected to fall on an undefended flank. Skorzeny made a snap decision. "Werfers right!" he bellowed, and the flamethrower men scrambled across to cover the Brandenburger platoon. Valves opened, fuel hissed, and flame spat. Arcs of bright fire cut across the watery afternoon Siberian sun, shining in the air before falling to earth across the lead edge of the advancing Russians. The Reds stopped, but the flamethrower men paid a terrible price, as they always did. Men fell screaming as their fuel tanks were pinged, leaving them walking - or falling and flailing - torches. Still, they bought Skorzeny's position a little more time, and half of them fell back toward the center of his slowly contracting ring. They were the day's first significant casualties.
The Russians pulled back once more to lick their wounds, surprised once more at the ferocity and intensity of the German resistance, and repositioned for another attack. Zhivago was no fool, and knew what would come as soon as the flank attack had broken. That force scrambled backward as the Blitzes began to strike along that side. Skorzeny's position was ringed in fire to the south and west, and the Russians pulled back to consider their next move. Against every expectation, the Germans held the crossroad after six hours of fighting. Sheer weight of numbers should have carried it, but the Russians had been worn out by years of losing, and no longer had the stomach for endless bayonet charges. Zhivago had seen enough of them in his career, and by now was sick both of losses and casualties. He pulled back a hundred meters and wearily signaled the mortar teams. The position would not be taken directly or by enfilade. It would have to be taken by bombardment followed by assault. The mortar-snipers' hour had come.
---
Inside the breastwork, Skorzeny and Fölkersam squatted wearily. "So now I owe you," Skorzeny said with a crooked smile. The Brandenburger nodded. The Russians knew where they were, so now there was a fire lit, a coffee-pot boiling, and without rounds cracking overhead, men were coming off the line, to half-strength, to eat quickly and relieve their comrades. Small piles of yellow ice next to their fighting positions revealed where many had simply relieved themselves in place. It seemed for the first time as if some of them might live to nightfall. That was, of course, the moment that the first mortar round fell.
The Russian 160mm M1943 heavy mortar could throw ten forty-kilogram bombs a minute for five kilometers. The morning and early afternoon's assaults had pinpointed the German position well, so no ranging rounds were needed. The mortarmen had needed all of that time to haul their guns into place, sweating, heaving, and cursing against the mortars' ton weight. The ground was at least hard, so that the wheels did little to resist movement. Zhivago had preserved a whole brigade of thirty-two of these, and each mortar team had ten rounds of ammunition - they could in theory fire all three hundred and twenty rounds in one minute. Zhivago made a calculated gamble, threading men forward into the burnt-out wreckage of the forest to Skorzeny's front before the first lanyard was pulled. Again, the assault would be in regimental strength, along a very tight corridor. The signal to advance would be the first round's landing; he was quite certain that they would not be atop the breastwork by the time the last of that bombardment struck. There would be no reserve, because the imagined Soviet infinity of ammunition and manpower simply no longer existed.
Forty kilograms of explosive and metal landed on the steel-hard icy ground behind Skorzeny's breastwork, flinging shrapnel in all directions. The radio shelter was cut almost in half. Skorzeny had been looking at Fölkersam when the round hit; some instinct had propelled both of them flat beside the fire when it went off, and for the next sixty seconds, his entire world consisted of thunder, the smell of blood, and the incongruous image of the coffee-pot swaying merrily on its tripod, otherwise unharmed by an artillery bombardment the likes of which he had not experienced since France. He knew what this meant, and hoped only that enough men had survived to hold the crossroad. He lifted his head to look around. Where logs had been arranged into crude benches to eat, all that was left were splinters and a red smear. Fölkersam's hair had been clipped ridiculously along one side, but he, too, was otherwise unharmed, shaking himself and dusting his shoulders with the aplomb of a born aristocrat. Skorzeny had no time for such displays. "ACTION FRONT!" he yelled, gesturing madly and charging to the breastwork, where enough men remained to put up a skeleton defense.
The ripsaw whine sounded again, machine guns spraying death to their front. Wherever the gunners had gone down, other men had stepped in, seeing their salvation in constant fire. At least the remaining guns would stay fed, and whatever reservations they had once held about warping barrels were abandoned in the rush to keep the guns firing. Skorzeny took his part in the frenzy, mashing down on the clickers on his segment of front as the Reds reached the first log funnels. His voice, deep and bellowing and roaring, undercut the thunder of the detonating mines, the higher-pitched snarl of the machine guns, the constant, endless banging of the carbines. For one of the few times in his life, the Austrian giant was afraid, unconsciously praying to a god he didn't consciously care about that this be the last great Russian charge of the day.
It had to be. It must be. There simply was no way that they could hold against another charge - especially when the mustard-colored coats reached the breastwork, stumbling over the bodies of those before them. Skorzeny dropped the carbine, letting it hang slung around him, and pulled a pistol, banging away as the Reds came over the top. The roar-hiss of the flamethrowers met them, spraying streams of fire over them and turning "URRAH!" into wordless screams. Still the Red Army came. The floodgate had broken and Yevgraf Zhivago was on the rampage.
Adrian von Fölkersam's platoon knew what to do. They had fallen back on their trucks, desperately hauling them over on their sides to form a second barricade - a Ring Zero, if Skorzeny's logs were Ring One. They fired over the Hutier men's heads, yelling frantically at them to fall back, and Fölkersam himself waved his cap at Skorzeny, trying to draw his attention. The Austrian fell backward, openly weeping as he fired back over his shoulder. One round took a Soviet soldier in the chest, another in the face, and on the third, he simply dropped the magazine as it clicked empty. His hands slammed in a new magazine of their own volition as tears blurred his vision. "Bastards. Bastards. Bastards," he muttered, beyond comprehension of the situation beyond the need to kill and kill and kill.
The Soviets tried to scramble up the sides of the trucks, and the survivors learned to stay inside the rim of the bed, firing upward into the Red horde. A grenade came over the side, and a Brandenburger lunged for it, flinging it desperately upward. It detonated above the swarming Soviets, giving them a breathing space and deafening them. As they huddled among the trucks, the sun dropped below the horizon for the first time, the light failing completely, leaving them in the dark, surrounded by Red Army troops and barricaded only by trucks stolen from those same men.
Skorzeny lunged upward, his mind completely gone beyond the combat madness. He had heard about Wilhelm Volkmann's Pour le Merite, and how the two men who had gone out with him refused to speak of it. He had even tried to ply the big Irishman with drink, hoping that he'd have said something. He refused - and this was a man who had held the Kingsgate Lighthouse for days while the British Army had marched past. Had he been able to think consciously about what he was doing, he would have understood what had happened to Volkmann then, watching his company destroyed behind him.
He jerked one of the Red Army men upward by his throat, knife stabbing into the man's gut just as he registered his surprise. The next man on the hood of the truck caught the first on his bayonet, still surprised, and the Austrian's boot caught him in the chin, knocking him back on to the men below. The Austrian was silhouetted against the aurora, roaring and firing his last magazine down into the horde below. For a moment, they stood transfixed, unable to do anything but gape at this figure from ancient myth, Thor come to the Slavs. Then one man, braver than his comrades, stepped back, raising the rifle to his shoulder and sighting down the barrel. He worked the frost-stiff bolt and pulled the trigger. As ever, the Mosin-Nagant kicked like a mule. Otto Skorzeny toppled back into the tight circle of the trucks, blood and foam bubbling from a wound in the side of his chest.
He gasped and grabbed at the men who looked down at him, trying to form words that simply would not come. When he breathed in, no air reached his lungs, but the foam bubbled across his chest. Colors faded, then turned black and white. As the brightest stars faded to nothing and Fölkersam's men frantically tried to press the wound shut, he heard the only sound that mattered.
To the northeast, he heard the sputter of diesel engines. He smiled, eyes rolling back, and let his head fall on the frozen ground.
Command Post, Kampfgruppe Skorzeny
Shkotovo Crossroad, Russian Socialist Federative Soviet Republic
20 February 1946
Skorzeny paced and swore, swore and paced, behind the shoulder-high log revetment. Snow had already banked against the glacis side, and the men had stood-to for most of the morning since occupying this position. The preparations were, in short, all in place for when the Reds came. Instead, he had warning that some Brandenburger colonel would be arriving along the coast route. The last thing he wanted was to turn this from Kampfgruppe Skorzeny to Kampfgruppe Oberst von Preussens, he thought, taking a certain savage pleasure in imagining ways for the almost-certain Prussian aristocrat colonel to meet his demise between the Two ring and here.
He had little time to wait; the dying-tubercular coughing of Soviet-built trucks gave away the approaching Brandenburgers long before he saw them. When they spluttered up behind the barricade, he was deliberately at the other end of the line. Thus, when he dismounted, Oberst von Fölkersam had to traverse the entire length of Skorzeny's position to find the Austrian. He was already tired and edgy after a morning of being chased by Cossacks. Having to hunt for the commander of this band of men did not sit well with him. When he finally found Skorzeny, the air thickened, as if charged with static electricity. The dapper, slender East Prussian aristocrat and the hulking Austrian giant turned toward each other, warily sizing up their respective opposition, and Skorzeny mulishly stayed silent. Finally Fölkersam broke the silence. "Oberst Adrian von Fölkersam, Infanteriedivision Brandenburg, Sondergruppe Peipus. I understand we have you to thank for our lives." He pulled off his right glove, ignoring the risk from the cold, and thrust it toward Skorzeny, who, looking down, considered for a moment not acknowledging the courtesy, or even out-Prussianing this man by clicking heels and saluting. Instead, he grinned, pulling off his own glove and squeezing Fölkersam's hand in his own massive paw. "Major Otto Skorzeny. Regiment von Hutier, Kampfgruppe Skorzeny. Didn't expect anyone from inside the Red perimeter. Walk with me."
The two of them moved down the line, each measuring the other. Fölkersam noticed the easy way Skorzeny nodded and grinned at his troopers, who glanced back at him and gave the occasional obscene gesture. For his part, Skorzeny saw that Fölkersam was equally determined not to put his head above the parapet. East Prussian he might be, aristo he might be, but he apparently knew his way around a rifle line. "I've got a hundred and sixty effectives between here and my forward observers," Skorzeny explained. "Here, I have a hundred and twenty on this line. Do you know what the Reds have forward of us?"
"Only a hundred times that, give or take," Fölkersam said, waving airily, voice heavy with irony. "Comrade Commissar Zhivago isn't Generalfeldmarschall von Lettow-Vorbeck, but he's solid."
"Mm. And this crossroad is the gate to Vladivostok."
"Exactly, Major. You can expect all of dear Yevgraf's men to call upon you."
Skorzeny came to a halt. "I had considered waving you back toward Moustache Rendulic." Once more, Fölkersam was struck by the tremendous informality of this Austrian - most majors did not call their marshals 'Moustache' in the hearing of anyone who outranked them. "But... I will be honest with you, Herr Oberst... I need those men on this line." Skorzeny hesitated. "I don't have enough bodies to hold this crossroad forever. What I do have... is enough heads." Skorzeny tapped his temple. "I can't make you stay. I'll ask you to, so we can kick Ivan in the teeth a little harder. But if you stay, this is my show."
"This is... complicated, Major. I have Molotov." That stopped Skorzeny completely. "And I am under orders to get him clear alive." Fölkersam noted with grim satisfaction that Skorzeny had no convenient response to that. "I will put it to my men - who wants to fight Ivan, who wants to finish the mission and go home. You've got... I'd say even odds of convincing them."
Before Skorzeny could respond, or pitch into the Prussian, the woods to the front of their line erupted in an explosive roar.
---
The Schardin mine was, at its heart, a curved rectangular hardened steel plate, half a meter on the side that ran parallel to the ground, half that tall, that set on two sets of stilt legs that resembled an engineer's compass, down to their pointed ends. On the concave side of the plate was printed the phrase "Front nach dem Feind" in letters generally thought too large to miss, though training had shown soldiers incredibly still missed them. On the opposite side was a four-centimeter paste of plastic explosives and three-millimeter stainless steel ball bearings, a thousand of them in total. On the convex side of the plastique-ball mesh was printed "FRONT" in even larger letters. A thin metal case surrounded the whole, pierced at the top with two holes for the insertion of blasting caps. The blasting caps were wired back to a device that had almost instantly gained the name "the clicker," a handheld trigger activated by squeezing it between thumb and palm to produce a clicking sound. The clicker could be rigged either to tripwire or for hand detonation. Skorzeny's orders had specified only hand-detonation - he wanted no accidents such as had happened in training, where a Hutier trooper had gone to urinate and had tripped over the tripwire on his way back. That had been an unpleasant letter for him to write to the parachutist's mother.
Skorzeny had put half of his Schardin mines with his forward outposts, in his Two ring, with scout-sniper teams forward of them in the Three ring. The mines were placed in the trees to maximize their killing effect, firing down and across into their killzones rather than merely across them. Thus, throwing oneself flat on the ground to escape the explosion actually increased the lethality of the mines by providing a larger target area. A lucky mine trigger could destroy a company as combat effectives; one merely well-timed would eliminate a platoon if they were not adequately spaced. Ivan never adequately spaced his men.
Thus it was that, along the Dora approach, the first Soviet soldiers crossed Skorzeny's Two ring. The section leader at Dora-2 mashed down on a set of four clickers, triggering the entire array at once. The previously still forest erupted. The explosions achieved two effects, scattering ball bearings down into the head of the Soviet column and cutting the trees off at roughly head level. Men were perforated from scalp to calf by flying steel balls, shredding meat from bone and opening viscera to the air. As soon as the explosion died and they could thrust their heads upward, the "mad minute" began. The German section opened fire on the space that had been a Soviet company moments before, round after round crossing the kill zone and striking down any Russian who dared to thrust his head up. Each German magazine held thirty rounds, giving them a long window in which to fire; as soon as a magazine was empty, its bearer broke from his position, bounding back toward the One ring, slotting a new magazine, and setting up in overwatch to allow his comrades to fall back. It was a perfect ambush, save that the Reds simply outnumbered them and could overrun them easily if they were not stopped continuously.
The falling trees helped with that, blocking the Soviets' easy advance, and the constant fire from men falling back allowed the rush back to the barricade. "Hutier! Hutier! Hutier!" the section sergeant bellowed as his men broke cover into the fire zone before the breastwork, sprinting across the gap madly. A handful of Nagant rounds snapped overhead angrily, but Zhivago's men were too confused to react adequately to this first contact. The rout of the Cossacks along the coast had left them blind. The sound of firing reached Yevgraf Zhivago far back up the column and Skorzeny in the breastwork roughly in parallel. Fölkersam's men tumbled from their trucks to form around their prisoner and their commander, who barked out that one squad would sprint for Rendulic in a truck, the rest, himself included, would act as Skorzeny's reserve. The Austrian nodded and thumbed them back over his shoulder to the log shelter containing his radios.
On the other side, Yevgraf Zhivago rushed forward, trotting along toward the head of his column. Along the rest of the approach to Shkotovo, his force continued to butt up against the Two ring. Explosions sounded to left and right, shattering the forest. As runners came in, a picture emerged, radiating from Shkotovo crossroad, angry circles appearing as Zhivago penciled his map with each new report. Whatever German force was to his front was concentrated there. For the thousandth time this war, Zhivago prayed to Mother Russia to provide artillery that Father Stalin had lost west of the Urals, and knew that instead it would be rifles and bayonets. Even grenades were too precious to waste except once atop the enemy's defenses, and most of their machine guns, thanks to their wheeled carriages, had been abandoned on the long, long retreat from the Ukraine to this frozen hell.
---
The German line leaned into the breastwork, almost to a man, as Skorzeny dropped back to the radio hut, yelling at the hapless radioman. "Get Rendulic on the line. Tell him to pull his guns out of his ass, and when they're set, to start firing six hundred yards southwest of our position. If he doesn't have rounds in the air in fifteen minutes, I'll be back there for his gunners' balls. Go!" he shouted, slapping the man on the back of the head as he picked up the handset, then vaulting back into the clear.
Forward of the breastwork, he could see smoke rising from the forest to his front, and the men scrambling back over the kill zone from the Two ring. Those men, when they returned, would be thoroughly blown and would need a few minutes to rest after scrambling back the eight hundred meters of broken ground from the Two ring to here. As they came back in, he greeted them at the wall, slapping backs and punching shoulders, congratulating them and directing them back on Fölkersam's position to gulp down water and recover their breath. The first screams began to reach him, the terrible wailing of men whose death had not yet come, from the ambush sites to his front. Men and the wrecks of men lay in the verge of the forest, blood freezing on the snow and steaming as it seeped from them, frantically trying to scoop lengths of intestine back into their stomachs even as the icy weather did its work on their innards. The terrible reek of a battlefield began to spread despite the cold.
When he reached this point, Yevgraf Zhivago frowned, eyes transforming from their usual sleepy-dog relaxed look to the icy hardness of a man who had been a Chekist since the Revolution. He had seen and done terrible things, but these men were his, not enemies of the state. The crossroads loomed ahead, apparently unoccupied. It was too sweet a prize, he thought, too obviously undefended. He made a snap decision, turning to bark at Polkovnik Konovalov. "Send in a battalion on the run, fixed bayonets. Whoever you can get in the treeline may fire to support, but don't waste time, Viktor Klement'ch." The colonel gulped, saluted, and spun on his heel, racing to his unit, and the first charge began.
The Soviet troops bunched in the woodline, teeth chattering in a mix of cold and fear. They were all veterans, and most of them knew that their odds of surviving the first charge were slim. They were the last resource the Soviet Union possessed in abundance, and knew they would be used as such. They flipped their bayonets down, snapping them into place on the ends of their rifles, and waited, hunched and shivering. On Skorzeny's side, they leaned into the breastwork, safeties flicking off and machine-gunners bracing their left hands across the stocks to reduce muzzle climb. Both sides held their breath, then a thin, high-pitched whistle shrilled and the killing began.
The Soviets rose in a long line, yelling out their "URRAH!" battle-cry and stumbling forward across the open space before the crossroad. The assault battalion barely had a chance. They outnumbered the Germans in the breastwork four to one, but their weapons were semi-automatic or automatic, and they had machine guns, where the Soviets had bolt-action rifles that had to be fired from the hip on the charge, and Hutier training had emphasized swift, accurate marksmanship, where the Red Army had never been long on marksmanship training. Skorzeny crouched behind the barrier until the assault battalion was halfway across the killzone, then bellowed out, "FUCK 'EM!"
The terrible ripping-canvas howl of the FG42s drowned out the Soviet roar, and the German line was almost instantly wreathed in a thin wisp of smoke. The gunners methodically worked their guns from ankle level to shoulder, left to right, as they had been trained to do for years. It was easy to tell where one burst began and ended by looking at the bodies: early in a burst, the target would take a round in calf, shin, or thigh, drifting upward to hip and groin, and then by burst's end, they would be opened in abdomen, chest, and shoulder. Then the gun would walk back down to the next target. At this range, a hundred and fifty meters, a well-trained, well-armed company in a good position could shatter any charge that lacked tanks. It was not war, it was purebred slaughter, and Skorzeny stood tall, glorying in it even as the few Soviets who could flicked rounds past his head. This was what he had been born to, and he laughed at the sight of Konovalov's assault battalion in its death throes.
Zhivago, though, had what he needed: he knew where the German position was. His lips tightened, and he snapped for a runner. "Tell the mortars to set up," he ordered before stalking to the treeline. He only had a handful of rounds for those mortar crews, but they were massive 160-millimeter breech-loaders, and because of endless ammunition shortages, the crews that had survived this long were the so-called mortar snipers. Everyone else had become a rifleman. They could drop rounds in an area the size of a farmhouse from five thousand meters... and he could set them up within a fifth that from the German lines. "And send forward the snipers," he added as an afterthought. Men began to squirm and wriggle forward into no-man's-land, peering through their scopes for the Germans behind the breastwork. To his west, he shook out an additional regiment of infantry, with the goal of creating a noose around Skorzeny. He did not know how many Germans there were, but he had no intention of letting them escape, even though everyone here knew the Soviet Union was dying around them. Here, today, he would make the Germans bleed.
Zhivago's strategy was simple: the forces to the front would continue with their concentric-wave attacks, imitating Suvorov at Ismail. He had no great expectations there; he had fought in the Great War, and knew that men stood little chance against superior fire in open charges. His goal was to distract, not to overwhelm. There was little room to infiltrate between Shkotovo and the sea, but on the landward side, his men could easily outflank the German force, and he was puzzled by the lack of response as he probed on that side. By the time he was gnawing on a hard chunk of black bread at noon, word came that the flanking force was ready. He nodded absently at the runner and continued eating, apparently unconcerned for the brutal battle unfolding to his front.
For his part, Otto Skorzeny, too, concealed his worry with a bluff, cheerful exterior. His men could not continue firing endlessly. Machine gun barrels could not easily be swapped, because placing the hot barrels on the ground would supercool and warp them, and the belts were getting shorter. Of the five meters or so of machine-gun ammunition on hand for each gun, they were down to about two meters a gun, and the sun was at its weak and watery noon high. Riflemen were not as badly off as the gunners, but they too were beginning to feel the pinch. How many Russians were there out there? he wondered. Fölkersam answered for him again. "Zhivago had a rifle corps, and from the sound of it, that's what he's pitching in at you. Good news is he's only pitched a third of it at you so far," the Prussian announced with a smile. The good news was their losses thus far: men who had burned themselves on casings, and a nasty gash from a round that had peeled a strip off a log to scar a man's cheek, but nothing that pulled them off the line. Skorzeny guessed, but only guessed, that they had killed, wounded, or disabled roughly eight times their weight. Eight times was fine, but if Fölkersam's estimate was correct, that was less than a tenth of Zhivago's force.
Rendulic had not shaken his artillery loose as hoped, either. Word was that the advancing Germans were ten crow and thirty road kilometers out, and pushing forward at five kilometers an hour. At that rate, the sun would be setting before the Hummels could set up and fire, and that was if Rendulic had lost his mind and put his artillery at the leading edge of his advance. For the moment, the only angels who might hear his prayers were the Luftwaffe - and they had thus far been remiss in answering. It never hurt to put in another call, though.
Thus it was that as Zhivago positioned a regiment to attack Skorzeny's exposed flank, a flight of Arado bombers came roaring in low and slow, a series of malignant olive-colored lozenges under their wings. They were bound for the known positions to the front of Skorzeny's force, still heavily wooded and bare of foliage. When their munitions tumbled loose, they flipped end-over-end before bursting above the trees and spraying burning, jellied petrol over the forest below. Ice evaporated and trees exploded as their internal moisture transformed the wood into splinters, covering the Soviet force with burning shrapnel and setting up a broad, burning slick to the Germans' south. Skorzeny stood erect, whooping and cheering, and even his soldiers let up a faint, tired cheer. On the Soviet side, Zhivago's attention was distracted by the need to recoil from the burning land between him and the German position.
Skorzeny had found his angels.
They would fly in constant rotation throughout the day, the whole of Kampfgeschwader 76 devoted by Rendulic to keeping the Crossroads in German hands. They took on fuel and incendiaries, then roared back over the battlefield, in carousel rotation. Zhivago could not approach across the lake of fire created by the bombing, and he shifted his entire force slowly over to the planned infiltration assault. Finally, all was ready, and they began to creep forward, hoping to close on the Germans and take them by storm without being spotted.
It almost worked. They were within a hundred meters of the logs, and could see the end of Skorzeny's line, when an Arado pilot winged over them and called in their position to Skorzeny. The Austrian swore and spat, yelling at Fölkersam. "Herr Oberst, I would appreciate support on the west end." The Brandenburger nodded and whistled for his men, who had for the most part sat out the encounter thus far. They scrambled low across the snow before dropping into place on Skorzeny's exposed right. They did so just in time, because the Soviets had guessed at the airplane coming overhead's importance, and sprung to their feet. These men, unlike the first assault wave, had been handed PPSh-41s, perfect for close-range assault work. The Brandenburgers were similarly equipped - just outnumbered, ten or fifteen to one by Fölkersam's guess. He grimly lay across the ice, greatcoat fanned around him, and worked the submachine gun, tuning out the thought of their impending deaths.
Their presence did just enough, spoiling the Russian attack, which had expected to fall on an undefended flank. Skorzeny made a snap decision. "Werfers right!" he bellowed, and the flamethrower men scrambled across to cover the Brandenburger platoon. Valves opened, fuel hissed, and flame spat. Arcs of bright fire cut across the watery afternoon Siberian sun, shining in the air before falling to earth across the lead edge of the advancing Russians. The Reds stopped, but the flamethrower men paid a terrible price, as they always did. Men fell screaming as their fuel tanks were pinged, leaving them walking - or falling and flailing - torches. Still, they bought Skorzeny's position a little more time, and half of them fell back toward the center of his slowly contracting ring. They were the day's first significant casualties.
The Russians pulled back once more to lick their wounds, surprised once more at the ferocity and intensity of the German resistance, and repositioned for another attack. Zhivago was no fool, and knew what would come as soon as the flank attack had broken. That force scrambled backward as the Blitzes began to strike along that side. Skorzeny's position was ringed in fire to the south and west, and the Russians pulled back to consider their next move. Against every expectation, the Germans held the crossroad after six hours of fighting. Sheer weight of numbers should have carried it, but the Russians had been worn out by years of losing, and no longer had the stomach for endless bayonet charges. Zhivago had seen enough of them in his career, and by now was sick both of losses and casualties. He pulled back a hundred meters and wearily signaled the mortar teams. The position would not be taken directly or by enfilade. It would have to be taken by bombardment followed by assault. The mortar-snipers' hour had come.
---
Inside the breastwork, Skorzeny and Fölkersam squatted wearily. "So now I owe you," Skorzeny said with a crooked smile. The Brandenburger nodded. The Russians knew where they were, so now there was a fire lit, a coffee-pot boiling, and without rounds cracking overhead, men were coming off the line, to half-strength, to eat quickly and relieve their comrades. Small piles of yellow ice next to their fighting positions revealed where many had simply relieved themselves in place. It seemed for the first time as if some of them might live to nightfall. That was, of course, the moment that the first mortar round fell.
The Russian 160mm M1943 heavy mortar could throw ten forty-kilogram bombs a minute for five kilometers. The morning and early afternoon's assaults had pinpointed the German position well, so no ranging rounds were needed. The mortarmen had needed all of that time to haul their guns into place, sweating, heaving, and cursing against the mortars' ton weight. The ground was at least hard, so that the wheels did little to resist movement. Zhivago had preserved a whole brigade of thirty-two of these, and each mortar team had ten rounds of ammunition - they could in theory fire all three hundred and twenty rounds in one minute. Zhivago made a calculated gamble, threading men forward into the burnt-out wreckage of the forest to Skorzeny's front before the first lanyard was pulled. Again, the assault would be in regimental strength, along a very tight corridor. The signal to advance would be the first round's landing; he was quite certain that they would not be atop the breastwork by the time the last of that bombardment struck. There would be no reserve, because the imagined Soviet infinity of ammunition and manpower simply no longer existed.
Forty kilograms of explosive and metal landed on the steel-hard icy ground behind Skorzeny's breastwork, flinging shrapnel in all directions. The radio shelter was cut almost in half. Skorzeny had been looking at Fölkersam when the round hit; some instinct had propelled both of them flat beside the fire when it went off, and for the next sixty seconds, his entire world consisted of thunder, the smell of blood, and the incongruous image of the coffee-pot swaying merrily on its tripod, otherwise unharmed by an artillery bombardment the likes of which he had not experienced since France. He knew what this meant, and hoped only that enough men had survived to hold the crossroad. He lifted his head to look around. Where logs had been arranged into crude benches to eat, all that was left were splinters and a red smear. Fölkersam's hair had been clipped ridiculously along one side, but he, too, was otherwise unharmed, shaking himself and dusting his shoulders with the aplomb of a born aristocrat. Skorzeny had no time for such displays. "ACTION FRONT!" he yelled, gesturing madly and charging to the breastwork, where enough men remained to put up a skeleton defense.
The ripsaw whine sounded again, machine guns spraying death to their front. Wherever the gunners had gone down, other men had stepped in, seeing their salvation in constant fire. At least the remaining guns would stay fed, and whatever reservations they had once held about warping barrels were abandoned in the rush to keep the guns firing. Skorzeny took his part in the frenzy, mashing down on the clickers on his segment of front as the Reds reached the first log funnels. His voice, deep and bellowing and roaring, undercut the thunder of the detonating mines, the higher-pitched snarl of the machine guns, the constant, endless banging of the carbines. For one of the few times in his life, the Austrian giant was afraid, unconsciously praying to a god he didn't consciously care about that this be the last great Russian charge of the day.
It had to be. It must be. There simply was no way that they could hold against another charge - especially when the mustard-colored coats reached the breastwork, stumbling over the bodies of those before them. Skorzeny dropped the carbine, letting it hang slung around him, and pulled a pistol, banging away as the Reds came over the top. The roar-hiss of the flamethrowers met them, spraying streams of fire over them and turning "URRAH!" into wordless screams. Still the Red Army came. The floodgate had broken and Yevgraf Zhivago was on the rampage.
Adrian von Fölkersam's platoon knew what to do. They had fallen back on their trucks, desperately hauling them over on their sides to form a second barricade - a Ring Zero, if Skorzeny's logs were Ring One. They fired over the Hutier men's heads, yelling frantically at them to fall back, and Fölkersam himself waved his cap at Skorzeny, trying to draw his attention. The Austrian fell backward, openly weeping as he fired back over his shoulder. One round took a Soviet soldier in the chest, another in the face, and on the third, he simply dropped the magazine as it clicked empty. His hands slammed in a new magazine of their own volition as tears blurred his vision. "Bastards. Bastards. Bastards," he muttered, beyond comprehension of the situation beyond the need to kill and kill and kill.
The Soviets tried to scramble up the sides of the trucks, and the survivors learned to stay inside the rim of the bed, firing upward into the Red horde. A grenade came over the side, and a Brandenburger lunged for it, flinging it desperately upward. It detonated above the swarming Soviets, giving them a breathing space and deafening them. As they huddled among the trucks, the sun dropped below the horizon for the first time, the light failing completely, leaving them in the dark, surrounded by Red Army troops and barricaded only by trucks stolen from those same men.
Skorzeny lunged upward, his mind completely gone beyond the combat madness. He had heard about Wilhelm Volkmann's Pour le Merite, and how the two men who had gone out with him refused to speak of it. He had even tried to ply the big Irishman with drink, hoping that he'd have said something. He refused - and this was a man who had held the Kingsgate Lighthouse for days while the British Army had marched past. Had he been able to think consciously about what he was doing, he would have understood what had happened to Volkmann then, watching his company destroyed behind him.
He jerked one of the Red Army men upward by his throat, knife stabbing into the man's gut just as he registered his surprise. The next man on the hood of the truck caught the first on his bayonet, still surprised, and the Austrian's boot caught him in the chin, knocking him back on to the men below. The Austrian was silhouetted against the aurora, roaring and firing his last magazine down into the horde below. For a moment, they stood transfixed, unable to do anything but gape at this figure from ancient myth, Thor come to the Slavs. Then one man, braver than his comrades, stepped back, raising the rifle to his shoulder and sighting down the barrel. He worked the frost-stiff bolt and pulled the trigger. As ever, the Mosin-Nagant kicked like a mule. Otto Skorzeny toppled back into the tight circle of the trucks, blood and foam bubbling from a wound in the side of his chest.
He gasped and grabbed at the men who looked down at him, trying to form words that simply would not come. When he breathed in, no air reached his lungs, but the foam bubbled across his chest. Colors faded, then turned black and white. As the brightest stars faded to nothing and Fölkersam's men frantically tried to press the wound shut, he heard the only sound that mattered.
To the northeast, he heard the sputter of diesel engines. He smiled, eyes rolling back, and let his head fall on the frozen ground.
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Nearly caught up, at last, c0d5579! What an excellent AAR this has become. I do hope you continue.
The Kaiser is displeased at your priorities!
Not that I don't like your other AAR from an artistic viewpoint, it's just that to me the Nazis will always be nothing more than the embodiment of evil.
Not that I don't like your other AAR from an artistic viewpoint, it's just that to me the Nazis will always be nothing more than the embodiment of evil.