The trucks carrying the POWs had stalled outside Stadthagen, the snow falling so heavily and the temperature dropping so fast that by nightfall, black ice covered the snow-plowed road from the huge fuel depot twenty miles behind the front, so that the prisoners were made to get out and push the trucks up a long one-in-twenty incline. The guards were yelling at them to work harder, but to no avail, as prisoners like David Brentwood, Waite, and Thelman, despite loud exclamations of intent, merely leaned against the trucks, grimacing ferociously but doing as little as possible to aid and abet their captors. Military police were in evidence everywhere, directing convoys of tank refuelers moving slowly out of the dump of countless drums of fuel hidden under enormous camouflage nets in woods several miles north of Stadthagen.
David Brentwood was surprised to see, in lines of other prisoners all wearing distinct white POW armbands, hundreds of Bundeswehr troops. Before the American airborne had left for their ill-fated drop outside the DB pocket, they had been told that the only NATO troops they might run into, should they be blown off course, would be members of the Dutch Forty-First Army.
“Looks like the whole German army surrendered,” Brentwood said casually, blowing on his frozen fingers. He had no idea that his comment to Thelman about why there were so many Germans would trigger a series of events that would have a profound effect on his life and thousands of others’ in a chain of fate over which he had no control.
“Yeah,” added Thelman. “Thought we were told we’d only be running into the Dutchies. Where’d all these Krauts come from?”
“Germans to you,” said someone amid the scrabble of boots and curses of men clambering back into the trucks, their breath in the frozen air creating a mist that momentarily made the four Stasi guards look as if they were in a steam bath.
“All right,” said Thelman. “Germans. No offense.”
“How the hell should we know where they came from?” retorted an infantryman grumpily. “What is this—’Let’s Make a Deal’? What’s it matter? We’re all in the same boat.”
“Actually,” put in the English lieutenant, “I think they’re from the Territorials.”
“Who are they when they’re at home?” asked Waite in his cockney twang.
“Reserves,” the lieutenant replied. “Damn well trained, too. Not frontline troops, of course.”
“Like us!” said Brentwood. It got a good laugh.
“Touché.” said the Englishman. “No, what I mean—”
“Schweig dock!” one of the four guards called out.
“Up your doc, too!” said Thelman.
The guard began shouting again, but the British lieutenant ignored him, as the other three guards didn’t seem to care one way or the other.
“Bundeswehr Territorials,” the lieutenant continued as the truck skewed dangerously on a patch of black ice before straightening. “Territorials were assigned to man and maintain all NATO transport in Northern Command. Unfortunately, they ran out of gas — thanks to our SPETS friends, who got behind our lines and cut both Amsterdam and Rotterdam pipelines. Ergo — the Territorials in our midst.”
“Like Doug Freeman did in Korea,” said one of the Americans.
“He didn’t use enemy uniforms,” said David.
“Well,” said the English lieutenant wryly, “I don’t think Americans look much like North Koreans, do they?”
“Suppose not,” answered David, not quite knowing whether the Englishman was being sarcastic or merely gently matter-of-fact.
“How do you know he didn’t put South Koreans in gook uniforms?” asked a disgruntled signaler.
David felt the man was less interested in finding out than in venting his spleen against the SPETS who’d deprived him, like David, of his uniform and who’d left him near death with cold.
“He knows,” Thelman said, pointing to David. “He was there.”
“Really?” asked the Englishman somewhat haughtily.
“Yeah, really,” replied Thelman. “Silver Star.”
Brentwood was acutely embarrassed, but the Englishman’s voice lost any trace of haughtiness. “I say, well done! Brent-ward, isn’t it?”
“Brentwood,” said David, feeling conspicuous.
“Silver Star and no fucking brains, right, Brentwood?” an American ribbed him. “Signed up again.”
“Right!” said David boyishly, grateful for the laughter that swept through the truck and started the guards shouting again. This time all of the guards were joining in, one of them waving the AKM as the truck slowed a hundred yards from the main entrance to the fuel dump, which was almost obliterated in the swirling snow as lines of prisoners carried 160-liter drums on stretcherlike pallets to waiting trucks on the opposite side of the road. A Stasi oberst approached the truck, tiny balled snow bouncing off his uniform like fine hail. “English? Amerikaner!”
“Yes,” answered the lieutenant, being the most senior rank.
“You will be issued with armbands, which you must wear at all times.”
“When are we to dine?” asked the Englishman.
“Who are you?” asked the oberst.
“Lieutenant Grimsby, Royal Engineers. And you are?”
“Oberst Hotter.”
The lieutenant jumped down from the tailgate and gave a snappy salute. “Very well, Colonel Hoffer. I must request that these men be fed as soon as possible. We’ve been traveling all day and, as I’m sure you’re aware under the rules, specifically agreed to by both NATO and Warsaw Pact under the Gorbachev Protocols—”
David wasn’t listening. He was far more interested in the fact that the fuel dump wasn’t in the old NATO prepo site after all but had been cunningly moved. No wonder the NATO bombers had been unsuccessful in penetrating the old prepo sites.
What would Freeman do? Not sit on his ass whining about the next meal, that’s for sure. It was a God-given opportunity. The idea literally caught his breath for a moment, the row developing between the Stasi colonel and the disdainful Englishman over the issue of “appropriate apparel” and “victualing “ passing over him. Why hadn’t he thought of it earlier? he wondered. But that was easy. His only concern, like everyone else in the truck, had been to survive. “Defensive driving,” Freeman used to call it derisively drilling them that defensive thinking was “a disease for the timid… defensive tactics excuses for not attacking. A goddamn torpor looking for reasons to fail.”
David could still see him aboard the chopper carrier before they’d lifted off on the Pyongyang raid against “Kim Il Runt,” as Freeman had called the dictator Kim Il Sung. David hadn’t known what torpor meant until he’d heard the general use it.
There was a sudden crack, silence, then bedlam in the truck, the guards outside firing into the air. “What the—” began David. In the pale yellow light of the tailgate, he could see the Englishman spread-eagle in the snow, a dark pool round his head, a look of utter amazement on his face.
The oberst slapped the pistol back into his holster. “Ja! — ” he was saying, a smile on his face that David recognized immediately as the mad look spawned of sustained battlefield stress. “Ja—now you see. You will do as you are told.” He turned to the guards, one of whom looked as astounded at what had happened as the dead Englishman, and rattled out a series of sharp orders. Turning to the prisoners in the truck, he informed them, “You will go over to the depot. Two men to each drum, and you will load them back into this truck. Is this understood?” No one answered, and as the guards motioned them out and they dropped down to the snow, one by one they looked down at the dead Englishman, no one speaking out of respect and fear.
In the distance, muffled by the snow, they could hear the steady crump of Marshal Kirov’s thousand guns that kept pounding away in a massive creeping barrage through the DB pocket, to stun the already battle-weary Americans and British, as the Russian advance moved inexorably westward. Now and then the sound of the guns would change as the creeping barrage shifted, when the Russian gunners, after having “bracketed” an area, laid the shells down in a different sector to confuse and undo any of the defenders’ attempts to predict where they would be hit next.
David, clutching his blanket and shivering, plaintively held up his hand, reminding Thelman of a timid student asking for permission to go to the washroom.
“Ja “ asked the oberst brusquely.
“Sir — may I bury him?”
“You want his clothes, his boots, ja?”
David shrugged ingratiatingly. The oberst nodded to one of the guards and then told Brentwood, “Be quick. We must be loading the trucks in twenty minutes.”
“Could I have a spade?” asked Brentwood.
“Use your hands,” said the oberst.
“But, sir,” David started to protest, then stopped himself. “Thank you, sir.” The oberst had turned away from him, heading across the road toward the entrance to the dump.
“Schnell!” said the guard whom the oberst had ordered to follow Brentwood, waving the machine gun toward a ditch and the snow-covered field across from the truck in the opposite direction to where the prisoners were being marched.
David motioned to the guard that he needed help carrying the lieutenant off the road across the ditch. The guard obviously understood his gestures but wasn’t going to help, instead indicating brusquely that Brentwood should hurry up.
By the time Freeman was out of the field hospital’s OR, the advancing thunder of the Russian guns was barely twenty miles away east of Bielefeld, the Russians having already penetrated the defenses south of Bielefeld beyond the Weser River. Simultaneously other Soviet tank and helicopter surges out of Frankfurt-am-Main to the south were hammering at the fragmented NATO line, forcing what was left of the Belgian Sixteenth Armored, Bundeswehr Second Mechanized, and the American Third and Eleventh Armored to try to contain the ever-widening arrowhead of the enemy advance swelling and curving north from Fulda in a left hook encircling movement, heading toward Krefeld and Gelsenkirchen.
If this left hook coming from the south was successful, Supreme Allied Command Europe knew that the hundred-mile-long Dortmund-Bielefeld pocket could not retreat, the Rhine behind them cut. Yet SACEUR, in having to commit NATO forces to the south, were forced to deny the pocket vitally needed reinforcements which could provide rearguard actions to effect withdrawal from the pocket.
“You can’t give the general that!” Major Norton advised the doctor as he prepared to give Freeman a shot of Demerol to ease the pain after the operation he’d had to relieve complications of paresis.
“Why not?” asked the harried doctor.
Major Norton, whom Freeman had seconded to his G-2 staff, did not know everything about the general yet, but Al Banks had made a point of telling him early on that the general was a man who eschewed medication, boasting on occasion that the strongest pill he’d ever taken was an aspirin and that anything stronger than the medical corpsman’s APC was for “goddamned sissies.”
“Are you serious?” asked the exhausted doctor scornfully. “The pain’s acute after that surgery.”
“What exactly’s wrong with him?” asked Norton.
“He’s got paresis. Insufficient blood supply to the spinal cord. It’s a partial paralysis, but he’ll get over it. Meanwhile I’d like to make him as comfortable as I can.”
Freeman stirred, his eyes opening briefly, then closing again, his voice slow, raspy with dehydration. “Al?”
The doctor looked down at him, loudly informing him, “General — I’m going to give you a shot. It’ll ease your discomfort.”
The general tried to turn his head. “Al — what the hell’s—” He slipped back to unconsciousness. The doctor gave him the shot.
“I hope that won’t make him confused when he wakes up,” Norton admonished him.
“Well, without it, he won’t be thinking at all, Major. Anyway — it doesn’t really matter, does it? No one’s getting out of this abattoir.”
For a moment Norton thought the doctor was talking only about the hospital — until he realized the doctor meant the entire pocket. Norton had to admit to himself that the latest batch of aerial reconnaissance photos still showed no sign of Russian tanks with fuel drums attached. It confirmed Freeman’s last-minute discovery on the way back from Heidelberg that the Russian tanks were not short of gas. As soon as the front wave of Kirov’s tanks were on empty, rather than having to stop, sitting ducks for the stationary NATO tanks dug in defilade positions, already low on ammunition and with no fuel reserve, a second wave of Russian tanks would sweep forward in echelons to cover the first as they refueled.
The other members of Freeman’s staff told Norton that it was the first time in Freeman’s career that the general had ordered a defensive strategy, hoping to convert it to an offensive one when the Russians’ overextended supply line brought their tanks to a stop. Southern Command was pressing Freeman’s staff to release the tanks, arguing that they might as well rush the breaches in the DB perimeter. But without oil and the tank-killing Thunderbolts, it was adjudged by Freeman’s staff that any such move would only trade short-term gain for a massive overall loss, as well as giving away the defilade positions to the Russian choppers, which, though hampered by the blizzard conditions, were on infrared, the vacated defilade positions merely providing the Soviets with more gaps in the line.
“There are too many holes in the dike,” conceded Norton, “and not enough fingers to plug them.”
The final blow to the already rock-bottom morale of the American, British, and Bundeswehr divisions fighting for their lives in the pocket was the news that Soviet SPETS who had infiltrated the rear areas had blown up fuel reserves west of Munster and that Freeman’s mine field/defilade strategy was not working, the Russians driving prisoners before them to clear the mine fields. The choice for the prisoners had been a stark and simple one: run for your lives or get shot. In some places to the south, particularly near Leverkusen, it didn’t work, prisoners refusing to be used as human detonators. But in other areas they ran toward the lines, blown into oblivion, opening corridors for the Soviet armor-borne troops to pour through.
Allied helicopters, roughly equal in number to the Soviets’ were, in general, superior fighting machines, and for the most part, the Allied pilots could literally fly rings about their Russian counterparts, but as in the Thunderbolts’ case, the Allied choppers were short of ammunition and missiles of all types. Compounding NATO’s problems in the first few hours of Marshal Kirov’s attack was the Soviets’ dropping of nonnuclear EMP — electromagnetic pulse — bombs, knocking out all radio communications, every microchip circuit within a twenty-mile radius blown, leaving NATO’s frontline commanders without communications while Kirov’s divisions stayed in close touch with each other via Kirov’s superbly trained motorcycle courier battalions. The DB pocket was becoming an abattoir.
On Marshal Kirov’s general staff, only the marshal was worried. He held the awesome responsibility if anything went wrong, and he understood better than any of his subordinates that for all the years since World War II, and especially after the defense cuts of the Gorbachev years, the Soviet Union’s victory in the West had to be a quick victory — a victory of quantity over quality — before the Americans and their damnable ability to resupply had a chance to make any difference. Still, as the battle wore on, the fact that the NATO forces were now being split in two raised to a certainty the possibility of driving them into the sea before the Americans could muster the wherewithal for a counterattack.
Shaking with cold, David Brentwood had quickly dug a shallow grave in the snow. As he dragged the Englishman’s body into the depression and removed the Englishman’s clothes, he felt as unobtrusively as he could for a cigarette lighter. There was none. Maybe it was inside the boots. But here, too, he drew a blank. He was sure he’d seen the Englishman smoking, but perhaps he’d got a light from one of the guards. He looked about for anything that he could make a rude cross from, but there was nothing. The guard was telling him to hurry up again. Quickly putting on the Englishman’s uniform and taking the Englishman’s dog tags, he heaped up the snow and placed a bramble as the only marker he could find for the makeshift grave. He bowed his head for a moment and then trudged slowly back to the ditch, slipping the dog tags over his head, forlornly carrying the snow-sodden blanket with his left hand, jumping the ditch, breaking his fall with the right.
As he got up, he threw the blanket into the guard’s face, shoved the AKM up into the air, and kicked the man in the groin. He heard the explosion of air from the Stasi as the guard fell back into the ditch, cracking the ice, David falling with him, bringing his knee up to the guard’s chin. There was a crunch of bone, and for a second David didn’t know whether it was his knee or the guard’s jaw. Either way, he finished the job with the butt of the AKM. Quickly he took the dead guard’s coat off him, but the man’s torso fell back into the broken ice so that when Brentwood reached for the man’s undershirt, it was sodden, as was the rest of his uniform. “Damn!” said David under his breath, but he did find a lighter. He could do it, he guessed, by cutting out a strip from the truck cabin’s plastic upholstery, but the problem was, he didn’t know how long it would take.
He heard voices as the men started to return from the dump. He wouldn’t have enough time to hot-wire the truck — they’d cut him down before he got behind its steering wheel.
“All right,” he muttered to himself, determined to do a little SPETS number of his own, “it’s time we evened the score.” He tore off the guard’s dog tags, and inside thirty seconds he’d put on the guard’s sodden coat, stuffed the two grenades the guard was carrying into the coat pocket, put on the helmet, and started running to the last truck in the line. He could hear the colonel’s voice and the muffled thud of an oil drum and a guard shouting at the two men who had dropped it. His back to the other prisoners, now, he guessed, about fifty yards off, he lifted the collar of the guard’s coat high around his neck and fired a long burst across the ditch into the field, screaming, “Amerikaner! Hah!”
Behind him he heard prisoners dropping to the ground, the other guards running through the snowstorm to join him at the end of the line of trucks, and the oberst shouting orders. He moved quickly back down alongside the ditch to the first truck, unscrewed the gas tank cover, snapped the AKM’s swing butt hard on the stock, and using its bayonet, cut through the neck of his T-shirt to make a wick for the gas tank.
But the guards were closing faster than he’d thought, and he still wouldn’t have time to get into the truck. He stuffed half the T-shirt strip into the tank, lit the bottom of the taper, and slid down the embankment toward the ditch, running as fast as he could away from the line of trucks. He guessed it would be no more than five seconds before the truck would blow, and instinctively everyone around it would hit the road for a few minutes, afraid to go to any of the other vehicles behind it. He slipped on the ice, crashing headlong into the snow-covered side of the ditch, the blizzard swirling about him, and glanced back the fifty yards or so — the trucks dim blots in the rolling snow.
There was no explosion — maybe the taper had been too long and they’d seen it in time, or maybe it hadn’t been as dry as he thought. He kept running, and although hot from the effort, the sodden clothes turned his perspiration to ice. He paused to catch his breath. The unexpected, the DI had always told Thelma and Stumble-Ass — go for the unexpected.
Gasping, the icy air searing his lungs, he wondered how far he could get before they recaptured him. He heard shouts coming from the direction of the parked convoy and then an ominous silence, except for the howl of the blizzard. Crawling up to the top of the embankment, he looked for the trucks again, but they had vanished in the white-out, and though he knew the dump was opposite him, a hundred yards or so across the road, the loss of depth perception in the white-out created the dangerously comfortable illusion that because he couldn’t see his enemy, he was safe.
Then, beneath the wail of the blizzard, he heard a swishing noise, faint yet distinct — coming closer.