Russian Front (19) Hugh looked at the controls. He knew that a tank was steered by braking the left or right tracks depending on which direction you wanted to go. He could see the levers for doing that. But a three-point turn in No Man’s Land would be suicide, if they hadn’t effectively committed that act already. He pushed his heavy felt boot down on to what he assumed was the clutch. The tank stopped immediately, rocking forward slightly. Wrenching the gear stick he found reverse in a few seconds and let the clutch out. It nearly stalled. He adjusted the accelerator, jammed his foot on the clutch and tried again, more slowly. The tank shuddered and began to roll backwards. They were heading back towards their own lines. But the change in direction had let the Germans know who had got the upper hand inside the T34. It was less than minute before machine gun bullets hammered across the outside of the tank. Hugh looked through the vision slits at the German lines. The tank had seemed to be approaching them at breakneck speed, now they were receding all too slowly. What seemed like scores of machine gun muzzles were twinkling at him. There was a larger flash and an explosion just to the right. Then there was another, nearer, deafening noise. A moment later the cabin of the tank filled with cordite smoke. He turned around to see Tania dumping the shell she had fired from the tank’s cannon on to the floor of the tank where it rolled around as the tank bumped along the rough ground. She might not know how to drive but she knew how to load and fire a 76.2mm gun – she had seen the artillery version used in anger enough times. Hugh could see that she wasn’t bothering to pick her targets or attempt to rotate the turret, just loading and firing. Hugh looked through the vision slits. Smoke filled his view. Tania had found some smoke shells and was firing these in the general direction of the German lines. Hugh reached across and pulled the cocking lever of the machine gun on the right of the driver’s position. He fired off a belt at the enemy lines for good measure. There was nothing really to aim at, no infantry had appeared, but it would help to keep their heads down. But Tania had run out of smoke shells. The air in front of them cleared and mortars and an artillery piece bracketed them and shook the tank. Hugh climbed up and risked a quick look out of the hatch to their rear. They only had about a hundred yards to go. Then their luck with the tank ran out. The vehicle shook and slued as one of its tracks was blown off. It ground to a halt and stalled, this time for good. Hugh looked at Tania. Her eyes were wide in her face, stained with the Major’s blood. ‘How far to go?’ ‘Too far to run,’ he answered. ‘They’ll spot us as soon as we come out of the hatch.’ But something had occurred to him while he had been pumping bullets from the tank’s machine gun. How had the Major gained access from the tank from his foxhole? He certainly hadn’t climbed up and jumped in the top hatch; Hugh and Tania would have seen him. Hugh reached down and pulled the Major’s body in its blood-soaked camouflage shroud away from the floor of the tank. The hood came off and he had a glimpse of a bald head – the Major looked at least thirty-five. Beneath the sniper’s body was a newly cut hatch - the Major’s secret entrance. Hugh reached down and lifted it open. One part of this mind marveled. How had the sappers managed to cut that at night without being detected? He tapped Tania on the leg and they squirmed down through the hatch on to the rubbly ground. They began to squirm towards their lines. If they could just keep the tank between them and the sights of the German machine gunners, they might have a chance. It worked for a while. Then, as they neared the safety of their trenches, the Germans caught sight of them. Bullets whipped up Earth. They got up and ran. They were nearly there when Hugh was hit in the knee, the bullet shaving the left side of his patella and making him stumble. Tania stopped to help. Hugh was having trouble breathing – he must have been bleeding more than he realized from the chest wounds inflicted by Tania. They fell, as if in slow motion, down the side of a trench. Hands were around his shoulders. Tania was being led away. He wanted to say something to her, he didn’t know what. Then he knew that it could only have been goodbye. Even as he lost consciousness he perceived that the men holding him were Politrook. Then he was lying down. What was Sergei grinning at? Epilogue EXMOOR The bus creaked out of Dulverton. It was a freezing day and Hugh’s knee ached under bandages. Almost without thinking he touched his chest. The stitches had only just been taken out of his cuts a couple of days before, at a military hospital in London. He was dressed in new civilian clothes, courtesy of Fortune’s shadowy outfit. The overcoat and leather gloves were excellent quality, and he needed them in the unheated bus. He seemed to have been cold for weeks. All of a sudden he missed the beating sun of the desert. He looked again at the copy of the popular daily newspaper that Lesley had kept for him. GERMAN SPY-BUTCHER IN SUICIDE SHOCK ‘DIDN’T HAVE THE GUTS TO FACE MURDER TRIAL’ SAYS DETECTIVE Hans-Günter Eichmann, the German spy caught red-handed in a dramatic chase on Exmoor three weeks ago, has hanged himself in Wandsworth Prison, the Home Office revealed yesterday. Eichmann had been accused of the murder of Violet Jenkins, twenty-four, an innocent young typist. Miss Jenkins had apparently befriended Eichmann and offered him shelter in her Bristol flat. Detectives are convinced that Eichmann killed himself because he was unable to face the indignity of a murder trial. Precise details of his activities while in this country have been withheld for security reasons, but Miss Jenkins is believed to be his only victim. When asked if Eichmann was typical of the kind of brutal, sadistic Nazi sent to spy on Britain, Detective-Sergeant Johnson commented, “Yes, I expect he probably is.” Asked if the Nazi coward had taken his own life so that he would not have to ‘face the music’ of British justice, the detective added, “That’s very likely true.” A number of German spies have been caught, tried and hanged - in strict accordance with the Geneva Convention - since the beginning of hostilities. It had taken Hugh ten days to get back from Stalingrad. He had regained consciousness in a hospital tent on the far side of the Volga. Apparently, during the night before he and Tania fought the Major, the Volga had finally frozen over completely, allowing an ice road to be built. He had been taken across in one of the first field ambulances to be seen in Stalingrad for many months. If it were not for that he might have died in the desperately overcrowded dressing stations in the city. In the ambulance his head was thoroughly if inexpertly bandaged by Sergei to prevent him being recognized. Once his wounds had been dressed, Sergei had accompanied him all the way back to Moscow on a hospital train. The official story was that ‘Yuri’ had died of wounds after defeating the Major in a sniper duel. Tania had been given a medal, and ‘Yuri’ had posthumously been awarded the Order of Lenin. Hugh had protested, ‘But Tania killed him, nobody else. She practically cut his heart out with a bayonet. She nearly did for me in the process. All I did was hold him down. She should have got the big gong.’ Sergei refilled his vodka glass in the private compartment of the train as it rolled across the seemingly endless snowbound steppe. ‘Our betters in the Kremlin decided that it would be bad for the soldiers’ morale if a woman was credited with killing such an adversary. The victor had to be a man. Russians are terribly old-fashioned about that kind of thing.’ ‘What are they afraid of?’ asked Hugh irritably, sipping the vodka, ‘That women might demand the vote?’ ‘Oh, nobody gets the vote over here old chap,’ Sergei replied in a wryly. ‘Our betters have decided that we’re better off without it.’ Once in Moscow, Hugh was driven to the British Embassy, a beautiful mansion across the river from the Kremlin. Here he was warned not to go near the windows if he didn’t want to be court-martialled. He mooched about for a couple of days, relieved not to have to wear his bandage disguise. He discovered that not staring out the window is the hardest thing in the world to do when you’re bored stiff. At first it looked as if he might not get a seat on any of the flights to Britain. There was talk of sending him up to Murmansk to travel home on one of the destroyers escorting the Arctic convoys. This prospect rather alarmed him, despite the assurances of a naval attaché that the U-boats only attacked the ships on their way to Murmansk, never on the way back. ‘After all, the merchant ships are empty on the way back. The Kriegsmarine wouldn’t waste a torpedo just on you, would they old boy?’ was how it had been put to him. Then, as so often happens in any Army, he was suddenly given five minutes to get his kit together. An American diplomat had been taken ill and there was one place left on a Liberator bound for Prestwick. He had vaguely wanted to stay in Moscow to have a final drink with Sergei, whom he had started to warm to on the long journey back from the Front, and also get some news of Tania. But, within an hour of being told to get ready, he was in the cavernous stomach of the big airplane as it lumbered down the runway. That girl Lesley, whom he had briefly seen before she whisked Sally away at Fortune’s headquarters – it seemed like months before – met his train at King’s Cross. She took him to the office where he was given a replacement identity card, civilian clothes, back pay and official notification of a month’s sick leave. ‘They had a spy looking for you all the time you were away,’ Lesley had told him, picking a piece of fluff from his new overcoat. ‘But we caught him. I don’t like to claim too much credit, but he had actually found his way to your parents’ home in Somerset. I put the hounds on him. Buy me dinner tonight and I’ll tell you all about it.’ They had a very pleasant evening in a basement restaurant where the menu hardly reflected the strictures of rationing in late 1942. Lesley suggested that they return to her flat for coffee – ‘why pay for it when I can make us some?’ – and, when they got back to her studio, Hugh got the definite impression that more than coffee was on offer. But he made an excuse and left her flat for his hotel after half an hour. Walking back down to Piccadilly by the light of a hunter’s moon, he told himself he was a fool. He almost turned around to go back to her flat and invite himself in for another cup of coffee. She was certainly very attractive: thick black wavy hair, white skin and big dark eyes. Standing on a street corner, torn with indecision, he let his imagination run. He pictured himself caressing her breasts and stroking her nipples in the hissing gas firelight of her small living room. Kissing her mouth. Brushing aside silken underwear and running his fingers lightly up her thighs. As he imagined turning her naked body around and pushing the pale cheeks of her rump apart, his hips moved forward involuntarily. ‘Everything all right, sir?’ said a woman’s voice, flashing her torch briefly in Swayne’s face. In the blackness he hadn’t noticed the approach of the two female police officers. Jesus Christ, he thought. He thrust his hands in his raincoat pockets. ‘Yes, fine, thanks – um - officer. I was just on my way back to my hotel.’ ‘And where would that be, sir?’ Swayne looked at her. He had forgotten the name of the hotel. ‘May I see your identity card, sir?’ It took him the best part of five minutes to satisfy them that he wasn’t any kind of shady character. He couldn’t blame them. He was, after all, hanging about a street corner in Soho. The infuriating aspect was that both policewomen were attractive, if rather older than he. He experienced a mad urge to ask them if they wanted to come back to his hotel for a night-cap. The wounded English marksman hero of Stalingrad, unheralded in his own country, limped back to his hotel to sleep. He had been in action too long, he decided. He needed a rest somewhere sane. Somewhere where the rule book hadn’t been torn up. * * * * * The bus ground over yet another small hill and there was Hawkstone. He felt a tremendous sense of relief. A feeling of coming home. And he didn’t want to go back to the bloody war, either. Maybe he could find a Blighty posting, a cushy number. He had killed his seven. That made him think of Montague. Where on Earth was he? He rang his mother from the post office and she drove to pick him up. ‘We have a guest for Christmas,’ she announced. ‘Who is it? Aunt Margaret?’ He didn’t mind one way or the other. ‘You’ll see.’ So it probably was Aunt Margaret. At least he could play chess with her. Nobody else in the family was interested in chess. In the house, he was about to go upstairs when his mother guided him into the sitting room. Something was going on. His mother liked surprising people. Hugh and his father hated surprises. There was Sally, standing by the fire, a cup of tea in her hand. The late afternoon sun reddened her face. ‘Sally’s staying with us over Christmas. I’ve given her your room. You don’t mind sleeping down here, do you darling?’ END
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