Last Flight to Stalingrad Graham Hurley (sight word books .TXT) 📖

bombs and at least two of the gaunt apartment blocks appeared to be on fire. As well, from time to time, he could hear the distant howl of Stuka sirens as they dived through the murk to find targets among the wreckage below. If there’s a choir in hell, thought Nehmann, it would sound like this.

‘It’s a shithole,’ Messner said. ‘You’ve talked to any of the Russian prisoners? Come here a year ago and the place was a model city, everything new, everything working. That’s why Stalin gave it his name. Now? You wonder what’s left to fight for.’

They’d arrived at the edge of the airfield. A handful of men were gathered around a brazier, warming their hands. What might have been coffee was bubbling in a bucket, suspended over the burning wood. Messner bent for the ladle lying in the snow. A corporal in a mix of Wehrmacht and Russian uniform wiped his mouth with the back of his hand and gave Messner his empty mug. Messner spooned coffee into the mug and passed it to Nehmann.

‘You first, Kamerad,’he said.

‘Kamerad?’

A new voice, rough, amused. Nehmann spun round. There was a smile on the battered face, which was unusual, but there was no mistaking the rest of him.

‘Schultz? Willi? What are you doing here?’

Messner was looking surprised.

‘You know each other already?’

‘We do.’ Schultz nodded.

‘Then why didn’t you tell me?’

‘You never asked. You’ve been with Nehmann for a while? Then you’ll know what we all know. The man is a wraith, a phantom, here today, gone tomorrow, which maybe explains his charm. What you see is never what you get, and what you get is often a very big surprise. I thank you for delivering him intact, Messner. He’s mine now, and I’ll make sure he doesn’t come to grief. Alles gut?’

Messner nodded and extended a hand to Nehmann. No Hitler salute. Nehmann watched him as he turned on his heel and made his way back towards the aircraft. Nehmann still had the mug of coffee.

‘Give it to someone else,’ Schultz grunted. ‘There’s much better where we’re going.’

*

Schultz was driving a VW Kübelwagen. The canvas top was shredded and where the bonnet and the spare tyre had once been was open to the elements, the ribbed metal floor of the cargo space already rusting. Schultz stirred the engine into life and told Nehmann to get in. A couple of days ago, he said, he’d made the mistake of leaving the KW out in the open too close to the bomb line. The Ivans had been busy with their heavy mortars that night and a couple of bombs had straddled the vehicle. Next day, engineers had got the engine at the back running again but the little runaround had definitely lost its looks.

‘Much like the rest of us, Nehmann. Whatever they tell you at Tatsinskaya, this place isn’t where anyone sane would ever want to be.’

They were bumping along a cratered road towards the towering smoke that marked the city centre. Waste land to the right seemed to serve as a field and Nehmann caught a glimpse of an old woman bent over what looked like the carcase of a horse. She had some kind of blade in her hand, and she was sawing back and forth, pawing at her shawl from time to time to ward off the snow. To Nehmann’s surprise, the area seemed abandoned and there was little evidence that most of Paulus’s Sixth Army had come to a halt here.

‘People go underground, Nehmann. It’s human nature. Whether it’s rain or high explosive, you get your head down.’

Nehmann nodded. Schultz was driving fast, zigzagging around one pothole after another. It was snowing hard now, driving fresh needles into Nehmann’s face. There were bucket seats in the open KW,and he hung onto the bare metal of the grab handles, his hands already numb. He knew that Schultz’s connections extended to every corner of Berlin’s intelligence establishment and guessed that he had a secure line to Abwehr headquarters.

‘So, what are you telling them, Willi?’

‘Nothing. Yet.’

‘Because nothing’s happened?’

Schultz, fighting the wheel as they skidded on yet another patch of ice, threw him a look.

‘We took prisoners last night. One of them was a lad from Georgia, one of your lot. He knew more about Sixth Army than we did.’

‘How come?’

‘He’s in and out of Chuikov’s headquarters. He told us they’d intercepted a message from the General Staff main intelligence department.’

‘In Berlin, you mean?’

‘Ja.The lad had it word perfect. He said it made him laugh. You want to know why? Listen to this…’ Steering one-handed, Schultz fetched a scrap of paper from the breast pocket of his tunic. He flattened it against the middle of the steering wheel, squinting hard through the driving snow. ‘Stalingrad has been taken by brilliant German forces. Russia has been cut in two parts, north and south, and will soon collapse in her death throes.’Schultz refolded the message and tucked it carefully back into his tunic. ‘Taken? Death throes?’ He gestured towards the smoke. ‘How does any of that sound?’

Nehmann said he didn’t know. Vasily Chuikov was the Soviet Army Commander in Stalingrad, charged by Stalin with holding the city whatever the cost. Gossip back at the airfield gave him gold-crowned teeth and a deep bandit laugh, both of which had endeared him to Nehmann.

‘So what’s the truth?’ he asked.

‘The truth is we’ve got a fight on our hands. The Ivans are still dug in around the Mamayev Kurgan and we can’t winkle them out. They’re also hanging on in that fucking great grain silo down by the river. We’ve shelled it non-stop for days. It has to be full of smoke and dust. It must be hell even to breathe in there, let alone fight, and as far as we can tell they’ve got nothing but a couple of old machine guns, Maxims,can you believe that? They must have run out of water by now. They must be pissing in the cooling jackets. We sent an interpreter