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

next to emerge. The sight of Schultz’s automatic brought him to a halt. He demanded to know what was going on.

‘We have custody of the prisoner,’ Schultz growled. ‘That’s all you need to know.’

‘We?’

‘Myself and my Kameraden.’ He gestured at the watching faces. ‘The Bolsheviks turned the world on its head. Maybe we’re doing something similar.’

‘That’s treason,’ Kalb said. ‘And you know what happens to traitors.’

‘Treason is your word, my friend. I can think of a number of others. The prisoner will be safe in our hands. Any complaints, I suggest you address them to Admiral Canaris in Berlin. This man is an important intelligence asset. These last few weeks he’s earned the Reich’s gratitude. I think you’ll find it pays not to waste men like that.’

There came a murmur of agreement from the ever-growing mob of partygoers. Yet more had appeared around the corner of the church.

Kalb glanced back at his men, then shrugged. His body language spoke volumes. Not now, he seemed to be saying. We’ll take care of this later. He stepped past Schultz, then stopped again, barely centimetres from Nehmann.

‘You’re Goebbels’ little monkey, aren’t you?’ Dead eyes behind the mask. ‘He told me you’d be here.’

28

STALINGRAD, NOVEMBER 1942

Two days later, the temperature plunged to minus eighteen degrees and forecasters warned of an impending storm. Frozen clumps of horse dung, rock-hard, littered the streets. Nehmann watched men from a bicycle company wheeling their machines past the bus depot, needles of ice hanging from their nostrils. Listen hard between spasms of artillery fire, and you could hear the grinding of ice floes drifting down the river.

Then, overnight, the wind picked up, and Nehmann awoke to the metallic clatter of corrugated iron sheets, torn loose by the gale, cartwheeling away across the apron of asphalt where the buses had once parked. Soon the falling snow became a full-scale blizzard and when he ventured out again, accompanying Schultz to yet another interview, the corpse of the city lay under a thick white shroud.

Schultz was worried about Standartenführer Kalb. He’d done his best to locate SS headquarters but had so far drawn a blank. Just the mention of the men in black was enough to seal most lips and, in the end, he’d had to resort to a long conversation with Nehmann. Nehmann was reluctant to talk about Goebbels but Schultz had picked up enough to know that the little Georgian had incurred some kind of debt to his Minister, and that Kalb had probably been tasked with obtaining settlement. Himmler and Goebbels, he said, were on the best of terms. Which in turn put Nehmann in a position of some danger.

‘You think Goebbels has the ear of the SS?’ Nehmann asked.

‘Yes.’

‘How do you know?’

‘Because in the Abwehr we follow their every fucking move. Himmler knows where the power lies. That means Hitler. Hitler has always had a soft spot for Goebbels’ wife, the saintly Magda, whore that she is, and as for the man himself, Hitler has him in the palm of his hand. Your little boss has always been halfway up the Führer’s arse, which happens to suit the Führer very nicely because the man is clever, too. He’s a believer. He makes things happen. And when he needs a favour, he knows he can rely on Hitler’s backing. Believe it or not, that puts the whole of the fucking SS at his disposal. Something you’d be wise to bear in mind.’

Schultz, ever practical, had laid hands on a bodyguard for Nehmann, an enormous infantryman called Ernst Grimberger. The Bavarian was a dog-handler by trade and had somehow taught an Alsatian called Mitzi to detect anti-vehicle mines laid during the chaotic days of the Soviet retreat. Most of the mines had now been located and dealt with, leaving Grimberger at a loose end. Schultz, who had highly placed contacts at Sixth Army headquarters, secured Grimberger’s service in turn for a guarantee that Werner Nehmann would continue to put General Paulus and his men in the best possible light.

‘Go nowhere without Ernst,’ Schultz told Nehmann. ‘This man’s like his dog. He can smell shit like Kalb at a thousand metres. He’s as close as you’ll get to safe.’

And so Nehmann, after his brief interlude in Berlin, began to write again. Mitzi was an obvious place to start and Ernst was delighted with the results. The story centred on a truckload of badly injured men from the front line en route to the airfield at Pitomnik where they were to await evacuation. Mitzi loped ahead, nose to the ground, tail wagging, and despite several centimetres of frozen snow she still managed to find the anti-tank mine that would have blown the truck apart. The wounded men were on special rations and every single one of them insisted on sharing their good fortune with Mitzi. The story was, of course, a fiction but Ernst didn’t seem to care. Had a mine really been there, he insisted, then she’d definitely have found it. So, who’s making a fuss about whether it’s true or not?

*

On 11 November, in a last spasm of violence, Richthofen’s Stukas and battle groups newly organised by Sixth Army HQ made a final bid to winkle the Ivans out of their positions in the ever-shrinking pocket that was their last remaining hold on the city. The Russians, as ever, fought like tigers. A handful of them were forced back to defend a narrow strip of land barely seventy metres from the riverbank.

That evening, Nehmann talked to a tank commander from Bremen who’d been in the front line, baffled by the odds the Ivans were facing. ‘In the end,’ he told Nehmann, ‘their ammunition ran out and you know what they did then? They got their own artillery, on the eastern bank, to shell us. We were that close…’ his hands were a centimetre apart ‘…and they all died under their own shells. If you think that was some kind of accident, you’d be wrong. They called in fire knowing that