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

air, wreathed in coils of dirty black smoke, then one wing disintegrated, sending the Heinkel into a flat spin. Nehmann turned away, knowing the aircraft was doomed. Kalb watched it until the end, the eyes behind the woollen mask giving nothing away.

The Leutnant was back moments later. Nehmann heard him apologising for the lack of transport. If they were to go now, it had to be on foot. Kalb offered a curt nod and then checked his watch again before setting off at a brisk pace, leaving the Leutnant in charge of the next incoming aircraft to make it safely onto the airfield. Nehmann, his head down, his hands plunged deep into the pockets of his borrowed Wehrmacht greatcoat, set off in pursuit. Finding Kalb had been a miracle but what was especially sweet were the odds so suddenly stacked in his, Nehmann’s, favour. Just as Stalingrad had hidden Kalb all this time, so the city would make Nehmann equally invisible. All he had to do now was stay close.

Nehmann was back at the bus depot by dusk. Schultz was at his desk in the office. He barely lifted his head to acknowledge Nehmann’s return.

‘You’re late,’ he growled. ‘We’ve been worried. Where the fuck have you been?’

‘Kalb,’ Nehmann said simply. ‘I’ve got him. I’ve found him. I know where he’s quartered.’

Schultz’s head finally came up. If he was pleased, Nehmann thought, it didn’t show.

‘How? Where?’

Nehmann described the scene out at Pitomnik and the way that Kalb seemed to have materialised from thin air.

‘One minute I’m looking at a Russian tank captain,’ he said. ‘The next I realise it’s Kalb. He’s with the Chain Dogs. I should have worked that out weeks ago.’

‘You’re right, you should.’ Schultz had got to his feet and crossed the office to the big map of the city that showed all the bus routes. ‘So how do we find the fucker?’

‘Here.’ Nehmann’s finger settled on an area called Tsaritsyn. ‘I followed him back from the airfield. The building is only half demolished. He must have commandeered it.’

‘How do you know he lives there?’

‘There’s a well nearby. It still works. There were a couple of old women dropping rocks to break the ice at the bottom.’

‘And?’

‘I talked to one of them. Pretended I was a journalist. Asked all those sweet questions that disguise your real interest.’

‘And?’ Schultz had never learned how to mask his impatience.

‘The man dressed like a Russian lives in the house I mentioned, draws his water from the same well.’

‘He’s alone in the house?’

‘She thought not. She thought there might be more men in there. They might have something to do with the field hospital at Gumrak. It’s a forty-minute walk away.’

Schultz nodded. He was still staring at the map.

‘And the terrain?’ he asked at last.

‘Flat. Like everywhere else.’

‘Any cover?’

‘Not much. Except for a little stream about six hundred metres away.’

‘Frozen?’

‘Of course. But there are banks on both sides, maybe about this high,’ Nehmann’s hand briefly hovered at waist height.

‘You checked?’

‘Yes. Why does that amuse you?’

‘Because you’ve been thinking snipers, Nehmann. Just like I would.’

*

That night they emptied the last bottle of vodka. Schultz, Nehmann realised, had only half believed that he’d really found the SS Standartenführer but when Nehmann sat him down and made him listen to a detailed description of what had happened beside the Tante-Ju,he acknowledged that it must be Kalb. More importantly, he began to visibly warm to the script Nehmann had written for himself. His entire professional life, Nehmann had always stood a challenge on its head. First work out what you want to achieve. Then work backwards until you know how.

‘I want him crippled,’ he told Nehmann. ‘I want him injured enough so we can take him to Gumrak.’

‘The field hospital?’

‘Yes. He’ll need attention. Happily, we’ll be in a position to take him there.’

‘And you think they’ll have the time to deal with him? Have you been inside that place? It’s a tomb, a charnel house. They have nothing. No drugs. No anaesthetic. No bandages. No plaster of Paris. On a good day they scrape lice off uniforms and skin with a spoon and throw them in the fire, but mostly they don’t bother. They have no food, either, nothing to keep these men alive. Most of them die from starvation. I’m told the busiest man in the hospital is the Catholic chaplain. He gives extreme unction hundreds of times a day. They call him the Tote König.’

The Death King.

‘It’s not important,’ Nehmann said.

‘It’s not? We pick up the bastard? He’s bleeding all over us? We take him to this place? And it’s not important?’

‘Not in the slightest, Willi. Because the trick is he never arrives.’

‘This is some kind of kidnapping?’

‘It is. We’ll need a place to take him. Somewhere private. Somewhere out of earshot.’

Schultz reached for his glass, not saying anything. He swallowed the vodka in a single gulp and told Nehmann to fill the glass again. There was a darkness around his eyes that Nehmann had seen in a thousand Stalingrad faces. He looked exhausted. And old.

‘You’ve thought this through, haven’t you, Nehmann,’ he muttered at last.

‘I have, yes.’

‘The sniper takes the shot while he’s at the well?’

‘Yes. He aims for the legs, preferably the knee.’

‘Why?’

‘Because it will be agony.’

‘And us? What do we do?’

‘We wait. In the Kübelwagen. And then we turn up and play the patriot.’

‘Good.’ Schultz nodded. ‘Very good. One more death? Who’s counting?’

‘Death?’ Nehmann made light of the word.

‘You’re telling me you won’t kill him?’

‘I’m telling you we’ll have lots of time. Plan it right and you won’t believe what might be possible.’

Another silence. Nehmann thought Schultz might be having second thoughts but it turned out he was thinking about the sniper. Over the past few months, he’d met most of the men who were making themselves a reputation in the front line. The sheer brutality of close-quarters combat left little room for heroes but the ongoing battle between Soviet and German marksmen had caught the imagination of both armies. Indeed, a