The leading company of the 3rd Battalion met little resistance when it reached the park. They found thoroughly demoralised Soviet soldiers hiding behind trees and anything that could provide cover. Those that had weapons tossed them away and knelt with hands clasped behind their necks when called on to do so.
Dawn was beginning to break as the last man from 3rd Battalion crossed the only remaining bridge across the Spee for twenty miles, but ten minutes later it too had been dropped into the polluted water.
The brigade commander used the light from the flames of the last of the Soviet anti-aircraft vehicles to be hunted down to study his map before ordering his force at the airbase to pull out and head for their next objective.
2nd Commando Battalion had suffered far heavier than the rest of the brigade’s dozen dead and wounded, but they had been faced with regular troops in prepared positions that had to be attacked across open ground.
The commando battalion had captured the airbase motor pool intact and had sufficient transport to carry the troops, the wounded and pull the brigade’s 105mm guns. From where he was standing the brigade commander could see a glow across the rooftops to the north from the fires at the airbase tank farm. All that remained to be done at Cottbus was to destroy the stored munitions, much of which had been moved from the bomb dumps and placed in stacks on the runways where they would be detonated once the troops were clear.
An aide intercepted the town folk who were making a beeline for his commander, armed with a bottle of Schnapps and wanting to greet the town’s liberators. The commander felt a sickness settle in his stomach. His brigade was mounting captured and commandeered vehicles in preparation to pull out, and he wondered what revenge would be exacted on the town when the Red Army reoccupied it.
Two explosions to the south jolted him from his gloomy thoughts and he turned to his radio operator. The signaller finished acknowledging a message and reported that a pair of BMP-2 fighting vehicles had appeared on the eastern side of the autobahn. The Lanciers Milan’s had engaged both but only succeeded in destroying one of them.
It was time to go.
CHAPTER 5
Following Svetlana and Caroline’s visit to the Russian girls contact, the routine at the farmhouse had sunk back into more or less the same monotonous routine as previously.
Svetlana no longer had to listen to the radios constant programming of folk and classical music from dawn to dusk. From 1900 to 2100 were the times she now draped herself in an armchair next to the old couples’ radio set, the rest of the time she and the Americans helped out around the farm.
The previous afternoon Patricia had left once more to perform maintenance on the Nighthawk; it left the pilot and the spy to help the farmer and his wife until the evening.
At 8pm Svetlana had listened to the hourly news report, hearing how the courageous Red Army had forced the Elbe and Saale rivers and NATO was in full retreat, which to her reckoning made it the seventh time in the past two weeks. Even the wording of the item was identical to that of the previous bulletins.
After the news the music programme had resumed with Wait For Your Soldier, sung by a well-known baritone and Svetlana had sat upright. After all the previous so-called good news reports, the audiences had been treated to stirring performances by the Red Army Chorus singing the likes of The Brave Don Cossacks. The piece tonight had been followed by Ochi Chornye, Dark Eyes, but the romantic gypsy melody had stopped after twelve seconds with an announcer apologising for technical difficulties before it had restarted.
Caroline, sketching the Russian girl once again had noticed the body language change and paused in what she was doing.
The same baritone who had performed the song, informing already faithful and patriotic womanhood that their men would return and to keep faith in inevitable victory had then sung Dubinushka. The sequence of the first two songs, with the technical difficulties had been the signal from Elena Torneski that the Premier’s present location followed. Torneski had allotted each of the secure locations the title of a song and Svetlana opened a map, finding Saratov on the river Volga, and then tracing a finger westwards to a river valley twenty-six miles from the town.
“Here’s your target Caroline.”
Major Nunro had looked at what was marked as a disused mineshaft set in a re-entrant off a narrow river valley.
“Can you hit it?” Svetlana had asked.
“Oh we can hit it honey, we just got to get there first.”
It was only a little under 400 miles as the crow flies, but it meant an initial circular route to avoid overflying the Moscow air defence zone, after which they would need to pick their way around four fighter bases that lay on the way.
Leaving the Russian girl, she had set up the satellite transmitter, sending the location to the US and informing them they could not attack for at least eighteen hours, allowing for the time it would take to return to the forest strip once Pat had returned.
Svetlana was no longer in the living room when she’d returned. The water was being run upstairs so Caroline lifted a floorboard and false section of pipe below it to bring out a laptop. The USB she had inserted contained what had been the most up to date intelligence on AAA locations in Russia at the time they had left Kinloss. With the machine powered up she’d begun the business of plotting a route.
Patricia had an uncomfortable journey, as usual, concealed within their contact’s ancient van. Patricia had been trying to learn basic Russian and used a flashlight to read the children’s textbook she had found in a box at the farm. It was one way to pass the time, repeating parrot fashion such useful phrases as “Ya zhyvu na marskom paberezh’e”, as if a KGB guard at a checkpoint could give a damn that she allegedly lived at the seaside, though! Twenty miles from the forest the contact had stopped the van and left the cab to stand beside it, looking for all the world like a man tending to the call of nature. Being inside the rattling contraption she could hear little of the outside world so it came as a shock when he spoke loud enough for her to hear, informing her that there were helicopters in the area and about a mile off one was hovering, the light reflecting off the lenses of a surveillance device it carried. No doubt the crew were watching them as he spoke, his head carefully away so they could not see him speaking.
“How long have they been watching us?” Pat had asked.
“Off and on for about forty minutes.”
“And you only tell me now?”
She hadn’t been able to see him shrug as he did up his fly buttons.
“I didn’t need to pee until now. Their cameras are very good; they would see I was just pretending if I stopped when I first saw them.”
They had continued the journey and the helicopter, apparently satisfied had vanished for the time being, no doubt checking on other vehicles in the area.
At a small hamlet the driver had stopped the van and left her there whilst he went to make discrete enquiries.
On his return the news had been nearly all bad, deserters had taken over one of the more remote farms, remaining until the food had run out before moving on, but not before killing the family that lived there, to prevent them from sounding the alarm as soon as they were out of sight. The bodies of the family had been found that morning, and the word around the hamlet was that they had been related in some way to the regional military commander, who had drawn on resources from surrounding regions and begun a manhunt. All properties were being searched and roadblocks were up on all the roads, slowly extending out from the scene. The only good news was that the helicopters were on loan to the region for just today, and of course the contact knew of another route to the forest, always providing it wasn’t too muddy for his van.