The field telephone rang. The sound severed the hold that the nightmare had taken on the captain. Mueller appeared at the door. “Corporal Schroeder is on the line, Lieutenant.” Voss went to the parlor and picked up the phone. “In which direction? Very well. Maintain your position, Corporal. I’ll deal with it at this end.” He hung up the phone and turned to Vogel, who had been rooted to the storeroom doorway, listening with concern and some confusion. “Return to the command vehicle, Sergeant. Wilms must surely be trying to raise you on the radio.” Taking possession of himself, Vogel fled the house. Voss returned to the storeroom. The captain was pulling on his boots. “Sir, I have just been informed that a motorcycle from the SS column has returned. The rider appears wounded.”
The distinctive throaty purr of a BMW motorcycle engine had caught Wilms’s attention. He watched with binoculars as the motorcycle weaved and bobbed over the muddy steppe, heading directly from out of the north. Single rider. The sidecar, with a white skull and crossbones emblazoned on the hood, was empty. The motorcycle continued across the road, east of the workers’ settlement, and followed an erratic course past the warehouse and below the water tower. The rider leaned over the handlebars unnaturally, his hand gripping the throttle limply. The machine did not travel at an appreciable rate of speed as it swerved and skidded down the rutted alley between the maintenance depot and workshops. Immediately on the radio, Wilms tried to raise the command vehicle, but there was no answer. He watched as Braun and Angst ran out from the repair garage at the south end of the depot in an attempt to intercept the BMW, but the machine abruptly detoured down a side pathway that led into the equipment dump. Once past the dump, it made several large circles, around and around, engine spluttering, until it jerked to a stop. The rider was thrown from the seat and lay sprawled in the mud. By the time Braun and Angst reached the wounded man, Wilms had finally made contact on the radio.
Braun knelt beside the SS trooper, his tunic torn and bloodied, and tried to make sense of the words garbled through a mouthful of reddish foam. The scout car hurtled toward them, and the Hanomag followed close behind. “He’s dead,” Braun announced, as the command vehicle pulled up. Falkenstein leaned out of the turret with Khan at his side. “Did he manage to speak?”
“Nothing that made any sense,” Braun replied.
“Repeat it for me.”
“He said something about an ambush that came from out of the river. Moloch devours us. Moloch? What does it mean, Captain?”
“Moloch, the malevolent god of sacrifice from the Old Testament. But he meant Red Vengeance.”
The Hanomag came to a stop beside the command vehicle. Voss and Reinhardt contemplated the dead motorcyclist. “The Einsatzgruppen have been attacked,” Falkenstein informed them. “We’re going to the river to see what exactly has occurred.”
“It could be a trap, sir. We might encounter a sizeable force,” Voss cautioned him.
“Sizeable indeed, Lieutenant. Great and powerful. My dream came at an auspicious time. The beast is out in the open. Red Vengeance baits me.” The scout car swung about and headed west on River Road. Voss snapped his fingers. “Corporal Angst! You too, Braun. You’re coming with us.” Hartmann had the motor fired up and the vehicle moving as the two grenadiers climbed onboard. Voss raised Wilms on the radio. “Contact Schroeder and inform him he is to remain in charge until our return. Have him pull back anyone occupying a forward position. No one is to be left out in the open. And whatever you do, don’t leave that tower. Voss out.” He disengaged from the headphones, left the co-driver’s seat, and joined Angst and Braun in the crew compartment. The grenadiers had lifted the bench seats where the panzerfausts were stored. The lids to the cases were unlatched but not removed, so the weapons could remain secure from the shake and rattle of the speeding vehicle. As he crouched down on the deck, Angst said, “Maybe this is it, Lieutenant. We might be done with this business once and for all.”
“I pray you are right, Corporal.”
36
The din and vibration was deafening as Hartmann wrestled as much speed as was possible from the heavy Maybach engine. When they had traveled ten kilometers, the road began to decline subtly into the river valley. The further west the vehicle and crew traveled, the stronger the smell of the river became. Water, vast and fragrant, intoxicating in significance. When the Dniepr finally loomed into view, there was a gasp. “Look at it,” Braun shouted. The slate-blue water flowed placidly at a width of nearly six hundred meters. The River Road had come to an end at a muddy track that ran parallel to the riverbank. Hartmann turned right, as he had seen the command vehicle do several minutes earlier. Pale brown reeds stood tall in the gray sand at the river’s edge. To be this close, the end goal of the retreat for their comrades-in-arms, and not be allowed to cross to safety was torturous for the crew. Using binoculars, Voss and Angst concentrated on the surroundings. There were trees, interspersed singly and in small clusters, and small hamlets that had been laid waste, all with the potential of concealing danger. Two kilometers had passed since making the turn when Hartmann decelerated. The scout car had stopped before a thin column of black smoke that curled into the overcast sky from an epicenter of chaos. “Stay alert, men,” Voss stammered, agitatedly. “Heinz, pull over.”
The Hanomag veered to the right and braked to a stop. Armed with a panzerfaust each, Angst and Braun exited the vehicle and separated to provide cover and focused on the distance for any threat that might loom toward them. They waded through slaughter and destruction, beyond belief or imagination, that mired the road. Braun, every fiber of his being quaking with revulsion, began to heave bile. He sank to his knees, exhausted from the wrenching effort as the green oily substance erupted from out of his mouth. Angst tried not to look directly at the horror in the road, but no matter where he cast his gaze, some ghastly detail would violate his sight. Leg. Hand. Torso. The shapeless mass that had once been the Sturmbannfuehrer’s staff car still burned. Corpses lay on the ground, burnt clothing fused to seared flesh. Amid this blackened, smoking wreckage was the Sturmbannfuehrer, his face still brightly jaundiced despite being partially charred, his lipless mouth forever open in a helpless, silent scream. Voss, having witnessed his share of maiming and death, turned ashen. There was neither incident nor memory to compare with what he now confronted. This was annihilation taken to the extreme—willful, almost ritualized mutilation of men and machines by machine. A thick, pulpy jam of meat and bone lay in a smear across the muddy road amid twisted, shredded mechanical parts. The impression of tank tracks were evident all around, formed in crisscross and circular patterns. A slurry of mud, gasoline, and blood flowed into the river and discolored the water with a red oil-slicked plume. It was difficult to distinguish where the mud began and the blood ended, so thoroughly mixed had the two substances become. Reinhardt was numbed by the sight; to preserve his sanity, he blanked out the image. He cowered behind the shield of the bow machine gun, sweeping an arc, right to left, on the coaxial mount. He seemed to struggle for breath as he felt whatever was true, meaningful, and real slowly die within him. From the scout car turret, Falkenstein studied the details and attempted to play out the course of events in his mind. The staff car was the very epicenter, the bull’s-eye as it were, of the destruction. Trucks, motorcycles, and bodies radiated outward in a compact diameter; some had even ended up in the river. Separate vehicles had been targeted and destroyed in different positions in relation to the core of wreckage and then rammed or pushed closer. Those that had survived the initial volleys of high-explosive shells were raked by steady bursts of machine gun–fire. Afterward, the tank did some quail shooting, using cannon, to judge by the dismembered casualties who tried to run away from the opening onslaught. Others had been chased down individually and crushed. The tank had then returned to the center of the initial ambush and systematically rolled over the bodies and vehicles. The ground had been deeply churned and furrowed as the tank traversed from side to side on its tracks, grinding up and flattening its victims. Falkenstein made an attempt at some analysis as he viewed the scene with the coolness of a police inspector at a particularly ugly homicide. The hideous nature of the spectacle was remarkable. Red Vengeance wallowed in mutilation. The slaughter it left behind was not haphazard but willful. The tank seemed to dare the observer, the witness, to try and recreate the method of its depravity. Voss had stepped out of the Hanomag and approached the scout car. The captain still brooded from the height of the turret. No one, Voss believed, could survive such a rampage without his mind becoming unhinged. He did not want to linger any longer than was necessary. The residue of evil that hovered over the scene was palpable. “What are your orders, sir?” Falkenstein did not respond; he was so transfixed by what lay in the road that his subordinate’s presence had yet to register. “Captain! What do you intend to do now?” Voss asked again, but it was the sound of Khan’s distinct voice that broke the spell. Upon their arrival, Khan had left the scout car and ran some distance along the riverbank, carting along the weighty antitank rifle. He now stood some two hundred meters away, at the water’s edge, waving his arms and shouting. The captain muttered a few words into the microphone, and the scout car circled about the wreckage and drove off to where the shaman stood. Voss had Braun and Angst get back to the vehicle and, upon boarding himself, issued the order to follow the command vehicle. Although the retching had subsided, all the color had drained from Braun’s face. He looked terrible. “I can’t take any more of this.”