Last Citadel Read online

  Zoya began to burn. A searchlight followed her. She side-slipped, turning the fuselage sideways trying to keep the fire from the plane’s engine. Somewhere in the dark the night fighter banked and zeroed in again. Another pounding trail of tracers cut through Zoya like crimson scissors and then was done. Zoya’s plane was aflame, green and red signal rockets spurted out of the cockpits, a crazy light show. The plane did not explode but fell, torched. The searchlights abandoned Zoya and Galina and began their quest for Katya, who looked away before the dead plane hit the ground.

  ‘Vera.’

  ‘Damn it!’ the navigator cried. ‘Damn it!’

  ‘Where are we? Focus!’

  Over the intercom, she heard Vera’s lungs work, the girl huffed hard to control herself. Katya kept tight reins on her own breathing.

  ‘Vera, stay with me.’

  ‘Yes, yes, shut up! Wait! Alright, stay steady. Damn it. Steady.’ The intercom went silent for several wind-whipping moments. Vera’s voice returned.

  ‘Alright. Get ready. Five, four, three, two…’

  Katya gripped the bomb release.

  ‘Now!’”

  She pulled on the wire and thrust her free hand at the magneto switches, then the throttle. The milling propeller caught and Katya blessed Masha. She looked up out of the cockpit and saw something whisk past, straight up in front of her, a blacker piece of the night moving at five times her own speed. She cringed. She heard the roar of the German engine and felt the turbulence of his wash in her own wings. The night fighter had barely missed running into them.

  Katya banked left and dove hard for the ground. A searchlight brushed her starboard wings and that was enough for the night fighter. Above her own engine Katya caught the howl of the Messerschmidt zooming down. The searchlight was gone from her plane but the German pilot had a read now on the slow-moving U-2. Red tracers ripped beneath her, she pulled up from her dive, just missing driving straight into the bullets’ course. The hammer blows of the night fighter’s machine-guns cut through every other sound of the night, the engine, the wind, Vera’s curses, Katya’s pummeling heart. Then she heard the slower thumps of cannon fire, and she thought this was ridiculous, that the night fighter needed his 20 mm cannons to stop a plywood bi-plane. The Germans are serious; they want the Night Witches cleared from the sky. And the Russian women made it easy for them tonight, sailing in from one direction, at one altitude. The night fighter was feeding on them like a black shark.

  Katya banked hard right, plunging again to avoid the bright tower of another searchlight. The Messerschmidt screamed past. The U-2 rocked in the wake of his wailing engine. The German pulled up and away so fast, he vanished in an instant. Katya aimed at the ground, glued to her altimeter. At four hundred feet she leveled the plane out. The U-2 could fly slow enough to hug the ground and blend in with the earth.

  ‘He’s gone,’ Vera said. ‘Son of a bitch.’

  ‘No, he’s not. Get us home, Vera.’

  Over her shoulder Katya caught the glow of Vera’s flashlight. The navigator was scrambling for her maps, gazing over the cockpit for landmarks now that the night fighter had chased them out of their prescribed track. That track, Katya thought. We’re going to have to change our tactics if this is how the Germans fight now. We were prepared for searchlights and flak, but not this. We’ve got no armor, no radios, no guns. She wished Leonid were here in his Yak-9, blasting back at the Messerschmidt. That would be a proper duel. Not this.

  As if to illustrate her thoughts, Katya saw the U-2 in line behind her become snared in the white web of the searchlights. ‘No, no, no,’ she whispered, beseeching God or whatever power flew with the Night Witches in their ancient, plodding bombers, but her voice was screeched away by machine-guns and engine whine. The red teeth of the black shark bit the U-2 above and the little plane burst in the air, struck above the wings in the gas tank. Not even the death of the Russian girls in their little plane was louder than the bellow of the speeding German, climbing out of the way to wait for his searchlights to find him another morsel.

  Katya kept at four hundred feet over the smooth, dark terrain. Vera recited the names of the crew. ‘Marina Rudnova. Lily Baranskaya.’ This was her need to witness, to talk out her shock and anguish. Katya’s witness would be to survive, reach the airstrip as fast as she could, and stop the night’s mission before their regiment was annihilated. She flew straight and low over enemy territory while Vera gathered herself and her maps.

  In a minute Vera had a direction for them to fly. Katya climbed to two thousand feet, safely away from the killing zone of the supply depot burning behind them. Thirty Night Witches had set the depot on fire, that was their mission. Each one, flying in line, saw the plane in front of her attacked, some destroyed, yet stayed on course, cut her engine, sailed over the target, banked through the lights, and did her job. Katya dreaded the final tally for tonight’s German vegetables and bandages. She could not spur the U-2 to go faster and her heart sickened.

  * * * *

  CHAPTER 4

  June 30

  2150 hours

  Wehrmacht train moving east

  Treblinka, Poland

  Luis Ruiz de Vega lifted a hand to snare the attention of a passing waiter. He waved his fingers over his plate, then made a sweeping motion to tell the man to take the dinner away.

  ‘Ja, mein Herr.’

  Luis had been asleep over the half-full plate. He’d not touched more than a few bites. The train slowed herky-jerky and Luis opened his eyes. He heard the waiter’s German and remembered he was not in Spain, where his dream had taken him. He did not speak to the waiter - white-gloved hands swooped down dovelike and took away the tray of schnitzel and wafers - and so did not switch languages in his head, but continued to think in Spanish.

  He’d quelled the hunger, but he knew it would return soon. A year ago he’d been shot in the stomach by the Russians, leaving him forever with appetite. His gut had been cut in half, stitched closed in an emergency field hospital to save his life. And such a life it has become, he thought, looking at the hand he’d left dawdling in the air. He could not wear his father’s signet ring anymore, his fingers had shrunk too much. His face, his chest, hips, legs, everything but his bones and them, too, he believed at times, had been whittled away, the shavings of Waffen SS Captain Luis de Vega must be lying in a trash bin somewhere in the Berlin recovery ward of his previous eleven months.

  He flipped the suspended hand over, examining his palm, then set it in his lap. In the way he’d awakened from his dream in Spanish, Luis awoke in his old form, strong and sinewy, five foot ten, the perfect physique for a man. It was the dark body that had earned him his renown, in the bullrings, then in the Civil War, next with Franco’s Blue Division, and finally with the SS at the Leningrad siege, his captain’s commission and his own company. The feats he could perform in that body earned him praise, women, and his nickname, la Daga. The Dagger. He raised the shrunken hand to his waist to finger the sheathed knife he wore on his belt, a ceremonial blade given to him by his division. On the blade was written the SS oath: Meine Ehre Heisst Treue. My honor is loyalty. Funny, Luis thought, smiling a wretched grin, the irony of things. Finally I have become la Daga. I could stick someone with these hands.

  To help wake himself up, Luis dug a knuckle into his eye socket. Both were bony, there was little cushion of flesh to him anymore. The chased-away dream was of the plaza de toros and his father: The old man was young and the crimson muleta rippled in his outstretched arms, bull, blood, and dust boiled around him, the arena was packed and hot. In those days before the Civil War, Ramon de Vega’s picture was painted for posters, tacked up across Barcelona, the matador’s son was his best banderillero, until the cape of Luis’s eyes lifted when the train stuttered to another stop and his father disappeared. He wanted the waiter to bring back the tray of food; he was hungry again. Tidbits satisfied him now only for short periods. He’d lost the old human habit of savoring; still, on occasion the des
ire for it came back like the echo of a missing limb. Luis swallowed saliva instead and looked out the window. How can anyone get anywhere, he thought, aggravated, stopping like this at every station and encampment?

  A Wehrmacht major sat in a seat facing him. The man was overweight, his uniform belt bit into his belly folding into the red velour chair. For all the habits Luis had lost, he’d picked up others. He viewed this major as a glutton, though the man had only a small roll about his waist, and the beginnings of a double chin. Before his wound and long, wasting convalescence, Luis was voracious for women and drink, a Spaniard set loose in wartime Germany; a muscular and hot-blooded Catalonian from the bullrings could have a field day among the cool fräuleins. Luis had not had sex in a year, what woman would have him. It would be like coupling with Death himself, white and skeletal. His little stomach could no longer tolerate alcohol or spicy foods. He would not laugh, what is funny to a skeleton? All his former appetites had been replaced by the one, hunger. He ate constantly - no, he nibbled, and this irked him, the memory of great skillets of paella and chilled jarros of sangria - and now he had become silent, his Spanish flame banked and his spirit pruned. Luis Ruiz de Vega had not yet become accustomed to what he saw in the mirror, and his hate for the Russians who did this to him smoldered like his hunger, it was never far away.

  ‘Where are we?’ he asked the major, not looking from the train window.

  ‘Still in Poland, I’m afraid.’

  ‘How far from the border?’

  ‘Not too far. Northeast of Warsaw.’

  The village train station bustled with soldiers on the platform. The town seemed too small for all this activity. Luis brought his head around to gaze out past the curtains on the other side of the train car. Not far from the tracks was a high and vast barbed-wire perimeter. Inside it rose a solid block fence, many watchtowers, and the peaks of a hundred barracks. The place was grim and busy.

  Luis looked back to the platform. An armed guard followed three emaciated men hauling a cart filled with the luggage of the debarking passengers. The skinny men wore blue-striped wool trousers and tunics. Their heads were shaven over vacant eyes. Water could have collected in the hollows of their cheeks.

  ‘What is this place?’

  The major said, ‘Treblinka.’

  ‘A work camp?’

  The major chose his words. ‘Of sorts.’

  Luis watched the three slaves shuffle the cart away from the train. German officers, some of them SS, walked behind their bags, clapping others on the shoulders who’d come to meet them, some saluting higher officers. The SS were Totenkopf, the Death’s Head Division, the prison camp guards. To Luis they were fat. The slaves were the ones who looked like him.

  He was careful to keep his distaste off his face in front of the watching major. There was so little padding to his features anymore, even a wince was a wrenching gesture. This train trip back to the Russian front was a revelation for him, and he did not like what he was seeing.

  In 1941, Luis first crossed through Poland into the Soviet frontier as a soldier. He served in the vanguard of the troops, moving fast with the Blitzkrieg over enemy towns and cities, gobbling up territory and prisoners until his army hit the gates of Leningrad. There, the assault ground to a halt, and the old city was surrounded and put under siege. Millions of square miles of Poland, Ukraine, and Russia had been captured and occupied by Hitler. Luis did not know then the quality of that occupation. Why should he? He was one of millions fighting at the leading edge of the war. The rear was not his concern.

  Then he took his bullet to the stomach, standing beside his tank, one of the lousy Mark IIIs, near Lake Ladoga. A Red sniper got him. As a teenager Luis had been gored by a bull, he’d guessed wrong and the bull accommodated his mistake - his father did not rush out to tend to him lying in the ring; the matador came last and not until the bull was bled and worn down, that was the rule, even for fathers - and the Russian bullet did not feel as bad. But Luis’s bleeding did not stop and he would die, that’s what the medic told him. He asked for a priest, but there were none to be brought to him. And so he faced God alone, and God reprieved him. He woke in a hospital three days after his surgery and began his recovery. He spent four months in that hospital and seven in another in Berlin learning about his new body and withered spirit. He found bit by bit that he’d become almost impervious to passion; that was left behind in the Spaniard he was. He must always have food with him, crackers, cheese, something to keep him going when the small reservoir of his stomach was empty. There was humiliation in this, it was a weakness, and Luis accepted it as his shame, and a small one as shames go. And this new body, with all it had gone through, the stitches and vomiting, so much of itself shearing away like melting ice, was almost unable to feel pain anymore. Luis, though rail thin, sensed he had become even more powerful than the distracted boy, the Spaniard, he once was.

  He’d been given a few medals and ribbons and, when he was well enough, a black, tailored uniform and an assignment to return to the Eastern Front on this train as security officer.

  Luis stood.

  ‘Taking a walk?’ the major asked.

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘I’ll come along, if you don’t mind. Stretch my legs.’

  The major rose and followed Luis down the narrow corridor and off the train. Stepping onto the platform, the waning day was tepid and bland. Polish weather, Luis thought, it makes for an indifferent history. This country has a tradition of being conquered. Luis walked quickly through the crowd, careful not to be bumped by any of the burly bustlers leaving or greeting the train.

  He stopped with his back to the warm brick wall of the station. The major stood close, protective, reading Luis’s discomfort. Luis stared down the length of the train, twenty cars long. In the middle of the linkage were ten flatcars bearing brand-new Mark VI Tiger tanks. These were painted tan for the coming Kursk campaign, Operation Citadel. The tanks were marked for delivery to the SS Leibstandarte Adolf Hitler Division on the southern flank of the Kursk bulge. The machines were behemoths, so broad their regular treads had to be removed and narrower transport tracks put on so they could fit on the train cars. The things were mighty-looking to Luis, they seemed proud and powerful like fresh, angry bulls. They were his to deliver to Leibstandarte. The Tigers were supposed to guarantee victory in Operation Citadel and turn the war around again for Germany. This was the third summer of campaigning in Russia. The Reds had not buckled as expected in the first year or two under the Blitzkrieg; in fact, they’d held and gone over to the offensive themselves after their big victory at Stalingrad. Even so, the question was never the superiority of the German forces or the power of the tools at Hitler’s command, like this Tiger under Luis’s protection. No. Germany would beat Russia if given the time, if a breakthrough could be won at Kursk. But the war had dragged on so long, the calendar might soon run out of pages for German destiny. Why?

  The Americans. They were coming, certain to enter the war in Europe anytime now The Americans, powerful, an unknown quantity, like an infant grown too big, were clumsy and unpredictable. But their presence on the Continent would split Hitler’s strength in half, he’d have to fight on two fronts. The Russians had to be broken before the Yanks landed, or the war in the East would take a sudden and nasty turn against Germany.

  Luis had been given another chance, a rarity in war. He knew he could never win back his old body, the Spaniard; he believed he might surpass it in this new and deformed shape. He would do it in the days coming soon, in Russia, at the battle for Kursk, somehow. If the Americans left him time.

  He had placed four armed men on each flatcar with the tanks. The Tigers were safe for the moment in this Polish town of Treblinka. There were no unguarded enemies here.

  Without inviting the major to follow, Luis strode along the platform to where the concrete ended. He stepped down onto the blue gravel strewn beside every train track. He walked gingerly, the stones shifted even under his weight. Behind him
, the major’s boots crunched more assuredly than his own.

  ‘Off to check on your Tigers, Captain?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Quite the brutes, aren’t they?’

  Luis did not feel this remark required a reply and picked his way along the track. He wished the major would go back to the train and leave him alone.

  ‘You’re one of Franco’s boys. The Blue Division.’

  ‘Once. I am in the SS now.’

  The major sidled up beside Luis with one long, confident stride, then kept pace easily. ‘So I see.’

  Luis wore the uniform of a Leibstandarte captain, except for two small irregularities. He was not allowed to wear the SS lightning bolt runes at the right collar, these were reserved only for Germanic members, and on his sleeve was a depiction of the Spanish flag in the shape of a shield.

  The first cars behind the locomotive were filled with troops. Then came a dozen flatbeds, the first and last of them covered by green tarps. Luis strolled along the track to stop beside the first flatcar bearing a Tiger. Two SS guards facing him saluted with extended hands. He waved in the air, approximating the return salute. The two men gripped their machine pistols and went ramrod stiff until Luis and the major passed. The Tiger seemed impossibly huge up there on the flatbed, as though it might crush the supporting train wheels and platform. Luis had spent years fighting in the forerunners of this ultimate tank, the Mark IIIs and IVs. Those were toys, cap guns compared to this brute with its impenetrable armor and 88 mm gun. But the Tiger, like any weapon, had to be put in the proper hands. Luis had been la Daga, had once been those right hands.