Vengeance 10

That explained the explosions, then, Memling thought. He had not the slightest idea what was going on, and there was no time to find out. Already the volume of gunfire was slackening. He waved the two Germans to either side of the door; there wasn’t even time to ask if either had combat experience. Jan tried the door, and when it gave, a rictus of anger slashed across his face. He slung the machine pistol, twisted the screw covers from the grenades, and pulled their igniting cords.

‘Damned careless of them,’ Prager grunted as he threw the door open.

Memling stepped forward and lobbed the grenades with easy underhand throws, aiming to bounce them from the walls so that the blasts would fill the long room with shrapnel. He hesitated long enough to see them strike walls; a white face turned towards him, the mouth forming a warning scream; a man in a suit paused in the midst of cranking a field telephone. Then Memling slammed the door. Twin blasts vomited through the front of the building and bulged the iron-reinforced door from its frame. It took the three of them to wrench it open.

The room was a shambles. The cement-block wall had contained the explosion and turned the blast inward, leaving the walls and every piece of furniture gouged and splintered by shrapnel. There were five bloody, torn bodies, one of them barely recognisable as a woman’s. He had once seen an American Sherman tank in Sicily. A grenade had been dropped down the hatch, and the shrapnel had spun and ricocheted around the interior, so that the crew had looked as if they had been blasted over and over with buckshot. These bodies looked the same.

A groan came from a small room off to one side, and Memling kicked the shattered door wide, almost losing one of his too-big boots in the process. Walsch was slumped on the floor. Blood ran down one side of his face, and his arm dangled at a strange angle as he tried to get to his feet. A small Mauser pistol lay on the floor nearby. From behind, Prager was shouting through a smashed window that they had succeeded. The wind howled in sudden fury, and papers flurried.

Bethwig pushed past him into the room.

‘He’s mine,’ he said, swallowing hard to contain the bitter sickness. ‘He killed my father and….’ He could go no further. Walsch looked up and unexpectedly laughed in genuine mirth.

‘And the little whore. Please do not forget her. The Reichsführer gave her to my charge. So, you will kill me now,’ he choked. ‘You must kill me.’ Walsch slumped but recovered himself and stared up at Bethwig. ‘You see, I have a cancer in the lungs. I will die soon in any event. You will spare me the pain.’ He tried to laugh again but collapsed on the floor instead, coughing harshly.

Bethwig raised the pistol. ‘I don’t give a damn for your cancer, you sadistic bastard,’ he screamed.

Memling caught his arm. ‘Have you ever killed before?’ he demanded. ‘Shot a man to death in cold blood?’

Bethwig shook his head. ‘This isn’t a man, he’s… he is an animal.’

‘Then let me do it. It’s not an easy thing to live with.’

Bethwig hesitated just as Sussmann staggered in. Walsch read the uncertainty in Bethwig’s eyes and tried to laugh at him. He knew.

‘It will live with you for ever,’ Memling warned.

Sussmann leaned against the door-frame to watch. Walsch started to speak, but Memling turned then and shot the Gestapo officer once, through the forehead.

‘One more can’t make my nightmares any worse,’ he muttered.

* * *

Bethwig parked the car on the northern boundary of the deserted POW camp. He and Jan Memling got out while Prager worked to bandage the surviving grenadier’s shattered arm. The corporal and the other grenadier had been killed, and Sussmann had received a shrapnel wound in the stomach. The pain and loss of blood were sending him into shock. He lay back in the front seat breathing heavily, his face pale.

The wind whipped tatters of snow at them once again, and Memling shivered in his ill-fitting uniform. They stood just below a small rise where the trees had been cleared, and talked for what seemed a very long time. Bethwig told him of the work they had done, passing lightly over the details in his haste to cover everything. He wanted this quiet, capable Englishman to understand what had brought them to this night; more, he wanted his help.

Memling nodded when he began to describe the V-10. ‘I know. I was here.’

Bethwig hugged his coat about himself. ‘It was rumoured you killed four SS soldiers.’

’How do you know about that?’

Bethwig laughed humourlessly. ‘Peenemunde abounds in rumours. They were confirmed when the Gestapo arrested Wernher von Braun, Ernst Mundt and Helmuth Gottrup.’

‘Arrested… then…’

‘No, all three were subsequently released. The SS wanted to hang them, but in those days we still had a few connections that meant something.’