Special Purposes: First Strike Weapon

CHAPTER TWENTY

0001 GMT, 25th November 1987

Vickerstown, Walney Island, North-West England

VADIM MADE HIS way through the streets of Vickerstown past rows of mock-Tudor housing. The wind howled down the road, blowing the black snow around, creating drifts. There were very few candles burning in the houses, and the curtains were all closed tight against the horrors of the world. It was a joke; a place to hide and pretend that their world hadn’t just ended. He had expected to see patrols, but found none. It seemed like the re-enactors just patrolled the shores of the island and manned the bridge and the shallow parts of the channel.

He was wondering why he was doing this. Walking into the wolf’s den on his own. He remembered what the Fräulein had said to him on the Dietrich about their encounter with the national guardsmen in New York: You look like you were trying to get yourself killed. Was that it? It would be easier than carrying on, in this world, in his strange, terrible state. But he didn’t think he was trying to kill himself.

He told himself he was going to negotiate, to see if he could arrange for the release of the hostages; but having sent Princess back to get the others, he knew he was on a clock. The Joy Division, the plan to indoctrinate the youth, were enough to want them dead. He suspected the real reason was to look into the eyes of this Hauptsturmführer Kerrican.

Vadim had done some very bad things over the years during various wars. He was already a monster before he died. He had served monsters, probably for most of his life. But he had limits, and when the likes of the KGB had tried to push him past those limits, he’d pushed back, as had the people he had commanded. Maybe it was the sickening maths of comparative atrocity. Maybe he was no better than Kerrican, but the Nazis’ commitment to evil as an ideology, rather than a means to an end, had always staggered him. To find someone like Kerrican aping them, to the point that he would take advantage of the current horror to subjugate and brutalise his own people, disgusted Vadim. He had to look in Kerrican’s eyes. He had to try and find himself in them; to see if he himself was anything more than a hypocrite unable to face what he really was.

Back in North Scale they’d agreed to move fast. Frightened people informed, especially when their loved ones were at risk, and they would be; the fewer people knew and the faster they moved, the less chance there was of someone tipping off the fake SS. Bill and his people would arm themselves as well as they could and contact people they trusted in other parts of the island. Then they would descend on the houses in Vickerstown that the re-enactors had taken over. They would leave the compound to Vadim’s squad. It was a lot of ground to cover, a lot of personnel to deal with for just five people. Assuming Gulag came along with the others.

Vadim heard the compound before he saw it: loud music and raucous cheering. It sounded like some sort of sporting event.

The compound was a squat, ugly, high-walled square of red bricks. A heavy wooden gate opened onto the main road through Vickerstown. Vadim could make out scaffolding towers at three of the compound’s corners, topped with sandbags. They were manned, and in the poor light Vadim could just about make out a machine gun in each tower. A larger building rose above the walls in the fourth corner, also made of red brick. No-thrills military architecture at its most utilitarian.

Vadim came down the middle of the deserted street under a dark sky. The moon and stars were still hidden from view by all the dust in the atmosphere. He managed to get quite close before the light of a powerful handheld torch stabbed through the night and blinded him. He raised his hands slowly and told them who he’d come to see.

THE FAKE SS men came rushing out of the gate to cover him. Before the war they may have been businessmen, or worked in shops, or driven lorries; but now they looked like Vadim’s forty-year-old nightmares.

Their search was perfunctory; they didn’t want to get too close to the dead, and they certainly didn’t want to touch him. They took what weapons they could find before escorting him into the compound, into madness.

He had a look around as they marched him across the slush-covered yard. To his left the two Tiger tanks were parked between the gate and one of the towers. To his right was the half-track and another Saracen APC, with space for the one they had taken. Four prefabricated buildings ran down the right-hand wall, between two of the towers. If Bernie and Bill’s information had been correct, and they seemed to agree, then the first hut was empty, unless the refugees and crew from the Dietrich were being held there. It looked dark. There was no way to be sure if there was anyone inside or not, though there were no guards posted outside it. The second hut was where the children were kept, the third hut was the so-called Joy Division, and the fourth was the barracks for the single men.

On the left in the back corner was the building he had seen, some kind of hall. A huge, blood-red banner with a swastika painted on it hung down from the roof. Vadim made out a number of military trucks parked against the rear wall.

In the middle of the grassy yard next to the hall, a pit had been dug out and then lined with multi-floored scaffold boxes, like crude bleachers around an arena. Nazis packed the stand, looking down into the pit and cheering.

Finally Vadim saw Captain Schiller, standing in the yard outside the bleachers. A chain ran from his neck to a substantial-looking iron ring that had been hammered into the tarmac. His ears had been cut off and he was very clearly dead. He was swaying from side to side like a caged predator, watching Vadim as he was escorted past the captain of the Dietrich. There was no recognition in his eyes at all. It took a great deal of effort for Vadim not to start killing there and then.

Then he got his first look at Hauptsturmführer Kerrican. Wooden steps ran up the side of the hall to a walkway overlooking the arena, ending in a door into the hall. Kerrican stood on the walkway looking down into the pit, like Caesar on his balcony. The flickering light of a flaming torch illuminated his grinning face.

Vadim reckoned Kerrican would be thought of as handsome, though his high cheekbones and the cruel set of his mouth made him look arrogant. He looked at home in the grey SS smock and soft forage cap. Bernie hadn’t been lying when he’d claimed that this man had served; it was plain to Vadim that he was looking at a soldier.

The guards marched Vadim up the wooden steps to the walkway where Kerrican stood. On the way up, he got a view into the pit. New Boy and a badly-beaten Harris were facing off against three zombies, armed with a broadsword and a cricket bat with nails driven through it. The body of a fourth zombie lay on the muddy ground of the pit. New Boy and Harris looked exhausted. Part of the pit had been fenced off to form a corral for more of the zombies.

Vadim was staggered by the waste of effort and resources. It had been only nine days since the world had ended, and yet somehow these people had decided this was the best use of their time. Nine days. Again Vadim had to force himself not to react. He just turned away as another of the zombies lunged.

The Hauptsturmführer tore his eyes away from the spectacle in the pit to face Vadim. Up close, the captain realised Kerrican was wearing a necklace of ears. He looked into his green eyes and didn’t see himself. This man was irrevocably mad.

Kerrican looked him up and down.

“You look fucked, mate,” he said, and then grinned. He had a charming smile. Vadim had seen smiles like that before on other psychopaths. “Let’s talk in my office.”

Vadim nodded. There was more cheering from the scaffolding, and Vadim risked a glance. Harris had embedded the nailed end of the cricket bat into the head of one of the zombies. It sank to its knees, spasming. Another charged the police officer but New Boy rammed the broadsword into the thing’s mouth, the tip of the sword exploding out of the back of the dead man’s head. “Looks like the nig-nog can fight after all,” Kerrican muttered, before leading Vadim through the door and into an office. Vadim had no idea what a ‘nig-nog’ was.

THE OFFICE WAS warm and well-lit with electric bulbs, suggesting a generator somewhere in the compound. There was another door in the opposite wall. Vadim figured it had once been the office for the commander of the TA unit stationed here. It was neat and ordered. It was obvious Kerrican had added the framed picture of Otto Skorzeny, a Waffen-SS officer who some credited with being the father of modern special forces operations. Vadim was not one of those people. Kerrican followed Vadim’s gaze.

“Old Otto, he was a lad, wasn’t he?” Kerrican asked, grinning. Three of his soldiers had escorted Vadim into the office. Kerrican nodded to one of them, who slung his SLR and went back onto the walkway to watch the end of the pit fight. The other two, both armed with double-barrelled shotguns, remained in the office, keeping an eye on Vadim. He assumed they knew how to kill him, or they wouldn’t have lived this long, and the shotguns were good tools for the job in close quarters. Instead of answering Kerrican, Vadim turned his attention to a rifle hanging from a hook, along with two canvas pouches, each containing three spare magazines.

“Like that?” Kerrican asked. “That’s an StG 44, one of the first assault rifles ever made.”

“Came in towards the end of the last war,” Vadim said. He couldn’t shake the feeling that Kerrican was trying to impress him. He wasn’t. “Still didn’t save the Nazis. I thought Britain had very strict rules own gun ownership.”

“Yeah, and they were just about to get tighter,” he said with distaste. His accent was very different from the locals. Vadim was no expert but he was pretty sure he was from London, or its environs. “Some of us had licences, mostly for the bolt-actions. Some of the deactivated weapons weren’t too difficult to reactivate if you knew what you were doing, but you’d be amazed at how much of this stuff was just left hanging around, if you knew where to look. Add to that a few shotguns off the farms” – he nodded towards one of Vadim’s guards – “and what they had in the armoury here, and…”

“You’ve got all you need to equip your little army,” Vadim said. A nerve over Kerrican’s left eye twitched at the goad. Kerrican sat down behind the desk. Vadim’s weapons had been laid out on top of it. The captain was losing count of the mistakes these guys were making.

“So what are you, then? Other than dead, I mean,” he asked, looking up at Vadim. “KGB? GRU? VDV?” Vadim tried not to flinch at the mention of the hated KGB.

“Spetsnaz,” Vadim told him. Kerrican wasn’t looking at him; he’d picked up Vadim’s NRS-2 knife.

“What’s that when it’s at home, then?” he asked, only half paying attention. It made sense that he hadn’t heard of the Spetsnaz, very little was known about them in the West.

“Think of us as the Russian SAS,” Vadim told him. That got Kerrican’s attention. A shadow seemed to cross his face at mention of the SAS, as though he didn’t want to hear their name. Vadim wondered if Kerrican had failed selection, perhaps on psychological grounds.

“Yeah, I don’t think so, mate,” he said. “But I’m guessing you’re some kind of smart, Kremlin super-zombie sent over here to infect us with this plague, right?”

If I was, it would be foolish to let me get this close, he thought. Kerrican pointed at him.

“Ha! I knew it!” He turned to the guard to the left of his desk. “Ralphy, what’d I fucking tell you?”

“Aye, you were right enough, Stevie,” the guard said.

Kerrican turned back to Vadim. “Before the Wartime Broadcasting Service stopped working, we heard that your lads had invaded down south.”

Again Vadim said nothing.

Kerrican leaned back in his chair. “So I’m assuming you want something. What’re you here for?”

“I want my people, the ones you took on the beach,” Vadim said. “And get the two men in that pit out of it right now.”

Kerrican appeared to be giving this some thought.

“So you came on the ship?” he asked. “Always wanted to go to New York; you see it in all the films, don’t you? Well, maybe you don’t. Problem is it’s full of spicks, niggers and chinks, isn’t it?” Vadim tried to keep his naked contempt off his face. “What do I get?” the Englishman continued. The guard behind him chuckled.

“What do you want?” Vadim managed.

“If you’re just off the boat, then I don’t think you’ll have much sway with the occupying forces.”

“I’m a colonel in the USSR’s equivalent of the SS,” Vadim lied. The KGB were much more like the SS – and the Gestapo – than the Spetsnaz were. “Let’s assume that I’ll have more pull than you. Will you make me repeat my question?”

“All right, mate, calm down,” Kerrican said, leaning forward, raising a conciliatory hand. “I think the world would have been a much better place today if Hitler hadn’t broken the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact. He shouldn’t have gone to war with the Soviet Union. You’ve seen what I’m capable of with next to nothing. I want control of this zone, ultimately under your command, but with autonomy to run it how I see fit. There’s gas fields offshore, a refinery, there’s people on the island who know how it all works. We could get it up and running for you. You give us the resources, we can take back Barrow-in-Furness, which means you get the dockyards.” He sat back in the chair and looked up at Vadim, expectantly.

The little speech reminded him of Gulag’s fantasy of carving out a kingdom. This is what it would look like: sad, pathetic and built out of other people’s misery. Even for Kerrican to be talking to him about this was clutching at straws; Vadim could have been anyone with a Russian accent. Kerrican was accepting him at face value because he wanted it to be true.

“And for this, you’d turn on your own people?” Vadim asked, intrigued now. Kerrican shot to his feet. He dropped the knife he had been toying with and slammed his palms down on the table.

“I didn’t fucking turn on them! They fucking turned on me! First the niggers in the ’fifties! Then the fucking Pakis! But oh, no! It’s all right for young Stevie Kerrican to go and watch his mates get killed in Ulster, get fucking chewed up in the Falklands. I deserved a Victoria Cross for what I did down there, but you know what I got instead? Fucking binned, mate, that’s what! And meanwhile the country’s turning a funny colour!” Vadim wasn’t following every word but he was getting the gist of it.

“Calm down, Hauptsturmführer,” Vadim said. He didn’t like using the man’s assumed rank, but if he gave a little, he might be able to walk out of here with all the civilians. Then it would just be a case of exterminating these fools. “As you can imagine, our supply lines are somewhat stretched at the moment, so we would be grateful; and will reward any collaboration. I assume that you have worked out that we are in satellite communication with command? We can see what can be arranged.”

Kerrican smiled and nodded. “See, what did I tell you, Ralphy?” he said.

“Sweet,” Ralphy said.

“Of course, I’ll need my people back,” Vadim said.

Kerrican gave this some thought. “That’s not a problem,” he said. “But the nigger stays in the pit.”

“Why?” Vadim demanded, trying to keep a grip on his temper.

“Because he offends me.”

“How did he offend you?”

“No, he offends me,” Kerrican said. Vadim silently apologised to Harris. He would get the policeman out as soon as he could. “Anything else?”

“Let the women and children go,” Vadim said. Kerrican’s eyes narrowed. It had been a long shot, and straightaway he knew he’d gone too far. Suspicion was written all over Kerrican’s face. The guard standing to the right of the desk, Ralphy, shifted, bringing the shotgun up, but the so-called Hauptsturmführerraised his hand to stop him.

“Why would you want me to release the leverage I have over the people here?” he demanded. “Who’ve you been talking to?”

“It didn’t take us long to work out what was going on in here. You give people nothing to lose and they fight back. You want to control them, subjugate them, they need something to live for.” Vadim put both hands on the desk and leaned across it towards Kerrican. “And because this isn’t the way that soldiers behave.” He felt the twin barrels of Ralphy’s shotgun pressed against his temple. He was quite surprised his head hadn’t been sprayed all over the wall already, but it had been worth it. He’d managed to palm his knife off the desk and slip it up the arm of his jumper. He could feel it, pressed against the cold dead flesh of his forearm.

“No, mate,” Kerrican said, shaking his head. “Wars are won by those who have the will to do what others will not. Look at what your lot did in Berlin in Nineteen-Forty-Five.”

“Because having the will to do what others won’t worked so well for your heroes in the last war,” Vadim pointed out.

“Because they were fucking betrayed!” Kerrican was on his feet again. “One of the most shameful things this country has ever done. We should have been marching lockstep with the Germans. Instead the loony-left somehow took control and we fucking betrayed our whole race!” He pointed towards the prefab huts on the other side of the yard. “We’re doing these children a favour. We’re finally going to make Britain great again! All those women are doing is their fucking duty, for once! Breeding the next generation!” The madness was blazing in his face, now, panting and red. Vadim was struggling to control himself.

“What happened to Captain Schiller?” he asked through gritted teeth.

“He wouldn’t kneel, would he?” Kerrican told him. His eyes seemed to glitter. “He told me he’d made a mistake as a young man. He’d been conscripted, found himself in the engine room of a Kriegsmarine battleship. I told him that the only thing wrong with that was that he hadn’t volunteered. He said that the biggest regret of his life was that he hadn’t joined the resistance, fought the Nazis.” Kerrican took a knife from a scabbard on his belt: a Hitler Youth knife. “See that? Blut und Ehre. Blood and honour, as in your fucking friend the captain had none. He was a race traitor!”

“So you cut his ears off?” Vadim asked, looking at the grisly necklace around Kerrican’s neck. He could hear the sound of an engine now. Shouting from the gate. Kerrican glanced in that direction and then back, apparently unconcerned. He noticed Vadim looking at his necklace and held it up. Two of them, presumably Schiller’s, looked very fresh, the rest were blackened and old.

“You like that?” Kerrican asked grinning. “Just like Vietnam, yeah? See I was 3 Para, proper green-eyed-boy me.” Vadim had no idea what the colour of his eyes had to do with it. Kerrican was shaking the necklace of ears now. “Mostly Argies on here, but some of these belonged to American mercenaries. There’s even a couple from Ulster.”

“3 Para?” Vadim said, wracking his brain. Kerrican and Ralph were looking at his face, not his hand, and he slowly cocked the lever on the right hand side of his concealed knife’s hilt. He’d heard the gates creak open. “Didn’t they very bravely fight at Arnhem? Operation Market Garden?”

“Yeah, so what?” Kerrican said.

“And were nearly wiped out by the 10th SS Panzer division?” As Vadim clicked the knife’s safety off he saw it in Kerrican’s eyes, just for a moment: guilt. Then it was swept away by the excuses, the hate, the fantasies that had twisted the young man’s mind.

“You are a disgrace,” Vadim told him. “You deserve to wear that uniform.” Outside the office, he heard the Saracen drive into the compound. There was no cry of warning. The fake SS soldiers were too stupid to make sure that it was their own patrol returning. “This is going to happen very quickly,” Vadim told him.