Special Purposes: First Strike Weapon

CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE

0019 GMT, 25th November 1987

Vickerstown, Walney Island, North-West England

VADIM HEARD THE rockets in flight. The building shook, windows shattering, as the two Tiger tanks exploded, destroyed by the squad’s remaining RPG-18s. The world turned orange. The fragmentation grenades were almost lost among the noise.

The explosion, not surprisingly, distracted Kerrican and Ralph. Vadim raised his left arm and pulled the trigger on the NRS-2 knife, firing the 7.62mm bullet out of the blade’s hilt at Ralph. The recoil drove the blade into the dead flesh of his forearm, but a small hole appeared in Ralph’s forehead and he started to fall back. Vadim grabbed his saperka from the desk with his right hand, swung round and threw it at the other guard. The sharpened edge of the entrenching tool caught him in the shoulder and he stumbled back, dropping his shotgun.

Vadim swung back to find Kerrican hooking the Hitler Youth knife in towards his head. More out of instinct than design, Vadim stabbed out with his own blade and caught Kerrican’s knife arm with it, driving it back against the wall. Vadim tore the blade along the arm, opening it up, and the Hitler Youth knife dropped from nerveless fingers. Kerrican howled.

The door to the external walkway was kicked open and the guard with the SLR came through firing, almost hitting the screaming Kerrican. Vadim threw himself sideways as the rifle stitched a line of holes in the wall. He landed on Ralph’s corpse, scrabbled for the shotgun and rolled over. The guard fired the SLR again, hitting Ralph’s body; Vadim let him have both barrels, driving backwards out of the doorway and over the rail, into the pit.

“I’ll fucking have you!” Kerrican screamed as he clawed awkwardly for his holstered Walther with his left hand. Vadim heard gunfire outside as he rolled to his feet. He hit Kerrican in the face with the butt of the shotgun, breaking his nose.

“Ow! You cunt!” he screamed, but it distracted him long enough for Vadim to grab the pistol and toss it away.

He retrieved his knife, stabbed it into Kerrican’s leg and tore it downwards. The so-called Hauptsturmführer sat back down hard in his chair, trying to hold the wound in his leg together, shouting obscenities. Ignoring him, Vadim holstered and sheathed his weapons, before grabbing the StG 44 and the pouches of spare magazines. The guard with the saperka in his shoulder was trying to crawl through the doorway. Vadim crossed the room, kicked him screaming onto his back, tore the entrenching tool out of his shoulder and brought it down on his skull, almost bisecting it. He dropped the dripping saperka back into its loop on his webbing, then turned toward Kerrican.

“What are you gonna do?” Kerrican demanded. He was wary but not exactly frightened. Vadim strode back across the room, shoved the desk out of his way and picked Kerrican up. The Englishman thrashed ineffectually with his left arm as the captain carried him out onto the walkway.

Vadim took in the scene. Next to the gate he could make out the gutted remains of one of the Tiger tanks, torn open by the explosion. It looked like the 40mm fragmentation grenades he’d heard going off had hit the tops of two of the guard towers. Skull was limping as fast as he could towards the lorries parked against the rear wall, looking for higher ground to shoot from, and Gulag was running towards the prefab building that held the child-hostages. Once this would have worried Vadim, but not now, after what the Muscovite had done for Gloria and the Carlsson boy.

He caught a glimpse of Princess disappearing into the Joy Division prefab. The Fräulein was firing the MG 34 machine gun into the stands, using the Saracen for cover, belts of ammunition draped over her right arm. Nazis were tumbling into the pit, and Vadim saw tracers spark off the metal scaffold poles and fly into the night air. Such had been the ferocity of the attack that the re-enactors hadn’t even started firing back yet.

Vadim dragged Kerrican to the edge of the walkway, over the zombie corral. The dead were already in a frenzy, feeding on the men falling to them under the Fräulein’s onslaught. The so-called Hauptsturmführer could see what Vadim was about to do.

“I’m gonna come back!” he screamed. “I hate, like you do!” Vadim threw him down into the corral. Kerrican didn’t even try to save himself; to hold onto him, or grab for the rails.

The zombies descended.

“You’re nothing like me,” Vadim muttered, even as bullets impacted all around him. He could see Harris and New Boy in the makeshift arena. They had harvested weapons from fallen Nazis; New Boy was dispatching the injured.

At last the fake SS started returning fire, if only sporadically. Bullets sparked off the Saracen’s armour as the Fräulein took cover behind the APC. The shooters were on the ground floor of the hall beneath Vadim and in the prefab housing the barracks. The Fräulein turned the MG 34 on the prefab as Vadim shouldered the StG 44 and headed back into the office, in time to see the interior door opening.

Vadim dropped to one knee next to a filing cabinet, and watched the barrel of a rifle slowly push the door open. A stray bullet flew in through the window behind Vadim and put a hole in the interior wall. The door opened enough for Vadim to see another SS uniform; the man’s eyes widened as he saw Vadim, and the captain squeezed the trigger on the StG 44. The rifle hammered into his shoulder, the recoil worse than an old AK-47, making the barrel climb as it stitched three neat holes in the enemy rifleman’s chest and face. He fell back, and Vadim heard panic on the other side of the door. He could use panic.

He crossed the office in a few strides, and was through the door onto a mezzanine floor above a large hall stacked with looted supplies. He saw leather sofas, huge televisions and stereos, VCRs, crates of alcohol, fridges and freezers, all presumably powered by the as-yet-unseen generator.

There were about twenty of the re-enactors down in the hall, firing through the windows facing into the compound. They were probably all aiming for the Fräulein, but their inaccurate, undisciplined fire would be sending stray rounds into the prefab huts where the refugees and the local women and children were. There were three other SS men on the stairs up to the office, and they had been smart enough to have another two covering them from the floor of the hall.

Vadim started receiving fire the moment he stepped through the doorway. He felt one bullet open up his cheek, and another bury itself into his right arm just below the shoulder; more shots whistled by, powdering plaster all around him. Had he been alive, the impacts would have been more of a problem. As it was, he barely registered the pain. He fired one three-round burst, then another, and the two shooters on the floor hit the ground. The gunmen on the stairs were still struggling to react when Vadim turned his weapon on them.

The defenders shooting out the windows, realising there was danger in here with them, swung their weapons up towards Vadim. He emptied the rest of the StG 44’s magazine and disappeared back through the door. Holes appeared in the walls off the mezzanine office and everything in the room seemed to explode as a rain of bullets tore through it. Vadim threw himself bodily towards the back of the room, feeling something tug at his leg in mid-air. He landed heavily and rolled over. A bullet had carved a furrow across his thigh. He curled up, trying to present the smallest target possible, and resisted the urge to scream. As a zombie, he knew he could take more punishment than a living human – short of a headshot, they’d have to more or less destroy his body to stop him – but he wasn’t impervious to bullets, by a long shot. He assumed there was less liquid in his body than there had been when he had been alive, but ballistics was ballistics: one good hit from a machine gun bullet could easily blow a limb off through hydrostatic shock. Pistol and SMG rounds worried him less, but he couldn’t just walk into a hail of bullets and expect to be fine.

The fusillade slacked off – presumably they’d emptied their weapons – and Vadim changed the magazine on his own gun.

The Fräulein returned fire for him. He heard her MG 34 as she poured fire into the hall below the office. Vadim made his way back to the door and peered out. He saw tracers flying through the hall, furniture and electronic devices exploding. He saw the slowest of the SS men dancing as bullets churned up their flesh. The rest were lying on the floor, hands over their heads, so Vadim started killing them.

Five people shouldn’t be able to do this to a hundred armed men; had the re-enactors been soldiers, as opposed to well-armed but enthusiastic amateurs, they probably wouldn’t have been able to. Even with trained soldiers, it took experience to function in the face of this sort of firepower, let alone when it was wielded by dead men and women with extensive special forces training.

The Fräulein’s machine gun had stopped, but Vadim was still firing when they started to surrender. It was only when he ran out of rounds and had to reload that he actually heard their cries. The survivors downstairs had had enough, and were raising their hands in the air. Vadim moved down the steps, covering them. He had a choice: kill them now, which he suspected they deserved, but would probably descend into another fight; or accept their surrender and hope they were frightened enough not to try anything, since he had nobody to guard them. He chose the latter. The gunfire outside had died down some; he suspected that the Fräulein was changing the belt on the MG 34, and what he could still hear was from the barracks. The odd round ricocheted into the hall.

“Fräulein, do not fire into the hall!” Vadim shouted as loudly as he could in Russian as he made his way down the cracked, splintered steps. He half-expected the whole mezzanine to collapse. He thought he heard an answering call.

“Drop all your weapons and ammunition; that means grenades, knives, sidearms, anything! Then get into the middle of the room on your knees and lace your hands behind your backs!” Vadim told the re-enactors. “You move, we kill you; you try and run, we kill you; we find a weapon on you, we kill you; understand me?” There were nods from the six survivors. They looked dazed, in shock, as if their experience of war had not quite lived up to their fantasies. “Move, now!” They had enough sense of self-preservation left to scramble to obey him.

Vadim moved to the doorway of the hall.

“Fräulein!” he shouted in Russian. “I’m at the ground-floor door to the hall. I’m coming out, don’t shoot!”

“Understood!” she called back, and Vadim risked glancing out of the door. The burning tanks illuminated the yard. Gunmen in the prefab hut against the rear wall, the barracks, were firing at the Saracen, rounds sparking off its armour. It looked like the fire was concentrated on the rear right corner of the vehicle, presumably where they had last seen the Fräulein take cover. He could also see muzzle flashes through the windows of the Joy Division hut and the hut where the local children were being held; and for the first time, he was aware of the sound of gunfire from outside the compound, in the town.

He glanced at the prefab closest to the gate. By process of elimination, that was where the refugees and the crew of the Dietrich had to be held. It was dark and still. That was either a good or a very bad thing. Vadim was preparing to sprint over when he saw four of the gunmen charge out of the barracks towards the Saracen. Presumably they had worked out that the Fräulein was reloading and had taken a chance. It was the bravest thing that any of the fake 10th SS Panzer soldiers had done.

Vadim raised his StG 44 and was about to shoot when they started dropping. The lead man was down, then the rear. The last two were looking around, trying to work out where the shots were coming from, and then there was one.

Peering through the bleachers around the pit, Vadim finally located Skull atop one of the lorries at the back of the compound. The last of the four men jerked back, his helmet spinning into the air.

Vadim lowered his weapon and again prepared to make a run for the prefab, but heard gunfire coming from the pit area and ran towards that instead. He saw the Fräulein emerge from the left-hand side of the Saracen, firing her machine gun from the hip, spraying the barracks, tracers zipping over the slush in the yard and punching through the hut as she walked towards it.

Vadim reached the scaffold stand and clambered onto the lowest level. Someone had thrown open the gates to the zombie corral, and Harris and New Boy were once again fighting for their life. New Boy was dropping them one after another with headshots from an SLR, while Harris was uselessly emptying an MP-40 SMG into the body of the zombie charging him. Vadim put a three-round burst into its face and it collapsed to the ground. He grabbed his KS-23 from the sheath on his back and dropped it down to Harris.

“Four rounds left, aim for their faces!” he shouted. Whether Harris heard him over the deafening roar of New Boy’s SLR, or just felt more comfortable using a shotgun, Vadim didn’t know, but the police officer dropped the SMG and grabbed the KS-23. Vadim raised the StG back to his shoulder, wondering who had freed the zombies, when a figure swung down from the level above. The newcomer caught the captain in the chest with both feet, hard enough that he heard a crack from his ribcage as something broke. He was knocked out of the scaffolding and sent sliding across the black slush in the yard. His attacker landed on his chest, their knees pinning his gun down, metal glinting in his fist.

“I fucking told you I was coming back, little man!” Kerrican yelled, flaps of skin hanging off his recently-feasted-upon face, the flesh pared down to the muscle. Kerrican drove the knife down towards Vadim’s forehead. It was all the captain could do to catch the zombie’s arms, stop the blade from being driven home. “I’m stronger than you!” he screamed, drool flecking Vadim’s face as the blade inched closer and closer to his head. It seemed that the wounds Vadim had inflicted on Kerrican troubled him much less in his dead state.

There was no-one to help. The Fräulein was still marching inexorably towards the barracks. The makeshift bleachers stood between Vadim and Skull. Princess and Gulag were both still in the prefabs, and judging by the gunfire, New Boy was still fighting for his life in the pit. The flames from the burning tanks flickered in the blade of Kerrican’s knife as the tip came closer and closer. Vadim felt the cold steel against his dead forehead, the sharp point parting it. He felt the tip meet his skull, felt the bone crack. It would be peace, at last; all he had to do was let it happen.

Vadim wasn’t ready to stop existing yet. He screamed, and with all of his might tried to push the blade away, but Kerrican was right. He was stronger.

“Lernen!”

A rusted iron spike was suddenly rammed through Kerrican’s head; he vomited blood all over Vadim and then collapsed to the ground. Vadim pushed the madman’s body off him and scrambled backwards.

The earless corpse of Captain Schiller stood over him, staring down.

Vadim brought his weapon up.

“Captain?” he asked. A chain ran from Schiller’s collar to the spike through Kerrican’s head. “Are you in control?”

“Go.” The word was torn from a dry throat. Vadim backed away from the other zombie, then turned and sprinted for the prefab by the gate. He heard a grenade explode behind him.

He glanced at the Fräulein, who’d made it into the barracks. Tracers zipped past the window; she was firing towards the rear wall, away from the other huts.

VADIM HIT THE door of the prefab hard and walked straight into a burst of fire from an MP-40. Three rounds stitched a diagonal line across his chest. Overconfident, he thought, as he squeezed the trigger of the StG 44 and returned the favour, killing the gunman.

The inside of the hut was spartan, with two rows of beds running down each side of the structure. The refugees and crew were standing at the far end of the hut, against the back wall. It took a moment to work out why. There were three guards still in with them, who had been organising them into a human shield.

“You just need to back out now,” the one in the middle called to him.

“And then what? All your friends have surrendered,” Vadim told him.

The refugees looked scared, but not terrified; there was very little snivelling or crying. After what they had been through over the last nine days, Vadim could understand why. “I want everyone to kneel down,” he told them.

“Stay where you are!” the guard ordered.

“You know me,” Vadim said to the refugees as he switched the selector on the StG 44 from automatic to semi-automatic. “Please do as I ask.”

“If any of you kneel, I start killing,” the SS man said.

“If he starts killing, just throw yourselves forward,” Vadim told them.

“I’ll get some of them!” the guard shouted, his voice breaking.

“I’m Russian. If you know anything about us, you must realise I’m prepared to accept losses to achieve victory. You know that as soon as you kill any of them, you lose your leverage. And my friends from the Dietrich know I will act whether they kneel or not.” The refugees started to kneel. The SS guard screamed at them, but they ignored him.

With the refugees down on their knees, Vadim got a much better view of the situation. The SS man on his right, his knife to Colstein’s throat, was young and frightened, tears running down his face. The man on the left, holding a pistol to the Carlsson boy’s head, looked tense, but was handling it. The one in the middle, a big brutish man who looked like an Allied propaganda poster of a Nazi stormtrooper, had a pistol to Maria’s head. As horrible as it sounded, Vadim was just relieved Maria wasn’t in the Joy Division. He kept his weapon trained on him.

“Hello, Colstein,” Vadim said.

“A fucking Jew, I knew it,” the big guard snapped.

“Hello, Captain Scorlenski,” Colstein said. Something strange seemed to be going on with Maria’s eyes. She kept on looking down. Vadim glanced down and Maria opened her hand, showed him what she was holding.

“Do you trust me, Gerhardt?” Vadim asked Colstein.

“I’m going to have to say ‘no’,” the first mate told him. Vadim smiled.

“Do you hear how quiet it is out there?” Vadim asked the stormtrooper holding Maria. “All your friends are either dead or have surrendered. Pick one.” The guard opened his mouth to answer, and Vadim swung his weapon to the right, squeezed the trigger, hitting the man holding the Carlsson boy dead centre in the head.

The switchblade in Maria’s hand unfolded and she rammed it into the stormtrooper’s arm. He howled in pain as she slithered out of his grip, then shrieked when she rammed the knife into his groin. Vadim cut off the screaming by shooting him in the head. Then he swung around to point his weapon at the young man with his knife to Colstein’s throat. He was shaking and crying, and he appeared to have wet himself.

“Unlike you, I’ve cut a throat,” Vadim told him. “It’s a lot harder than it looks. You really have to saw it. You might cut my friend there a little bit, but you won’t kill him. I, on the other hand, will kill you, assuming the lady with the switchblade doesn’t emasculate you first.” Maria was glaring at the frightened young Nazi, her right hand covered in blood well past the wrist. The boy dropped his knife and stepped away, and some of the longshoremen grabbed him. Vadim lowered his weapon and leaned against the wall. Dead or not, he was exhausted.