Last Flight to Stalingrad by Graham Hurley (novels to read .txt) 📕

the two things going together. I never realised you could be meticulous and evil at the same time. A credit to the Reich, eh? We Germans break new ground every day. Maybe that’s a thought for your boss, Nehmann. I wish you luck, Kamerad.’ He nodded at the table. ‘And by all means show him one of these.’

‘But how do you come to have them?’

‘They were a little present. From Kalb. Just a selection. And you know something else? He was proud of what he’d done. Can you imagine that?’

*

Nehmann left the photos with Messner and returned to his own tent, tramping across a fresh blanket of snow on the airfield. The newcomers were both asleep, oblivious to the cold. Nehmann, still wearing Messner’s greatcoat, slipped under his single blanket, doing his best to ignore the chorus of snores. He had a repertoire of tricks to get to sleep but tonight none of them seemed to work. However hard he tried, the faces from Helmut’s photos returned to haunt him.

In the small hours, shaking with cold, he must have drifted away because the next thing he heard was a voice whispering in his ear and a rough hand giving him a shake. It was the Unteroffizier from the despatch team, telling him he had just thirty minutes to make his way across the airfield to the plane for Berlin.

Nehmann nodded, grunted his thanks, then lay back, trying to make sense of the nightmare. He’d been a kid again, back in the mountains around Svengati. It was winter, bright moonlight, the theatre of the surrounding peaks shrouded in snow. Then came a low rumble he first mistook for artillery but then realised were footsteps. They grew louder and louder, thump-thump, and he looked up, terrified. A giant, he thought, striding over the Caucasus, pitiless, hungry for flesh of any kind, and then a head appeared, dwarfing the frieze of peaks, and a slender neck, and bare shoulders, and he saw only darkness where the eyes had once been, and he knew he was looking once again at the little girl in the back of the SS truck.

Kalb’s work.

Nehmann pushed the blanket away. His booted feet found the bare earth. He stood up, aware that he was trembling, hoping that Messner would forgive the theft of his greatcoat. God willing, I may be back here one day, he thought, slipping out of the tent, trying to remember how to find the plane.

25

BERLIN, 28 SEPTEMBER 1942

Nehmann was last onto the aircraft. The pilot had already started all three engines and Nehmann tried to duck the icy blast from the propeller on the port wing as he clambered up the ladder with his single bag. There was one seat remaining and the plane was already on the move when he finally made it up the narrow aisle.

He sank back, groping for his seat belt, but something had happened to the buckle and it wouldn’t work. He shrugged. He suspected that the little figure across the aisle with the dumpling face and the ready smile was Wilhelm Knaus, but he didn’t care about that, either. The flight to Kyiv would take hours, and after that came the even longer leg to Berlin. Just now he wanted to close his eyes and bask in the warmth of the cabin. Within seconds, still bumping towards the runway, he was asleep.

He awoke five hours later. The aircraft was still droning west above a carpet of fluffy cloud. Sunshine streamed in through the window and when Nehmann took a second look he recognised the two silver shapes high in the sky behind them. Bf-109s, he thought. Just in case I think this fucking war is over.

They landed at Kyiv in time for a snatched lunch in the windowless room that served as a cafeteria. While ground crew refuelled the Tante-Ju, Nehmann found a table and took advantage of the peace and quiet to have a word with the Reich’s new hero. Messner had been right. Knaus was a small, unassuming figure, a one-time baker from Koblenz, and he seemed oblivious to the place in Nazi folklore that Goebbels was preparing for him.

Faced with Nehmann’s racing pencil, he confirmed that he was a flak gunner. He’d enrolled with the Luftwaffe,half intending to become a pilot, but his mum had been right about his eyesight and he’d ended up in the Luftwaffe’sFlak Regiment.He had good mates there. He also had a mongrel dog he’d christened Gustav for no particular reason that he could think of. He’d tried to smuggle Gustav aboard the plane at Pitomnik but had been caught out. The mutt was white with grey patches which sometimes made life tricky trying to find him in the snow.

Nehmann underlined the name Gustav. Readers loved nonsense like this. As Goebbels was the first to point out, it made them feel better about the war.

Nehmann looked up.

‘Twenty-one tanks? Have I got that right?’

‘Twenty-two really. One got away but it was trailing smoke and I blew one of the tracks off it. We found it later that day.’

‘And the crew?’

‘Still inside.’

‘Dead?’

‘Ja,very.’ He was eating a plate of pickled cucumbers. He chased the smallest one with a corner of his bread and then sucked at the vinegar. The bread, he said, was Scheisse. Kyiv needed a decent baker.

Nehmann tried to tease out a quote or two about the 88mm flak gun, about blowing all those tanks apart, about what it took to be in a battle, and hold your nerve, and steady your aim, and chose exactly the right moment to squeeze the trigger.

‘Trigger? Have I got that right?’

‘Lanyard. It’s a kind of rope. You lay the gun first. Then give the rope a yank.’

Nehmann wrote the word down. Yank.The Reich’s new hero might have been preparing a tray of Brötchen.

‘Did you shoot before? As a kid, maybe?’

‘Never.’

‘And the funfair? As a kid? Did you ever try for the coconuts?’

‘My father hated the funfair. He locked us up, me and my brother.’

‘Did you ever