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

ex-wife. She must have stolen down the stairs without making a sound, Nehmann thought. He extended a hand. In the other he still had the present.

‘Happy Christmas, Frau Merz,’ he said. ‘I’m sorry to call like this.’

She brushed aside his apology. The children were asleep.

‘What’s happened?’ she asked. ‘Why are you here?’

Nehmann explained briefly about the tent, and Tatsinskaya, and the Russian tanks, and the shells exploding everywhere. Beata was looking confused but he at last had Merz’s full attention.

‘You were there? At Tatsinskaya?’ Merz asked.

‘I was. You know it?’

‘Very well. I’m a flyer, too. Georg was my best friend. Tatsinskaya’s a shithole. The Russians have taken it now and in my book they’re more than welcome.’

‘Georg?’ It was Beata. She didn’t care about Tatsinskaya.

‘I’m afraid he’s dead. I’m very sorry. I got to know him a little out east. He was a good man.’

She nodded, biting her lip, saying nothing. Then Merz had his arms around her heaving shoulders, holding her close. Nehmann heard a scrape of movement behind him as the bodyguard shifted his weight from foot to foot.

‘One minute,’ he muttered. ‘Then we go.’

Beata had regained her composure. She’d found a handkerchief in the pocket of Merz’s dressing gown and she blew her nose.

‘You were at Stalingrad?’ It was Merz.

‘Yes.’

‘How was it?’

‘Don’t ask.’

‘That bad?’

‘Worse.’

Merz nodded. Nehmann at last offered the present to Beata. She took it, turned it over, examined it from all angles. Finally, she shook her head.

‘What is it?’ she asked.

‘An egg slicer,’ Nehmann said. ‘Georg invented it himself. He told me you have chickens. These days eggs maybe need to go further. Make a thousand, and Georg thinks you’ll both be rich.’

‘Thinks?’

‘Thought.’ Nehmann offered a parting nod. ‘Frohe Weihnachten.’

*

The airfield at Tempelhof was no distance at all. The first flights out would be departing at dawn but the ground floor of the terminal was already busy with servicemen in uniform, mainly Wehrmacht and Luftwaffe.A Standartenführer in SS uniform was waiting for Nehmann and his bodyguard beside the desk that checked every outbound passenger. A secure room, he said, had been prepared for HerrNehmann. He would, from now on, become the responsibility of the Gestapo.

A prisoner, Nehmann thought. In all but name.

Hans offered him a curt nod of farewell and strode back out to the waiting Mercedes, while the SS Standartenführer demanded a look through Nehmann’s kitbag. Nehmann emptied the contents onto a nearby table, aware that he still had Goebbels’ billet-douxin his pocket. Among the litter of stinking underwear and sundry other items on the table, the Standartenführer found a brown paper bag.

He opened it, sniffed the contents, frowned.

‘What’s in here?’ he asked suspiciously.

‘Herbs. Spices.’ Nehmann held his gaze. ‘Where I’m going the food is shit.’

32

STALINGRAD, 12 JANUARY 1943

That first week of the New Year in Stalingrad was quiet. At night, Nehmann sat in the Abwehr office in the bus depot, mostly alone, smoking. From time to time he caught the flat bark of a sniper rifle or a distant burst of machine-gun fire, but he got the sense that, post-Christmas, the orchestra was still tuning up. Sixth Army was surrounded. Walk in any direction and you’d finally bump into a Russian. Both armies were restive but the final onslaught, that last yank on the rope that would strangle the German presence on the Volga, had yet to come.

Did it matter? He wasn’t sure any more. After his brief visit to Berlin – hot water, proper food – Stalingrad had closed around him again. This was an outpost of hell he’d come to regard as normal. The bread ration had been reduced to seventy-five grams per day, less than a couple of slices, and even Schultz was running out of food. Blankets, proffered by peasant women in felt boots, had become the new currency. Infantrymen turned up at the bus depot complaining that frostbite had done them in. Their forefingers were so swollen, they said, that they could no longer get them through the trigger guard.

An army incapable of firing a rifle? Nehmann simply added this tiny detail to the grotesque tapestry that had become his world. Once he’d have made a note, worked it into one of his stories, used it at the end of a paragraph to make the reader close his eyes and shake his head and wonder who’d commissioned madness on this scale. Now, though, Nehmann had put his pen away. The Promi didn’t need him any longer. His readership had gone. And even Stalingrad, with its inexhaustible horrors, couldn’t penetrate a growing sense of apartness. If Nehmann felt anything, he concluded, he felt numb. Nothing mattered. Except somehow finding Kalb.

Then came the moment when he and Schultz were sharing a cigarette on a patch of dirty snow outside the Abwehr office. Crows were circling overhead, black against the grey shroud of cloud that never seemed to lift. Schultz watched them for a moment then told Nehmann they were looking for fresh corpses.

‘They’re running out of eyes to peck,’ he grunted. ‘That’s what those bastards have for lunch.’

Eyes, thought Nehmann. The hostages trussed in the back of the SS truck. Kirile sprawled on the floor in the vestry, nothing left of his face. Kalb had done that.

Kalb.

*

In the second week, Russian envoys crossed the front line with a demand that the Germans surrender. Their position was hopeless. Sixth Army was running out of food and fuel. Almost all the ammunition had gone. On days when the weather was kind, permitting supply flights, Soviet fighters were causing havoc among the lumbering Tante-Jus. In short, the game was up.

Schultz knew about the Russian offer. The good General,he said, had just twelve hours to make a decision. Naturally, Paulus consulted Hitler. The Führer dismissed any thought of retreat. Sixth Army would have to fight on.

With what?

*

In the middle of the month, Nehmann found himself once again at Pitomnik airfield. Schultz had done his best to locate Kalb’s SS detachment but was beginning to suspect that it had gone. Commandeering a place on one