Free Angel, Archangel by Nick Cook Page A

look anything like the radial-engined German fighter and there was Lutz almost blowing kisses at the pilot until Ivan started shooting at them. Lutz deserved to be posted to a slit trench at the front. Then he wouldn’t mistake Russians for Germans in a hurry.
    Menzel got back to his map reading, every so often peering through the clouds for a landmark that would point them accurately to the Chrudim sector.
    The Army had received reports of an unusually large Soviet presence in the area and had contacted the Luftwaffe to go and take a look-see. The twenty-year-old Klepper, being one of the most senior and experienced pilots on the squadron, had been asked with his crew of two to take off from their airfield at Altenburg, forty kilometres south of Leipzig, fly to Chrudim to establish the validity of the reports and, if they were substantiated, bring back pictures.
    Fucking marvellous, Menzel thought. Here he was, suspended four thousand metres above the earth and heading for one of the hottest sectors on the Eastern Front. All on the say-so of some madcap intelligence officer who had received spurious reports about a Soviet armoured and logistics build-up in some shithole near Prague. So what. The Russians had been ‘building up’ their forces in the region for months and he hadn’t noticed any sign yet of a German counter-offensive.
    Menzel had no faith in the Wehrmacht’s intelligence corps. For a start, Chrudim had been behind enemy lines in Czechoslovakia now for weeks. So what did the Army know? The nearest an intelligence officer or a scout party had ever got to Chrudim in the last month was staring at it on a map.
    Since the big Russian breakthrough in eastern Czechoslovakia several months before, all had been chaos on the squadron. Things had become so desperate in the last few weeks that some joker at Luftwaffe Staff Headquarters had given orders for their FWs to be equipped with bombs. The mechanics jury-rigged racks under the wings and the same afternoon the lumbering aircraft had set out to bomb Soviet armour. Mercifully, their supply of bombs had run out ten days ago, so the squadron’s remaining six aircraft went back to their observation duties. It was up to the Wehrmacht and the SS to defend the homeland against the Russian T-34 tanks now.
    Below their port wing Menzel caught a gleam of sunlight on metal. Shit! Yaks scrambling to meet them. He was about to alert the others when a gap in the clouds showed him that it was water and not airframe on which the early morning rays of sun had reflected. Menzel glanced at his charts.
    “Crossing the Elbe now, Herr Hauptmann. We should reach Chrudim in twenty minutes.”
    ‘Good,” Klepper said. “Both of you. Keep alert. The Soviets must be worse than we think they are if they haven’t spotted us by now. If we get bounced by fighters I’ll head for the nearest clouds and try and shake them off. Once we get to Chrudim, the important thing is to take a look, take pictures and get the hell out.” Klepper’s intercom clicked off.
    Menzel scanned the sky, looking for a Soviet air presence, but saw none. Every so often he shot a quick glance at the cloud cover above them. The cumulus had never taken on such significance before. When the Yaks came for them Klepper would have a hell of a time finding cover.
    As the March sun climbed higher into the sky the clouds around them evaporated one by one.

    * * * * * * * *

    So far, the major of tanks concluded, the maskirovka operation had been a complete success.
    As the engineers erected the last of the dummy T-34s in the town square of Chrudim, Major Kirill Malenkoy sat back in the rear seat of the jeep and ordered his driver to return to HQ.
    The road that led from the little provincial Czech town was lined with T-34s and even the new Josef Stalin 3s, their barrels stowed to the rear in readiness for rapid mobilization, their drivers’ cupolas pointing north-east. The dirt track met the main Prague highway about ten