Free Agent of Death by John Drake Page B

pilot out.’
    ‘We know that,’ said Ulitzky, ‘We know all about that. We could make them ourselves if we wanted to,’ he sneered. ‘But they’re for cowards: to abandon their planes. In the Red Army we shoot men for that!’ He slapped the pilot’s shoulder. ‘Go round again, comrade. I want Moscow boy to see everything.’
    The pilot took us round again, as slowly as he could.
    ‘See the bodies?’ said Ulitzky. ‘They tried to examine the wreckage.’ I saw the figures – mostly Russian soldiers – that lay close to the Arado, plus one civilian and his dog: all dead, all unmarked. ‘It can’t be touched or approached,’ said Ulitzky. ‘Whatever it was that killed fifty thousand people, it came from that Nazi jet-plane, and it’s still active.’
    ‘What about the German pilot? What happened to him?’
    ‘We’ll take you to see him next,’ said Ulitzky. ‘He had some special equipment. Perhaps you can tell us what it is.’ He paused and thrust out one hand in a flat, dismissive gesture. ‘Not that we don’t know already,’ he said, and he said it in loud and angry denial. But then the bluster faded and he wagged his head from side to side. ‘Truth is, Moscow boy, we know nothing. That’s why we need you.’
    *
    I cringed at the noise, squinted through the smoke, tried to keep my shoes out of the thick mud, and realized why the Russians all wore jack boots. The 312 th Reconnaissance Army Aviation Regiment’s base was part of a huge airfield shared by many other units, and the regiment’s twin-engined Peshkas were a small minority among Yak 9 and Mig 3 fighters, and huge numbers of heavily-armoured Ilyushin, Sturmovik ground-attack aircraft flying non-stop sorties, because while the city of Ulvid with its silent dead was beyond range of German attack, the airfield was not, and it was a bombed-out, shelled-brown, miniature recreation of the Great War’s Western Front. But it was so big that a German air attack, actually in progress at the other end of it, looked distant, with the black-cross Stukas howling down to bomb, as if in a film.
    But mainly the base shook to the roar of Russian engines, as Sturmoviks by the dozen took off or landed, with the more shot up crashing horribly and screeching across the ground in lethal flame, so the whole field was decorated with burned-out fuselages, naked engines, dangling pipes and wires, and other fragments too smashed to recognize. Everywhere men shouted and waved, and hammered gravel into the craters and whipped horse-teams to clear the wreckage of the dead, so those still alive could take their chance to land if they could, and medic teams hauled out the wounded and ran them off in stretchers.
    Such was the immense scale of this eastern war, where the Red Army was facing the Wehrmacht nose to nose, and I’d never seen anything like it. The noise was appalling, the filth beyond imagination, and the chaos seemed total. But the Russians kept going through the uniquely Russian mixture of stoic perseverance, ferocious patriotism, noble self-sacrifice, and the threat of punishment which might include shooting on the spot, or sending to a penal battalion where death was equally certain, but took longer to arrive and was nastier when it came.
    Meanwhile Ulitzky was yelling red-faced at another Russian, who yelled back in fury and suddenly drew his Tokarev automatic and waved it the air. So Ulitzky shouted even louder and tapped a finger on the row of medals on his tunic, because like most Red Army men he wore the lot, even in battledress: not just ribbons but the dangling metal as well. Ulitzky had a lot of medals and the other did not, and Ulitzky was pointing this out.
    Otherwise, both wore near-identical uniforms: khaki jodhpurs and gymnatiorka with shoulder-boards bearing the three stars of a polkovnik – a colonel. Likewise, both wore caps with patent leather peaks and a single red star. But Ulitsky’s cap was khaki all over, while the other’s had a