Free Red Shadow by Paul Dowswell Page A

blew off the river and she shivered in her thin cotton dress and pulled him a little closer. Her body was touching his, from shoulder to feet. He felt her warmth and a hopeless longing but glancing at her face he saw she was staring forlornly out to the far embankment.
    ‘What can we do?’ was all Misha could think to say.
    ‘I’m going to join the partisans,’ Valya said firmly. ‘They’ll be asking for volunteers to fight behind the German lines.’
    ‘Then I will too,’ said Misha rashly.
    She hit him briskly on the arm.
    ‘You, Mikhail Petrov, are not old enough. But you could join the air defence section of your Komsomol detachment. I dare say they’ll put you in charge of a Pioneer brigade.’
    ‘Look at this city,’ she continued. ‘All the effort, all the work we put into building it up since the Revolution. All these factories, all these new hospitals, apartment blocks, they’re all in danger. You know what the Nazi bombers have been doing to London.’
    ‘Papa says the bombers could be here tomorrow,’ Misha said.
    ‘No. They’ll need to set up airbases nearer to us.’ She paused again and looked him straight in the eye. ‘But they’ll be here soon enough.’

Chapter 11
    Midnight, 21st June 1941 Polish–Soviet Border
    Â 
    Augustus Grasse breathed in the damp summer air that drifted across the River Bug. Grasse shivered a little and lit another cigarette, carefully hiding the light in the slit trench he had dug that evening.
    â€˜Hey, me too, Dummkopf ,’ said Steiner, holding out an unlit cigarette of his own. Both of them were soldiers in Generalfeldmarschall Fedor von Bock’s Army Group Centre, Fourth Army, 197th Infantry Division.
    They were both from Berlin but Grasse didn’t really like Steiner. He was always banging on about the Jews, how they had started the war and how they would soon be getting what they deserved. Grasse wanted to tell him he sounded like a parakeet, parroting that poisonous Dr Goebbels. But he bit his lip. Grasse, the boy whose father was a communist, a traitor to the Reich. He just had to put a foot wrong and the Gestapo would be bringing him in for interrogation.
    On the far bank of the River Bug were the Russians. At least he assumed they were there. His division had been perched in their start position for several hours now and they had not heard a whisper from the other side. The Germans had even brought up their tanks – there was no hiding the thunderous rumble the Mark IV Panzers made – and the smell of exhaust still hung in the night air like some monstrous creature panting and sweating after a night’s marauding.
    The simple truth was, Grasse wanted the communists to win. As an eleven-year-old he had joined his father fighting the Nazis in the street battles in Berlin, before Hitler wangled his way into power. When the Nazis got in, his father was one of the first to be sent to Dachau. He came out five years later. Augustus didn’t recognise him – he was skin and bone, and bald. That fine head of black hair had disappeared, and his bushy eyebrows had gone white.
    â€˜Get out, son. Go to Russia, or France,’ his father had said, shortly before he died of tuberculosis. ‘The devil has come to Earth.’
    But Augustus didn’t go. He didn’t know the right people to bribe for a visa, and he knew instinctively that he had to keep his head down, otherwise they’d come for him too. So he went along with all the military training at school. Some of it he even enjoyed. No one could throw a grenade quite like him. He had a silver cup on the mantelpiece to prove it.
    Augustus never forgot his father’s politics. It made perfect sense. Power to the people. From each according to his ability – to each according to his needs. There was almost a religious logic to it. Didn’t Christ want to help the poor and oppressed to make a better life for themselves? He looked at his watch. They were four