The Doomsday Testament(68)

‘Come out where I can see you.’ A harsh voice that enjoyed giving orders. North German, from the back streets or the docks. ‘I said get out here, or I’ll fucking shoot.’

Sarah pulled herself from the bracken. She was partly concealed by the man between them, but Jamie could see that though her eyes were wary, she wasn’t frightened.

‘Put your hands on your head and take two steps forward. Good. Now kneel. I like it when the girls kneel in front of me.’ There was a pause while Sarah obeyed. ‘Good. Now, where’s your boyfriend?’ Jamie untangled himself from the thorns, wincing at each slight ‘tick’ as the hooked barbs came free, and rose silently to his feet. He heard the sharp slap of flesh meeting flesh. ‘I said where’s your fucking boyfriend. Open your mouth.’

‘Please don’t hurt me.’ Sarah’s plea was just loud enough to mask the sound of Jamie’s three strides through the soft grass.

The reaction to her words was as natural as breathing. No calculation was required. Just a realization that it had to be quick and there must be no sound. His left hand came round to clamp over the man’s mouth and nostrils, his right took the back of the head, and the two twisted in opposite directions in an unconscious imitation of Stan’s demonstration at the hospital. It took more force than he would have expected, but adrenalin added to his strength and he felt the moment the German’s neck snapped. The body jerked and twitched in his hands and there was the sound of tearing cartilage you get when you tear the leg off a Christmas turkey. He held the head until the twitching stopped before he allowed the German to drop. As he stood over the dead man all the strength drained from him. He stretched out a hand to help Sarah to her feet, but she seemed to be part of a mirage because he wasn’t able to find her.

‘For Christ’s sake, Jamie, let’s go,’ she hissed. She was beside him, tugging at his arm. ‘If you want to send him flowers do it later. We need to get out of here. Now.’ She picked up the German’s pistol from where it had fallen and handed it to him.

‘Sorry, it’s . . .’ His brain seemed to reassemble one small piece at a time. ‘Where?’

There was a soft crackle from beside the body, where the earpiece had dropped. Sarah darted a glance to the right, but he shook his head. ‘Not there.’

No time for argument. They dashed through the undergrowth knowing the only way to escape now was to outpace their hunters. Jamie could still feel the dead weight of the man he had killed; the warm head resting between his hands as the torso convulsed. The morality of what he’d done could be debated later, for the moment his mind barely acknowledged his surroundings. Sarah dropped back a little, her eyes scanning for danger. A shout from behind announced that someone had found the body and it was echoed from left and right. But not in front.

‘Christ.’

If her reactions hadn’t been lightning fast he would certainly have fallen. As it was he found himself teetering on the brink of a two-hundred-foot near-vertical drop to the river with Sarah hanging on to one arm and digging her heels into the turf. For a split second he thought his weight was going to carry them both over, but with a grunt of effort she hauled him away from the edge.

‘Bloody hell.’ He peered over the edge.

‘Stop!’ A faint rattle accompanied the shout, like a woodpecker at work somewhere in the faraway woods, and the tree above them began to disintegrate, chunks of white bark dropping down like snowflakes amid a curtain of pine needles. It seemed odd that there was so little sound to accompany the violence. Jamie’s mind made an unconscious calculation. Machine pistol, silenced, only accurate at short range, but now we’re really fucked.

‘Stop,’ the cry was repeated. They looked at each other.

‘Bugger that.’ Jamie made the decision for them both. He took her hand and they launched themselves over the edge.





XXXIII


WHILE I HAD been fighting my war, Walter Brohm had been fighting his. The contest could only have one winner. Klosse’s face was pink with rage and he wore a new bruise on his right cheek. Brohm’s eyes shone with the eerie light of victory and he twirled my pistol on his finger as if he was Tom Mix. I retrieved it before he shot himself. ‘We make a good team, you and I, Leutnant Matt. Perhaps you should come with us to America?’ Somehow I restrained myself from wiping the smile from his face with the Browning. I signalled him to get to his feet and told him we had a job to do first. Strange how you can share your food and your blanket with a man, but still never really know him. Ted Jack, my wireless operator, had nursed me through two bouts of chronic dysentery, but because I was an officer I’d never called him anything but Sarn’t. Ted was one of those stolid, competent, uncomplaining types who are the backbone of the British Army. He had a wife and two children under five. Now I cradled his head in my hands, wondering at the weight of it, as the others watched me with the kind of look you reserve for a man standing outside a lunatic asylum who suddenly announces that he’s Napoleon. Sarn’t Jack’s eyes were half closed, the way most dead people’s are, but at least he still had eyes. Al Stewart didn’t even have a head. We hadn’t been able to find it. Klosse muttered something about being a gentleman and threw his entrenching tool down. Stan didn’t appreciate that and kicked him in beside the tattered, blackened remains of what was left of our four friends. The German looked at me for support. For answer I tossed Sarn’t Jack’s head at his feet and he got the message and continued digging. Even Walter Brohm didn’t complain. We put the bodies of our ambushers into the ditch. I didn’t want them sharing a grave with the men they’d killed. Apart from an older SS veteran who had operated the machine gun, they were probably aged between twelve and fifteen and their bled-out, marble-grey faces and surprised eyes made them look younger still. Just children. But they were Hitler’s children, indoctrinated since the day they started school to worship the Führer and programmed to give their lives for the Fatherland. Well, they’d got their wish. I looked down at them, the flies already feasting on the drying blood that stained their faces. One particular fly made its way slowly from one side of a staring opaque eyeball to another and I was surprised the dead boy didn’t blink. If you asked me then how I felt about killing children I would have told you that they weren’t children, they were the enemy, and the moment they had lifted their weapons and fired upon my friends they had forfeited their lives. But I knew that someday these dead boys would come and visit me in the night, the way all the men I’d killed do, and maybe then my answers would be different. At one point my hands started shaking and I kept them busy by replacing the magazine in the carbine I’d recovered from the wreckage of the first jeep. It made a sharp click when I pushed it home. The three men filling in the grave froze and their faces went almost as pale as the corpses in the ditch. Stan laughed.