An Autumn Break in St Petersburg
Russia, September 1980
My three years based out of Berlin had started off in a reasonably civilised manner, as the social assignment I had failed to convince Wolf that it would be. I only expected it to last a few months, and during that time, we were wined and dined and kept busy being shown the good side of German life. But much of it was day-to-day stuff, one isolated terrorist incident aside, and I soon found myself longing for a bit more excitement. However, things changed about six months after I had arrived, when I was almost due to rotate out, with the death of Reinhard Heydrich in November 1977, when he failed to land his private plane in bad weather. Of course the obligatory rumours started kicking around afterwards, with regard to whether Führer Schenk had dispatched an inconvenient predecessor, but the official enquiry had ruled that it was exactly what it appeared: a tragic accident.
Even before the accident, Schenk had struggled to prove himself, leading him to adopt a more expansionist attitude to maintaining German greatness. Heydrich's death, and the hysteria - there really wasn't another word for it - surrounding his state funeral, opened the floodgates. So for the next two and a half years, the Press Corps travelled to a variety of godforsaken holes in the Greater German Reich, as the powers that be pushed their agenda further south and east. During that time, I'd tried very hard not to overstep the mark of what I was allowed to do, limiting my anger at what I was seeing to my reports to Simon Rathbone, rather than following my journalistic instincts and stirring up trouble. That way lay Prinz Albrecht Strasse, as Wolf had so forcefully reminded me that last night before I'd left.
I hadn't spoken to Wolf since. I'd never figured out a good way to contact him directly, so I'd sent him a couple of messages via Simon. However, I'd never had a response, not that I'd particularly expected one, given the circumstances. Moreover, I'd expected to be back in England before Christmas, at which point I'd been planning to invite him down to Kent and make my apologies. However, six months stretched to a year, and a year to two years, and by then I had genuinely no idea of what I could possibly say to him.
When word came down in late-August 1980, that about half the Press Corps were being sent to St Petersburg on a fact-finding junket, I was curious. Why there? That part of the front had been stable for years, so what was there to report? The obvious answer was that High Command were planning something big, somewhere a long way from St Petersburg, and wanted the press out of the way. On the other hand, maybe there was actually something else to it, and I would be a fool not to try to find out which was true. So I put my name forward to be in the group which headed east. If nothing else, at least St Petersburg should be a civilised change from the grimness of the eastern Ukraine.
I arrived in the city early in September, and initially things seemed pretty quiet. Most of the press junket were happy to spend their time drinking vodka in the hotel bar and charging it to expenses, but I decided I'd actually take a look around the city. I'd never been there before, and it was supposed to be impressive. And indeed, and with the leaves turning on the trees, golden in the autumn sun, the place would have been positively pleasant, if it hadn't been for the hordes of Nazi soldiers.
Initially, this didn't seem particularly unusual: the place had been part of the GGR for a long time, and as the largest city they held in Russian territory proper, it was logical that it would be strongly garrisoned. But after a couple of days of wandering around, my gut told me something wasn't right. There was something else going on under the surface. It was enough to start me looking, and while it was subtle, I began to see the signs that something major was in the offing. There were too many senior officers coming and going from the big civic buildings on Palace Square, and as I took note of the unit designations of the soldiers around town, I realised that there were far too many of them. Somewhere, nearby, they were building up forces.
Is that why they'd brought a group of us here? They were planning something big, and wanted to have the press handy for when they declared their great victory? It was a gamble: on the one hand, they liked to make a splash, but on the other, they were risking a lot by assuming that none of us would spot what they were doing. A nosy journalist in the wrong place could cause an intelligence nightmare for a major offensive. Except most of my compatriots considered this assignment a cushy holiday, and were drinking in the hotel bar, or enjoying strolling up and down Nevskiy Prospekt with the local girls. The only nosy journalist out and about appeared to be me.
I had little to go on but my instincts - and thirty years more experience of war zones than most of the other members of the junket - but I did my best to find out what was going on. However, I had frustratingly little success. When I did manage to get any of the soldiers talking, they didn't even know themselves what the build-up was for, although I did get one to admit that the main force was assembling in Tosno, to the south.
I was putting some serious thought into how to borrow a vehicle and snoop around down there without needing travel papers the day I saw Kasimir Ritter walking across the Palace Square. He was accompanied by a group of other Ahnenerbe officers, none of them ranked less than a Sturmbannführer, and all of them were hanging on his every word. What the Hell was the general commanding the Ahnenerbe doing in St Petersburg? That was the point I realised that whatever was going on, it wasn't just a major offensive. It was something else.
That evening, I bumped into Marina Acker in the hotel bar, looking as lovely as ever. We'd met on and off since the first time we'd slept together, in a rush of relief and adrenaline after being caught up in the September '77 terrorist attack in Danzig, but I hadn't seen her for a couple of months. She'd been reassigned to Berlin by her paper after the Battle of Liezna, so seeing her in St Petersburg was something of a surprise.
"I don't suppose they've deigned to tell the esteemed correspondent for Die Welt what's going on, have they?" I asked, sitting beside her at the bar.
"Good evening, Herr Cuijper," she said, ignoring my question and giving me a peck on the cheek, then smiled more warmly, "you're looking well, Miska. The autumn break seems to be agreeing with you."
"Some autumn break," I answered, "something's going on, but I can't figure out what it is. It's bugging the Hell out of me."
"You're probably imagining it."
"Come on. I wasn't born yesterday. They're mustering for something, but they aren't even admitting it. What's going on?"
"Why on earth would you think I'd know that?" she asked, her expression curious.
"You're here," I replied, "which you weren't before. And you have an unerring knack of being in the right place at the right time. Almost as if you have a source in High Command, tipping you off."
"All journalists have sources," she said with a shrug.
"But yours are better than most...it always bothers me."
"We've had this conversation before. I study, just like you. I learn things, just like you. It's no more than that. So, dinner first? Or do you want to skip the formalities."
"It's been a long, unsatisfying day."
"Skipping the formalities it is, then," she said, with a wicked grin, and we headed upstairs to her room.
Over a late dinner afterwards, I tried to press her on what was going on, either she genuinely didn't know, or she'd become a far better actress since I'd last seen her. That was always the problem with Marina. I was never sure who she was working for, or what side she was on at any given time. Sometimes she seemed more than willing to help me, and we got into and out of numerous difficult situations together. At other times, she was cold, distant and very, very German. This time, though, she seemed in one of her better moods, so I decided to risk asking her to help me get to Tosno. She ummed and ahhed for a bit, and eventually agreed to help me.
The following morning, she met me outside the hotel in an unmarked jeep.
"Dare I ask?"
"I have friends, Miska," she said, with a chuckle, "leave it at that."
Wisely, I think, I did as she asked. I threw my pack of useful stuff in the back, then climbed into the passenger side, while she put the jeep into gear, and we set off.
St Petersburg to Tosno is about sixty miles on the main road, and Marina set a decent but steady pace. We obviously hit checkpoints along the way, but somehow she had arranged proper travel permits, and each time we were waved through after limited questioning. Sometimes it's very handy to have a beautiful woman as your partner in crime. The closer we got to Tosno, however, the harder it became to talk our way through. Within ten miles of the city, security was noticeably higher, and there were more military vehicles on the road. Five miles out, it racked up another notch. And two miles from our destination, we were stopped dead, and even Marina's charms weren't enough to get us any further. With minimal argument, we swung around and headed back towards St Petersburg, but at the first opportunity, we ditched the jeep and started moving in on foot.
We had a few hairy moments along the way, but a couple of hours later, we found what we were looking for. A lot of the trees had been cut back since I'd last been in the vicinity, twelve years before, and every clear piece of ground, in both the city and on the outskirts, was filled with German army vehicles. It was the biggest massed force I'd seen in years.
"Is this the only muster point?" I asked, looking at her.
She paused before answering, and then shook her head.
"Just the most northerly one."
"Where are they going?"
"Moscow."
Over the years the Nazis had been far more interested in securing the west of the country. They hadn't tried a direct push against the Russian capital since the forties, before they dropped the bomb on it in October '45. If they were changing that policy now, it would be a huge escalation, but sadly completely in character for the hawkish Schenk.
"We have to tell someone," I said, looking at her.
"Do that, Miska, and they'll figure out that I led you here," she answered, "don't think for a moment that my contacts would protect me from a treason charge."
"Then why did you bring me here?"
"So you'd stop asking the wrong questions, and start asking the right ones."
"Strikes me that questions about an advance on Moscow are exactly the right ones."
"No. Moscow's incidental. After all, They're just Russians. They deserve what they get," she said with a shrug, "the right question is why is the Head of the Ahnenerbe here?"
And before I could argue with her, she began retracing out movements back to where we'd stashed the jeep. She got behind the wheel, and we moved carefully out onto the main road once more, heading back towards St Petersburg. However, a short while later, she hung a left.
"Where are we going?"
"You'll know when we get there."
We drove for maybe a couple of miles, and then she turned left again, down a smaller, more twisty road. After a while it petered out into little more than a dirt track but she pressed on. Finally, just short of rejoining something more major, she parked up in a stand of trees.
"Marina, what the Hell is going on?"
"You're the Adept, Miska. I was hoping you could tell me that."
I looked at her, startled. I'd never told her that; never mentioned the occult aspects of my life. How did she know?
"Later," she said, as I opened my mouth to ask the inevitable question, and she jumped down and started walking south-south-east.
Unsure what else to do, I followed her, catching her a few moments later, and we trekked through the trees. The main road was off to our right, and every so often, I could hear vehicles. After a mile or so, the trees thinned, and I could see a church spire, but as I looked more closely, it was obvious that it had been burned out at some point in the relatively recent past - certainly within the last twenty years. We pressed on, and the nearer we got, the more uncomfortable I felt.
With the cat well and truly out of the bag, I threw up a set of wards and offered to do the same for her, which she accepted. Then I put myself into a light trance so I had a chance of detecting any traces which might tell me what was going on. Something very bad had happened here: not recently, but it had been enough to leave a psychic resonance which I could pick up several hundred feet away. I paused for a moment, centring myself so that the resonance wouldn't stop me being able to act, and as I did so, we saw three more vehicles come down the road and enter the village. Two were army trucks, and one was a staff car with SS plates, and lighting rune flags flapping on the front wings.
Once the road was clear again, we moved further in the village, Marina letting me take the lead, but doing a surprisingly good job of following. As we began to see people, it was very obvious that we were the only ones in the village who weren't wearing SS uniforms. There were no civilians at all. More cautious than ever, we made for the central square, where we could see forces massing, made up of a combination of Ritter and his Ahnenerbe flunkies, and both sub-divisions of Einsatzgruppe-4, Wolf's old unit. Death squads and ritual black magicians. There was no way that combination could be good.
We ducked into the shadow of the church to watch, while I snapped a few pictures with my camera, and that was when I realised that the side of the building was riddled with bullet holes. Suddenly overwhelmed with a very bad feeling that I knew exactly where I was, I extended my arcane senses to see if I could figure out what Ritter was up to. The Rathaus, across the square, was obviously warded - and I could feel the tang of dark magic in the wards. I didn't expect what happened next.
I'm not sure exactly what hit me: maybe the resonance of the place took hold of me, but suddenly everything seemed different. It was just before dawn, and from the positions of the stars I could still see in the sky, I guessed it was a couple of weeks before Midsummer. The square in front of me was filled with people. Half of them were in SS uniforms, bearing the unit markings of Einsatzkommando 2/IV, chasing down civilians, and I could hear crying and screaming as the villagers were hauled into separate groups: men by the church, women and children the other side of the square.
I watched helpless as the men were lined up by the wall where I was standing, unable to do anything but get the Hell out of the way. Then an officer wearing the insignia of an Einsatzgruppe Sturmbannführer ordered about fifty or sixty of his men to line up roughly twenty feet away, weapons drawn. I knew the words were coming before he said them, but I felt cold to the soul anyway as I heard them.
"Macht alle kaputt!"
Machine gun fire rang out, and the prisoners began to fall, blood blossoming from their bodies. It went on for about ten minutes, and once the shooting stopped, the silence was deafening. And then, from across the square I heard the sound of a child crying, and I saw an Ahnenerbe colonel and an Einsatzgruppe captain with sandy brown hair, standing over where the women and children were huddled, staring each other down. Behind them, other Einsatzgruppe soldiers surrounded the prisoners, obviously ready and far too willing to fire.
Unable to stop myself, I moved in that direction.
"Shut her up," the senior officer ordered, and the captain moved towards the little girl, bending down to comfort her.
"No, captain," he said, his voice ice cold, "permanently. She's just a stupid brat. She isn't worth your sympathy."
The younger man looked at him, his unwillingness to comply obvious in his expression, but then I saw his eyes flick downwards to where the Ahnenerbe officer was holding his sidearm, pointed directly at him.
"They aren't important, captain," he repeated, "they're Russians. The day you learn that lesson, will be the day that you will be free achieve your potential. Now, shut...her...up."
The younger man stared at him with hatred, but his senior officer raised the weapon so the muzzle was more obviously aimed at his torso, and his expression became stony. They locked eyes, the elder gesturing with a flick of the barrel, and very slowly, the captain drew the Luger at his belt. Then he turned back to the little girl, resting his hand on her shoulder and talking quietly to her. For a moment I thought I saw hope in her face, but it turned to incomprehension as he rested the muzzle of the pistol against her temple. I saw him pause for a moment, eyes closed, and then he pulled the trigger. She collapsed like a broken toy, his shot echoed by others as his subordinates opened fire.
As the younger man turned round, there were blood splatters on his hands and uniform, his face was as white as a sheet.
"Wolfgang Dietrich Armand Ulrich," Kramer said to him, smiling broadly, "your grandfather would be proud of you."
"Go fuck yourself, Kramer," came the answer, as he turned his back on the bloodshed and walked towards me.
As he got close to me, I could see the unshed tears in his eyes, and there was a look of self-loathing on his face that it was painful to see. Then his shade touched mine, my head started spinning and I dropped like a stone. The next I knew, I was lying on the ground beside the church, puking my guts up.
"What the fuck is going on," came an urgent female voice. I caught myself, tried to control my rebellious stomach, and rolled onto hands and knees, but I couldn't draw breath to speak, "they've heard us. We have to go. Now."
"Give me a moment..." I croaked.
"Only if you want Einsatzgruppe-4 on your ass," she answered, and pulled me to my feet.
Sure enough, behind me I could hear voices, as someone started trying to organise a pursuit. Steeling myself, I got to my feet and followed her as she led us away, but I felt so shaky and out of it that in the end she to grab me and point me in the right direction. Beyond that, I don't remember much about the mad rush back to the jeep. Once there, she helped me into the passenger seat, climbed behind the wheel and crashed through the trees to the road, where she turned right and started belting up it as breakneck speed. Before she got more than a mile, I passed out.
When I came around, we were back on the St Petersburg road, and she'd slowed down to a less conspicuous pace. I sat back against my seat and downed most a bottle of water from my pack, using the rest to clean myself up.
"What happened, Miska?"
"You could have warned me it was Eglizi," I said, quietly.
"I would have if I'd realised you'd react like that," she snapped, and I could tell that she was still scared and tense from what appeared to have been a successful escape, "what went wrong?"
"In certain circumstances, an Adept can be sensitive to impressions. And you dumped me in a place where 300 people were murdered. I saw the whole bloody thing."
I realised I was shaking, and I still felt sick and clammy. I took another drink of water.
"Miska, I'm so sorry," she answered, and she sounded like she meant it.
"How did you learn what I was?" I answered, trying to change the subject before I said something I would regret.
"As you know well enough, there is more acceptance of the occult in certain areas of German society than there is in other areas of Europe. And I have...contacts...who are quite into that kind of thing. I've recognised the signs over the three years we've been...whatever we are. Your obvious interest in the occult. The occasional odd moments when you seem to switch off and be somewhere completely different. The fact that whenever you think you're heading into trouble, you ask the gods for protection, in a way that doesn't seem mainstream religious."
Obviously, I hadn't been as careful as I thought - or she is a far, far better observer than even I had realised.
"Did you figure out what Oberstgruppenführer Ritter was up to?"
"Not completely," I had to admit, "although the fact that they're assembling at the site of a massacre, which I very much doubt is a coincidence, and the combination ritual magicians in the form of the Ahnenerbe and mass murderers in the form of Einsatzgruppe-4 does not bode well. I think they're planning a major death ritual. I just don't have a clue what or where. Is there any way your contacts can find out what Ritter's orders are?"
"You're asking me to potentially commit treason, Miska," she answered, "I'm not sure our relationship is that serious yet."
"Do you want your country to be associated with yet another massacre?" I asked, "Schenk has proved surprisingly hawkish since he became Führer, but up until now he's drawn a line in the sand at that."
"I'm not sure my country's reputation could get much worse in certain quarters," she answered, with a resigned sigh, and I could tell from her expression that she wished it were not the case.
"If you happened to hear anything, I'd appreciate you telling me," I said, quietly.
She gave a slight nod, and we left it at that. We lapsed into silence, me sitting back with my eyes closed, trying to centre properly, while she drove confidently and efficiently, and we eventually made our way back to our hotel in St Petersburg.
"Do you want dinner tonight? Or anything else?"
"No," I said, with a slight shake of my head, "all I want tonight is a hot shower, a bucket of painkillers and my bed."
"I'm sorry I didn't tell you where we were, Miska," she said again, as we reached the lifts in the lobby, "I didn't for one moment realise what it was going to do to you."
"Apology accepted," I answered, as the life bell dinged and I stepped inside, "goodnight, Marina. No doubt I'll see you in the morning."
Then the doors closed and I headed up to my room.
* * * * * *
The following morning, I sent a contact request to one of the SIS's Russian network. Details of a meeting arrived for me that afternoon, and in a café that evening, I handed over a short, coded report on the likelihood of a move against Moscow in the near future, with my assessment of troop movements and units involved. I included a sidebar to Simon himself that I was pretty sure Ritter was up to something bad on an arcane level, most likely in support of the Moscow offensive. I decided not to tell my paper more than the basics which could be gleaned by a decent reporter around the St Petersburg: suppositions, but no specifics.
That done, I tried to get back into a more normal routine, pretending to be just another journalist on autumn break. However, not knowing what the Hell Ritter was up to meant that I just couldn't relax until I knew what was going on. That he was planning something fatal for a large number of people seemed inevitable. Being mid-September, the upcoming equinox - which would be around midnight, night of the 22nd/23rd St Petersburg time - seemed the most likely time. The question was, was there anything at all that I could do to stop it, or even throw a large spanner in its works.
Disrupting things at Eglizi might be one method, but there were various problems with that. For one, my disappearing off the face of St Petersburg for too long, without the convenient company of the esteemed correspondent for Die Welt, would be noticed. For another, I had no idea how long he'd be at Eglizi for. It had been 14th September when Marina had taken me on our little day trip, so if I was right with the equinox as timing, unless he was going to do it in situ - which was possible, but seemed unlikely, given he'd have to ship in his victims - he was going to have to move out eventually. And for a third, I couldn't seriously expect to personally declare war on Einsatzgruppe-4 and live to tell the tale.
The other option would be to try to discover where he was going, and set things up at his destination such that he would have a less than friendly reception. But again, potentially that came under declaring war on Einsatzgruppe-4, and if he went after a non-military target, which would certainly be easier than attacking a Russian military position, anyone resisting an armed German force was going to come off worst.
Unfortunately, all speculation aside, in the end my deliberations always came back to the same thing: unless, by some miracle, I found out what he was doing, any moves I might consider against him were just pissing in the wind. It made me feel more helpless than I had for a long, long time.
I kicked around St Petersburg in a state of frustration for the next couple of days. I occasionally saw Marina in the bar, but she was brusque with me, to say the least. No more relieving our mutual frustration of an evening. Meanwhile, in my strolls around the city, I realised that the flood of senior officers reporting in for orders had reached its peak. By the 17th, my gut told me that the forces massing in Tosno would be on the road within hours, and there wasn't a bloody thing I could do about it. The question was, would Ritter move at the same time, or not?
Deciding the story was better than legalities and travel permits, I threw my pack over my shoulder, snuck out of the hotel the night of the 17th/18th, stole myself a motorbike and headed back to Eglizi. I arrived a little before dawn, and moved carefully into the village, noting that security had been significantly increased since our previous visit. I looked around for a decent vantage point from which to watch, this time pointedly avoiding the area around the church, and broke into one of the unoccupied houses. It hadn't been burned out - albeit it was rapidly heading for derelict - and had decent sight lines on the central square, so I set up camp in there. I'd packed rations for a week, just in case, and hoped I'd be able to find a decent supply of water. The only problem was that I would need to be very careful moving around, as being the only civilian in the place, I would be rather obvious.
I found a solution to the water problem later that morning, when the heavens opened in a torrential rainstorm, and rain came pouring into the upstairs levels of the house. I wasn't expecting to be there long, and I have a pretty solid constitution, so I came to the conclusion that it shouldn't do me too much harm to live on rainwater for drinking as well as washing. I searched around for something I could catch it in - most of the useful stuff had been stolen by the Germans after the massacre, but they'd left some odds and sods - and found a large, reasonably clean plastic tub.
That first day, and early into the second, the rain was a constant feature, which had its advantages, not least because it covered most of the sounds I might make moving around the house. However, my vigil was cold and uncomfortable, and I really wished that something would happen. As if to spite me, Ritter's forces show no signs of getting ready to pull out. Still, every day they stayed in Eglizi shortened the radius they were potentially going to have to travel, if I was right on the timetable.
As I waited, I took a lot of photographs, and wrote up decent notes of everything I was seeing, in the hope that I would actually ever have the chance to file the reports. I assessed their strength at roughly 500 men, plus the twenty or so Ahnenerbe officers I saw kicking around over the course of those couple of days. The planning was definitely being done out of the Rathaus, from the flow of officers in and out, and Ritter appeared to be living in there: I only saw him out and about when he was consulting with his subordinates from both Einsatzgruppe-4 and the Ahnenerbe.
The mood changed on the evening of the 20th, and it became obvious that the pull-out was imminent. Vehicles were being checked, weapons cleaned and made ready, etc. They began to move with the dawn the following morning, travelling down the main road through the village in the direction of Tosno. I waited for a couple of hours, until the last vehicles had gone, before I headed back to where I had stashed my stolen bike. I dried it off, got it running (after some effort) and then followed them at a distance, confident that one man on a motorbike would catch up with a convoy of military vehicles in short order.
I watched them as they met the Chudovo road for long enough to ascertain which direction they were going, and then cut cross-country with the intention of avoiding Tosno itself and picking them up to the south. I timed it well, waiting for a relatively short period, during which time I tried to ward myself so that they might be less inclined to notice me, until they appeared in front of me on the road. I moved off the main route to shadow them from the less well maintained track which ran roughly parallel. It was slightly surreal, effectively backtracking over the territory I'd covered twelve years before, an injured Wolf hidden in the back of my stolen car. Obviously the partisans hadn't made a great deal of progress since '68. The main road certainly looked to be in better repair than when I'd last travelled it, although it showed recent signs that a military force significantly larger than Ritter's had preceded my old adversary down the road. I took that to mean that my guess about the main Tosno force moving out earlier had been correct.
Ritter's group took their time, eventually reaching Zuevo, where they overnighted, much to the upset of its residents. I camped out in the woods nearby, and hoped that I wouldn't be spotted. The following morning, they turned off the main southern route, instead going up the road I had driven to get to the pick-up co-ordinates Gallagher had given me twelve years before, which left me with even more of a sense of déjà vu. It also confirmed to me that they weren't going to Moscow.
Where in the name of the gods was he going?
I continued my journey parallel to the main route, taking it slowly so as not to alert any sentries or outriders that I was there, and by noon, Ritter's force was moving into a small town. I checked my map, and came to the conclusion that the place was called Kirishi. A river ran through it, with the bulk of the town on the east bank, and there was a lake to the south-west, but it seemed an odd sort of place for the Ahnenerbe to be bothered with. I traced three bridges over the river, two road and one rail, and opted to aim for the rail bridge, on the theory that it might be the best approach on foot.
I aimed for the highest area around, where I might be able to get some idea of what he was doing, and settled down with a pair of binoculars to observe. I wish I hadn't. I've never watched one of Einsatzgruppen at work before, but they were calm, efficient and completely unstoppable. They surrounded the town in short order, and then began moving in with a ruthlessness which surprised me. Soon I could hear gunfire, and the sounds of screams. Then, abruptly, it went very quiet as the resistance fell away in the face of the first bodies.
With a coldness for the story that surprised me, I documented what I could on film, using the long zoom I carried with me. However, as they began to round up the townsfolk and march them towards what looked like a central sports stadium, surrounded by parkland. I knew I had to act, or they were all going to die.
I made my way to the river as dusk was falling, stashing the bike as close as I safely could to the railway bridge I'd selected as my method of ingress. I guessed that Ritter would have put sentries on the bridge, so I approached cautiously. Sure enough, half a dozen men were manning the west bank, alert with weapons at the ready. I looked around for other approaches, and figured that I could reach the bank about half a mile upstream, and then work my way through the scrubland towards the underside of the bridge.
Even that had some hairy moments - Ritter had people patrolling the banks - but I managed to dodge them and finally reached my objective. I thanked the gods as I realised that the bridge itself was a metal girder affair, which meant that if I was careful, I could probably make my way along the underside of it, beneath the tracks. Although I fervently hoped that a train wouldn't choose just then to turn up, as that may well make things very difficult for me: I was strong, but whether I was strong enough to hang on to the bottom of a bridge with a train rolling over it was more open to debate.
As it turned out, luck remained with me, and I managed to cross the river without taking an early bath. Dodging the equivalent patrol on the other side, I worked my way around, and then headed down the tracks into Kirishi proper as quickly as I thought I could safely achieve it. By now it was about eight in the evening, and the moon was rising, just a couple of days short of full. That was the main source of illumination, as the street lighting around the town had been turned off. Still, I knew where I'd seen the troops, and I had at least a direction for the stadium, so I started moving cautiously towards it and soon saw powerful floodlights in that area.
It soon became apparent that not all the armoured vehicles attached to Ritter's convoy were involved in rounding up the townsfolk: at regular intervals around the main peripheral road, I saw them stationed, guns pointing in towards the residential areas of town. Listening for movement, I worked cautiously inwards, and the deeper into the town I got, the more bodies I saw. Unarmed men, women and children, gunned down in the streets. I must have passed getting on for sixty of them. My inner journalist warred with my desire to keep moving in case I could help their fellows, but the journalist won through long enough for me to put some low-light film into the camera and document what I saw as I walked.
By now it was around nine, and the closer I came to my destination, the more the hackles were rising on the back of my neck. He had already started whatever it was he was doing, and if I was going to stop him I had to move. I emptied my pack of everything except my camera equipment, notes, room key and working paraphernalia, throwing the rest into a nearby rubbish bin. Then I clipped my sheathed combat knife and the holster of my Browning Hi-Power to my belt, stuffing a couple of spare clips of ammunition into my pockets, and got moving.
I tried to be as careful as possible, but as I moved through a group of light industrial buildings bordering the parkland, I was seen. I heard the solder begin to sound the alarm, and without pausing to think, I rushed him and broke his neck. I dragged him into an alley, changed into his uniform, then redoubled my pace towards the stadium. Which left the problem of how I was going to get into it.
From my vantage point, it looked as if there were full brick stands on the two long sides, and some more haphazard wood and iron affairs on the ends. The whole thing was surrounded by a chain link fence. I was roughly at the short north end, and could see sentries at the top of the stand. However, they appeared to be looking in, not out, towards the floodlit sports field. I refreshed my wards, adding an anti-concussion element to the physical ones, and strengthening the mental ones so I wouldn't be affected by whatever was going on in the stadium. Then I moved small and low to the fence, trying to make the best use of what little cover there was.
Quickly and quietly pulled I myself up and over, into the compound. As I did, I felt a tingling sensation, and cursed as I realised I'd just climbed through a set of wards. I hoped to Hell that sounding the alarm wasn't their purpose. Distracted, I made some noise as I landed, and froze for a few seconds, but there was no movement from above me. I counted three sentries up there, and planned in my head the best order to take them out. I ducked under the stand, moving slowly through the tangle of wood and metal to the end, and then started to climb. As I did, I became aware of chanting from the sports field behind me.
I climbed faster, and eventually hauled myself up into the stand exactly where I had wanted to position myself. I moved in behind the sentry and slit his throat, catching him as he fell. I lowered him to the floor as quietly as I could, and then took to the shadows between the seats and moved along to the next one. Unfortunately, this one made a noise, and the third started to call out a challenge. He died before he could complete it.
As quickly as I could, I collected their weapons - rifles, I noted, rather than the machine guns that many of their colleagues had been carrying - then laid the bodies between the seats where they wouldn't be seen. That done, I moved back into the shadows under the canopy to see what was happening. It helped that this pretty much threw me into impenetrable shadow, given the bright floodlights on the edge of the roof, as I looked down towards the ground.
I could see that the surviving townsfolk - probably maybe as many as eight thousand of them - had been herded into sections, roped off with wire or tape, and as I traced the patterns, I realised that they were sectioned into a pentagram, with a platform at the centre, on which a group of figures robed in dark claret were Working. Armed soldiers surrounded them, both at ground level and from the lower tiers of steps, establishing firing patterns which would cover every single person on the ground. The smell of fear, sweat and human waste was strong enough to be sickening, not helped by the fact that whenever anyone struggled or panicked, or were apparently just in the wrong place at the wrong time, they were gunned down in their places. From my vantage point I counted at least three hundred already lying on the ground.
That was the point that I knew for certain that Ritter was going to ritually murder every man, woman and child in Kirishi.
What could a black ritual of that size possibly achieve? Unfortunately, pretty much anything it wanted. The questions were a) could I figure it out in time? And b) could I do anything to stop it? I huddled back into the shadows near the roof, keeping the camera handy to continue documenting what was happening, and began running through everything I'd ever learned about large-scale ritual magic. I kept a wary eye on the soldiers below me at the bottom of the stand, in case they decided to look up and noticed that their fellows weren't on duty any more, then opened myself up to the energies coming from Ritter's setup, in the hope that they might clue me in.
It took me about fifteen minutes to conclude that he was planning to use these people as an arcane connection, to try to achieve some effect elsewhere. To help the attack which they were massing in the south was the most obvious answer, but how could he achieve that from Kirishi? Moscow was nearly 400 miles away. It took me another fifteen minutes of studying the symbols and patterns to recognise the racial elements, related to the inferiority of the Slav versus the superiority of the Aryan, and the magnitude of what he was doing sunk home. He was going to use these people as a focus to try to kill thousands - maybe millions - of their countrymen.
I checked my watch. Gone eleven, which meant that assuming the moment of equinox was when the ritual would reach its climax, I had little over an hour. Below me, I could feel the cone of power he was raising, and every time the soldiers killed those poor unfortunates on the periphery who happened to be in the wrong place - they didn't even have to do anything to deserve it now - the power increased.
I couldn't let him finish, but I was well aware that there was nothing magically that I could do, which meant my best chance was to actually take out those performing the ritual. It was going to be a risk: if I disturbed them at the wrong moment, and the ritual got out of control, then the energies they would be wielding would probably kill everyone in the stadium, myself included. On the other hand, if doing so stopped the wider effects, the risk had to be taken. Knowing I would probably have to abandon the camera as I fled, I snapped a last few shots, rewound the film and stuffed it in my pockets, along with all the shots I'd taken in Eglizi and Kirishi, plus my room key and my notes from Eglizi, and swapped the combat knife for my athame at my belt. Then I set my jaw, lay down flat at the top of the stands, one of the stolen rifles ready, and began figuring out which one of ritualists on the platform was Ritter. Sure, he'd probably be warded, but a shot in the back was still likely to offend.
I listened to the cadences of their chanting, and watched the movements they made, and soon thought that I had identified who was leading. They were hooded, but it seemed a reasonable bet that it would be Ritter. I lined up my sights on his back, and took the shot. The report from the rifle was depressingly loud in the hushed atmosphere of the stadium, but thankfully it echoed around enough that it was immediately obvious where it had come from. More to the point, I didn't feel the energies of the ritual running out of control. I should have realised at that point that I'd hit the wrong person, but I was rather too occupied with other problems.
The soldiers reacted immediately, scanning for me, and I knew it was a matter of time. I glanced down at the platform, to where my target lay sprawled, blood soaking through the back of his robe (so obviously not that well warded), another of the participants kneeling beside him. Then the kneeling figure pulled back his hood and looked directly at me, and that was the point at which I realised I'd fucked up.
The dead man wasn't Ritter. The man beside him was.
He yelled orders at his men, indicating my position with unerring accuracy, and as he did, I took a quick aim at him and fired, hitting him high in the chest. He fell back, but I didn't wait to see if he bled as well, as THAT was the point everything went to Hell in a handcart.
Below me, I could feel the energies suddenly magnifying, and beginning to run out of control. I could also see some exceedingly pissed off looking Nazi soldiers running up the stands towards me. I had to get out of there, and down the tiers wasn't an option. That left the edges of the stands. With a strength born of desperation, I sprinted for the railings at the edge, leapt onto them, then swung myself up onto the roof, and ran the length of the top of the stand to try to get enough speed for what I was going to do. Below me, the guards opened fire, and bullets started smashing through the asbestos sheeting. Commending my soul to the gods, I launched myself into space, hoping I'd have enough momentum to get beyond the fence.
I made it, just, and braced myself for the impact as I landed, hoping that my wards would stop me crushing every bone in my body. I landed in a parachute roll, although it was a jarring contact, and momentum took me a good ten feet. Then I kept rolling back to my feet and started sprinting as fast as I could, ducking and weaving to avoid gunfire from above me. I felt a bullet crease my shoulder - obviously my wards had been weakened when they stopped me smearing myself on the landscape - but this just gave me more impetus. I was about fifty yards away when everything blew behind me, and I was knocked to the ground by the concussion wave.
Wild energies poured over me, almost flattening me, and it was all I could do to avoid blacking out. However, after a couple of minutes, the pressure subsided and there was nothing but a deathly silence. I got back to my feet and ran for the railroad tracks. I was hurting all over, but I didn't let that stop me. It took me about ten minutes to reach them, and then I started following them as fast as I safely could. As I approached the river, I could see the sentries in disarray, calling helplessly into the radio for orders. I shot the closest two in the head with the Browning, then dived for one of their machine guns and came up firing. I felt extremely satisfied as their fellows fell backwards, blood blossoming from their torsos. I grabbed the radio, then set off sprinting across the bridge, managing to keep my footing as I threw the machine gun into the river, and dived into the trees towards where I'd left the bike.
All the time, I was waiting for the hue and cry behind me from those forces which hadn't been involved in the ritual at the stadium, but confusion seemed to have taken hold of the soldiers, and I used that to my advantage. Once back at the bike, I cut cross-country, and eventually made it back to the Zuevo road, travelling more than a little too fast for the circumstances. Half an hour later, I was en route back to St Petersburg, running purely on adrenaline, and hoping that I'd beat the radio communications telling anyone I met to kill me.
I made it back to the city with the first light of dawn, dumping the bike in an industrial area on the outskirts. Unwilling to disarm myself, I strapped the knife to my ankle and stuffed the Hi-Power into the pocket of the now rather battered and uniform jacket I was still wearing, and then headed into the city centre on foot, trying to avoid meeting too many people. I knew I looked filthy and exhausted - the blood on the shoulder of my jacket from where I'd been clipped by the bullet being the icing on the cake - and I could think of absolutely no way I could explain my appearance which wouldn't get me arrested. The only thing in my favour, was that at the moment, it didn't look as if the authorities in St Petersburg were reacting to what had happened over a hundred miles away.
As the city woke up, I realised I had to take steps to change my appearance. I started looking around for a clothing store, and eventually found one which specialised in casual wear, and didn't have an obvious alarm. I broke in through the back door, holding my breath until I didn't hear the ringing of alarm bells, and found the stock room. I changed quickly into a pair of jeans, t-shirt and blazer, and found a cap to cover my head. Next, I rinsed my face and hands under a tap in the bathroom, so at least I would look clean and tidy as long as no-one got down wind of me. That done, I walked out, throwing the uniform into a commercial waste bin as I went and started walking. I could hear sirens getting closer, and moved as quickly as I could in the opposite direction.
I made it back to my hotel by about 7.30am, and strolled in nonchalantly, cap down to hide my eyes, mixing with a gaggle of businessmen there for a breakfast meeting. I made it to the lifts without being recognised, rode up to my floor and let myself into my room. It had been serviced during my five-day absence, but hadn't been cleared out. I suppose because my bill was paid up until the end of the month. However, I checked everything carefully, and quickly concluded that the majority of the tell tales I'd left on certain items and in certain places had been disturbed. My disappearance had obviously been noted, and I realised that if I was going to get the story of what had happened out, I needed to do it soon, before someone connected my absence with whatever news fed back from Kirishi.
Unlike the Moscow information I had sent back, this time I didn't have time to use the approved channels. Moreover, if I was a marked man, which seemed likely, then I couldn't risk compromising any of the SIS's Russian network. There was also the issue that I wanted to get this one to my paper, rather than just my unofficial employers.
I opened my briefcase and got out a padded envelope on which I'd already paid generous postage. I wrote out a neutral address, across the Finnish border in Lappeenranta, which I'd been given to me for emergencies and hopefully wasn't compromised by the Gestapo, and then put all the film into it, along with a short report of what I'd seen, written in the code we had agreed before I left. I also enclosed a note asking Simon to send the developed photos over to Bill Deedes at the Telegraph, when he deemed appropriate.
Knowing that my hastily repaired appearance wouldn't stand any scrutiny, I showered to get rid of the stink of living rough for five days and then running for my life, and checked how bad the damage to my shoulder was. It was about two inches long, but was only a flesh wound - thankfully, it hadn't chipped the collar bone - and it had stopped bleeding. There was also a liberal amount of bruising across my torso from the effects of the concussion wave. I dressed the injury quickly, with a folded handkerchief and some tape, then changed into a pair of old jeans, a dark shirt and my leather jacket. Once I looked human again, I grabbed my briefcase and headed downstairs, trying to avoid the most populated areas of the hotel lobby as I walked out into the street.
I made sure I was a good two miles from the hotel, well on the other side of the river, before I risked dropping the letter in a post box. Once that was done, I wandered aimlessly for a while, dodging the occasional patrol, until I found a café in one of the more seedy areas of town, where I could find a quiet corner to write up the story for my paper.
I soon realised that I'd got lucky with the café I'd chosen. It was small and dark, the background music, which sounded like Russian opera, just a little too loud for polite conversation and fighting the sound from a television at low volume. There was a steady stream of patrons, but all of them were minding their own business, and the elderly proprietor seemed more than willing to leave me to my own devices, as long as I kept ordering. It took me most of the day to write something I was willing to submit, which addressed the horror of what I'd seen, while at the same time avoiding openly referring to the arcane elements of what Ritter had tried to do.
And as I wrote, I couldn't help wondering if anyone had walked away from that stadium alive, from either side. Still, no doubt, if I was wrong about what I thought I'd seen, when the story was published the Nazis would issue a denial, informing the world that actually they hadn't murdered eight thousand people, thank you very much.
I was satisfied with my day's work by about five in the evening, and walked over to the counter.
"Is there anywhere around here where I can send a fax?"
"Post office," the proprietor said, curtly.
"I was looking for somewhere a bit less...official."
He regarded me systematically, perhaps trying to figure out if I was a Nazi agent, and for a worried moment, I thought I saw a trace of recognition on his face.
"Never mind," I said, turning away, but he grabbed me by the arm and turned me back to him.
"You wait over there. I get someone."
I looked at him closely, trying to figure out if he was about to double-cross me, and not coming to any conclusions. I shrugged, then went back to my table, but as I did I started looking at exit routes in a way I hadn't before, and taking careful note of movements out on the street. He called for his assistant to take over the counter, and then ducked into the back, perhaps to make a phone call. He returned a few minutes later, and brought me my tenth cup of sweet Russian tea of the day. He also laid the evening paper in front of me. Puzzled, I flipped it over, and below the fold I saw my own face looking back at me. The picture was labelled in German and Cyrillic:
"Wanted for questioning
Mikael Cuijper,
journalist
If you see this man, contact the police immediately."
"What did you do?" he said, quietly, sitting at the table in front of me.
"I witnessed something I shouldn't have. Something the Nazis did to a town full of innocent Russians. And I need to tell people about it," I answered, "if I can't get to a fax machine, that isn't going to happen.
"Bring your papers, leave the rest of your things, and follow me."
Not knowing what else to do, and hoping I wasn't misplacing my trust, I did as he asked. He led me out of the back of the café, and into the side streets. He took a lot of twists and turns, and soon I was completely disorientated about where in the city I was. Then he stopped near a small, nondescript office building, and took me inside. On the security desk I could hear a television babbling, and thought I caught my own name spoken by the announcer. Tucking my head into the collar of my jacket, I followed my guide through to a shabby looking office at the back of the building, looking out over an alley.
Behind the desk was a man in his mid-fifties, definitely on the plump side, and dressed in a rumpled suit. My guide exchanged some quick fire Russian with him, of which I caught about half, and then the other man indicated to the fax machine over to one side. I moved over to it, typed in the number of the Telegraph bullpen in London, scribbled Bill's name on the top of the front sheet and started feeding in pages. About ten minutes later, the last one had been scanned, and the confirmation rolled slowly out of the slot at the bottom. I breathed a sigh of relief and ripped the confirmation to shreds, then stepped back and turned towards the room. The old man had gone, and the one behind the desk had a very large handgun drawn and pointed in approximately my direction.
"The back door is to the left as you leave my office, Gospodin Cuijper," he said, amicably, "Put your notes in the bin and go."
And he emphasised that he wanted me to depart with another wave of his pistol. I didn't need to be told twice. I walked out of his office, found the back door into the alley and headed away. I didn't recognise where I was, but for now, that didn't matter. I just kept going, trying to avoid being seen, and running through in my head all the emergency procedures I'd had drummed into me about getting out of hostile territory once my cover was blown. I quickly came to the conclusion that they didn't really address what to do if your face was on every newspaper...and your picture was on every TV screen, as I discovered on rounding a corner and finding myself staring at twenty of myself in the window of an electronics shop.
I was utterly screwed.
That was when I heard the sound of a police whistle. I ducked down an alley, and started to run. The trouble was, I didn't know the city well enough to be confident that I wouldn't make a mistake, and whoever the café owner's friends were, they obviously didn't feel inclined to help me further. I was on my own.
I managed to stay ahead of them for almost an hour before I was cornered, but in the end I made a mistake and ran myself down an alley between two industrial units, which ended in a chain linked fence. I could hear the shouting of my pursuers behind me and knew I had to act fast. With all the strength I could muster, which by then was beginning to be considerably less than I would have liked, given the aftereffects of what had happened in Kirishi, no sleep, and the tension of being the rabbit in the trap, I jumped, catching the links about two-thirds of the way up. I hauled myself towards the top, hoping I'd have time to get over an away. But I didn't.
A shot caught me in the side as I swung myself over, and took me off balance, and seconds later I lost my grip and was falling. I crashed to the ground the other side of the fence, and knocked myself senseless as I landed.