Blood and Ice Read Online Free Page B

room to their right, the door wide open. Legs spread wide apart, big body half crouched, Schulze clutched his machine pistol to his right hip and sprayed its occupants as they still lay in their beds, tumbling them out of the crude bunks like beetles from underneath a suddenly upturned stone. It was a massacre.
    Chink came running up to him, chest heaving, his knife gleaming scarlet now. ‘All gone!’ he gasped. ‘Chink fix!’
    ‘Good for you, you Siberian shit!’ he gasped himself, trying hard to control his harsh breathing. ‘Not bad for an honorary Aryan –’ Suddenly he remembered the sentries. ‘Chink, the other two. Come on!’
    Frantically they pelted down the body-littered corridor, out into the open again.
    ‘Over there!’ Chink gasped.
    The two sentries saw them at the same moment. They fired. Their bullets gouged out spouts of snow just in front of Chink. He fired back. Missed! Schulze tried to stop the frantic pumping of his heart so that he could aim correctly. The snarling hiss of his Schmeisser – a full half-second burst – almost ripped the sentry in two.
    It was too much for the other man. With a scream of fear, he flung away his rifle and started to run wildly, floundering through the deep snow towards the safety of the trees. Schulze knew he could not let him get away. He pressed the Schmeisser’s trigger. Nothing happened. ‘Shit!’ he cursed bitterly. The magazine was empty.
    The Chink raised his machine pistol and tracer-stitched the darkness. Schulze could see the slugs cutting a crazy pattern around the man’s running feet. But they were missing him by a metre or more.
    ‘Lift your muzzle, Chink, for Chrissake!’ he urged frantically.
    But already it was too late The lone Russian was blundering into the firs, crashing into their green gloom and disappearing from sight.
    Slowly, very slowly, Chink lowered his machine pistol and looked at Schulze standing there like some ancient Nordic god, turned to stone, oblivious of the wild fire still coming from the Cheeseheads below. ‘You think same me, Sarnt-Major?’ he asked reluctantly.
    ‘I think the same, Chink,’ Schulze answered equally slowly. ‘That Popov bastard will tell them we’re coming.’

TWO
    Dawn. SS Regiment Europa was drawn up on the crest of a ridge, the young troopers drinking steaming hot canteens of Muckefuck 1 and washing down the hard Army bread, stamping their feet continually on the packed snow of the road trying to drive out the cold.
    Chink filled Schulze’s canteen once more with the boiling hot, black brew, and taking the little bottle out of his pocket, poured a quick and generous slug of the fiery Hungarian plum schnaps into the coffee.
    ‘That’s the stuff to give the troops, Chink,’ Schulze said happily. ‘You’re not a bad sort – for a foreigner.’
    The little man beamed. ‘Chink your friend,’ he said.
    Schulze moved across the snow to where the Hawk was standing, smoking a cigarette and chatting to Major Kreuz, his second-in-command, a tall, rather cynical veteran with an intelligent face adorned by a monocle.
    Once Schulze had joined them the Hawk got to the point at once. ‘Now I know you are worried, Schulze, that the Red who escaped last night might nave alerted his masters that we are on this road.’
    ‘Sir.’
    ‘I appreciate your concern for the safety of our mission, but really where could the man have gone to? I mean we are at least twenty kilometres behind their lines by now and there is still no sign of the man who got away or any other Red unit for that matter.’
    ‘I don’t know about that, sir,’ Schulze answered doggedly.
    ‘But those fellows in the bunker back there must have had some means of communicating with their HQ.’
    ‘Agreed, Sergeant-Major.’ Kreuz spoke for the first time. ‘But even if he did somehow manage to get in touch with his people, do you really think that they could do anything to stop us now?’ He pointed an elegantly gloved hand to