CHAPTER 1

The weather had stayed dry for a few days, so Natasha didn’t have to worry quite so much about the dry cough Jim had developed. They had managed to find a few shrivelled roots in one of the burnt-out farm sheds they had passed three days ago, and there was still a little remnant of the black bread and sausage the four Soviet soldiers on horseback had given them the day before that.

Jim had managed to find a dryish spot in a small stand of trees, breaking off a couple of branches and laying smaller ones over one side of the rough framework he fashioned. It wouldn’t keep rain out for long, but it broke the wind that was sighing across the open fields. They had slept cuddled into each other, wrapped in what he called a gas cape, the night stretching out to an eternity as he snuffled and coughed beside her. When morning came, they had debated lighting a fire, as a haze lay over the sweep of the gentle slope they were crossing. Before they had made a final decision, she had spotted the movement at the edge of the treeline about a kilometre away.

Four odd shapes had emerged in line, the pale sunlight flashing for a second from the top of the first, and all of a sudden, the objects had made sense, as a party of cavalry troopers, one with a pair of binoculars. That one had made some gestures to either side, and the three others had turned aside to space the group out before advancing slowly across the open ground. Jim had sworn, then coughed once more.

“Sorry, love. Looks like we’re right up shit creek”

As the troopers had approached, she had seen them unsling weapons, three of them shorter ones that looked like sub-machine guns, the other a much longer rifle. That one had pulled up, dismounting and pointing his weapon their way. The ither three had paused, while the one with the binoculars she could now see slung round his neck had shouted across to the two of them in a mixture of German and Russian.

“Hender hock, fucking fascist pizda!”

Natasha had called back as loudly as she could manage, in Russian.

“We are not fascists! We have no weapons!”

“Huh? Fucking shlyukha?”

A couple of sharp instructions to two of his men, the third remaining a little distance away, rifle unwaveringly pointed at the two of them, and then the three mounted soldiers had approached slowly, still spread out, three dark muzzles ready for use.

The oldest, with the binoculars, and who had a heavy Georgian accent, had looked her up and down.

“Where are you from, girl? You’re no fucking Pole or Czech!”

“I’m from Moscow, Comrade Junior Sergeant”

“What the fuck are you doing here?”

“The… I was a student in Kyiv. The Fascists made me work”

The soldier’s gaze had gone directly to her breasts, and she shook her head, the word he had called her still hurting her pride.

“No! Not like that! I was studying foreign languages!”

His blond friend, who sounded like a Muscovite, had laughed out loud, showing several missing teeth.

“What the fuck for? Russian not good enough for you?”

The third had grunted.

“Best have a good answer for that one, girly, for when the Cheka ask you. And who the fuck is that? What sort of uniform is that supposed to be?”

The first soldier had held up a hand.

“Shut it, you two. Girly, we aren’t those bastards, so give an honest answer, right? And what uniform is that? Wrong colour for a fascist pizda”

Jim was looking worried, but he had caught some of the meaning behind the questions, and pulled himself to his feet, all four weapons turning towards him as he rose and answered in English.

“Allen, James Robson, Sergeant, Royal Northumberland Fusiliers”, followed by a string of numbers.

Natasha had waved him to sit back down, as he swayed in a parody of ‘attention’.

“Sir, Comrade Junior Sergeant, he is a British man the fascists held as a prisoner. That was my role, as an interpreter. Nothing more”

“What is he doing here?”

“They moved many of their prisoners to their East, Comrade Junior Sergeant. All he wants to do is go home. We are following the front as it moves forward, but it is hard”

The muscovite had laughed once more.

“No more front now, girly! Not unless the Americans are stupid”

The Junior Sergeant had muttered something in his own language, not realising it was one she understood until he caught the slight widening of her eyes, and then he had given her a very slight head shake: ‘Don’t’. He had then drawn a long breath, then let it out slowly as he calmed himself once again.

“Fascists have surrendered, girly. All over, and that fucking bollockless bastard and his shlyukha are dead. Shot themselves, yes? Lads in Berlin are busy at the moment, with so many lamp posts to decorate. Running out of rope, they are. Do you know where you are?”

“Not sure. I know it’s not Poland, and I don’t think we’ve reached Germany. Czechia?”

A sharp nod, and a wave of his arm.

“Pilsen is over there. Fascists call it Budweiss or something. It’s all shit, written in Roman, of course. I’d stay well away. Three, four days that way, small town. Americans are there”

He had shaken his head, almost in resignation.

“Don’t let the fucking Cheka catch you. NKVD will not believe you, girly”

Another braying laugh from the blond.

“Oh, they’ll believe her, all right, but that won’t mean a fucking thing! They’ll still send you to the Gulag, if they don’t just waste a couple of bullets in the backs of your heads. Here!”

A couple of links of dried sausage and a heel of black bread had come out of his knapsack, and the smile from the blond had been far softer.

“We can see what you’re hoping for, girly. Don’t get caught”

They had turned their horses, weapons slung once more, and ridden off to the South, Jim’s eyes following them as they left.

“What was all that about, love?”

“Ah, we were just being very, very lucky”

“That corporal, he said something under his breath, but it wasn’t in Russian, was it?”

“No. That was in Georgian”

“What did he say?”

A careful look around, just in case there were any other eavesdroppers, even though the land was so open she would have spotted them a couple of kilometres away. Old habits, from painful lessons.

“He said the war was over, that Hitler and the others are dead”

“And the rest?”

“Ah, that he hoped a little man from his own Soviet Republic had enough sense not to start all over again with the Americans. They are four days further, that way, the allies”

Another worrying cough.

“Soonest started, soonest finished, then!”

Three days later, the bread and sausage eked out by the dried but unidentifiable roots, and they were still some way from any obvious front line, peaceful or otherwise. A night in the shelter of a small hedge ended badly, Jim shaking her awake as the memories savaged her dreaming mind. Herr Doktor Messner was always first to invade her sleep, his associate the Hauptsturmführer, Ganz, and it was ever the same words, as Ganz smiled, blowing cigarette smoke into her face.

“I don’t care how loud it is, Natalya Ivanova. Just the words. You don’t need to translate any other sounds they may make”

Those sounds, though, were always the worst part, but the screaming was an inevitable human reaction, to things, acts, which were abhuman. The others… Messner had days when he liked to play with finer tools, almost those of a jeweller or watchmaker, but on others it was bolt-croppers and meat cleavers. Those were the sounds that would never leave her.

Jim held her until she could speak again, as he did most nights, even when she could no longer find words, but that night was one of the rarer ones where she could actually speak about parts of it. Only parts, though.

“Jim, it was all so useless! There was nothing they could tell them, no information, no intelligence about troops or tanks. And most of what they asked was about buried gold”

He grunted, hugging her closer, and she rambled on for a few moments more, until his rattly breathing eased a little, and she knew he was asleep once more.

Three and a half years of sounds…

The Germans had made a new religion out of old hatred, and ended up believing the lies they had used as foundations. All Jews were rich, even if they were poor, and because of the first premise, the second could never be true, which meant that the poorest of the poor must have hidden wealth. Her days had alternated between translating for prisoner interrogation, which was not quite as brutal, and being used by Ganz for his own personal treasure hunt. The Germans classed her as what they called a HiWi, a civilian collaborator, but with an uplift in status due to her utility. She didn’t sleep in some broken building in the city, like the other HiWis, as the Germans had set up a wired compound for people like her, those the Germans valued enough to do a little to avoid the risk of someone cutting their throats as traitors. The little fortress, or maybe prison, also housed several of the German officers’ girlfriends, and it was where she had met Jim.

Non-Soviet prisoners were housed in an adjoining compound, with that strange German inconsistency in treatment between what they did to the Untermensch and what was delivered to those deemed to be racially or politically superior. She had seen what happened to Soviet captives, and when she had first encountered the British and American prisoners, she had been astonished at how well-fed they had looked, how cheerful many were. A couple of days after the British prisoners arrived, she found Valentina, one of the ‘girlfriends’, at her shoulder as she stared at the young men in the dirt-coloured clothing.

“Ah, Natasha, they’ll all be gone in a while”

Natasha had jerked at the words, Valentina placing a hand on each shoulder.

“No, girl! Not like that! Not unless any of them is a Yid, of course. Anyway, Heinzl tells me they use gas now, not bullets. More humane, he tells me. And cheaper, more efficient. He’s working with the English, now. Got a special job”

One of the men in brown was staring at the two women, and as Natasha watched, he had given a little wave and smile, and automatically she had returned the gesture, as Valentina had giggled.

“You like that one? If he has sense, you might get to meet him properly. And I mean…”

A very rude gesture had followed, with another bout of giggles.

“Not in the same clothes, though! That’s the special job Heinzl has”

“What special job?”

“It’s the Waffen-SS, Natasha. They are expanding. Heinzl says that there are Aryans outside Germany, not just the Volksdeutsche. They’ve got the Danish and the Dutch joining now, and he’s going around the camps looking for British recruits. For a Free Corps. Like Vlasov, yes?”

“What do you mean?”

“Ah, it’s a common enemy, Heinzl says. Bolsheviks, Russians. We just need to make the Amis understand, then we can let them come straight through, smash the Bolsheviks and the Yids. Save civilisation. And he tells me the Führer’s got new weapons, amazing ones”

Natasha had stared at the other woman until she had snapped back a quick “What?”

A pause for breath, and then Valentina had been off on her usual obsession. Always the same thing, the hatred of the Soviets for what a Georgian thug had done to her grandparents, her parents, her cousins, her friends and their families. Pointless to argue, because Valentina was actually right in everything she said about the Reds, apart from that single small error: the Germans were no different, not in any meaningful way at all. Not for the first time, Natasha had wondered how Valentina might react if she ever saw ‘Heinzl’ at his real work, to which role Natasha herself was a regular witness. He wasn’t more than a moderately proficient torturer, lacking the subtlety and imagination of the true sadists such as Messner, or the utter inhumanity of Ganz, but ‘Heinzl’ managed more than adequately.

Three days later, Heinz had come for Natasha.