Urdoma, Eastern Front.

15 January 1942, 9:18 p.m.

German Territory.

Winter.

“Dear sister, dear sister

Why are you stumbling so dizzily?

‘Look for the chamber door

Look for my little bed

Dear brother, it will be fine

To lie beneath the grass.’”

- Extract from a German folk song

The trip out of Rzhev had been difficult. Oryl had collapsed inside the volkswagen that Karl had borrowed for their return to the hideout, nursing his injuries both internal and external.

The bumps hadn’t helped the other man rest, but he hadn’t said a word despite his restless sleep. Karl had respected his silence and kept his distance. Had Oryl been one of his soldiers he would have had the words to comfort him, but in Russian his thoughts wouldn’t flow as easily and his meaning would be too easily lost or misconstrued.

Instead they had continued straight on in silence, Karl’s attire, vehicle and stolen Gestapo badge passing them through checkpoints despite curious stares at Oryl.

Until they had stopped for the night and Oryl had gotten up, a fire in his eyes that had only been present fractionally before his second visit to Rshev.

“I’m going to find this Veber,” he had said. “And I’m going to kill him.”

And that had been that. None of Karl’s persuasion had gotten through to him once his mind was made up. Karl did admire that obstinance about him, but it wasn’t a valuable trait when trying to change his mind.

Kassian had disappeared back towards Rshev as they had set off, so he was no longer around to talk Oryl out of his decision either. And it was Kassian’s words which had set the nail in Weber’s coffin.

“It was Veber, that officer. He brought the pair of them out and had them beaten. I don’t know what they did to anger him, but it must have happened before they were brought into zaderzhaniye… into, eh, prison. Then he got sick of it and shot them. He made a group of us clean up the bodies. Dragged them to the edge of the camp and loaded them onto those black trucks. Then they were driven away to some mass grave outside town where they were dumped. I don’t even know where.”

Karl didn’t know anyone called Weber in Das Reich, so he couldn’t be a senior officer, but he could get the gist of what might have happened with him. His family had sent him a letter once mentioning the conditions inside one of these camps back in Germany. They were sad places, full of mindless labour and pointless waste of life.

Most Germans tried to forget they were there, like some kind of ugly tumor upon society, or the child nobody spoke of but everybody knew existed. Their guards were made of the worst Scheißkerlen of the SS, those too afraid to go to the front who instead stayed behind the lines and tormented those who wouldn’t shoot back.

He didn’t know why Oryl’s parents had been chosen from the rest of the workers for punishment, but at this point it didn’t matter. What mattered was that Oryl’s last connection to his home had been severed, and he was looking for something new. New enemies to take his fears and inner anguish out on, as if he didn’t have enough already.

Karl pitied him, although he couldn’t and shouldn’t ever tell that to the man. He at least had a home, a family to go back to, and he had faith that they could weather whatever the socialist party and their state police could throw at them.

In a way, perhaps it was his responsibility to give the man a new purpose. He had done it for his troops before, time and again as they despaired when they killed others, or cried for lost friends, or were heartbroken by those they hadn’t seen for so long. He believed he could do it again, even if this man was more broken than any he had led so far.

He glanced over at Karl’s still figure across the attic, covered by moonlight. His blanket rose and fell with his breaths, which had come steadier as the stiffness around his chest caused by the bruising had faded away.

The man, or perhaps even boy, as Karl gazed at his crop of short hair and missing beard, had gone through yet another horrible experience. He had struggled and suffered, been beaten, starved, even betrayed from what he had heard, and as he had finally been freed from captivity his greatest hope had been crushed and replaced with nothing.

So now he needed something to fill that emptiness.

As Karl looked out the window at the pristine white blanket outside the attic, he considered their next moves. They needed to start moving away from Russia, away from the war, if that was even possible. Perhaps to America. He heard there were a lot of Germans there digging for gold. Switzerland maybe.

It would soon be time to move forward on their plans.

But for now, Karl was on watch, eyeing the surroundings through the windows for wild animals or worse, wild people, until Oryl roused himself for his turn to stare at the white nothingness.

The next morning came softer than usual, gusts of wind and grey clouds snatching away the sunlight and coating the world in a dull monochrome. The sun seemed to barely be peeking through the clouds at midday as Karl and Oryl sat in their idling vehicle, some distance out from the next village.

“Do you know you want to do this?” Karl asked Oryl, gazing at the road straight ahead and the buildings beyond. “Are you sure? We could just drive straight through. There’s no need to stop.”

Oryl shook his head. “We need to go through with this. We know he’s going to visit here, if your allies’ information is true.”

Karl sighed. He had regretted linking the Panzerdivision with Oryl to share information almost as soon as he had done it. He should have waited, given both of them more time to plan and consider.

But now Oryl knew his adversary’s name, Manuel Weber, or Veber as he pronounced it, and he knew that he would be stopping in at this tiny town, Urdoma, on patrol. Glancing outside at the quality of the road, Karl doubted this town had seen a motorcar before so it was unlikely there was an army presence here, but here he was coming all the same.

In reality, the division had only given them a few towns along his route and they had followed Weber’s trail of destruction. Missing people, stolen provisions, he seemed to spread calamity in his wake like a horseman of the apocalypse. They had tracked down his passage over a day and taken a different road to get ahead of his path. His group should be arriving at the village ahead at some point soon.

And that was exactly what Oryl was hoping for, and Karl was afraid of.

“Come on, let’s speak with the villagers,” Oryl said. “We have to warn them at least.”

Karl nodded. He did think that much was true. He had earned a sense of distaste himself from seeing the state of the villages left behind after the raiding band’s path. “But how much more than that?”

“Then we head away and wait for Weber to arrive, single him out when he’s apart from a crowd and take him out from a distance,” Oryl said. “I know the plan. We’ve been over it enough times.”

Karl nodded and dismounted the car, leaving it parked in some trees a short distance off the road. Weber’s men shouldn’t be making their way through this way, and even if they did they should be able to outrun German pursuit through the woods with the snowshoes they had prepared.

He had changed from an SS outfit to more casual clothes, although he did have one of the military-issue greatcoats on as there was nothing else among their supplies quite as warm. There was an element of talking involved in this incident, and while that would be Oryl’s job due to his accent, he didn’t want to get in the way of civil conversation.

Oryl strode forward in the lead, Karl following. The few days of rest and travel had done much for the smaller man’s recovery and he was now sprightly rather than subdued, although for all the wrong reasons.

Their tracks through the snow stood out among the clear coat across the rest of the ground, although only a few millimetres had fallen so it hadn’t been that clear to begin with. Karl was a little worried about a tracker following their footprints back to the car, but he supposed that even if they did there wasn’t much there to steal beyond the volkswagen itself.

Oryl strode forward with no such worries, attracting more than a few concerned faces as the pair approached town. Visitors appeared to be unfamiliar here, even more so than in the rest of Russia. Unexpected visitors like the pair must then have been even more so.

“Can we speak with the mayor?” Oryl called out to the villagers, who looked at each other and said nothing, although a few more heads popped out of the surrounding houses.

He repeated the call as they drew closer to the centre of town, although to Karl’s eyes it felt less like a town than even that abandoned townlet near his company’s watch posts back in Demjansk had. The buildings were too far apart, there was nothing on the ground but dirt, and there was even the odd chicken running between peoples’ legs.

A grizzled old man, although from the wrinkles on his face he may have actually been middle aged, walked out of the shade of a verandah at the final call.

“No mayors here. I’m the closest thing you’re going to get. You can call me a chief, I suppose.”

“Good,” Oryl called. “German soldiers are coming to tax your food and supplies. You should think about leaving town for the day.”

The old man cocked his head as the people muttered. “And go where?” he asked. “We can’t move. And for those who can, they need to stay back and protect those who don’t. We’re grateful for your warning, but we don’t need it. We can protect our own.”

Karl frowned. Killing an SS officer would be dangerous for these people if they were still around. They would need to change the plans, or try again at another village.

“In that case,” Oryl asked, “Do you have anywhere you hide people you don’t want found?” Somewhere underground, a cabin off in the woods, something like that?”

The chief eyed Oryl then nodded. “Of course. Why, you suggest we all hide there? It’s not designed for that much.”

“No,” Oryl said. “We want in. Can you let us stay there until the Germans are past?”

Karl jumped, uncertain what Oryl was planning, because they certainly hadn’t discussed this.

“Sure, why not,” the chief said, giving Karl a glance. “It’s not like you have a German with you or anything.”

Wincing at his sarcasm, Oryl tried to cover for him. “He’s not a soldier, he’s a deserter. He hates these Germans as much as I do.”

“I wouldn’t say that much. But I’ve killed a few of them,” Karl said. He didn’t see the point in staying quiet if Oryl had already admitted to it.

“And what do we have to go off that will make us trust you?” the chief asked. “I tell you how this is going to work. You sit in the crowd as the Germans come. We use you as shields if they try to shoot us, or we sell you out if they ask questions. And we get a rifle,” he said, pointing to Oryl’s gun, “and if you try anything strange or try to sell us out one of us guns you down with it, hang the consequences. Either our side get out of this, or you die. Or perhaps both. Either way is fine with us.”

Oryl nodded at Karl’s expression, which he was forcing to stay calm, and nodded. “Deal.”

A village child dashed out before Oryl could react and snatched his rifle from his shoulder, passing it over to the chief who checked it over and nodded before Oryl could grab it back. “Red army. Well kept but not with a good kit. I’ll bet you’re a deserter too, like your German friend, if he is that.”

“How do you know?” Oryl asked, almost too surprised to try at that point.

“I fought in a couple of the previous wars. The guns you use never seem to change in them, only who you’re fighting.”

Oryl and Karl were kept in the cellar of one of the smaller houses in anticipation of the arrival of the Germans. The door was guarded but otherwise they were left alone to await their fate.

Karl rounded on Oryl as the door closed behind them. “What did you do that for?”

“I’m not sure now,” Oryl said. “I thought it would give us a better chance to get to the officer. But I didn’t think they would want my rifle, just any old rifle. Now we don’t have anything to kill him with.”

“Indeed. And how do you plan to do anything with German troops all through the village and us, and the villagers, stuck alongside them? If we try anything there could be a massacre!”

“But if we do nothing he’ll get away.”

“And which,” Karl asked, “Is more important? We can always hunt him down next time. We can figure out where he’s going. But these people’s lives?”

Oryl shook his head. “I don’t know anymore, Karl. Before I left this was so certain. I knew where I was going, who I was looking for. Now, it’s all a mess. There are people everywhere and I feel like I don’t know what to do with any of them. I only know this one. Once I’ve sorted him out, I think I can sort out the rest.”

Karl patted him on the back. “Then make sure there are others here left to sort out, huh? I think you need to get out of all this. Make it somewhere safe, where you can lay your feet back and not worry about survival. What do you think?”

Oryl grinned with half his mouth. “Does that sort of place even exist anymore? Anywhere near here?”

Karl nodded. “We’ve made one already. Our shelter. We can stay away from the war, there for a time. Let you kick back and just think things through before we need to make it anywhere else. And when we do, we can make sure that place is the right place to go.”

“Oh?” Oryl asked. “And where is that right place?”

“Home.”

Oryl shook his head. “You have a home. I don’t. Not anymore.”

“Then make one,” Karl said. “It’s easier than you think.”

Oryl laughed, although there was no humour in the sound. “That doesn’t comfort me much. My imagination is quite broad.”

Karl sat back against one of the support pillars of the cellar, glancing around the empty shelves with a few remaining truckles of cheese and bottles of alcohol. “Then just try and imagine what it would be like. Making a family again. Finding a house somewhere. Starting a job. Buying food, instead of scavenging or being rationed it. Laying down at night and listening to the sounds of the city, or the forest, or even the ocean. Isn’t it something special?”

Oryl nodded, almost despite himself, as he lay down opposite Karl. “It would be.”

“Then why not make that what you fight for? Something gentler than hate or death. Or even glory.”

Oryl sighed out, letting some of his tension into the air. “No. I can’t. I need to lay this aside first.”

“Even if it means you regret it later?”

“Even if I hate myself for doing it, right now I’ve resolved to. I can’t let myself make any other choice.”

“You know that’s not true,” Karl said, but not loud enough for Oryl to pick up.

“This is my choice, and I will make sure I see it through whatever it takes. My parents can’t rest, I can’t move on, until I kill Manuel Veber.”

Karl let the silence thicken and play between the two of them before he broke it at last. “I see. Then I’ll do what I can to help, but I’ll make sure you don’t walk down a path that will make you hate yourself while you’re doing so.”

Oryl nodded. “Thank you for your concern, but I can handle this myself.”

“That isn’t your decision to make.” Karl lay his head back against the knotted, whorled wood of the pillar. “Your life is your own, but not those of these villagers, or the soldiers under Manuel. Nor is this all of your life going into killing him, just the part of you that came out on top. I won’t let you sacrifice everything just to fuel that hate. I’ll make sure it’s cut off and that you can come out the other side, to get to that home you need.”

The two sat in silence before the door was opened, the two not even realising how long they had been kept there.

“It’s time. The Germans are here.”

They came in two L3000 all terrain trucks, thirty men or a single platoon spread between the different compartments of the vehicles. One vehicle dropped its twenty men around the town square, while the second and its complement of troops drove a sweep around the outskirts of town, looking for anyone trying to escape. Finding none, its troops rejoined the main force for their interrogation of the residents.

The forty residents of the town were gathered before the thirty troops into a huddle under the shadow of the different buildings. Despite their earlier words about human shields, the citizens forced Oryl and Karl into the centre of the circle, one keeping Karl bent at the knees so his height didn’t give away his identity.

The elder stood at the front, speaking via one of the soldiers translating with the leader of the German troops, a first lieutenant. Despite Karl’s fears, their discussion didn’t seem to be hostile from what he could see between the forest of shoulders.

In the end, the chief waved his hand and the officer shouted to his troops. “Search the place!”

The troops spread out and started banging doors open, stepping through them to chase down whoever or whatever might be kept inside. The chief’s house received special attention, a full half squad of soldiers storming inside to search the building where other houses received two at most.

With nobody to watch over them, a pile of loot started to grow on the ground as the soldiers made more and more trips through the houses. Most of it was food, but the pile also included jewellery, blankets and the odd weapon.

Karl motioned to Oryl and started to pull him free of the crowd as the mood started to change. Depending on how the Germans handled this, things could easily get ugly around the place.

The two started sneaking out of the crowd, easily done now that the soldiers had their attention on the houses and the citizens were watching the soldiers. Once they reached the edge, Karl grabbed Oryl’s shoulder, stood up straight and walked around the corner with him, hoping to appear to be a soldier to the other Germans and to escape the villagers’ attention.

The pair dropped back in the cellar where they had been kept earlier, now emptied of provisions. They left the door open to make sure no Germans thought to check the place again, sitting off to the side and listening out for further disturbances. The entrance of the cellar was just visible from the centre of the houses where the people were gathered, so they continued to stay out of sight as much as possible.

As the searches ended and the soldiers brought the last of their findings to the centre of town, one of them dragged a kicking and crying girl of perhaps fifteen or sixteen years old to the centre of town. One of her feet was turned inwards, a case of club foot which had never undergone treatment. Karl spotted the pair entering the centre of town and held Oryl back.

“This is going to get ugly,” he warned, drawing his pistol from inside his jacket. “Be prepared to find a gun off somebody if or when it does. We might need all the firepower we can get.”

Karl nodded and checked out the situation, sticking his head out of the doorframe to get a glance at the proceedings.

The situation escalated into a standoff as the girl was brought before the crowd. The first lieutenant and the chief were getting into a shouting match through their translator, the intensity of their words reaching Karl and Oryl’s position if not the exact meaning.

Oryl spotted a villager holding his rifle waiting ready behind one of the windows around. He was keeping the rifle at the ready while hidden behind the wall, ready to lean out and start firing, but he was visible to the pair’s position.

On the ground, the villagers were looking around at the soldiers in fear while the chief continued to argue with the officer, with less venom at least in consideration for the other citizens.

At last they seemed to come to an agreement, with the soldier releasing the girl so she could return to the crowd. She stumbled to her family, hyperventilating as she was released from her panic.

Then the officer shouted something and snapped his fingers, and the soldiers around the square opened fire.

Bullets thudded into unprotected flesh, and the targets of automatic weapons danced the danse macabre as they collapsed to the floor.

The chatter of gunfire filled the previously quiet, if not peaceful, town.

A few people ran, but they were targeted before those that stood still in shocked silence, or those who were too close packed to escape. A mother and her daughter that tried to slip away were caught and picked off from behind with single rifle shots.

The chief stood before his dying people, his friends, and fell to his knees, begging the officer to stop it, to end the madness. Which he did, in a manner of speaking, as the old man sagged to the ground with the hole in his head sending him to join the rest of the town’s former occupants.

Oryl and Karl saw everything from their hole, from the first bullet to the last survivor being finished off with a cry not of pain but of distress at seeing his family dead before his eyes.

The sniper in the window had wounded a soldier with his first shot but had been taken down before he could get off a second, a grenade landing in his window as he leaned out a second time. The rifle spun out of his hands and landed at the base of a tree below.

The officer divided the soldiers into a few groups, one to execute any survivors of the massacre, another to carry the loot into the trucks. He personally moved off towards the last few buildings with a group of soldiers.

“I think we do need to go after him now,” Karl said below his breath to Oryl. “We have a chance right now, and from what we’ve seen I don’t want to let this continue at another village.”

Oryl nodded. “I don’t want to watch more people die in front of my eyes like that. I’m not following this group any further - I was going to stop him here whether you said anything or not.”

Karl glanced outside at a pair of soldiers on the street, regretting leaving the SS officer uniform in the Volkswagen. “You didn't bring a stahlhelm, did you?” he asked. “If we had one of those, I might be able to walk around uncontested if the soldiers aren’t paying attention.”

Oryl nodded and pulled a German helmet out of his bag. Karl raised his eyebrows, but wore it regardless. “I won’t ask how you got that, but I’m glad you have it.”

The two poised by the doors, glancing around and ready to go, before realising they couldn’t continue their old plan. A whispered discussion broke out before they agreed on their next steps. Oryl would go for his rifle and get out of town to somewhere he could shoot from and escape. Karl would locate Weber, who they presumed was the Schutzstaffel officer, and get him to somewhere Oryl could take the shot from. That should stop their raid, if the commanding officer died.

The two stepped out in separate directions. Oryl skirted around the north side of town to get to where his rifle had fallen. Karl headed south to the building the officer had entered.

He reached the building without incident, the Germans too focused on their own tasks to check whether any of the soldiers weren’t who they appeared. From the lack of shouts on the other side of town, Karl presumed that Oryl was managing the same.

He made it to the building and slipped inside, closing the door behind him. The light inside the two-story house was dim, some of the windows snowed nearly covered leaving a handful of dusty electric lights the main source of illumination besides a collapsed lamp lying across the floor. He could hear bangs upstairs and something crashing in another downstairs room as the search of the house continued.

Stepping with care to not alert any of the soldiers in the building, Karl crept through the first level of the house. He needed to draw the officer out somehow, and he himself was helpful bait. He just needed to be spotted, and the soldiers would come after him. And if he shook the soldiers, the officer would be alone for Oryl to eliminate.

Peeking his eye around a corner, he spotted a single soldier in the room before him, stomping on a part of the rug beneath the table. Thuds resounding through the room indicated it was hollow.

Getting down on his knees and leaning on the stock of his automatic MP35 for support, the soldier started to lift the rug away from the carpet to investigate the trapdoor beneath.

Karl sprang into action. He jumped out from behind the doorway into the room, bearing the soldier to the ground and putting his weight on his back in case he tried to get up. He grabbed the soldier by the head with two hands, one covering his mouth and the other under his chin, and started pulling as hard as he could.

The soldier struggled and groaned, one hand bashing the butt of his rifle into Karl’s leg to loosen the hold, the other feeling around his waist for his bayonet.

Karl’s leg shifted a little off the centre of the soldier’s back, but before he could free himself Karl pressed down again with his other leg and jerked the soldier’s neck back again. At last, it pulled back another few centimetres, the metal of the soldier’s helm cutting into his back. He went still, his hands falling away from his weapons.

The struggle had caused more than a few bumps to ring out but Karl doubted anyone upstairs would notice with all the banging the man had been doing down here.

Karl grabbed the man’s submachine gun, making sure the magazine hadn’t been emptied on the villagers. It always paid to have a bit of extra firepower, assuming he didn’t have to carry it a long distance.

Karl gaved down at the dying man, his brain probably now starving for oxygen yet unable to take a breath, and crossed himself in respect. As a soldier he may have been doing horrible things, may have even then been hunting the last survivors of the attack, but in the end he was just doing his job. In some ways, Karl was no worse than these people, killing this man without giving him a way to fight back, and not even for his own safety.

But with another way of looking at it, this man had just worked with a group of other soldiers to open fire on civilians. Nobody could blame him for having the same thing happen to him.

Karl started to move away from the body, just as he heard someone coming down the stairs.

“How is it…” the soldier asked, before spotting Karl through the doorway standing over his companion’s body. He cried out in alarm or fear, bringing his rifle up and snapping off a handful of shots at the space Karl had been standing.

Karl ducked against the wall, blind firing the stolen weapon around the corner at the stairs. He heard glass break and shouts from above.

Karl’s time had run out the moment he had been spotted. He had already run through perhaps a third of his clip, while there were plenty more people upstairs and in the town around to soak up the remaining bullets even if he stole another weapon.

Instead he snapped off a pair of blind shots to keep the enemies’ heads down and dashed for the back door of the house.

He was out the door in moments, but he could hear them coming down the stairs inside. It didn’t seem like there was much panic in the rest of town, which said something about these soldiers’ experience, if they were used to random gunfire coming from their officer’s location.

Karl had no doubt that would change, though, once the lieutenant spread word to his men that somebody was in town. He needed to be out of here by then, but the snow would tell exactly where he had gone if he wasn’t careful.

Karl ran to the outskirts of town, trying to keep as many buildings between him and the centre of town as possible, but trusting to his helmet and coat to disguise his appearance to anyone who did see him. Once he reached the trail that the trucks had left in the road while driving around town he ran past to another building, stamping some snow off on the porch, then retraced his steps back to the road. He made sure to walk backward, letting his feet land in the places they had landed the first time through to not leave extra tracks.

There were other footprints around from the normal routines of the villagers, so he didn’t doubt that his trackers would have plenty of other places to check once they found that he wasn’t in the building they had followed him to. That would keep them off his trail for some time, as they breached and then searched for clues.

In the meantime he circled around town, looking for traces that Oryl may have left behind.

After more than a half circle, he had to leave off his search due to the trail of soldiers carrying the last of the loot to their truck and returning for another trip. The number was smaller now, but it seemed that even while under attack the officer didn’t want to give up on the spoils from the town.

Instead, Karl snuck into the centre of the built architecture, right under the enemy’s nose. He kept close to walls and kept watch around corners, staying away from the trained eyes of the few sentries that had been posted and dashing between cover when their backs were turned. Some of them caught the sound of his footsteps but he was gone before they were able to figure out what might have caused them.

With no trace of Oryl around, Karl had to take care of everything on his own. From the voices he could hear around, most of the troops that hadn’t left to search for him were up ahead around another corner or two. Depending on how many were there, he may have enough bullets to take them on if he caught them by surprise, but he would rather not take the risk. A surgical strike would be less risky.

Checking the buildings around him, he pulled out his compass and oriented himself against the town’s layout. Most of the soldiers were off to the South where he had lost them. Oryl would be to the North-East, closer to their vehicle than him and likely to have already retrieved his weapon. He could worry about himself. However, to get to that same vehicle Karl on the West side of town would have to go straight through the remaining soldiers.

He could head off into the forest after attacking, but he wasn’t sure there was any way to reliably hide his tracks and they were thin enough in this region that he may be spotted or caught while trying to escape.

He could try to climb a building and shoot from there, but the only two-story buildings in the area were the one the villager had shot from before to the North of town and the building where he had killed the soldier back to the South. And he didn’t want to go back down there.

The only option then, as far as he could tell, would be to get straight through the centre of town without dying and escape out the other side after killing the officer.

But first, he would likely need another weapon or more ammunition. And the only people with firepower around here were the Germans. He could steal some from a German without killing anyone, but the most reliable way was to take out another sentry, and since he was already inside their net now was the best opportunity.

He pulled out the bayonet he had stolen so long ago now, the ice catching for a moment on its steel scabbard, and checked the edge with his fingers. Still sharp enough.

The sentry he targeted was standing in a doorway facing the West of town, shielding himself from the wind while he scanned the approach to town he was covering. In the cover of the doorway he wasn’t visible to the nearby sentries and his view of the sides was covered by the very doorway protecting himself from the wind.

The only problem for Karl was that his back was protected by the doorway, so while he could approach unseen he wouldn’t be able to attack without being spotted.

In this case, he couldn’t think up a way to do it silently, so instead he gave up. Karl came up on the corner with his pistol drawn at head height. The sentry heard his footsteps approaching and stuck his head out to check who it was, his last movement. With a gunshot, the sentry’s brains were decorating the doorframe. He fell to the ground, his gun ready to shoot but with no reaction to fire it.

Aware he only had seconds before someone discovered him, Oryl grabbed at the sentry’s MP40 and posed just outside the doorway, ignoring the stench of crystallising blood around him and the corpse behind his legs. He spun his gun left and right, acting as if he was searching for a target.

Out of the corner of his eyes as he glanced in either direction, he spotted the other sentries coming to investigate. “Do you see a rabbit out there?” he called. “I missed and it scurried off!”

The sentries stared at him and out into the snow for a moment, Karl worrying that they would investigate or spot something wrong, but at last they moved back to their own posts with a chuckle. “If you do catch the bastard, make sure you give us a leg!”

Karl sunk back into the doorway with relief, the dead body beneath his feet yet unnoticed.

Once he was confident the other sentries were gone, he bent down and ruffled through the dead man’s pockets. He found two loaded and one empty magazine for the machine pistol, as well as a stick grenade, all of which but the empty magazine he grabbed. He didn’t want to imagine where the bullets from that magazine had been used.

Moving back towards the trucks in the centre of town, he glanced over the status of the SS as they finished off the raid.

Against him were perhaps four SS stormtroopers, maybe a fifth he couldn’t see, elite troops all. He himself had two automatic weapons, one of which was part of the way out of ammunition, a pistol and the element of surprise. He would need to make all he could get of the tools he had available.

He watched the SS climb into one of the trucks and raise the tailgate. It looked like they were planning to regroup and head out to the next town.

Moving to the other side of the building, he spotted his target also climing into the other truck. In moments it may drive off with him aboard, and Karl would have missed his chance.

The time for stealth was over. Karl stood straight and stepped out from the building, calling out to the SS.

“Sturmführer Weber?”

Heads turned in the truck as they noticed Karl. Some of the soldiers started to reach for their weapons, recognising the threat. But before they could do anything the lieutenant responded to his name, with a “Yes?”, and that was all the confirmation Karl needed.

He fired the MP35 on full auto into the back of the truck until it was empty. The momentary spray of bullets tore through the cloth of the truck and the men inside, some ricocheting off its steel fuselage and sending burning sprays of metal shards into the occupants.

Obersturmführer Manuel Weber took the brunt of the barrage, his body thrown back into the truck on top of his platoon’s plunder by the riddling of bullets. One of his men was hit by a lucky shot to the face, slumping back in his seat.

Karl dropped his empty weapon and ran before the counter-fire could begin, taking a zigzag course between the buildings as he headed out of town. He tried to avoid where he remembered the sentries had been, but he was relying as much on luck as memory to escape.

Luck, however, had nothing to do with the SS response. As Karl rounded a corner, he was brought face to face with the gun barrels of three sentries staring him down.

“Stop there,” one of the soldiers said, and as he stepped forwards with his gun still trained on Karl’s chest he recognised him as one of the two he had distracted with the story of the rabbit. “Drop your weapon.”

Karl had no choice but to comply, unslinging the MP40 from around his chest and letting it slip free as the three surrounded him. He dropped the grenade onto the snow with it.

“Pistol too.”

Karl hesitated and was rewarded with a second round of barrels pointed into his body as another group of soldiers joined the scene. He reached down with two fingers and pulled the heirloom free from its holster, laying it on the firmest patch of snow he could find.

“Stand against the wall.”

Karl complied and was rewarded with hands against his arms and heads pressing him flat against the freezing brick while another set of hands searched him.

From what Karl could see, there were at least six soldiers around him with weapons drawn and another four searching him. More soldiers would show up as he waited, too, but he didn’t have much chance to leave.

Faced with no chance of escape, Karl could only hope that they wouldn’t kill him straight away so he might have another chance to escape. He had just shot their officer and killed a tenth of their platoon, so they wouldn’t be feeling favourable towards him, but if he was lucky they might try to question him rather than shoot him outright.

If their stand-in leader, whoever that might be, knew what they were doing, that is.

The searching hands finished their roam, pulling the few items they had found away from Karl’s pockets. His compass, stolen identification tag, the keys to the door of the Volkswagen. All the magazines and ammo he was carrying. At least the iron cross wasn’t with him, so they couldn’t pick that up.

“Well?” asked a gruff voice behind him. “What did you get?” Karl didn’t dare to turn around and find out who was speaking.

“Not much,” a second voice said, this one younger. “No more weapons. A compass, which is weird.”

“Is he partisan then? His Erkennungsmarke?”

“No, I didn’t find any, so maybe a deserter. I did find this though.”

There was a moment of silence then a whistle. “Now where the hell did this come from?” the gruff voice asked. “Oi, you,” accompanied by a prod to Oryl’s shoulder. “Who’d you kill for this?”

Oryl chose to remain silent, half because he was unable to think of a response which would help him and half because he could barely breathe with his face ground into the building.

“Not talking, huh? Do you even speak German?”

“Yes, he does,” one of the men holding Oryl said, shifting his grip on his left arm as he did so. “He did fine before, anyway.”

Karl heard the chain rattle as the new leader did something with the tag - put it in a pocket or threw it away, he wasn’t sure. “Well you’ll have no need of this now. Anything else? Food or supplies? Anything else crazy?” Karl heard another rattling. “Keys, eh? I wonder what treasure chest this one is keeping. Where’s your hideout, huh?”

“Toropets,” Karl said, feeling that remaining mute wouldn’t help him in their eyes but not willing to give information away either.

“No way, not with that many Germans around. Maybe that’s where you deserted eh?”

“How did he know the Obersturmführer’s name then?” a new voice asked from behind Karl, slower yet surer than the others.

“Good question. How did you know?”

The focus had turned to Karl again. He wet his lips and considered his response. He couldn’t tell them the truth, or could he? He outranked everyone here, but they had no reason to believe him, and he didn’t want to give himself up if he wasn’t forced to either.

“Not saying then? It’s a shame, it would be helpful . I suppose finding a nest of partisans on our patrol and killing them will do for the report. Explains the villagers too. Men, back away. Give him some space.”

The hands holding Karl let go and the owners of the arms stepped away. Karl massaged circulation back into his limbs, feeling his face to make sure his nose hadn’t broken. It seemed they hadn’t harmed him beyond repair.

He started to turn around before being halted by the words of the commanding officer. “Stop there. Take aim!”

Karl froze as he felt the barrels of over a squad on his back. “Can I turn around first at least?”

He received no reply but “Ready!”

Darting his eyes from side to side, Karl took in the situation, ready to shout to them to stop. On his right side more troops were filing back, the first of those who had left to chase him earlier. On his left, one of the trucks had just rounded the corner, squeezing between the buildings to pick up the soldiers after he had been finished off.

Seeing no alternative, Karl called out before he was gunned down. “Wait! My name is…”

He was interrupted by a roar of engines to the left as the truck began to gun it down the wide path between two groups of buildings. He turned his head to focus on it, but he wasn’t admonished as the attention of the SS was no longer on him. They were focused on the man behind the wheel, a Russian deserter with an angry smile on his face.

As Oryl barreled his truck down the pathway, a handful of the soldiers opened fire on him. He ducked behind the wheel as shots sparked off his engine and smashed his window into smithereens, but the truck still came on.

With attention diverted away from him, Karl jumped into action. He grabbed his pistol and the grenade and dashed around the corner out of the way of the vehicle, shooting the two soldiers who had jumped the same way as him. He didn’t bother with anything bigger, as it would just get in the way of him running.

Behind he could hear shouts and thuds, the screeching of the car’s wheels on ice, and gunshots from further down the path as the newly arrived soldiers added their fire to the assault on the truck in lieu of the soldiers now dodging out of the way or being run over.

Karl sprinted and waded away from the conflict, expecting a bullet between his soldiers but happy to be proved wrong. He kept an eye on the town behind him in case of pursuit but the SS never seemed to recover their order to mount a pursuit for him besides a sweep of the town.

The vehicle had gone down outside the south of town from the smoke, but it was also far enough away from town that Karl doubted the soldiers would be able to catch Oryl. He did take a detour in that direction though, keeping to the rule of never going straight to your destination, and sure enough was rewarded with a view of the stocky Russian wading his way through a snowbank in a gully, staying out of sight of the town as much as possible.

Karl stepped up behind him, the Russian not noticing his presence until he clapped him on the back. The russian winced and stumbled forward in the snow, caught off guard.

“Thank you back there. You saved my life. Again.”

“I’m sure you were completely in control.”

Karl wasn’t sure about how satire worked for Russians, but he was pretty sure that was a joke. More of one than he had ever seen out of the man, even if in his situation he didn’t find it particularly funny.

“What happened to Veber?” Oryl asked after the moment of silence.

“I killed him,” Karl said.

“You did?”

Karl eyed Oryl and noticed his hands balled into fists. “I did. I didn’t know where you were and I had to make sure.”

Oryl’s hands relaxed a notch. “I suppose you did.”

Karl stared up at the grey sky, dotted with flecks of blue, and shook his head clear. “So that’s it. What’s next?”Oryl frowned. “I should be asking you that question. Aren’t you the one with a way out of here?”

“I wish,” Karl said. “I have ideas, but no ways yet.”

They passed out of the gully into an open field, the road stretching across their view up ahead. Karl could see the hood of the Volkswagen hidden behind a group of trees to their right.

“What was the saying again?” Karl asked. “I will find a way, or make one?”“No idea,” Oryl said. “Not something I would ever have heard before. I disagree, but I enjoy the idea.”

“That sounds like something you would say,” Karl said. “But stick with me long enough, and you’ll find that it works.”

“Or we’ll find ourselves dead like you almost were today.”

They reached the car and stood by the doors, exchanging some final words before departure.

“But I’m alive, aren’t I?”

“Would you be alive if I wasn’t here though?”

Karl nodded. “That’s true. Perhaps we should change the saying then. I’ll find a way, or you’ll make one.”

Oryl thought it through, an unwitting smile lighting up his face. “I think I like that better.”

“Speaking of making ways, have you got anything to break a window?”

“Why would I need that?”

Karl held up his empty hands. “I think I lost the keys to those SS troopers.”

As Oryl went to work on the driver seat window with the butt of his rifle, Karl gave their next moves some thought. With a quick detour, they could get back to Kholm and the remaining items in their supply cache. That would last them a while to plan their route away from Russia.

And from there, anywhere.

Sort of.