Opening Moves (The Red Gambit Series) (53 page)

Before he was in position above, two paratroopers ran through and moved immediately to shoot down anyone on the wall guarding the spot where their grapnels hung uselessly. Knocke brought up his Sten gun and pulled the trigger, only to be greeted by silence as the weapon failed. Two short staccato bursts sounded close in his left ear and the Russians were thrown back like rag dolls, their lifeless bodies testament to the accuracy and calmness of Anne-Marie Valois.

Quickly she grabbed at the German officer’s weapon, removing the magazine and working the cocking lever before punching the magazine home again.

“Danke Madamoiselle.”

Anne-Marie dropped another paratrooper as he tentatively worked round through the entranceway, leaning over and firing into the top of his helmeted head.

A Russian grenade bounced through the opening, bursting and quickly concealed the three dead bodies as the chemical smoke spread rapidly.

Both Knocke and Valois quickly repositioned, moving to the west of the opening, just in time to fire down into hazy shapes swiftly running into the garden. Most dropped either instinctively or involuntarily, the former seeking cover as they rolled on the floor, the latter no longer caring.

A squeal came from Von Arnesen, hit in the act of killing two more paratroopers scaling the grapnel lines. One of them survived long enough to get a shot off with his heavy Nagant M1895 revolver, the 7.62mm bullet smashing Von Arnesen down as it clipped the femur on its path through his right thigh.

“I’ll go”, shouted the French agent, and she dashed quickly along the battlements to Von Arnesen’s side.

Swiftly unhooking the sling to her Sten, she wound the webbing around the German’s thigh to create a ligature. Needing something rigid to tighten the tourniquet, she slipped the near empty magazine out of her submachine-gun and inserted it in the knot, twisting it twice to tighten it further, much to the consternation of Von Arnesen whose pain resistance level was already being tested.

A burst of fire from Knocke’s position drew both their glances, but the man was still there; there were just more bodies in the dispersing smoke.

Slipping another magazine out of her waist bag, Anne-Marie primed her Sten.

“Danke Mademoiselle.”

“Keep it tight Jurgen. Can you manage here?”

“Jawohl.”

It was not a time for pleasantries and she swiftly scurried back along the stonework, leaving Von Arnesen propped against the wall covering the grapnels and silently promising anyone a painful death if they showed themselves above the parapet.

Two more smoke grenades tumbled through the entranceway, both perfectly positioned to cover the Russian’s next move.

A single arm flashed in the smoke and a more deadly object careened off the underside of the battlement roof, dropping between the two defenders.

Von Arnesen heard the shout and risked a look at his two comrades.

He saw a blur of movement through the smoke and the flash of the explosion.

The other grenades continued to produce smoke, further obscuring the parapet where two bodies lay.

Instinctively turning, he fired blindly at a noise he almost missed, sending yet another young paratrooper to the ground ten metres below.

Major Marion Crisp had been dragged away from the doorway, insensible, felled by the explosion of a grenade that did deadly work in the confined space at the bottom of the north stairs.

Enemy machine-guns were lashing the defenders, permitting the assaulting party to make it into the stairwell without further casualties.

However, the confined space then worked against them, funnelling them forward one by one. A ‘Deux’ agent dropped the first three, two bullets a man, piling the corpses on each other as momentum drove the dead flesh on.

Caught in the act of reloading his Beretta, the agents head jerked back as a burst from a PPS took his life, his body slithering down the stairs and adding itself to the pile accumulating there.

The second agent, having dragged Crisp up the stairs, turned to help and was dropped by the same weapon, his lifeblood rapidly washing the stairs onto which he fell.

Crisp, the Thompson slung around his shoulder, groggily tried to get the weapon into action but could not disentangle himself. His hand sought and found the comforting butt of the Beretta pistol. Ears still ringing from the grenade’s blast, he brought up the handgun and put four bullets into the men moving up the stairs. The lead man fell back into those behind and the advance stopped in an instant.

At the main staircase, Ramsey’s Webley had been emptied stopping an assault, paratroopers suddenly able to enter the garden from the North Ward, the resistance offered by Knocke and Valois having been smashed aside.

Mounting the stairs, a few were picked off from behind, commandos and orderlies with rifles dropping men from safe vantage points in the accommodation part of the Château Supérieur. Twenty-five steps carried the survivors up to the drawbridge leading to the Grand Bastion, but no further. A ‘Deux’ agent used his M3A1 Grease Gun to good effect, emptying the thirty round contents of his magazine and killing or wounding the lead five troopers.

The garden was rapidly becoming a slaughter ground, and the Russian paratroopers grew more desperate in their assaults to gain entry to the Bastion.

Every entrance was assaulted and mini battles raged, each the property of a handful of men from both sides.

The lower room was breached and paratroopers pressed in, the handful of defenders engaged in hand-to-hand combat around the stairs. Here the Soviets had the advantage and the defenders were pressed hard.

The agent covering the main entrance with Ramsey took a round in the stomach and collapsed on the floor, rolling dramatically down the stairs before coming to rest against the inner door, writhing in pain and out of the fight.

Three paratroopers threw themselves through the main doors, bodies made small but still expectant and scared.

One young Russian prodded the badly wounded agent in the throat with his SVT automatic rifle, the bayonet opening a nasty gash and silencing the Frenchman’s moans.

At the top of the stairs, Ramsey was reloading his pistol, one round at a time, aware that he was about to become part of a race in which there was only one winner and losing had a price.

The fourth bullet slid home into the Webley’s chamber as the SVT man saw the movement at the top of the stairs. The automatic rifle barked three times, each bullet missing the Black Watch Major, but each close enough to heighten Ramsey’s fear.

The three paratroopers rose as one as the fifth bullet went home, their shouts of ‘Urrah!’ adding to the pressure of the situation.

All three Russians fired from the hip as they bounded up the stairs, one bullet passing through Ramsey’s right armpit leaving no trace on his body.

The sixth bullet went home and the Webley was closed, the two actions joined together by speed and urgency.

Ramsey brought the handgun up in an instant and fired.

The first .455 bullet took the SVT man in the chest, throwing him against the left–hand wall with the force of the impact, the second missed, chipping the stonework on its way down the stairs.

Switching to the second man, two more bullets took him down, dead before he hit the stairs.

The third man ducked low and left, intent on driving his bayonet into the British officer. Ramsey twisted as best he could to avoid the blade and, in so doing, missed with his fifth and final shot. The Russian barrelled into him and both crashed to the floor, Ramsey winded and pinned under the not inconsiderable weight of the larger man.

The Soviet paratrooper, benefitting from the softer landing, recovered quicker. One hand found Ramsey’s throat and a knee pinned his opponent’s right arm as the Russian tried to retrieve a knife from his belt.

Ramsey started to see stars before his eyes as the pressure of the man’s steel grip grew and his free arm, desperately trying to find a point of weakness on his assailant, started to lose power.

The weight suddenly lifted from the Englishman’s chest and he was able to draw breath, choking and coughing, eyes misty and blurred, but not so much that he hadn’t seen the red spout as something burst out of the Russian’s chest.

An NCO, a Quartermaster 1st Class, had been fighting on the gun platform above the main entrance and had turned just in time to see the British officer’s plight. One bullet from the Frenchman’s Enfield rifle sent the paratrooper toppling off Ramsey and onto the floor, his breathing little more than a gurgling of bubbles as blood filled his damaged lungs.

The French NCO grabbed one of the ‘Deux’ agents and doubled round to Ramsey’s position, in time to shoot down another paratrooper firing into the side room at the bottom of the stairs.

Ramsey shook his head and controlled his breathing, gradually returning to his senses but remaining weak. He looked around for his revolver but could not locate it. The SVT lay nearby so he retrieved it and removed three magazines from the now quietly dying paratrooper. The SVT was a large weapon weighing over eight pounds and four foot long, not ideal for a man still recovering from standing on the threshold of death a few seconds beforehand.

He propped the automatic rifle against the stonework at the top of the stairs and sat on an ammo box, regaining more of his senses.

He became aware that the intelligence agent was looking at him, examining him from head to foot.

Normally smart and dapper, Ramsey was now anything but.

Blood from his nose gently leaked down his face, dripping onto his tie and jacket, the rupture caused by the impact of the Russian.

A painful cut on his hand made itself known, origin unknown this time, again adding its own red stain to Ramsey’s attire.

His shoulder, the old sniper wound from Nordenham, stung and ached but had not reopened.

Examining his right armpit, Ramsey discovered that the bullet had indeed missed him but his probing fingers were met with ravaged cloth and he suspected the repair would prove a challenging job for his tailor.

Producing a handkerchief, he wiped blood and saliva away from his chin and mouth and started the process of composing himself.

As the agent looked on, Ramsey returned to some semblance of a British Infantry officer, straightening his tie, smoothing his hair into order, pulling and patting his uniform into some sort of presentability.

As he was doing it, the professional part of his brain was trying hard to relay a message, and it was not until he accepted a cigarette from the French NCO that he realised what the voice was saying.

‘They’ve stopped firing.’

Ramsey was wrong; the firing had not stopped, it was just further away.

Whilst the attempts were being made to carry the garden and the bastions, Soviet paratroopers had pushed hard into the accommodation, fighting through chambers and hallways, across wooden balconies and up circular stairs.

The courage of the Russians was incredible as they pressed the defence, urged on both by their commanding General and the sounds of heavy fighting outside the Château behind them.

Rispan had been sent to the Lower Courtyard by Makarenko, with orders to prepare for the assault force’s exit from the Château. Firing from the road below had risen in ferocity since the first and only radio communication with the mortar group, who identified a solitary enemy vehicle coming from Selestat. The Major dispatched Nakhimov to the main gate to discover the facts, as he started to organise how best to evacuate the growing numbers of badly wounded men from the Château.