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Russian.
“Come on,” Stansfield whispered. “Come on!”
He was perched atop a rocky outcropping that overlooked a small village to the east. A north–south flowing river wound past the settlement’s western edge, separating him from the village. The river’s placid surface concealed a surprisingly deep body of water.
The village itself was unremarkable. A collection of houses, a bakery, butcher shop, and the prerequisite pub. There wasn’t much of Germany that hadn’t been ravaged by war and this went doubly so for Berlin’s suburbs. Case in point, several of the village’s dwellings sported gaping holes hastily covered by tarps and the like. A smoking crater denoted where another building had once stood, and the furrows torn into the fields by the metal tracks of countless armored vehicles were visible even without the aid of Stansfield’s binoculars.
Nothing that should be of interest to a Russian column.
Nothing except for the one hundred tons of uranium oxide housed in a metal barn.
This was the moment of truth in more ways than one.
The convoy had been approaching the village from the west, but the road they’d been following emptied into a north–south farm trail that paralleled the river.
The column slowed as it approached the intersection. To the left lay a packed dirt trail that meandered north for one hundred yards past a barren field before arriving at a bridge. The wooden span had been reinforced with metal girding, but the bridge still looked a bit rickety to Stansfield’s eye. To reach surer footing, the convoy would need to turn right and proceed south for another two miles to where a bridge constructed of much sturdier river stone spanned the river.
Sturdiness aside, Stansfield had wagered that the shortcut would prove too tempting for the road-weary Russians. The convoy was in a race with a collection of American and British scientists and soldiers who were also intent on claiming the German uranium oxide. Time was of the essence.
“What are they doing?” Andre punctuated his question by reaching for the binoculars.
Stansfield intercepted the teen’s questing fingers and pushed them away. Though it was often easy to forget, Andre was still a boy, and boys liked to see. “No binos,” Stansfield said. “Can’t risk a glint from the glass.”
As if hearing Stansfield’s thoughts, the lead scout car’s passenger door opened and a Russian soldier exited. A soldier with his own set of binoculars. Though he couldn’t be sure without using his binos to check the shoulder boards on the soldier’s uniform, Stansfield was willing to bet that the man was a member of the Russian military intelligence organization known as the GRU.
Stansfield sensed motion to his left and instinctively grabbed Andre’s shoulder. “Be still. We’re well hidden. At these distances motion is easier to detect than a human form.”
Andre’s muscles stopped twitching beneath Stansfield’s grasp. “What are they doing?”
This time the question carried more frustration than curiosity. Stansfield sighed. The boy’s body might no longer be in motion, but his mind was never idle. “Trying to decide which bridge to take. Safety to the right or speed to the left.”
“Will they choose left?”
“The Russians know they’re on borrowed time. Multiple countries are looking for that uranium just like multiple countries are trying to capture Nazi nuclear scientists. If it were me, I’d turn left.”
Unfortunately, it was not up to Stansfield, and while his reasoning was tactically sound, if the intelligence was correct, the Soviet convoy was not composed of just tactical men. Though he understood verylittle of the underlying science, Stansfield knew that the world’s top physicists were feverishly working to be the first to develop a weapon that unleashed unfathomable destructive power by splitting the atom.
Rare uranium oxide was critical to this endeavor.
Differentiating between uranium oxide and other remnants of the German nuclear weapon’s program was not a task for common soldiers. This column was rumored to contain two Russian physicists who had been rushed to the front lines for just this purpose. Scientists by their nature were slow, methodical creatures taught to plod through experiments with an eye toward reproducibility and bulletproof data.
Spies were a different breed.
Men and women whose livelihood depended on short, and often frantic, bursts of communication. An existence lived both figuratively and literally under the gun in which speed was its own variation of safety. Russian physicists might be the ones charged with validating that the strange material wrapped in tarps in an otherwise unassuming barn was the uranium the Soviet nuclear weapons program so desperately needed, but it was the GRU minders who were responsible for ensuring that they obtained the prize before the Americans or British did. Intelligence officers would choose speed over safety any day of the week.
At least that’s what Stansfield hoped.
As with everything the Resistance had used to wage their covert war against the Axis, German-manufactured RDX plastic explosives were in short supply. With only enough material to rig one of the two bridges, Stansfield had put all his chips on the closer one.
Now his wager was about to be put to the test.
For an impossibly long moment, the convoy remained stationary.
Not for the first time, Stansfield considered revising his plan and ambushing the vehicles outright. While traditional military doctrine stated that an attacking force must outnumber defenders by three to one, the Resistance had grown adept at adapting tactics to suit its perpetually numerically inferior members. The men and women who staffed its ranks had become experts in the art of sabotage and were quite proficientat engaging Germans with hit-and-run attacks. Skirmishes in which the goal was to inflict maximum casualties in the minimum amount of time.
The military maxim of gaining and holding terrain was just that—a maxim for conventional forces. Stansfield thought his band of ruffians stood an excellent chance of disabling the convoy and killing most of its members, but most wasn’t good enough.
There could be no one left alive to report what had transpired here.
