Last Citadel - [World War II 03] by David L. Robbins

speeding German, climbing out of the way to wait for his searchlights to find him another morsel.
     
    Katya kept at four hundred feet over the smooth, dark terrain. Vera recited the names of the crew. ‘Marina Rudnova. Lily Baranskaya.’ This was her need to witness, to talk out her shock and anguish. Katya’s witness would be to survive, reach the airstrip as fast as she could, and stop the night’s mission before their regiment was annihilated. She flew straight and low over enemy territory while Vera gathered herself and her maps.
     
    In a minute Vera had a direction for them to fly. Katya climbed to two thousand feet, safely away from the killing zone of the supply depot burning behind them. Thirty Night Witches had set the depot on fire, that was their mission. Each one, flying in line, saw the plane in front of her attacked, some destroyed, yet stayed on course, cut her engine, sailed over the target, banked through the lights, and did her job. Katya dreaded the final tally for tonight’s German vegetables and bandages. She could not spur the U-2 to go faster and her heart sickened.
     
    * * * *
     

CHAPTER 4
     
    June 30
    2150 hours
    Wehrmacht train moving east
    Treblinka, Poland
     
    Luis Ruiz de Vega lifted a hand to snare the attention of a passing waiter. He waved his fingers over his plate, then made a sweeping motion to tell the man to take the dinner away.
     
    ‘Ja, mein Herr.’
     
    Luis had been asleep over the half-full plate. He’d not touched more than a few bites. The train slowed herky-jerky and Luis opened his eyes. He heard the waiter’s German and remembered he was not in Spain, where his dream had taken him. He did not speak to the waiter - white-gloved hands swooped down dovelike and took away the tray of
schnitzel
and wafers - and so did not switch languages in his head, but continued to think in Spanish.
     
    He’d quelled the hunger, but he knew it would return soon. A year ago he’d been shot in the stomach by the Russians, leaving him forever with appetite. His gut had been cut in half, stitched closed in an emergency field hospital to save his life. And such a life it has become, he thought, looking at the hand he’d left dawdling in the air. He could not wear his father’s signet ring anymore, his fingers had shrunk too much. His face, his chest, hips, legs, everything but his bones and them, too, he believed at times, had been whittled away, the shavings of
Waffen
SS Captain Luis de Vega must be lying in a trash bin somewhere in the Berlin recovery ward of his previous eleven months.
     
    He flipped the suspended hand over, examining his palm, then set it in his lap. In the way he’d awakened from his dream in Spanish, Luis awoke in his old form, strong and sinewy, five foot ten, the perfect physique for a man. It was the dark body that had earned him his renown, in the bullrings, then in the Civil War, next with Franco’s Blue Division, and finally with the SS at the Leningrad siege, his captain’s commission and his own company. The feats he could perform in that body earned him praise, women, and his nickname,
la Daga
. The Dagger. He raised the shrunken hand to his waist to finger the sheathed knife he wore on his belt, a ceremonial blade given to him by his division. On the blade was written the SS oath:
Meine Ehre Heisst Treue
. My honor is loyalty. Funny, Luis thought, smiling a wretched grin, the irony of things. Finally I have become
la Daga
. I could stick someone with these hands.
     
    To help wake himself up, Luis dug a knuckle into his eye socket. Both were bony, there was little cushion of flesh to him anymore. The chased-away dream was of the
plaza de toros
and his father: The old man was young and the crimson
muleta
rippled in his outstretched arms, bull, blood, and dust boiled around him, the arena was packed and hot. In those days before the Civil War, Ramon de Vega’s picture was painted for posters, tacked up across Barcelona, the
matador’s
son was