Stalemate (The Red Gambit Series) by Colin Gee Page A

all too plain to her eyes.
    Beyond the clearing, the horrified NCO could see the officer and her two soldiers moving up, approaching that unspeakably bloody something hanging from the tree directly opposite them.
    Sverova nodded, a silent message across the divide, and both parties moved up and into the camp, picking their way over the horrors.
    Both NCO and officer silently extended arms, directing their soldiers to move further apart.
    The two met in the middle of the clearing, not even the tweet of a bird to break the tension.
    “Killed while they slept, Dina, all except that one.”
    As if by common assent, they both turned to face the body that had been pinned to the tree with knives, the bloody swastika carved into the torso appearing the least of the apparent horrors.
    “Werewolves.”
    Not a question, just a statement.
    Sverova slipped her Tokarev pistol back into her holster.
    An agreed hand signal summoned Astafieva’s group.
    “Check their lorry over. If it ’s fine, we will load the bodies aboard and take them to the nearest checkpoint.”
    The NCO moved off to inspect the lorry, the cover force emerging from the woods to start the grisly task of recovering the dead.
    It took Ponichenkarova a few seconds to find the grenade booby-traps on the vehicle, and less than a minute to make them safe. She warned her soldiers to be vigilant, something that Sverova was also doing back at the clearing.
    “Be careful , Comrades. Who knows what the SS bastards have left behind?”
    Sverova and two of the older women removed the tortured man from the tree, placing him gently upon a blanket and rolling him up, as they would swaddle a baby.
    The three of them carried the burden, moving gingerly across the clearing as others, similarly wrapped, started their own journey to the waiting Studebaker.
    Most of the weapons had been damaged, the rifles and sub-machine guns bent, probably by smashing the metal against a tree trunk.
    One PPSh sat propped against a pack, inviting attention.
    “No , Olga!”
    The female soldier who had been looking carefully at the vignette , nodded without moving her body, responding instantly to the voice of command, but keeping her eyes focussed on the threat.
    Sverova knelt down gingerly and swept away the leaves with care, seeking the telltale signs of interference and hidden death.
    There were none.
    Both she and the soldier, Olga Matalinova, breathed out with relief.
    The unit’s youngest soldier was crying openly, her ginger hair matted with blood, saying a forbidden prayer over the men she was tending.
    Her eyes fell on the German helmet and she snapped, a wail of anger escaping her lips.
    Sverova screamed.
    “NO!”
    She lashed out viciously with her boot, sending the object of her hatred flying.
    The moment the helmet moved, it activated a simple tilt switch, igniting a detonator.
    Two-thirds of a second later the zinc-encased charge exploded.
    A loud bang mixed with the high-pitched screams of the horribly injured.
    Ponichenkarova rushed back to the clearing.
    The pretty ginger girl was no longer intact, the pieces of her svelte body now spread around the clearing.
    Other women soldiers were also amongst the dead, many dismembered and spread to the four corners of the open ground, the odd portion hanging from a branch like a macabre Christmas decoration. There were a handful of survivors, some hideously injured and yet still clinging to life.
    Additional horrors had been wrought on the already dead bodies of the NKVD soldiers.
    Sverova was propped against the torso of an NKVD soldier, looking across the clearing, the smoke of the explosion stinging her eyes and robbing her of her final clear memories.
    She was silent, unable to speak, her lower body torn away from the hips down, her upper body naked and unblemished, save for some splashes of blood and other fluids from the unfortunate Matalinova.
    The horrified NCO made it to her side in five huge steps. Sverova’s destroyed body failed