Predator-Prey

1

Below her the Eisenbach flowed, its waters sluggish, muddy, rendered muddier still by the dirty second-floor window through which she viewed it. A thatch of daisies grew on the far bank, beside the bridge’s thick support, their yellow an Earth-bound patch of sun on a gray afternoon. The only sun she would ever see. Below the patch of daisies a helmet, a dark-green Soviet helmet, and beneath the helmet a face, its eyes wide, centimeters from her own soft brown eyes. She focused on that face now, caressing it with her free hand.

“Please, please,” the soldier whispered. “Please what?” she replied, a hint of playfulness in her voice. “Please,” his eyes left her face, searching lower, fixing on her full lips, the top stretched as if straining to conceal her teeth. She smiled. He whimpered. Slowly, surprised at the effort it took, Katharina slid the 12 inch knife into the soldier’s throat, watching his eyes grow dim, thrilling at the warm blood flowing onto her hand.

2

Oberleutnant Michael Koch of the Territorialheer watched the same river, flowing under the same bridge. Koch and the thirteen men remaining of his platoon were ensconced on the third floor of the Eisenbach Karstadt that overlooked the Eisenbach River.

Koch lay between a pair of upended manikins that were dressed in casual summer clothes. Clothes you might wear at an evening pub in Normandy. Clothes no one was going to wear for the rest of this summer, maybe for summers to come. Behind him the store lay in ruins. Not from shelling, gunfire, or grenades, but rather the looters that followed Soviet occupation of Eisenbach. The structure still stood, but its racks of clothing had been ransacked. The smell of urine wrinkled his nose. Perhaps one of his men had pissed on a pile of clothes; perhaps it had been the looters. It wasn’t important. Killing Soviets and saving his men were important. The thought that one was often diametrically opposed to the other didn’t occur to the Oberleutnant.

It was two days since the Americans had withdrawn. His thoughts flicked to the memory of the last Abrams that had crossed the bridge; the one Corporal Herzner’s Milan team had saved. Where were they now? Fighting the Soviets west of Eisenbach? Dead, a Soviet 125mm armor piercing round ending their existence? He knew where the Corporal was. The Corporal was still lying next to the cottage’s stone wall, a meter of dirt and rocks covering his lifeless form.

Under the cover of darkness, on each of those three evenings, a Soviet convoy had rolled across the Eisenbach Bridge. Two-ton Gaz trucks crammed with prepackaged rations. A case had fallen off one night ago and two blocks down the road. Kurt, Sergeant Varner, as the baker from the shop nestled on the corner of Essen and 3rd Street was called in the Territorialheer, had hid in the recessed doorway of a pub until the convoy had passed, hefted the case of rations on his shoulder, and waddled back to the department store that Koch was using as his base of operations. They had eaten well, or at least as well as soldiers can eat on prepackaged rations. But even more importantly, the case had told Koch what he needed to know. These convoys carried supplies that were needed at the front, by the Soviets laying waste to his country. Destroy a convoy and soldiers go hungry, short on ammunition, or lack batteries to a critical radio, perhaps an attack fails. Tonight, when the convoy crossed the bridge, they would meet more than a sleepy Russian sentry waving them on. Koch looked at his watch. It would be dark in two hours; the convoy would be here in three. He settled down to wait, ignoring the smell of urine.

3

She crouched behind the wreckage of a military vehicle; her afternoon’s kill little more than a pleasant memory. Her hand rested on one of the vehicle’s drum-sized sprocket wheels. She was pretty sure it was a tank, but which side’s she didn’t know. She had never been one to study the tools of this war. It had never been part of her world, at least until now. Now her world had been turned inside out, the ordered streets of Eisenbach morphed into a junkyard, it houses into morgues, and order would be a long time returning. The thought made her smile.

The darkness flickered across the pavement, chased by the weak, dancing light of nearby flames. It was chilly spring night, and the pair of soldiers she watched had built a drum fire to warm themselves. Both stood next to it, five meters distant, their backs to her, hands stretched toward the glowing drum. The pistol in her hand was familiar, the knife in the other a little more so. She was breathing hard, but not sure why. They wouldn’t stop her. She knew that. Rising, she stepped toward the men.

4

“Movement,” the small radio clipped to Oberleutnant Koch’s shoulder tab hissed. Sergeant Varner’s report was redundant. He saw the figure rise from beside the destroyed M48A5 as soon as the Sergeant did. “What the hell?” he muttered.

Varner’s men were hidden in the service station across the street, their Panzerfaust 44 team lying in the rubble of the service bay whose back wall had been blown out by an HE round from a Soviet T-80 four days earlier. Corporal Wagner, Rudi Wagner, his brother-in-law to be exact, had most of the other men below the bridge on the riverbank. Koch and the MG3 machinegun team were set up in the first floor of the Karstadt.

Again the radio whispered in Koch’s ear. “Engage?”

Was the figure a third sentry, running to warn his comrades? A panicked civilian the nervous guards would shoot on sight? A dog morphed by his adrenalin-spiked imagination into human form? Koch hesitated and fate decided. The figure reached the nearest guard, Koch saw the fire glint on metal and then the metal was in the Soviet’s back.

5

She drove the blade hard into the Soviet. Backs were thickly muscled and punching steel, even sharpened steel, through those muscles was no easy task. Through the light jacket, cotton smock, dark green undershirt, skin, and muscle, the knife drove, into his heart. And then through his heart, out of his chest and into the night air. The soldier grunted, the second to the last sound that he would ever make, and sagged against her. She dropped him to the pavement as his comrade spun, pulling his AK-74 to his shoulder. The knifed soldier hit the asphalt with the sound of fresh meat and releasing bowels, the expelling excrement his final audible contribution to the world. Her other arm, the arm with the American pistol, was swinging up when the Soviet fired. The pop-pop-pop of the Soviet assault rifle echoed like bombs against the buildings facing the bridge and she ducked. It was an unnecessary reaction. Rushed, frightened, and inexperienced, the soldier aimed a centimeter high. The first bullet snapped over her right shoulder, the kick of the AK-74 sent the other two rounds even higher. The soldier realized his mistake and adjusted his aim as her first 9mm bullet tore into the bridge of his nose, tumbled through his cranial cavity and blew out the back of his skull. He dropped to the pavement like a sack of clothes, lying on his back, the flame’s warm light licking his pulped face, the heels of his boots tapping the pavement in response to basal commands from his shattered brain. She put the gun to his heart and fired again. The heel-tapping stopped.

Quickly she straddled him, feeling the heat of his still-warm legs beneath her. She placed knife and gun beside the victim and slowly slid her hand up his chest, stopping at the ragged hole above his heart, first caressing its edges with her fingertips, then slowly lowering her lips to…

“Stop.” The word was flat, dull, barely above a whisper. Not something you would normally heed. The object pressed into the back of her neck, however, was. She stopped.

“Get up.” The same voice. “Slowly.” Perhaps an afterthought. Maybe a warning. A boot kicked her knife and pistol and they clattered obediently into the darkness. Slowly, she stood.

6

Koch kept his Walther P1 pressed, pressed hard, against the back of the woman’s neck. Kurt Varner stood five meters distant, his finger nervous on the trigger of his Heckler & Koch G3, his eyes darting from the woman to the bridge and back to the woman.

She was tall, equal to Koch’s medium build, dark hair, dark enough to shine in the fire’s light, and dressed simply in jeans, a dark t-shirt, and an unzipped, hooded sweatshirt. Slim shouldered, but not skinny, he had noticed the full flare to her hips when Varner and he had crept up on her as she straddled the Soviet.

“I’m German, you know.” Her voice was low, relaxed. The German was flawless, but with a trace of an accent, a strange lilt. Enough to worry Koch, not enough to kill for. She punctuated the statement with a throaty chuckle. “Tonight.”

“Shut up.” Koch snapped. He had witnessed the woman kill two Soviet soldiers. Using the sociological math of normal times that would make her his friend. The enemy of my enemy is my friend, or so the saying went. But these were not normal times. In these times Koch knew of only two types of people: the thirteen men in his tiny platoon, and whoever was in their way. He wasn’t sure to which type this woman belonged. She had killed the Soviets, but…

“Trucks!” Varner’s hissed, pulling Koch from his thoughts.

“Don’t be a fool.” Again her relaxed, deep voice. Either oblivious to the muzzle on her neck or past caring. “They are the enemy, not me.”

There was no doubt who “they” were. The march lights of the small BRDM Soviet scout car leading the column had swung onto the bridge, their hooded gleam barely visible on the on the other side of the river. Behind the BRDM Koch could see the intermittent winking of the remaining column. Really, he had little choice. He couldn’t spare a man to guard the woman while they ambushed the column. He could shoot her dead, or take her actions at face value and trust her to fight alongside his men. The fact that she was a woman, or that she had hair the color of his own Maria, didn’t affect his decision. At least that is what he told himself.

He pulled the Walther away from her neck. “Get your weapons.” Before he had finished the sentence she was sprinting toward the patch off asphalt to which her knife and gun had slithered. But he wasn’t done.

“Girl!” His voice was an urgent, edgy whisper. She turned and looked, her dark eyes glittering, T-shirt tight across her chest, and a moment of lust flashed through him. As distracting as it was shameful. He had a wife. At least he had a wife a week ago when he had sent her east to Hannover. He shook the thought like a dog shedding water and focused on the glittering eyes.

“You stay with me, behind me.” She nodded, and it was then he noticed the thin, pink scar tracing the line of her jaw. Razor-thin, perhaps a trace of a past tragedy, perhaps not. It didn’t matter now.

“You screw up, I’ll kill you myself,” he added.

She smiled, and he wasn’t sure why.