Thirty sincere men can dig a lot of holes in thirty minutes and when the dirt was cleared, the place in the middle of the road looked as though a two-ton bomb had dug the crater. The huge Mark III would fit into the gap nicely—and would have a lot of difficulty getting out.

  Mickey watched the men plant their dynamite and set the detonators. When that job was done, others brought long, thin branches they had cut from the trees and placed them across the holes. This they covered with leaves and other foliage and made it look as though the wind had strewn the brown dirt pass. It was a magnificent job of earthy camouflage. A light layer of brown earth was thrown over the whole.

  The holes dug in the side of the roadway were similarly treated. Only an expert in camouflage might suspect anything wrong. Mickey could see that the tank drivers would not.

  “That’s a magnificent job, Feodor,” he said admiring the handiwork of the men.

  “It is if it does the work it is intended to do,” replied the boy.

  With the job finished, Feodor ordered his men up to the top of the hill where they could observe without being seen themselves. As they were up the halfway mark, they saw the lookout coming down. He signaled to Feodor that the tanks were on the way.

  It was about two hundred feet to the top and when they arrived there, the men flung themselves on the grass for a much needed rest—and waited. They saw the line of tanks lumbering slowly along, digging their steel caterpillar tracks in the soft Caucasian earth. They rode slowly on to conserve what little fuel they had.

  * * * *

  Mickey watched them from his place on the ground. Young Feodor seemed unconcerned. Soon the noise of the roaring diesels reached them on the west wind. They lowered their heads deeper into the grass. From where the tanks rolled unsuspectingly along the pass, the guerrillas could not be seen.

  Slowly, slowly on came the rumbling juggernauts. In Mickey’s mind they seemed a lot of jugger that would soon be naughts. Mickey looked below to see if the wind had disturbed the camouflaging. From where he and the others lay hidden in the ground on the elevation, they could see up and down the road for miles. So perfectly had the job of laying the tank traps been done, that even he could not locate them. He smiled at the knowledge.

  He turned to Feodor. “It looks as though they are right on top of the traps,” he whispered. The tension that he felt all around him made him lower his voice. He actually thrilled at the experience. He had some difficulty controlling his emotions. This being a guerrilla, he thought, was stimulatingly exciting.

  All eyes were upon the steel caravan below. They watched the slow moving lead vehicle rumble and grumble on; its diesel engine objecting strenuously to insufficient and inadequate nutrition.

  Eagerly, anxiously, hidden eyes watched the scene hungrily. The heavy vehicle approached the main trap. The smell of burning oil rose to the men strewn about the grass. As their eyes followed the movement of the tank, there was a crashing sound that reached their ears; the tail of the tank rose suddenly into the air as the nose dived into the tank trap. The caterpillar tracks churned the edge of the hole and blew the dirt into the air like a dog kicking up the dust behind him.

  A terrific grating sound followed as the driver reversed the direction of the tracks in an effort to get out of the hole, but the more he ground, the deeper he buried himself and his tank.

  Mickey and the others laughed silently as they watched the tank dig in.

  It was only a matter of seconds for this to happen. So close rode the others behind the ill-fated Nazi landcraft, that the tank that followed it directly behind had not sufficient time to turn out and piled up on the tank in the hole with a crash that rang through the hills for miles. Its caterpillar track ground desperately on the roof of its fallen brother. The driver here too reversed his gear. The tracks in reverse rasped and screamed like a dull file on an iron casting. As the tank drew back off the other, it backed into another and oncoming rumbler behind it; the tracks of both tanks locked and the teeth were stripped from them like the teeth from an old comb. And just as the second tank rolled from the one in the trap, the stripping teeth robbed of power of grip and locomotion, the huge craft hung poised for a brief moment off balance, then toppled completely over on its side.

  * * * *

  The other tanks came on. The fourth tank, unable to pull up, crashed into the third tank which had just stripped it track teeth, and as the driver in the third tank again reversed his gear this time for forward motion, the impact of the fourth tank at his rear, and the propelling action of the track, drove him completely across the first and second tanks into another trap that lay buried just in front of the trap into which the lead tank had fallen.

  General confusion, trapped Nazis shouting and screaming inside their tanks; steel crashing against steel, with the ringing noise mingling with the roar of racing diesels; all this reached the eyes and ears of the men above and they laughed uproariously at the mad scene below. Laughed again and again as others, turning out and away from the piled up wreck, themselves dropped into other holes in the sides of the road and sank up to the tops of their bogie wheels.

  Feodor raised his hand to one man with a detonator. He dropped it again quickly. There was a terrific explosion below; a blast of yellow flame lit up the first of the stricken tanks, and its seam opened wide as the steel rivets blew off the tank like the buttons on the vest of an overfed fat man.

  Feodor repeated the maneuver. One of the other guerrillas pressed the plunger on the detonator and another tank was blown apart.

  The tanks in the sides of the roads, in holes that were not as deep as the first, reversed their tracks and drew out of the holes. But they did not go far. As they rode over hidden grenades that blasted the tracks off the bogie wheels and left the huge death-dealing steel elephants without a means of propulsion, the gas lines to the engines were also blown apart and the diesels coughed, gasped and, like many of the Nazi rats driving the craft, died a permanent death.

  Of the fifteen tanks that rode casually on, only six managed to get into the fields and safety. But even they did not move beyond the stricken tanks. Their engines gasped for want of fuel, and the tanks stalled where they were.

  Two more detonator plungers were driven home; two more deafening blasts followed; two more tanks were blown apart and fire began burning all around them. Men in the tanks who could escape ran to cover. Some ran up the hill toward the place where the Russian guerrillas were concealed.

  Feodor Koslovitch swung his arm again and called unto himself the submachine gunners. They fell on their faces as they watched the men coming up. Their guns were poised and waiting for the Nazis to get within range.

  Mickey followed them down; his kitbag in his hand. As he looked off in the direction of Pyatigorsk, toward the position in the Caucasus where the German lines were blasting at the Cossacks in an effort to bypass them to Grozny, Mickey saw two crawling objects about ten miles away. They were headed in the direction of the German tanks.

  “Look, Feodor,” Mickey said.

  * * * *

  The young guerrilla leader put his binoculars to his eyes. “Tankers,” he said. “Nazi tanker cars with fuel for those crawling insects we’ve just blown apart.”

  Feodor signaled the gunners to retire. They scurried back to the top of the hill, and down the other side.

  “Come!” he cried. And ran down the hill followed by the men who had quickly gathered their detonators and other equipment and ran to where their horses were tethered.

  Mickey and Feodor were the first to reach their horses. They mounted and waited for the others, and together they drove off at a gallop to a place about three miles below the shattered tanks.

  Feverishly they went to work to fell a huge pine tree which stood by the side of the road. In fact, they felled two huge trees and cut them so that when they toppled to the ground, they lay across the road and completely cut off the passage of the gas tankers.

  When the trees lay comfortably across the only road in the vicinity, Mickey, Koslovitch, and the rest of the band of Cossack guerrillas darted for cover about twenty yards off the side of the road and waited.

  They had not long to wait. Up the winding dirt highway rode the two tank cars carrying their load of gasoline through the Caucasian hills to the stricken tanks. Their dull green, circular, elongated steel bodies appeared and disappeared. The Russians in ambush waited until the fallen trees would halt the Nazi tankers.

  As the cars reached the spot, their brakes squealed, their tires skidded along the highway and the trucks came to a full stop just in front of the obstructions.

  Arming themselves with rifles, the men dropped to the ground and tried to run for cover. They knew this was an ambush and were taking no chances. Previous experience with Russian guerrillas had taught them to get under cover and get cover fast.

  But these men were not fast enough. Hand grenades came hurtling at them from the pines; two struck one of the gas tanks. They blew up tearing a rent in the tank out of whose big, oval belly gasoline poured over the ground. A second later an explosion rocked the world about the ears of the Nazis as well as the Russians. Mickey thought his eardrums had split. His head sang with the concussion.

  Of the escaping tanker, the drivers were blown out of their cab; the tank rolled side over side down a small gully and finished up on its top. A half-dozen well-directed hand grenades spread the tankers’ seams and blasted the tank apart and left it a raging mass of flames in the depression.

  “That places those Mark III’s just where they were when they were born,” said the grinning Koslovitch, “empty and at the mercy of our dive bombers. We’ll leave it to them to finish them off.”

  The men left the trucks blazing where they blew apart and returned to their horses which they had hidden in a depression in the side of the mountain. Five minutes later their horses beat a muffled tattoo in the grass as they tore up the pathless heights to their cave.

  V

  When the horses were put up, young Koslovitch and Mickey returned to the main cave to find an oxcart heavily loaded with ammunition and other munitions expertly hidden under a false load of hay.

  Kopelnikov, the driver of the cart, called Feodor aside. Mickey joined them at the boy’s request.

  “You can speak in front of the doctor,” the boy said. “What is it?”

  “Three things that you should know,” began the driver. “One: A Captain Von Starheim with a party of two hundred Nazi dogs are scouring these mountains in search of you and your men. Two: They are also looking for an escaped American doctor who was their prisoner. Three: Tomorrow night—or rather, about two o’clock tomorrow in the morning, an ammunition train will pass your allotment on the Rostov-Baku Railway from the direction of Rostov. It will be headed for the German lines near Pyatigorsk.”

  “It will be headed for the lines, my friend,” replied the boy, “but I promise you it will never reach them.”

  The other guerrillas in the meantime were unloading the cart.

  “Is this the doctor the Nazis are looking for?” asked the oxcart driver.

  “I’m the doctor,” replied Mickey.

  “Be careful, my friend,” warned the man. “That man Von Starheim takes no prisoners. He’s dangerous—and what is more, he is elusive.”

  “Have you tried to capture him?” asked Mickey.

  “We have,” replied the driver, “but he seems to know these mountains as well as we do. And he always gets away. He spent several years in the Caucasus during his younger years on various missions for industrial firms during his college vacations, I am told,” explained the oxcart driver further. “That is why he is so successful in evading us.”

  “I know the man well,” said Mickey. “We were at the Breslau University together when I was a medical student there.”

  “He is said to have sworn to kill you with his own hands,” added the driver.

  “He will have to catch me first,” smiled Mickey.

  “In the meantime,” injected Feodor, “we’ll see what we can do to dispose of him.”

  “I’m joining you on your job of train blasting, am I not?” asked Mickey.

  “I insist on it,” smiled Feodor. “One never knows when our own men may need medical attention in the field.”

  “That satisfies me,” replied Mickey. “If you hadn’t insisted on it, I should have. If I’m going to doctor guerrillas, I may as well be one.”

  * * * *

  This was not the first time the oxcart driver had brought the Koslovitch gang information of Nazi troop and supply movements. A member of the Soviet counterespionage system, it was his business to know many things and to convey what he learned to the men most closely involved in their execution. That is, if any particular job of destruction is to be performed as a result of what he has learned. And usually some job of Nazi baiting and blasting followed.

  The woman who had brought Koslovitch and Mickey to the cave proved to be better than even Mickey had hoped. The men under her care were doing splendidly. Three of them had been put on their feet and were back in service. Her own husband was still confined. Their little son kept him entertained when she was attending the others, or assisting Mickey with his work of making repairs on the men.

  It was midnight the next night when twenty of the men headed by young Feodor Koslovitch and with him in the lead, one Mikhail Tchekov— Mickey, for short—a guerrilla doctor—rode out of the pass down the side of the mountain in the direction of the Rostov-Baku Railway to a point midway between Pyatigorsk and Batalpashinsk. The ride took them almost an hour and a half. They would not need much time to set their time bombs. About fifteen minutes would be adequate.

  A dense overcast obscured the light that might otherwise have come from the Caucasian moon. As the twenty rode on, those who did speak seemed affected by the stillness that hovered about them, above them and all around them.

  Even the hoof beats of their horses were muffled on the soft, grass-covered earth.

  There was no need for Feodor to ride back and warn his men carrying the bombs and dynamite they would lay waste the railway; with that they should be doubly careful with their horses. There was always the danger of their tripping on a stone concealed underfoot. But a single misstep might send the twenty of them where the Nazis would like to see them; and they had a job to do first. He warned them to keep a tight rein on the horses.

  They had been out an hour when Mickey asked young Feodor: “How much farther?”

  “Not much,” replied the young Russian. “About another half hour when we will come to a bend in the railway. This bend cuts through a natural pass in the hills.” He turned and smiled at the impatient American. “Be patient, my friend. Are all you Americans so eager to get at the enemy?”

  “We are,” Mickey assured him. “A hundred and thirty million of us. And we’re eager to get it over with and go home.”

  Feodor was careful to keep to the lower hills and passes so that his approach to the railway might not be seen. He avoided the peaks. One hour and a half later, the guerrillas dismounted and tethered their horses to a cluster of maples about a half-mile from the tracks. The young guerrilla leader sent one of his men on ahead to see if the road was clear. He returned and reported in the affirmative.

  * * * *

  Careful not to drop one of their bombs, they hurried on to the railway tracks, separated into small groups and began working feverishly among the ties. They did not—dared not, use lights. They worked as best they could. It was not more than a matter of ten minutes when they had buried their bombs after setting them to go off in twelve minutes.

  For a distance of three hundred feet, bombs were laid alternately from one side of the tracks to the other. No train could escape destruction on a distribution of solid death such as that.

  Feodor gave the signal for the men to beat a hasty retreat. They scrambled up the sides of the depression and together they ran rather than walked that half-mile that separated them from their horses and impending death.

  They jumped into their saddles and whipping up the animals rode off without Feodor’s checking their number to see if they were all there. This was unusual. But with the bombs to go off in so short a time, they decided to count off in the cave.

  They stampeded in the direction of the cave and were not gone out more than three or four miles when the sound of a locomotive reached them on the wind that drove across from the north.

  They slowed their horses to a walk; turned about in their saddles and watched. The distant, darkened train’s black silhouette crawled through the night. The long shaft of steam which flowed behind it and trailed the long line of flat cars with its exposed cargo was the only thing visible when the fire door was thrown open and the fireman re-coaled. That was on only for a moment and was blotted out when the man had reclosed his fire door.

  From where the little band stood now, they watched the slow train lumber into the pass and gradually disappear completely from view.

  “Quick,” called Feodor to the others. “Dismount. Make your mounts lie down and flatten out near them yourself. When that train blows up, there won’t be a thing left standing within a radius of miles.” He looked at the luminous dial on his watch. “Hurry!” he ordered. “There is only two minutes left.”

  As the men hurriedly dismounted and dropped to the ground with their mounts, Mickey counted nineteen men and nineteen horses. He turned and shouted over his horse’s flank to Feodor: “One of your men is missing.”

  “Who is it?” called the boy. “Who’s missing?” His voice sounded anxious.

  “I’d suggest the men here name themselves,” urged Mickey.

  The men repeated their names one by one. The missing man was Pavlovitch.

  Without a word, Mickey slapped his horse’s rump and the beast struggled to his feet. Mickey grabbed up his kitbag and jumping into his saddle shouted to Feodor: “I’m going back. He may be in trouble and need me.”