Chapter 3a - Lesnoy Bivak
Once it had been determined that a smaller group might be better able to make contact with the native population, the rest of the troops piled back into the truck, going back uphill, back into the Forstlager Falkenhorst. Forstlager. It would need to be renamed Lesnoy bivak.
Sokolinoye Gnezdo.
Maybe Medvezhya Peshchera - bear cave - would be a better name for a Russian mountain camp. The capitalists weren't enough to claim a new name for the place anyway.
This were idle and useless thoughts, of course. Konnikov dwelt on them to push away the feeling of doom. HE had agreed to the troops being split in Berlin. And now, again, they split up.
His command got smaller and smaller.
They passed the spot where the Nazi's head had been stuck on a pike, the pike itself rammed so hard into the ground that it had been impossible to move. But now the wooden stake had sagged sideways and when they stopped to remove it, it gave way easily enough.
Konnikov could hear the men and women grumble, but nobody spoke a word.
Not much later, and he remembered the column of smoke he had seen earlier, when they had been down at the crossroads looking back up to the mountain.
Someone had burned down the camp!
His heart sank. But the damage was not as bad as expected. One of the barracks was half-gone. The larger buildings, most likely the ones housing the officers, was mostly burnt down. But whoever did this had not used gasoline or anything like it and the fire had burned out after eating through the dry wood, the heavy rains of previous days having soaked the rest of the logs good enough to save them from the fire.
Still, damage needed to be assessed and repaired.