Kyiv (Spoils of War) by Graham Hurley

Author:Graham Hurley [Hurley, Graham]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781838938352
Publisher: Head of Zeus
Published: 2021-07-07T22:00:00+00:00

17

THURSDAY 25 SEPTEMBER 1941

Ilya Glivenko had saved the last of his cigars for the first of this morning’s explosions. A small circle of sappers were enjoying the first rays of the rising sun through the canopy of trees. They’d now been on Trukhaniv Island for a full week, stretching their meagre rations to the very limit, saving their last bottle of vodka to toast the first full day of operations. That had come to an end last night with the spectacular demolition of Kyiv’s tallest building, the fifteen-storey Ginzburg Skyscraper.

While daylight lasted, Glivenko and fellow sappers in other platoons had outwitted the Germans. They relied on constant reports from Soviet agents still in place in the city. While rescue and fire crews rushed to the scene of the first explosion, Glivenko would order radio transmissions to trigger a second, and then a third, trying to lure the city’s new masters into blast traps as they tried to fight fire after fire.

This lethal game of chess, with German killed and wounded now in three figures, had delighted Glivenko’s men. In the frenzied chaos before the evacuation, they’d worked day and night, laying huge quantities of high explosives in location after location, and the lazy days that followed on the safety of the thickly wooded island had been more than welcome. Glivenko had always insisted on waiting for the occupation to bed itself in. The Germans needed to make themselves at home, he said. They needed to feel secure, organised, even relaxed. Only when they’d lowered their guard would the moment come to hammer them.

And so it had proved. Yesterday’s operation had opened with the attack on the Khreshchatyk, but a moment of pure delight had arrived with a neighbouring platoon’s designs on a viewing platform in the grounds of the Pechersk Monastery, built on a bluff above the river. The platform was in clear view from Mikhail Tatarsky’s men, hidden on the island. Through binoculars, they’d watched groups of German soldiers gathering to gaze down at the long bend of the Dnieper. They arrived every half-hour or so, dozens of them, and Tatarsky had managed to bag at least twenty, blowing them to pieces as they enjoyed the autumn sunshine and a last cigarette. Then had come a second attack, this time on the Kyiv’s old Arsenal building, also under observation, and low growls of applause had greeted the news from the agents across the water that the death toll included the Artillery Commander of the 29th Wehrmacht Corps.

Glivenko knew that trophy scalps like these would really hurt the Germans, but best of all, in his view, had been the Ginzburg Skyscraper. By eleven in the evening, the exhausted Germans were beginning to assume that the worst was over, precisely why Glivenko had kept the biggest bang until last. A nod in the darkness to Vassily, crouched over the transmitter, and the flash of the huge explosion through the trees had briefly illuminated the entire city centre. Then, as the darkness

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