[Icelander]

Even with several PCs adeptly confusing the situation further, the destruction of the patrol of special SS troopers merely gave the Allied infiltrators a few minutes of grace. Their positions as accredited Waffen-SS or SD officers with immaculate forged papers were not sufficient to protect them once someone in direct contact with senior RSHA officials or even the Reichsführer-SS started asking them questions. References to secret plans or threats of higher authority were kind of pointless if the questioners turned out to be from Himmler's personal retinue.

So after a tense minute or two of discussion among the Allied commandos, the decision was made to concentrate all Allied operators who had already landed, those from teams Percival, Galahad and Merlin, in an ambush position near the edge of the Tiergarten, to the east of Hermann-Göring-Straße, and prepare to engage any other members of the odd SS unit that approached up the street toward the landing zone in front of the Brandenburger Tor. As it might be as long as ten minutes until the gliders landed, no one was really happy about shedding their disguises and potentially end up fighting hundreds of Germans, but as they saw it, they had no choice.

Better a confused situation become even more confused a few moments before the gliders landed and the parachutists of Gawain start dropping than have the supposed SD officials with Percival be exposed in front of the flak gunners as frauds. That would certainly ruin the carefully cultivated rumours which had spread among the flak gunners and result orders being given to engage the gliders and Ju-52 as they came in for the drop.

As it turned out, the SS unit sent a platoon-sized force to ascertain the fate of their lost patrol and the Allied commandos were forced to ambush them before they could start talking to the flak gunners or other defenders near the Brandenburger Tor. The ambush succeeded perfectly and the platoon ceased to exist as an organised force in some thirty seconds of intense automatic weapon fire, explosions and white phosporous.

Close engagement with the SS troopers, however, revealed disturbing things. For one thing, the men of the special unit appeared capable of rapid and organised advance, in small units, despite the almost complete darkness for much of the route they selected. For another, while they crossed an area lit up a burning self-propelled artillery piece, the PCs could swear that a number of the enemy were not only running in that strange half-crouch men adopt during artillery barrages, they were somehow misshapen or hunchbacked.

As the Allied commandos launched flares and WP grenades during the ambush, flickering images and firelit horrors seared themselves into uncertain memory. An impossibly big and blocky man still screaming obscenities in a voice burbling as he drowns in blood, trying to bring his machine gun to bear even after having taken three carefully aimed bursts of 9mm bullets in the thoracic triangle. A man running toward the ambushers, entirely on fire, with one hand holding his Sturmgewehr and the hand, ruined by the fire, still trying to insert the obviously ruined magazine into the rifle. Emerging from his torso, what appear to be a pair of misshappen vestigal arms, one of them desperately reaching for the magazine as the cartridges cook off.