“That is good news,” Reiser said. “Prepare to move out.”
The Fallschirmjäger exchanged grins. They’d fought to their objective and obtained it.
Now they just had to fight their way out.
CHAPTER EIGHTEEN
BIVOUAC
They made it as far as the top level before a messenger from Hauptmann Werner told them the regiment was bivouacking here for the night.
“Billet where you stand,” Reiser said.
Muller sat on the floor exhausted. Steiner moved along on his hands and knees, sweeping as much of the loose papers as he could into a pile.
“What are you doing, Otto?”
The machine-gunner grinned. “Making a bed.”
The squad exchanged glances then dove to the ground to sweep up the paper. Tonight, these pages documenting the Reich’s secret weapons projects would make great bedding and future kindling. The British sergeant watched them with amusement before joining in to fashion himself a pillow.
“Herr Leutnant, should we dispose of the bodies?” Wolff asked Reiser.
“We achieved our objective,” the lieutenant said. “Heroes do not clean up. Let the other platoons deal with the mess.”
Muller picked up a random sheet from the dusty floor. The top of the page was stamped with a swastika and the words, TOP SECRET. He read:
Once the body’s surface is penetrated, the Overman bacterium, like any foreign bacterium, scavenges for free iron required to multiply, invading tissues and encountering complex defense mechanisms that respond with inflammation.
The Overman bacterium then distinguishes itself, in several ways. First, it is encased in novel proteins that protect it from opsonization and phagocytosis—
He crumpled it up with disgust. The corruption of the Wehrmacht, the fall of Berlin, the threat of creeping extinction for Germany, none of it just happened. It was the result of dedicated effort by minds far brighter than his. A grand scientific endeavor documented in fifty-mark words typewritten on thousands of sheets of paper.
Given time and resources, the scientists might have succeeded. They might have created the Overman, a super soldier of limitless strength and endurance. They might have conquered the world.
But Germany had been losing the war. Hitler was about to gamble everything on Autumn Mist. The scientists didn’t have time. They cut corners, jury-rigged what they needed, experimented on prisoners in Poland.
And produced this malevolent bug that took over its host and reprogrammed it to kill, eat, and destroy.
The squad jumped to its feet. Oberst Heilman had entered the center, trailed by his staff. The British sergeant remained on the floor, scooping up sheets and reading them before either discarding or shoving them into his jacket.
Hauptmann Werner snapped his fingers. Another squad of Fallschirmjäger set a series of steel vacuum flasks on the floor.
“It is time to meet the enemy,” Heilman said.
What was left of the Wehrmacht and Allied armies wasn’t at war with the dead, not really. They were at war with a bacterium, one of the tiniest forms of life on the planet. A mindless aberration of life carefully engineered to organize in a host and control its behavior.
Werner unscrewed the cap on one of the thermoses. Dry ice fogged into the air. He reached inside, gingerly extracted a sealed test tube, and handed it over.
Heilman held it up to inspect in the waning daylight. The mottled solution glowed a faint green that made the officers look like ghouls themselves.
Muller winced in disgust. Burn it, he thought. Kill it.
The bug was a work of profound, diabolical genius. It was also evil.
“Your company is to be commended for securing it,” the colonel said.
Werner raised his chin in pride. “Danke, Herr Oberst.”
“At dawn, we will proceed to the airport on schedule. You will deliver these samples to the plane. You will guard them with your life. Ist das klar, Herr Werner?” Is that clear?
“Klar, Herr Oberst.”
“All of us are expendable from this moment on. These materials are not. They must be returned to England. The future of the German nation depends on it.”
“Jawohl! Leutnant Reiser, come with me.”
The officers left while the rest of Eagle Company filed into the facility to bivouac on the lower levels.
Muller glared up at a portrait of a stalwart Hitler gazing down at him wearing a glowing white lab coat, surrounded by symbols of technologies the Nazis claimed to have invented, highways and rockets and medicines. Hitler portrayed as greatest scientist who ever lived, just as the war propaganda always proclaimed him as the Greatest Field Commander of All Time.
“Expendable,” Muller snarled. The whole country was expendable. The whole world, all to feed one man’s infectious vanity.
Schulte lay on his paper nest and rested his head on his helmet. “Ja, ja. Like we weren’t expendable before?”
The paratroopers shared grim smiles at the gallows humor.
“You know who’s expendable—the rest of the regiment that has to camp outside in the woods,” Beck said. “Glad I’m in here. Safe and warm.”
Steiner produced his steel Esbit stove, which looked like an animal trap and was about the size of a pack of cigarettes. “Ivan put us behind schedule. The whole regiment should be sleeping in apartments on the other side of Tiergarten.”
He unfolded the stove, inserted a little chemical brick into the base, and struck a match. The tablet ignited with a barely visible blue flame. The machine-gunner keyed open a few cans filled with K rations and dumped them into a mess tin, which he set on the burner to heat up for the squad’s supper.
Muller’s stomach roared at the rich aroma of meat. Another canned dinner, but he didn’t care. He was starving.
“Better to camp here anyway,” Wolff grunted.
“How do you figure, Herr Oberfeldwebel?” Muller asked him.
“Fewer ghouls in the park, and less chance of a big swarm walking up to us. If one does show up, the men outside won’t be trapped in a building with only one exit.”
Muller looked around at the research facility’s concrete walls. Suddenly, being outside, with the ability to retreat in almost any direction, looked better to him.
Leutnant Reiser returned wearing a rare happy smile. “Achtung, Fallschirmjäger. Hauptmann Werner commended our platoon on securing the facility without loss.”
Muller smiled too. The rest of the squad stared back at the lieutenant with taciturn stares. He wiped the smile from his face to imitate their cool.
The British sergeant turned away with a wince. In his view, securing the facility had come at an enormous loss.
The lieutenant set three steel canisters on the floor. “The hauptmann ordered us to safeguard the samples. Each squad will receive three.” His piercing blue eyes roamed Muller’s squad. “Oberfeldwebel, you will carry one. Your machine-gunner another. And...” His eyes lighted on Muller. “Ah, Jäger Muller.”
Wolff stood and scooped up the vacuum-sealed canisters. He gave one to Steiner then set Muller’s in front of him. “Guard it with your life, jäger.”
“Jawohl, Herr Oberfeldwebel,” said Muller.
He’d wanted to prove himself to Reiser and apparently had. As a result, the officer now more likely to assign him difficult tasks.
Scheisse, he thought.
Reiser surveyed the tired squad still wearing his smile. “Eat well, heroes. At dawn, we will complete our mission.” With that, the lieutenant left again, never tiring nor seeming to need food himself.
Muller looked at the canister and shuddered with loathing, his appetite gone.
CHAPTER NINETEEN
LIONS AND DEVILS
A splash of gunfire outside. The Fallschirmjäger bristled, cocking their ears.
The firing stopped. The men relaxed.
“Ring ding, jägers,” Steiner said. “Supper is served.”
The men held out mess tins to receive their
share of the beef stew. They filled their canteen cups and took out their metal silverware to eat.
The machine-gunner blinked when Wilkins held out his tin. “I forgot you were here. Every time I see you, I want to grab my weapon. Old habits.”
“I’ll try to be less British, mate,” Wilkins said drily.
Steiner snorted. From his red beret to his stiff upper lip, Wilkins couldn’t be less British no matter how hard he tried. “You’re fine the way you are. I like having you on my side. I’d rather fight the draugr than you. The average Tommy is tough as hell.”
“Lions led by mules,” Beck laughed.
“And whatever do you mean by that?” the British sergeant wondered.
“It’s how we view the British Army,” Wolff chimed in. “Your average soldier is brave. But your tactics are outdated and clumsy, and your officers aren’t very creative. They don’t adapt to circumstance.”
“It’s how an army works, Master Sergeant. An officer must follow through on his orders until he no longer has practical means of doing so.”
“In our military, independent initiative at the lower ranks is valued as much as obedience. We’re much more flexible in the field as a result.”
Steiner let out another snort. “Ironic, wouldn’t you agree?”
Wilkins nodded, getting it. Great Britain was a democracy, but its military operated with rigid top-down decision-making. In the Reich, you could barely take a dump without written approval by the Nazis, but the Wehrmacht permitted broad latitude in independent thinking from the ground up.
Wolff said, “You’re far better than the Americans, though.”
Wilkins shrugged. “They seem all right.”
Steiner said, “They just throw everything they have at you.”
Wolff nodded. “They’re aggressive, but their tactics are simple and outdated. They send in their tanks, you knock out a few, the tanks run, the infantry ends up stranded, and then they call in a big artillery strike.”
“Their artillery is very good.” Steiner shuddered. “And their planes.”
“We’d rather fight them than the English any day,” the oberfeldwebel said. “Especially you Red Devils. We’ve heard stories about the Battle of Arnhem.”
Wilkins looked down at his stew. “That was a rough party.”
He’d been with the 4th Para Brigade then. Out of 10,000 men dropped on Arnhem, only around 2,000 made it out. After that disaster, the brigade had disbanded, with most of the men going to the 1st Brigade. Wilkins ended up freelance, performing special missions for Colonel Adams.
Another splash of gunfire outside. This time, the men ignored it.
“A waste of good infantry,” Wolff said. “Your Market Garden operation was doomed from the start.” Wolff spooned stew into his mouth and chewed. “No, I’m with Steiner. I’d rather fight draugr than you Red Devils or the American airborne.”
“We fought some of you Fallschirm blokes at Arnhem. We called you the Green Devils.”
“Now we’re all on the same side,” Schulte said from his nest. “How inspiring.”
“Ja, ja,” Steiner said, imitating Leutnant Reiser. “Everybody gets a pony.”
The men chuckled at that.
“Steiner does all the wet work with his MG,” Weber said. “The rest of us just carry his ammo around our necks.”
This observation raised another round of laughter along with groans. Everybody carried ammo belts for the MG.
Steiner grinned. “An army of mules led by lions.”
The men hooted and threw crumpled-up Nazi documents at him.
Muller said, “What will you do after the war, Herr Feldwebel?”
Wilkins shrugged. “This gopping war has gone on so bloody long, it’s hard to imagine anything else. I try not to think about surviving it. The only way to be effective in combat and survive—”
“Is to believe you won’t,” several Fallschirmjäger finished together.
“There’s a girl back home, though.”
The paratroopers perked up and went quiet.
“Go on,” Steiner leered, all ears.
“Her name’s Jocelyn. The only thing I allow myself to see in my future is being with her. It gave me something to fight for besides king and country.” The sergeant set his meal down and lit a cigarette. “What about you blokes?”
“Rebuild Germany,” Weber said.
“That goes without saying,” Steiner said. “From the looks of it, we’ll be rebuilding the rest of our lives. Me, I’d like to get a girlfriend and get busy repopulating it.”
“I’d like be an artist,” Muller said. “Travel a Europe at peace.”
“Get my old job back at the post office,” said Schneider.
Steiner looked at Wolff. “What about you, Herr Oberfeldwebel?”
“I’d like to go back to my farm,” the sergeant said. “And never shoot a gun again.”
“You have a girl back home?”
“I did, but I haven’t written her. I hope she moved on.”
“I tried to end it with Jocelyn before my first big operation,” Wilkins said. “I’d rather break her heart that way than have her see me come home in a coffin. I just couldn’t.”
“I understand,” Wolff said. “It was not an easy choice for me.”
The British sergeant pinched off ember at the tip of his cigarette so he could save it for later. “I do hope this draugr menace is the end of war. Once we beat these things, I want peace between our countries. More than that, friendship. I don’t want my sons to have to fight yours in twenty years.”
The men nodded. None of them wished this on their children.
“Ja, we’re all the same under our uniforms,” Schulte said. “How touching.”
Steiner laughed. “Shut up, Erich—”
“Alarm geben!” somebody screamed in the distance. “Alarm, alarm!”
Rifles popped. An MG42 opened up with a ripping snarl Steiner knew well. Machine pistols and submachine-guns joined in, turning the crashes of fire into a steady roar. Figures flickered past the doorway shouting. Tracers and muzzle flashes burst in the darkness. Mortars thumped.
The squad jumped to its feet and collected weapons. The mortar rounds crashed louder than they expected. The mortar teams were firing almost on top of the regiment’s position.
Leutnant Reiser entered the facility as they were coming out. “Seal the door!”
The paratroopers looked at each other. Otherwise, nobody moved.
“The samples must be protected,” Reiser snapped.
Wolff frowned. “Herr Leutnant, the regiment—”
“Will take care of itself. Our mission is to protect the samples.”
Men screamed in agony and terror out in the dark amid the steady flashes of gunfire. The paratroopers looked each other again with wide eyes.
The lieutenant unholstered his Luger. “Schnell!” He kicked Steiner in the leg, making him jump. “Move, pig-dog!”
The squad rushed to the steel door and heaved it shut, shutting out the sounds of combat and slaughter.
CHAPTER TWENTY
REICHSTAG
Sergeant Wilkins sat on the floor on his doss bag while the battle raged all night and Lieutenant Reiser paced in front of the door. The German officer still had his Luger out and tapped it against his thigh like a nervous tic.
The door was staying closed.
A soldier pounded on the entrance with his rifle butt, shouting something, the words tinny and distant as if coming from deep underwater. Wilkins didn’t know what the man was shouting, but he felt certain it was along the lines of, Let me in, mates, before I’m torn to shreds by chomping jaws.
Reiser ignored the pounding. His platoon tried, flinching at each blow.
As for Wilkins, he imagined finding a nice, quiet space to vomit. The horrific sounds left too much to the imagination. The gunfire, the cries for help or ammo, the dead chanting what sounded like, sie, sie, sie, sie, the German word for you.
He just wanted it t
o stop, especially the screaming. These were men who only a few weeks ago could have all dropped dead without him losing so much as a single tear, men he would have happily shot himself. But the death the Germans faced outside was the kind you didn’t wish on your worst enemy.
The pounding stopped. The muffled rattle of gunfire went on.
He kept his eye on the lieutenant, who paused his pacing long enough to down another tablet. Benzedrine to keep himself awake.
Pep pills. Wakey-wakey pills.
The British War Office issued them as well. The Red Devils ate them like candy during the endless days of fighting at Arnhem, though nobody liked them much. They had a way of making you quite thirsty, and when the drug wore off, you had a nasty tendency to nod off, even during combat.
Then there were the side effects among a few who popped the stuff, which included panic, anger, and homicidal urges.
Wilkins suspected Reiser was the high-strung sort even without adding heavy stimulants to the mix. The sergeant’s stereotype of the average German was a neurotic. He knew for sure the lieutenant had it in for him and that they’d knock heads at some point, German severity clashing with British mettle.
He’d best watch his step if he wanted to return to base, and he needed to do just that. He’d found very interesting Overman project documents, which he’d stuffed in his jacket. They explained the characteristics of the bacterium. Plenty of scientific mumbo jumbo he didn’t understand but that seemed important.
The gunfire melted away, becoming even more distant.
“The regiment is retreating,” Corporal Steiner whispered.
He had no need to whisper. The ghouls couldn’t hear them, and the only trooper sleeping was the insufferable sniper named Schulte. Still, it somehow seemed the right thing to do.
“There must be a million of those things out there,” said Private Muller.
“More bullets than our comrades have,” the machine-gunner agreed.
“Are we trapped here then?”
“Not necessarily,” Wilkins grunted.
Colonel Adams had shared intel with him that he’d gained from Wolfensohn. There was another way out of here.
The Front (Book 3): Berlin or Bust Page 10