He could see Ramsgate not far ahead. The airstrips the Stukas were supposed to hit lay a little west and south of the town. The German air fleet would swing in that direction, and…
And British fighters jumped them. Hurricanes with red-white-and-blue roundels mixed it up with the Messerschmitts. The Luftwaffe had already seen that Hurricanes were at least as good as anything the French flew. Were they as good as 109s? If they weren’t, they came unpleasantly close.
While some of them engaged the German fighters, others bored in on the Ju-87s. One dive-bomber after another fell out of the sky. Hoarse shouts of fear and alarm dinned in Hans-Ulrich’s earphones. So did the shrieks of the dying. “Mother!” someone wailed. “I’m burning, Mother!” Rudel switched frequencies in a hurry. It didn’t help much.
Sergeant Dieselhorst fired at something. A couple of bullets had hit Hans-Ulrich’s Stuka, but only a couple. He feared that was nothing but luck.
He also feared the Germans had made a mistake with this attack. On the Continent, bombing targets close to their own lines, they could generally count on an advantage in numbers. Damaged planes didn’t have far to go to get back to friendly territory. Here, the deep blue sea lay between the raiders and friends. Only it wasn’t blue. It was grayish green, and looked cold.
“Drop your bombs anywhere!” The squadron commander’s voice cut through the din on the radio. “Drop them and get away! This is too hot for us!”
Hans-Ulrich wouldn’t have argued with that. He pulled the bomb-release lever. Ramsgate lay below. If hundreds of kilos of explosives came down on civilians’ heads instead of on the airstrip for which they were intended—well, too bad. Wasn’t it the RAF’s fault for interfering with the planned operation?
A British fighter flew right in front of him: a biplane, a Gloster Gladiator. It looked outdated, but the Czech Avias had proved even planes like that could be dangerous. He fired at it. The Gladiator, far more agile than his Stuka, spun away when the pilot saw his tracers.
Even though Rudel mashed the throttle against the instrument panel, he knew he wasn’t home free—nowhere near. A Hurricane could still catch him from behind. For that matter, so could a Gladiator. The Ju-87 was built for muscle, not for speed. He’d never felt the lack so much before.
“Anything on our tail, Albert?” he called through the speaking tube.
“Not right now, thank God,” Dieselhorst answered, which also summed up the way Hans-Ulrich felt.
He looked around for more Stukas and for Messerschmitts. Of course they wouldn’t go back in the neat formation they’d used to approach England. They’d be all over the sky. All the same, he saw far fewer German planes than he should have. When fighters came after them in swarms, Ju-87s were alarmingly vulnerable.
The 109s had held their own against the Hurricanes. He was sure they’d more than held their own against the Gladiators. Even that came with a price, though. If a Hurricane fighter bailed out of a shot-up fighter, he landed among friends. He could fly again as soon as he got another plane. A Messerschmitt pilot who bailed out over England was out of the war for good even if he came down unhurt.
There was the Belgian coast ahead. The RAF seemed content to have broken things up on their own ground. They weren’t pursuing hard. Hans-Ulrich eased back on the throttle. He’d never dreamt he could be so proud of nothing more than making it home from a mission in one piece.
AIR-RAID SIRENS WOKE SARAH GOLDMAN out of a sound sleep. She needed a moment, or more than a moment, to realize what they were. Münster had tested them a few times before the war started, and a few more afterwards. But the luminous hands on the clock by her bed said it was two in the morning. Only a maniac would test the sirens at a time like this.
Sarah didn’t doubt that a lot of the Nazis running Münster were maniacs. But they weren’t the kind of maniacs who’d do something like this. Which meant…
Ice ran through her when she realized what it meant. This wasn’t a drill. This was a real air raid!
She threw off the covers, which made her realize how cold it was inside the house. Throwing a robe over her flannel nightgown, she ran for the stairs.
She bumped into somebody in the dark. The grunt made her realize it was her brother. “Where do we go, Saul? What do we do?”
“Find someplace low, I guess,” he answered. “What else can we do? We’re Jews. We can’t go to any of the regular shelters—they won’t let us in.”
Somehow, Sarah had forgotten that. She couldn’t imagine why. It wasn’t as if regulations didn’t spell it out. The Aryans in charge of things in the Reich made no bones about how they felt. If they saved their own kind and watched Jews get blown to ground round, they would go out and have a beer afterwards to celebrate.
Sarah didn’t think all the goyim in Münster felt that way. Life would have been impossible in that case. It wasn’t now—it was just difficult. As she hurried down the stairs, she realized she might have to change her mind about that. If a bomb hit them and they weren’t in a proper shelter, life would be impossible.
“Come on!” Saul said. “Under the dining-room table!”
“Will it hold up if the house comes down on it?” Sarah asked doubtfully.
“No, but it’s the best chance we’ve got,” he said. She decided he was right.
Their mother and father crowded under there with them. Samuel and Hanna Goldman took the outside places. When Saul tried to protest, his father spoke two harsh words: “Shut up!” The gentle classical scholar never talked like that. The front-line soldier of half a lifetime ago might have, though. And Saul did shut up, which would do for a miracle till a bigger one came along.
Airplane engines droned overhead. Antiaircraft guns began to thunder. “Will they shoot them down?” Sarah said.
“They’ll try,” her father answered: not a vote of confidence.
Through the roar of the guns, Sarah heard other noises—high, shrill, swelling whistles. The flat, harsh crump!s that followed made the guns seem whispers beside them. The windows rattled. The whole house shook. Is this what an earthquake feels like? she wondered. But how could she tell? She’d never been in an earthquake.
“We need to put masking-tape squares on our windows,” Samuel Goldman said, his voice eerily calm.
“Will that keep them from breaking?” Hanna asked.
“No. But it will help keep them from spraying glass all over the inside of the house if something comes down close to us—I hope,” he said.
After what might have been twenty minutes or twenty years, the bombs stopped falling. The airplane engines went away. The guns kept banging for several minutes more. Shrapnel pattered down on the roof like hail. At last, silence fell.
“Well, that wasn’t too bad,” Sarah said. She was so glad to be alive, so glad it was over, she straightened up too fast and banged her head on the bottom of the table. That was the only hurt any of the Goldmans took.
“It wasn’t too good, either,” her father said. “I don’t remember any raids that bad in the last war.”
“Neither do I,” her mother said.
A siren screamed—that was a fire engine, heading somewhere. The Goldmans made their slow, careful way to the front door and looked out. Münster was black as a tomb…except for two or three orange glows on the skyline, one of them only a few blocks away. By the sound, the fire engine was going there. It couldn’t go very fast, not unless it wanted to plow into something.
“This is terrible,” Sarah said. “The enemy never did anything like this before. Why would they start now?”
Saul nudged her. “The enemy is running Germany,” he whispered.
“So why did you try to join the Wehrmacht, then?” she whispered back. He turned away without answering. She knew what the answer was: her brother and her father still wanted to be Germans, but the Nazis wouldn’t let them.
If her father heard the whispers, he didn’t show it. “Let’s go back to bed,” he said. “We might as well try, anyhow. We can’t do anyth
ing else here.”
“Except thank God we came through in one piece,” her mother said.
Her father didn’t answer. He’d always been less religious than her mother—and even Sarah wondered whether God had His eyes on the Jews in Germany these days. She went upstairs doubting she’d be able to fall asleep again. But she did.
She came down to breakfast: black bread and ersatz coffee that tasted like and probably was burnt barley. Her father was reading the newspaper. AIR PIRATES SLAUGHTER INNOCENT CIVILIANS! the headline screamed.
“The British claim it’s retaliation for something our planes did over there,” her father said. “Dr. Goebbels says that’s a bunch of filthy lies, of course.”
“Of course,” Sarah echoed. In both what they said and how they said it, they sounded perfectly loyal. A message got passed even so. Just for a moment, Samuel Goldman’s eyes glinted behind his spectacles. Then he raised the newspaper, hiding his face.
Sarah felt herself smiling. She was still cold. She’d just discovered she was in danger of getting blasted off the face of the earth. In spite of everything, though, she was happy. She wondered why.
LUDWIG ROTHE SWORE AS HE guddled around, deep in the bowels of his Panzer II’s engine. “Hold that flashlight higher, Theo,” he said. “I can’t see what the hell I’m doing here.”
“Carburetor again, Sergeant?” Hossbach asked, moving the flashlight not quite enough.
“No, it’s the damn fuel pump. I’m sure of it. We’ve boiled the carb out so often, we could boil coffee in it.” If Rothe sounded disgusted, it was only because he was. “Damned engine still keeps missing. I’m going to fix that pump or steal a new one somewhere or go back to the Maybach works and bend a wrench on somebody’s head.”
“Sounds good to me, Sergeant,” Fritz Bittenfeld said. After pausing to light a cigarette, the driver went on, “Why the devil can’t they make an engine that does what it’s supposed to, for God’s sake?”
Part of the reason was overstrain. The engine only put out 135 horsepower. That wasn’t much when it was trying to haul nine tonnes around. Rothe was not inclined to feel charitable, especially not right after he cut his hand on a sharp metal edge in the engine compartment. “Why? I’ll tell you why. Because they’re back there and safe, that’s why,” he snarled. “They don’t have to worry about what happens when things go wrong. We do. Hold that goddamn light higher, Theo!”
“Sorry,” Theo said, and still didn’t move the light enough. He made a good radioman. Radio waves suited him—they were out there in the ether, and you couldn’t see them. When it came to things more closely connected to planet earth, he wasn’t so great.
Somehow, Ludwig got the fuel pump out anyway. Six or eight panzers had halted here, somewhere near the border between Belgium and France. Their crews worked on them, aided by a couple of mechanics. A few hundred meters away, two batteries of 105s sent death and destruction across kilometers toward the British and French troops battling to slow the Germans down.
As he tore the fuel pump apart, he wished his panzer could carry a gun like the ones artillerymen used. A gun like that and you’d have yourself a land dreadnought. The 20mm on the Panzer II was a doorknocker by comparison, and not much of a door-knocker at that. Even Panzer IIIs carried only a 37mm piece—and they were still rare birds.
Enemy panzers didn’t have much more. Some of the French machines mounted 47mm guns. But the French and the British didn’t seem to know how to make a fist. They used their panzers in penny packets. Individually, their machines were at least a match for anything the Reich made. But if Germany had swarms of panzers at the Schwerpunkt and the enemy didn’t, the German drive would go forward. And so matters had proved up till now. Would the Low Countries have fallen in less than a month otherwise?
Foot soldiers came forward through the little motor park. At first, Ludwig paid little attention. Then his eyes snapped from the legend on their cuff bands—Leibstandarte Adolf Hitler—to the SS runes on their collar tabs. Here was something out of the ordinary! He’d heard that some SS men were going to the front alongside Wehrmacht troops, but he’d never seen any before. And wasn’t the LAH…?
These fellows, all of them big and fair, carried submachine guns and looked either nervous or extremely alert. They were almost out of artillery range of the enemy, so Rothe thought they were being silly…till he saw the middle-aged man in their midst.
He kicked Theo in the ankle. “Achtung!” he hissed, and stiffened to attention himself.
“Are you out of your mind?” the radioman said—nobody paid attention to parade-ground formalities in the field.
“Achtung!” Ludwig repeated. He jerked his chin toward the gaggle of SS men and their charge.
Hossbach’s eyes followed that gesture. At attention or not, Rothe almost burst out laughing at the way they nearly bugged out of Theo’s head. Fritz was gaping, too. Well, hell—who wouldn’t?
Hitler came over to the Panzer II. Automatically, Ludwig saluted. The other crewmen echoed the gesture a beat later. The Führer returned the salutes. “Is everything all right here?” he asked. Up close, his voice was even more resonant, even larger than life, than it was over a microphone in a stadium or on the radio.
“Y-Yes, sir,” Ludwig managed. “Just routine repairs. We’ll be at ‘em again soon.” He felt dizzy, half drunk. Talking to Adolf Hitler! He would remember this day for the rest of his life, even if he lived to 112. (Having seen what happened to front-line fighters here and in Czechoslovakia, he knew how unlikely that was. He knew, but he didn’t dwell on it. He tried not to, anyhow.)
“Your fuel pump giving you trouble?” the Führer asked.
Theo’s eyes bugged out all over again. Ludwig Rothe’s did the same thing this time. “How the devil did you know that, sir?” he blurted.
One of the big SS men guarding Hitler growled like an angry Rottweiler. But the Führer only chuckled. “I get reports. I read them. I remember them,” he answered. “That’s the most common failing on the Panzer II. I have had a few things to say to the Maybach people about it. An improved model is now in production.”
“Good. Very good.” Ludwig wondered what had happened to the people responsible for the current piece of junk. Maybe he was better off not knowing.
“We will use it to go on to victory,” Hitler continued. A lock of hair flopped down over his forehead. He brushed it back with a gesture so automatic, he must have used it thousands of times. “We will!” he insisted. “Victory may be coming a little more slowly than some of the poison dwarfs back in Berlin believe, but it is no less sure on account of that.”
Several of the LAH bodyguards growled this time. Wehrmacht men called the Waffen-SS asphalt soldiers, but Ludwig wouldn’t have wanted to mess with any of these guys. “I’m sure of it, mein Führer,” he said, not because that was the thing to say but because he really believed it.
Maybe Hitler sensed as much. Or maybe, once the Führer got rolling, he was no easier to stop than a river. “Victory is sure!” he thundered, as he might have on the radio. “And the mad mongrels and traitors who tried to stop the Reich from gaining it have got what they deserved. Oh, yes! That they have!” His eyes blazed.
The only trouble was, Ludwig didn’t know what he was talking about. “Sir?” the sergeant said.
One of the Leibstandarte men murmured warningly The fellow wore what would have been a major’s shoulder straps if he were in the Wehrmacht, but the SS had its own weird set of ranks. Major or whatever the hell he was, the Führer ignored him. “Some of those pigdogs—fancy aristocrats and even a few military men, I’m sorry to say—thought they could run the country better than I am doing it. Well, the ones who are left alive are seeing how they like the arrangements at Dachau.”
“Mein Führer—” the SS officer said urgently.
“Ja, Jens, ja.” Hitler sounded—indulgent? He turned back to the panzer crew. “Do not gossip about this, bitte. We have not said anything in the papers or on the radio. We
do not want the enemy to know there is even so much as a mustard seed’s worth of dissension in the Reich. You are good fellows—I can see that. I’m sure you won’t blab.”
“Of course not, mein Führer,” Ludwig said quickly. Fritz and Theo also stammered out reassurances. Rothe had never imagined he would end up knowing a state secret. By the way that officer was looking at him, the Waffen-SS man thought he would be better off dead.
“That’s what I thought,” Hitler said. He caught the officer’s eye again. “Don’t give them any trouble—you hear me? They said they’d keep quiet, and I expect they meant it. Unless you’re sure—and I mean sure—they didn’t, leave them alone.”
“Jawohl, mein Führer,” the LAH man said. The look he gave Rothe and the other panzer men shouted that he still wanted to dispose of them. But he didn’t look as if he had the nerve to go against Hitler’s direct order. Who in his right mind would?
“All right.” Hitler nodded to Ludwig, then to his driver and radioman. “I hope you stay safe, my friends. I know it’s warm work, but it needs doing. Fight hard!” He nodded again, then stumped away, his retinue all around him.
“Der Herr Gott im Himmel!” Fritz whispered.
“Somebody pinch me. I think I’m dreaming,” Theo said, also in a low voice. That amounted to about the same thing.
“He’s…something.” Ludwig heard the awe in his own voice. He tried to imagine why anyone would move against the Führer. True, the war wasn’t won yet, but Germany was still moving forward, and a lot faster than she had the last time around. What was wrong with that?
Plainly, the traitors had paid for their folly. Dachau…Rothe’s shiver had nothing to do with the weather. If half what he’d heard was true, the plotters who’d got killed outright might have been the lucky ones.
Luc Harcourt was alive. That was all he knew, all he cared about. He’d seen more war than he ever wanted to meet. He’d smelled blood and pus and death and his own shit in his pants. Nobody’d ever ragged him about that. He knew damn well he wasn’t the only one.
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