A big, beefy cop came out of his tavern. He was in his fifties, with a big mustache he’d probably grown before the last war and never bothered to shave off. At the moment, he was using a prehensile lower lip to suck beer foam out of it. He saw Peggy watching him do it. To cover his embarrassment, he did just what she’d known he would: he held out his hand and said, “Papieren, bitte!”
Out came her American passport. “Here,” she said. “I’m a neutral, as you see.”
He scowled at the passport, and at her. “In the struggle against Bolshevism and world Jewry, there can be no neutrals,” he declared. Some Germans really did talk that way, the same as some Communists really did parrot the Moscow line. Then he said, “Come to the station with me, so my captain can decide what to do with you.”
“To the station?” Peggy yelped. “You’ve got no right!”
“I am an officer of police,” the cop said importantly. “Of course I have the right.” In Hitler’s Germany, he damn well did, too. He touched the billy club on his belt. “Do you defy my authority?” I’ll bust your head open if you do.
“No,” she said. “But let me see your papers, please. I will complain to my embassy, and I want to know who you are.”
“Ha! Much good it will do you!” He showed her his ID willingly enough. His name was Lorenz Müller. Peggy wrote it down. She didn’t think the embassy would be able to do anything, either, but it was the only card she had, so she played it with as much panache as she could.
The station was only a couple of blocks away. Except for his uniform and haircut, the desk sergeant looked like a desk sergeant back in the States: fat and bored but wary, in other words. Müller spewed out a stream of German, too fast for Peggy to follow it. The sergeant listened, then turned to her. “What happened?” he asked.
“I said I was a neutral, and I am—I’m an American. And he got angry at me and brought me here,” Peggy answered.
“An American? Let me see your passport, please.” When the desk sergeant said please, he sounded as if he meant it. Peggy handed him the passport. After studying it, he gave it back. “Yes, it is in order. Danke schön. You may go.”
“What?” Lorenz Müller spluttered furiously—for about a second and a half. Then, without raising his voice, the desk sergeant gave him the most thorough reaming out Peggy had ever heard. She understood maybe one word in three, but that was plenty. Müller would’ve needed to get plopped into a specimen jar as soon as he was born to be as congenitally idiotic as the sergeant claimed, and he would have had to be 165 years old to have acquired all the vices the sergeant imputed to him. By the time the man got done, nothing was left of Müller but a demoralized puddle of goo on the floor. So it seemed to Peggy, anyhow.
“I am sorry you ran into this…individual,” the desk sergeant told her. She’d never dreamt the word could sound so filthy. “By all means visit your embassy. A formal complaint will go into his record, which is good.”
By then, she didn’t want to. She found herself pitying Müller, which she wouldn’t have dreamt possible a few minutes earlier. As she walked out of the station, the sergeant tore into the cop again—something about getting the Reich in bad with an important neutral power. Let’s hear it for the Red, White, and Blue, Peggy thought. Yeah! Let’s!
In the end, she did go by the embassy. The underlings quickly shunted her up to Constantine Jenkins, whose job probably included dealing with obstreperous tourists. He heard her out and then said, “Sounds like the sergeant did worse to this fellow than we could manage in a month of Sundays.”
“Ain’t it the truth!” she said. “All the same, I do want you to make a formal complaint.”
“Just remember that the official head of the Prussian police is Hermann Göring,” Jenkins said. “He won’t listen. If he does listen, he won’t care.”
“I understand all that,” Peggy said. “I still want to get it on the record.”
“Okay. I’ll do it,” Jenkins promised. “Maybe it’ll keep some other American from getting dragged to a police station because he runs into a cop in a lousy mood.”
“That’d be good,” Peggy said. “See? I’m a public benefactor.” She’d been a lot of things in her time, but that was a new one.
Undersecretary Jenkins gave her a look that would have been fishy if not for the half-hidden amusement she spotted. “What you are is a troublemaker,” he said accurately. “And you enjoy making trouble for the Third Reich, too.”
“Who, me?” Peggy couldn’t possibly have been as innocent as she sounded. And, as a matter of fact, she wasn’t.
HANS-ULRICH RUDEL GULPED FROM a big mug of steaming black coffee. Plenty of pilots in the squadron were keeping themselves going with benzedrine. Hans-Ulrich thought pills were even more unnatural than alcohol. He didn’t want to use them. If he had to, though, if it meant victory for the Reich…
And any one mission might. He knew that. They were so close, so close. The radio kept going on about the Battle of France, the decisive battle. If they could break through the enemy’s lines, he’d never be able to form new ones. Maybe nobody in the whole battle could see that as well as the flyers who went after the French strongpoints.
He wondered whether the Allied fighter pilots had that same sense of seeing the whole chessboard at once when they looked down from five or six thousand meters. Or were they just trying to spot the Stukas before the German dive-bombers roared down and blasted another bridge or train or battery of 75s to hell and gone?
He shrugged. He had more immediate things to worry about. The German attack had accomplished a lot. It had knocked the Low Countries out of the war. It had pushed French and English ground forces back from the middle of Belgium to the outskirts of Paris. The enemy was on the ropes.
But he wasn’t out, worse luck. And, while German supply lines had got longer and thinner, those of the Allies had contracted. The irony facing the Germans was that success made further success harder. Nobody on the other side could be in much doubt about what the Wehrmacht and the Luftwaffe had in mind any more, either. That made planning easier for the forces in khaki.
Which didn’t mean the forces in Feldgrau couldn’t still win. Hans-Ulrich was flying off an airstrip in northern France. Not long before, it had been a French strip. A couple of smashed French fighters still lay alongside the runway. German technicians had cannibalized them for usable parts—they were just scrap metal now.
Off in the distance, artillery rumbled. Rudel hoped it came from his own side, giving the Allies hell. Otherwise, French and English guns would be pounding the Landsers. He thanked God he was no foot soldier. He slept soft, and in a real bed—a cot, anyway. He ate well. Most of the time, he was in no danger. The enemy could still kill him. That came with any kind of military life. But he wouldn’t be hungry and filthy and lousy when it happened, if it happened. He wasn’t scared all the time, either.
Of course, when he was, he was about as scared as any human being could be. That also held true for the infantry, though. It was true for the ground pounders a lot more often than it was for him, too.
Sergeant Dieselhorst came by, a cigarette dangling from the corner of his mouth. He sketched a salute and asked, “Have they told you what we’re doing next?”
“Not yet.” Hans-Ulrich pointed toward Major Bleyle’s tent. “As soon as the boss lets me know, I’ll tell you.”
“If they haven’t hauled him off in the middle of the night,” Dieselhorst remarked.
Hans-Ulrich looked around in all directions. Nobody stood close to them, and nobody seemed to be paying any attention to what they were saying. Even so, he wagged a finger at the rear gunner. “If you aren’t careful, they’ll haul you off in the middle of the night,” he warned.
“Yeah, I know.” Dieselhorst made a sour face. “That’s not what I signed up for, dammit.”
“Neither did I,” Rudel said. “Who would have dreamt so many traitors to the Vaterland were still running around loose?”
“Yeah. Who?” D
ieselhorst said tonelessly. The cigarette twitched as he eyed Hans-Ulrich. At last, almost against his better judgment, he went on, “Who knows how many of them really are traitors, too?”
“What else would they be, if the government arrested them?” Hans-Ulrich exclaimed.
Sergeant Dieselhorst’s cigarette jerked again. “That’s right. You’re the milk drinker.” He might have been reminding himself. “Sometimes people get arrested because they tell friends the truth. Sometimes they get arrested because somebody with pull doesn’t like them. And sometimes, by God, they get arrested for no reason at all.”
“Dirty traitors tried to overthrow the Führer and stab us in the back again!” Rudel said hotly. “Where would we be if they’d got away with it?”
“Better off?” Albert Dieselhorst suggested. Then he held up his hand. “And if you don’t care for that, go tell one of the pigdogs in a black shirt about it. You’ll have a new gunner faster than you can fart.”
“I don’t want a new gunner. I want—”
Before Hans-Ulrich could say what he wanted, Dieselhorst did it for him: “You want a good little boy who never makes trouble and never looks past the end of his nose unless he’s aiming at the enemy. You want somebody just like you. I wish I were, Lieutenant—you can bet your ass it’d make my life simpler. But I’ve got pals—better Germans than I’ll ever be—in concentration camps or dead because those SS bastards hauled ‘em out of bed in the middle of the night. This isn’t Russia, dammit. This is a civilized country, or it’s supposed to be.”
Had a flyer Rudel didn’t know well said anything like that, he would have reported the man to the SS without the least hesitation. But he was alive not least because Sergeant Dieselhorst was good at what he did. By any reasonable definition, Dieselhorst was a good German, a patriotic German. If he was talking this way…
“You’re upset. You’re not yourself,” Hans-Ulrich said.
Dieselhorst stamped out the cigarette. “I’m not crazy, if that’s what you’re trying to say. This whole war is a lot more fucked up than you’ve figured out yet. And some of the people who’re running it—”
“Don’t say any more. I don’t want to listen to it,” Rudel said. “All I have to do is fly. The same with you, too.”
“Christ, Lieutenant, flying is the easy part—any jerk with an airplane can do that,” Dieselhorst said. “Trying to steer clear of the shit that pours down from on high, that’s where the going gets tough.”
“Well, let’s see what we have to do, that’s all.” Hans-Ulrich was grateful for the chance to turn away. As far as Sergeant Dieselhorst was concerned, he was part of the shit that poured down from on high. They’d gone through much too much together for Hans-Ulrich to feel easy about turning in the sergeant now. He’d keep his mouth shut—for the moment, anyway.
“Gisors,” Major Bleyle said a few minutes later. “They’re pushing supplies through there to the front near Beauvais.” He whacked a map with a pointer. “Gisors is about seventy kilometers northwest of Paris. You’ll recognize it by the castle and the cathedral. Here are some photos.” He passed around the reconnaissance shots. “Railroad and highway. Pick your targets when we get there. We’ll try to knock out both routes. Questions?” He waited. Nobody raised a hand. “All right, then. Good luck, everybody.”
Rudel and Dieselhorst stuck to business as the pilot taxied the Stuka out of the revetment and got it into the air. Hans-Ulrich felt bruised by their earlier encounter. He wondered if Dieselhorst did, too. One more thing he couldn’t ask…
Messerschmitt 109s accompanied the Ju-87s as they flew west. Hans-Ulrich hadn’t seen a 110 for quite a while. The two-engined fighters hadn’t lived up to expectations over the North Sea and England. Maybe they’d gone back to the shop for retooling. Or maybe the idea wasn’t as good as the high foreheads in the design bureau thought it would be.
Antiaircraft fire came up as soon as they crossed the front. It was heavy and alarmingly accurate. The Allies had more and more guns shooting at the Luftwaffe. They knew what was at stake here as well as the Germans did. French and British fighters attacked, too. The 109s darted away to take them on. Then more fighters jumped the dive-bombers.
They were French machines, not too fast and not too heavily armed. The 109s outclassed them. Stukas, unfortunately, didn’t. Hans-Ulrich threw his all over the sky, trying to dodge the enemy fighters. It was like trying to make a rhinoceros dance. Even when you did it, the result was none too graceful. Sergeant Dieselhorst’s machine gun chattered again and again.
“How you doing back there?” Rudel asked him.
“They haven’t shot me yet. That’s something, anyway,” the rear gunner answered. “How are we doing?”
It was a fair question—several bullets had hit the Stuka. “Everything shows green,” Hans-Ulrich said. A Ju-87 could take a lot of punishment. The war had shown that the dive-bomber needed to. Rudel’s head might have been on a swivel. “Now which way is Gisors?” He’d done so much frantic jinking, he didn’t know north from sauerkraut.
He spotted what he thought was the cathedral steeple a moment before Major Bleyle’s voice dinned in his earphones: “Abort! Break off! We’re losing too many planes!”
“Devil take me if I will,” Hans-Ulrich muttered to himself. To Sergeant Dieselhorst, he added, “I have the target. I’m going into my dive.”
“What about Bleyle’s orders?”
“What about ‘em?” Rudel shoved the control column forward. The Stuka’s nose went down. Acceleration slammed him back against the armored seat. Damned if that wasn’t a truck column on the road. Even if this wasn’t Gisors after all—plenty of little French towns had cathedrals—he’d do some damage. He yanked at the bomb-release lever, then pulled up for all he was worth.
In the rear seat, Sergeant Dieselhorst whooped. “What a fireworks show! They must have been hauling ammo!”
“Gut. Sehr gut,” Hans-Ulrich said. “Officially, of course, I never heard the major’s order to withdraw.”
“What order was that, sir?” Dieselhorst said innocently. Rudel laughed, then grimaced. Ignoring orders, disobeying orders…Once such things started, where did they stop? With trying to overthrow the Führer?
But I helped the Reich more than I would have by obeying, he thought. Maybe the conspirators had felt the same way. He shrugged. He was loyal. He knew it. His superiors did, too.
Pretty soon, they’d refill the Stuka’s gas tank and bomb her up again, and he and Dieselhorst would go off and try this again. And, if they came back from that run, they’d do it one more time, and one more after that, till the war was won and they didn’t have to worry about it any more. As long as you looked at things the right way, they were pretty simple.
SOMEBODY KICKED WILLI DERNEN IN the ribs. He grunted and folded up on himself and tried to go back to sleep. After a few seconds, the German marching boot thudded into him again. He grunted once more, louder this time. Reluctantly, his eyes opened.
“There you go,” Corporal Baatz said. “Time to get moving again.”
“Your mother, Arno,” Dernen said. With great determination, he screwed his eyes shut again.
Arno Baatz kicked him yet again, this time with real malice. He knew just where to put a boot to make it hurt most. Willi wondered how he knew. Had he learned in noncom school along with other bastardry, or maybe from an SS interrogator? Or was it just natural talent? It worked the same any which way. Willi sat up, clutching at the injured part. As with Macbeth, Baatz had murdered sleep. “Get it in gear,” he snapped. “Nobody put you on leave.”
Willi staggered to the bushes to take a leak. He was still yawning when he came back. No one who hadn’t been through a campaign had the faintest notion of how exhausting war was. Some men could get kicked almost to death without waking up, let alone marching. The mechanism simply wore down. Willi wasn’t there yet, but he wasn’t far from that dreadful place.
Maybe breakfast would help. Then again, maybe it wouldn’t. He t
ook out his mess tin and advanced on the field kitchen. The cooks spooned the tin full of slop. They called it porridge, but that gave it too much credit. They took everything remotely edible they could find and boiled it all together in a giant kettle. It ended up tasting the way library paste smelled.
The coffee, by contrast was pretty good. That was because it wasn’t Wehrmacht issue. Like the cigarettes the Landsers smoked, it was the good stuff, foraged from French farms and villages—and, no doubt, corpses. Wolfgang Storch already had a tin cup’s worth. “You know you’re beat to shit when even this stuff won’t make your heart turn over,” he said sadly.
“Tell me about it,” Willi agreed. He gulped the coffee anyway. He certainly didn’t move slower with it inside him. If he moved any slower, he’d be dead. The stink that fouled what should have been a fine spring morning reminded him how easy dying was these days. The Wehrmacht was still pushing forward, so what he smelled were mostly dead Frenchmen. Dead Germans were no sweeter to the nose, though.
Lieutenant Krantz took advantage of having most of his men gathered together. “We have to get through,” the platoon commander said earnestly. “We aren’t as far along as we ought to be. The more we fall behind schedule, the better the chance we give the enemy. If he stops us here, he can reinforce his positions north of Paris. That wouldn’t be good—not a bit.”
A few of the soldiers eating breakfast and smoking managed weary nods. Willi didn’t have the energy. He knew too damned well why they hadn’t come farther or gone faster. Anybody with a gram of sense did. The terrain in the Ardennes sucked, and they didn’t have enough panzers along to punch through the Frenchmen and their friends blocking the way west. Most of the goodies—and most of the air support—went to the right wing, the one punching ahead somewhere to the northwest. The plan had almost worked in the last war. The High Command had decided it just needed to make the fist a little bigger this time around.
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