Hitler's War (48 page)

But he missed it. Maybe he walked past the corner in the gloom, or maybe the place wasn’t where he thought it was. He wandered around, bumping into people and having others bump into him. “Excuse me,” he said, and,
“Pardon.”
It wasn’t curfew time yet, and Paris kept going regardless of such tiresome regulations.

Cars honked like maniacs as they rattled along. They had headlamps masked with black paper or cloth so only a tiny slit of light came out: with luck, not enough to see from 20,000 feet. The faint glow wasn’t enough to let drivers see much, either. Every so often, the sound of crunching bumpers and frantic cursing punctuated the night.

Another couple of steps and Alistair bumped into somebody else. “Excuse me,” he repeated resignedly.

“Pardon,”
said his victim: a woman.

They both stepped forward again, trying to go around each other, and bumped once more. “Bloody hell,” Walsh said. You could be as foul-mouthed as you pleased in a country where most people didn’t know what you were talking about.

But the woman laughed. “I was thinking the same thing,” she said, her English better than the barman’s.

“Sorry,” Alistair mumbled.

“Don’t worry,” she answered. “My husband would say that when he was alive. He was a soldier from the last war.”

“You were married to a Tommy?” Walsh asked.

“That’s right,” she said. “My father was a butcher. My brother got killed at Verdun, and so Fred took over the business. Better than he could have done in England, he always said. But he died five years ago…and now we have war again.”

“Too right we do.” Walsh wondered what the hell to say next. Verdun
was gone, lost, this time around, though not with the titanic bloodbath of 1916. He couldn’t very well ask a woman where the
maison de tolerance
was. He wondered if he could talk her into taking him home with her. If she was used to British soldiers (though he was no damned Englishman—by the way she sounded, her Fred had come from Yorkshire or thereabouts)…

Before he could find anything, she said, “Maybe you should go left at the next corner. It’s not far at all—only a few meters. Good luck, Tommy.” Then she was nothing but fading footsteps on the street: this time, she stepped around him nimbly as a dancer.

Alistair laughed at himself. So she wasn’t a widow who needed consoling—not from him, anyhow. “Too damned bad,” he muttered. “She’d be better than what I could pay for.” And then, thoughtfully, “Left, is it?”

He didn’t think in meters, but he could make sense of them. You had to if you were going to fight on the Continent. He found the corner by stepping off the curb. He didn’t fall on his face, which proved God loved drunks. He didn’t get run over crossing the street, either—no thanks to the French drivers, most of whom tooled along as if they could see for miles, not six inches past their noses if they were lucky.

A long block down the street, he bumped into somebody else. “‘Ere, myte, watch yourself,” growled an unmistakable Cockney.

“Oh, keep your hair on,” Walsh retorted, not only showing he was from Britain himself but suggesting he had the bulge to deal with any ordinary soldier. He paused. He still couldn’t see much, but his ears told him a long file of men stood here breathing and muttering and shuffling their feet. A light went on in his head, even if it illuminated nothing out here. “Is this the queue for—?”

“You fink Oi’d wyte loike this for anyfing else?” the Cockney answered.

“I suppose not,” Walsh said. Fred’s widow knew soldiers, all right, and knew what they’d be looking for. If she knew he also wouldn’t have
minded looking for her…well, that was how the cards came down. She might have been better, but this wouldn’t be bad—not while it was going on, anyhow. Later, he’d likely wonder why he wasted his money on some tart who’d forget him as soon as he got off her.

But that would be later. The queue lurched forward a few feet. Somebody joined it behind Alistair, and then somebody else. He wished he could light a cigarette, but that was against the blackout rules, too. One more thing he’d have to wait for. Well, it wouldn’t be long.

BREAKFAST AT THE AIRSTRIP WAS
rolls and strong coffee. Hans-Ulrich Rudel longed for milk. By the way a lot of the Stuka pilots and rear gunners went on, they longed for schnapps or whiskey. He didn’t care what they drank, as long as it didn’t hurt what they did in the air. They sassed him unmercifully. He’d got used to that—by all the signs, he was the only teetotaler in the
Luftwaffe
. He didn’t much like it, but he couldn’t fight everybody all the time.

And then someone said something different to him: “What do you think of the new wing commander?”

“Colonel Steinbrenner?” Rudel shrugged. “He seems like a good enough officer—and I’m sure he’s a good German patriot.”

“Do you think Colonel Greim wasn’t?” asked the other pilot, a new fish. Was he Maxi or Moritz? Moritz, that was it.

Hans-Ulrich shrugged again. “He’d still be in charge of the wing if the powers that be thought he was. Me, I say
‘Heil
Hitler!’ and I go about my business. What else can you do?”

Moritz started to say something, stopped, and then tried again: “The war hasn’t gone the way everybody hoped it would when it started.”

“And so?” Rudel gulped coffee. He needed help prying his eyelids open—like most flyers these days, he was chronically short on sleep. And this brew would do the trick, too, which meant it had to come from
captured stock. But he could see some things even with his eyes closed. “How many wars
do
go just the way one side thinks they will beforehand? Do we toss out the
Führer
because things aren’t perfect?”

“Of course not,” Moritz said quickly.

“Of course not,” Hans-Ulrich agreed. He hadn’t expected his colleague to say anything else. That the other man might not dare say anything else never crossed his mind. He believed in
Führer
and Party at least as strongly as he believed in his father’s stern Lutheran God. Till the latest political upheavals, he’d assumed everybody else felt the same way. “This foolishness isn’t doing the war effort any good.”

Moritz looked down into his coffee mug. Then he eyed Hans-Ulrich again. “Which foolishness?” he asked quietly. “The coup, or what’s happening now to anybody who might have known anything about it?”

“Why, the coup, of course.” Rudel’s answer was as automatic as the mechanism that pulled a Stuka out of a dive. Only after it came out did he fully realize what the other man had said. “I could report you for that!” he exclaimed. He almost said,
I should report you for that!

“Ja
. I know,” Moritz answered. “But think first. Would I go up there to get my ass shot off if I weren’t loyal to the
Vaterland
?”

Nobody without a death wish would fly a Stuka if he weren’t doing it for his country. Even so, Hans-Ulrich said, “You can’t be loyal to the
Vaterland
if you’re not loyal to the
Führer
. We’d lose for sure if anyone else tried to run the war, or if we bugged out of it. We’d stab ourselves in the back, the same way we did in 1918.”

“No doubt,” the other pilot said. Was that agreement, or was he just trying to get Hans-Ulrich out of his hair? Hans-Ulrich knew which way he’d bet. He didn’t know what to do next. Anyone who wondered about vengeance was less loyal to the Party and the
Führer
than he should have been. But if you were a brave pilot, and you hurt the French and British every time you flew…

Rudel was still chewing on that when he headed off to hear Colonel Steinbrenner’s morning briefing with the rest of the pilots. His ankle
still hurt, but he could walk on it and use the Stuka’s aileron controls. That was all that counted.

“If we can break through north of Paris, we have them,” Steinbrenner declared. “Then we wheel around behind the city, the way we would have done it in 1914 if von Kluck hadn’t run short of men and turned too soon.”

He was in his forties—old enough to remember von Kluck’s turn, maybe old enough to have been one of the footsloggers who made it and then got hurled back from the Marne. By the way he spoke, he still took it personally a generation later.

“We’ve done better this time than we did in 1914,” he went on. “Thanks to the panzers and to you boys, we’ve got most of the French Channel ports. That makes it harder for England to send men and machines to the Continent. And who’s to thank for the panzers and the Stukas and the rest of our toys? The
Führer
, that’s who.”

Hans-Ulrich nodded vigorously. So did most of the other men in the wing. He judged that some of them, like him, meant it from the bottom of their hearts. Others wanted to be seen nodding so the new wing commander would have no reason to doubt their loyalty.
Whited sepulchers
, he thought scornfully. His father had plenty of things to say about parishioners who acted pious in church but behaved like animals as soon as they got outside again.

And a few stubborn souls, Moritz among them, just sat there listening as if Colonel Steinbrenner were going on about the weather. Maybe they had the courage of their convictions. Some men did fight for
Voter-land
rather than
Führer
. Rudel didn’t think the two were separable. He was willing to bet Germany’s foes didn’t, either.

After a moment, Steinbrenner resumed: “Your target is Chaumont. There’s a railway viaduct there—it’s more than six hundred meters long, and it crosses the Suize. Artillery hasn’t been able to knock it out, and the enemy keeps sending men and matériel across it. Time to put a stop to that, by God!”

Now everybody nodded. Give the
Luftwaffe
a purely military problem, and it would handle things just fine. Even Hans-Ulrich was relieved that he wouldn’t have to think about politics while he was flying. If any of the other men felt differently, he would have been very surprised.

Groundcrew men were already bombing up his Stuka and fueling it when he went out to the revetment. Sergeant Dieselhorst was grabbing a premission cigarette a safe distance away. “What’s on the plate?” Dieselhorst asked.

“Chaumont. Railroad bridge,” Hans-Ulrich said.

“Ach, so.”
The sergeant’s cheeks hollowed as he took one last drag. He crushed the butt underfoot. “Flak’ll be thick enough to walk on,” he said mournfully. “They know what those bridges are worth.”

“You can always bow out,” Hans-Ulrich said. The rear gunner sent him a reproachful look. Rudel gestured toward the Ju-87. “Well, come on, then.
Heil
Hitler!”

“Heil!”
Dieselhorst echoed. Whatever he thought of the rumored coup, he didn’t say much. He just did his job. That wasn’t the worst attitude for a noncom—or anyone else—to have.

Inside the plane’s cabin, he and Hans-Ulrich went through their preflight checks. Everything came up green. With all the flying the planes were doing, the groundcrews had to work miracles to keep so many of them airborne. So far, the mechanics and armorers seemed up to it.

A groundcrew man spun the prop. Hans-Ulrich fired up the engine. Another groundcrew man sat on the wing to help guide him as he taxied out of the revetment and onto the airstrip’s chewed-up grass. The ground crewman hopped off with a wave. Rudel gave him one, too. When he got the takeoff signal, he gunned the Stuka. It bounced down the runway and lurched into the air. It might not have been pretty, but it flew, all right.

Chaumont wasn’t far on the map, but it was far enough: farther than
the Kaiser’s army had ever got. “We have company,” Sergeant Dieselhorst said, distracting Rudel.

He looked around, making sure he’d read the noncom’s tone the right way. Yes, those were Messerschmitts flying with the Stukas, not Hurricanes or French fighters streaking in to attack them. Chaumont
was
important, then. Flights over France, unlike those across the Channel, didn’t always get escorts laid on.

Hans-Ulrich saw the flak well before he reached the target. It did look thick enough to walk on. Yes, the enemy also knew how important Chaumont was. Hans-Ulrich muttered to himself, but didn’t say anything out loud. He didn’t want Dieselhorst worrying any more than necessary. Worrying as much as proved necessary would likely be bad enough.

Hurricanes streaked at the Stukas maybe a minute and a half later. The 109s zoomed away to meet the British fighters. Hans-Ulrich had seen over England that that was the best way to hold off enemy planes. Sticking too close to the bombers you were escorting gave attackers a big edge.

Sometimes the enemy got through no matter what you did. Sergeant Dieselhorst’s machine gun chattered. Rudel saw a couple of Stukas diving for the deck, hoping to outrun the Hurricanes on their tails. He wished them luck, and feared they’d need it.

He started his own dive for the railroad bridge sooner than he’d intended to, which also meant it had to be shallower. That gave the antiaircraft gunners plenty of time to fire at him. Shells burst all around his Stuka. He hung on to the stick as tight as he could—it was like driving a car on a badly rutted dirt road. Puffs of evil black smoke came closer and closer. A few bits of shrapnel rattled off the plane or tore into it—luckily, only a few.

Trying not to think about anything else, Hans-Ulrich bored in on the bridge. The viaduct had three levels, towering more than fifty meters above the river it overleaped. Some plump, pipe-smoking, mustachioed
French engineer of the last century must have been proud of himself for designing it. Rudel yanked at the bomb-release lever. With a little luck, he’d make that Frenchman’s grandchildren unhappy.

As soon as the bombs fell free, the Stuka got faster and friskier. More flak burst behind it, in front of it, all around it. And Sergeant Dieselhorst’s voice rang tinnily through the speaking tube: “You nailed the fucking bridge! It’s going down!”

“Danken Gott dafür!”
Rudel said. He sped back toward the east, keeping his gauges at the edge of the red till he was sure he’d made it to German-held territory. If one of the Hurricanes had chosen to chase him, red-lining the gauges wouldn’t have done much good. The Stuka made a fine dive-bomber, but a poor tired donkey in a sprint on the flat.