Hitler's War (61 page)

Boys, old men, women…The only men of military age were cops, soldiers and sailors on leave, and middle-aged fellows who’d been too badly wounded in the last war to have to wear the uniform this time around. She supposed some farmers and doctors and factory workers were also exempt, but she didn’t see them. Whatever jobs they had, they were busy doing them.

Another newsboy cried a different headline: “Soviet Russia now encircled in a ring of steel!” Several people stopped to pay a few pfennigs
for his paper. The Germans like that idea. When they thought about it, they didn’t have to think that the
Reich
was fighting a two-front war.

Peggy wouldn’t have called a half-assed fight over here and what might be a bigger, more serious one way the hell over there a ring of steel. A ring with gaps so big would fall off your finger pretty damn quick. But the Goebbels school of newspaper writing had perpetrated far worse atrocities. Even a Hearst headline man might have come up with this one.

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?” Dieselhorst 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.