The War That Came Early: West and East (30 page)

Right at 2:30, a taxi pulled up in front of the hotel. Peggy hauled her suitcase out onto the sidewalk. “Let me take that for you,” the driver said. His left hand was artificial, but his right arm was plenty strong. Into the trunk the suitcase went. “The train station, yes?”

“Yes!” Peggy said. He opened the door for her, then got in himself. He used his right hand to clamp the thumb and fingers of the left onto the wheel. That left the good hand free to shift gears, and to help the other as needed.

Maybe he saw Peggy’s eye on him, for he said, “It’s clumsy, but it works. And I’ve had plenty of practice since the last war. Only one accident in all that time, and it wasn’t my fault. The police court said so.”

“Good for you,” Peggy said. She gave him a big tip when they got to the station. He took her suitcase out of the trunk as easily as he’d put it in, but
she didn’t let him carry it to the ticket counter. Enough was enough. She could manage, and she did.

Her ticket was waiting. She’d had paranoid fantasies that it wouldn’t be, that the Nazis were still playing cat-and-mouse games with her. But no. Here it was, in her hands. The conductor gravely examined it when she walked up to the train. “I am required to ask you to show me an exit visa,” he said.

“Here you go.” Peggy was proud to show it off.

“Sehr gut. Danke schön,”
he said, touching the brim of his cap. “All is in order. You may board.”

You may board!
If those weren’t the three most beautiful words in the German language, Peggy didn’t know what could top them. She found her berth. It had to be the best one on the train. The Germans were laying it on thick, all right. About time, too! Peggy settled in with a sigh of pleasure.

At 3:30—not 3:29, not 3:31—the train jerked into motion. “Yippee!” Peggy said. No one heard her. It wouldn’t have mattered if someone had. You couldn’t translate
Yippee!
into German. But she was on her way home at last.

HANS-ULRICH RUDEL ALWAYS WONDERED
what would happen when Colonel Steinbrenner summoned him to the tent that did duty as squadron HQ. Showing you were worried was only likely to make things worse, though. “Reporting as ordered, sir,” he said, drawing himself up to stiff attention.

“At ease,” Steinbrenner said. “You’re not in trouble this time,
Oberleutnant
Rudel.”

“Oberleutnant?”
Hans-Ulrich squeaked in surprised. He’d just got promoted. “Thank you very much, sir!”

“You’re welcome. You earned it.” Steinbrenner opened a box that sat on the card table serving as a desk. “You earned this, too.” He took out a large Iron Cross on a red-white-and-black ribbon.

“A
Ritterkreuz
!” Rudel said, all breath and no voice—he was beyond even squeaking now.

“That’s right. You’ve got the first Knight’s Cross in the squadron. Not the last, I hope, but the first. Congratulations!” Medal in hand, Colonel Steinbrenner stood up. He came up and handed it to Hans-Ulrich. “You wear it around your neck.”

“Yes, sir. I know,” Hans-Ulrich said dazedly. Too much was happening too fast. He managed to put it on without dropping it. If you had to have a shield for your Adam’s apple, where could you find a better one?

“I’ve got the gold pips for your shoulder straps and the new collar patches with two chickens on them, too,” Steinbrenner said. “I figured you’d rather put the
Ritterkreuz
on first, though.”

“Uh, yes, sir,” Rudel managed.

Something besides the medal sat in the box, too: a piece of paper. Unfolding it, Steinbrenner read, “‘In recognition of Lieutenant Rudel’s cleverness in suggesting the installation of antipanzer cannon on the Ju-87, and in recognition of his gallantry in personally testing the new weapons system against the enemy.’ That’s not a bad citation. No, not half bad.” He stuck out his hand.

Hans-Ulrich shook it. “I never expected any of this,” he muttered.

“Well, you’ve got it. Enjoy it.” Steinbrenner’s eyes twinkled. “And you get to buy everybody drinks twice—once for the promotion, and once for the Knight’s Cross.”

“Oh, joy.” Now Hans-Ulrich’s voice sounded distinctly hollow. That was an honor he could have done without. He’d be the only sober guy at a party—no, two parties—full of rowdy drunks. They’d get rowdy on his Reichsmarks, too, and it wasn’t as if he were rolling in them.

“You could even unbend a little yourself,” the squadron commander said. “It’s not as if you haven’t got a good excuse.”

“I don’t care to do that, sir, thank you.” Rudel stayed within military discipline. He also stayed stubborn.

“Well, have it your way. You’ve earned the right this time.” Colonel Steinbrenner, for once, didn’t feel like arguing or teasing.

Hans-Ulrich could be stubborn about several things at the same time: a Renaissance man, of sorts. “You need to give Albert something, too,” he said. “If we’d got hit, he’d be roast meat just like me.”

Steinbrenner tapped another box on the table with the nail of his
index finger. “Iron Cross, First Class. Does that suit you, your Excellency?”

Sarcasm went over Rudel’s head as often as not. This time, his ears burned. “Yes, sir,” he mumbled.

“Well, good. Now get out of here so I can pin it on him. He’s due in”—Steinbrenner glanced at his watch—“six minutes.”

Thus encouraged, Hans-Ulrich got. Sergeant Dieselhorst wasn’t coming yet, which was good. If he saw the Knight’s Cross, he’d figure he was in line for a medal, too. This way, it would be a surprise—and the nice kind of surprise, at that.

Several groundcrew men walked out of a revetment where they’d been working on a damaged Stuka. As usual, their chatter was two parts technical jargon, one part filth. One of them waved to Hans-Ulrich: not much spit and polish on a working air base. The wave came to a jerky stop when he saw the new medal at Rudel’s throat.
“Heilige Scheisse!”
he said. “That’s a
Ritterkreuz
!”

The noncoms in greasy coveralls swarmed over Hans-Ulrich, pumping his hand and pounding him on the back. Then, before he could do more than squawk, they hoisted him onto their shoulder and carried him back to the airstrip. “Look!” one of them yelled. “He’s flying!” The others thought that was so funny, they almost dropped him.

Pilots came out of their tents to see what the fuss was about. They started yelling and beating on Hans-Ulrich, too. “You’ve got balls, you little squirt,” one of them said—he was twenty-five, a whole two years older than Rudel. “Now if you only had some brains.”

“Hey, he thought up those antipanzer guns,” another flyer said. “Maybe he’s not as dumb as he looks.”

“Maybe he’s not as homely as he looks, either, but I wouldn’t bet on it,” the first man said. They all laughed like lunatics. Hans-Ulrich didn’t think he was particularly homely, but nobody cared what he thought. The first flyer went on, “We ought to find out what the French girls think.”

Everybody cheered—everybody but Rudel. Several of the local girls could be friendly … for a price. Being friendly with them came with a price, too. Several flyers had come down with drippy faucets. The medics
had some brand-new pills that could actually cure the clap, but Colonel Steinbrenner wasn’t amused any which way.

As for Hans-Ulrich, he said, “Spare me, please.” The other Germans laughed, some of them not so good-naturedly now. What kind of pilot was he if he didn’t want to drink or to screw? It wasn’t that he didn’t have animal urges of his own, either. He did—did he ever! But he didn’t feel like wasting them on French popsies who probably smelled like garlic.

“We weren’t asking what you thought of the girls, Rudel,” the twenty-five-year-old said. “We want to know what they’ll think of you.”

“I don’t care.” Hans-Ulrich started to kick in earnest. “And put me down, for heaven’s sake!”

They did, none too gently. He was just working his way through the
Luftwaffe
pack when Sergeant Dieselhorst came back from Steinbrenner’s headquarters tent, his new decoration prominent on the left breast of his tunic. That took some of the heat off Hans-Ulrich, because people had to congratulate—and to thump—Dieselhorst, too.

Eventually, the two men from the Stuka crew managed to shake hands with each other. “Well, sir, here’s another fine mess you got me into,” Dieselhorst said, sounding like a Laurel and Hardy film.

“As long as we keep getting out of them,” Rudel answered.

“I’ll drink to that,” Dieselhorst said, and everybody cheered—not least because everybody knew Hans-Ulrich wouldn’t. The sergeant went on, “The old man told me you got promoted, too. You can watch us get plowed on your cash—twice.”

That put the focus back on Rudel.
Thanks a lot, Albert
, he thought. The flyers and groundcrew men bayed like wolves, anticipating their sprees. They teased Hans-Ulrich about not joining in. “If you’re wasted, too, you won’t give a rat’s ass about what it costs,” someone said. Half a dozen men roared agreement.

“Not then,” Rudel said.

“Why worry about afterwards?” another pilot asked. “Afterwards, the enemy’s liable to smoke us. Don’t you want something fun to remember while you’re going down in flames?” Rudel didn’t answer, and a lot of the good cheer drained out of the gathering. Some questions cut too close to the bone.

Chapter 13

T
heo Hossbach, Heinz Naumann, and Adalbert Stoss sat at the north-easternmost corner of Poland. A scrawny chicken roasted above a fire. Naumann reached out to turn the stick on which the bird was spitted. “Well, we’re here,” the panzer commander said morosely. “We did what they brought us to Poland to do. Hot damn!” He gave the chicken another turn.

“Hot damn,” Stoss echoed. Theo, as usual, kept his mouth shut. It wasn’t that he disagreed with his crewmates; he just didn’t feel like talking.

With some help from the Poles, the German panzers had smashed through the Red Army and cut a hell of a lot of Russians in this invaded chunk of Poland off from their homeland. Now German and Polish troops were methodically mopping them up.

That was all very well. It would have been better than all very well if only the Russians hadn’t just poured across the rest of the Polish border. How hard could the Poles fight? If the Russians cut a couple of railroad lines … Theo glanced over at their Panzer II, an angular shadow in the
long, slowly deepening northern twilight. In spite of the surprising Soviet panzers, it had come a long way and done a lot of hard fighting without taking much damage in return.

But it ran on gasoline. If the gasoline couldn’t get through, the machine was nothing but nine tonnes of scrap metal. A dead turtle, a shell without legs. And, in that case, Theo and Heinz and Adi were nothing but three foot soldiers. The only problem with that was, they didn’t have rifles and they didn’t have helmets. Well, if you were going to piss and moan about every little thing …

“So what’s going through your thick head now, Theo?” Naumann asked. Like Ludwig Rothe before him, he recognized Theo wouldn’t say much on his own. Unlike the late Ludwig, he kept trying to get answers anyway.

“Gasoline.” Theo doled out a word.

“Now why would you worry about something like that?” Adalbert Stoss said. “It’s not like we need it or anything.”

“Heh,” Naumann said, sounding as laconic as Theo usually did. The panzer commander looked around. There wasn’t much to see, nor would there have been on a sunny noon: a burnt-out farmhouse and a barn (that was where the chicken must have come from), some crops growing out in the fields, and a couple of dead Russians just starting to bloat and stink a hundred meters or so past the barn. Heinz shook his head. “If the world ever needed an enema, you’d plug it in right here, by God.”

Somewhere a couple of kilometers away, a machine gun opened up. All three panzer men leaned toward the noise. “Russian piece,” Stoss said.

“We might have captured it,” Naumann said. And so the Germans might have; you used anything you could get your hands on. Theo had seen that in France. If it could hurt the other guy, you grabbed it, turned it around, and started shooting it at him.

Another machine gun spoke up to answer: an unmistakable German MG-34. “They might have captured it,” Adi Stoss said, grinning.

Heinz didn’t grin back. He made a sour face instead. Theo didn’t like that. The rivalry between driver and panzer commander hadn’t gone away after Adi ducked Heinz in that French creek. Naumann had the rank, and maybe the meanness. But, while he was no weakling, he wasn’t
in Stoss’ league for muscle. Theo hoped trouble wouldn’t come of it. He wished he could do something, but had no idea what to do. Working with artillery fuses was nothing next to this.

“We’ll sleep in shifts tonight,” Naumann decreed. “We all sack out at once, we’re liable to wake up with our throats cut.” He glared a challenge at Adi Stoss. Adi only nodded back; what the sergeant said made obvious sense. Heinz muttered to himself. Yes, he wanted an excuse to come down on the driver. If he didn’t find one, chances were he’d go and invent one.

Theo drew the first watch. The panzer crew had long since doused the fire. Blankets would do on a mild summer night, and why advertise where you were? Theo held on to his pistol. If some Russian sneaked inside of thirty meters before trying to pot him with a Mosin-Nagant, he could defend himself with some hope of hitting back. Otherwise … Well, the weight in his hand was comforting, anyhow.