"Next .
* * * *
Standartenfuhrer Felix Hoth awoke, mumbling, fighting a strangling enemy that he only gradually realized was a mass of sweat-soaked bedclothes. Panting, he swung his feet to the floor and hung his head in his hands, the palm-heels pressed against his eyes. Lieber Herr Gott, but he'd thought the dreams had stopped. Perhaps it was the vodka last night; he hadn't done that in a while, not since the first month after Moscow. He was back in the tunnels, in the dark, but alone; he could hear their breathing as they closed in on him and he could not even scream…
"Herr Standartenfuhrer?" The question was repeated twice before it penetrated. It was one of his Slav girls—Valenrina, or Tina, whatever; holding out a bottle of Stolichnaya and a glass. The smell of the liquor seized him with a sudden fierce longing, then combined with the odors of sweat and stale semen to make his stomach twist.
"No!" he shouted. His hand sent it crashing to the floor; she stood, cringing, to receive the backhanded slap. "You stupid Russki bitch, how many times do I have to tell you, not in the morning! Fetch coffee and food. Schnell!"
The effort of rage exhausted him; he fought the temptation of a collapse back onto the four-poster bed. Instead, he forced his muscles into movement, walking to the dresser and splashing himself with water from the jug, pouring more from the spirit-heater and beginning to shave. Sometimes he thought she was more trouble than she was worth, that he should find a good orderly, and only send for her when he needed a woman. You expected an unter-mensch to be stupid, but it was what, five months now since he had grabbed her out of that burning schoolhouse in Tula, and she still couldn't speak more than a few words of German. His Russian was better. And she was supposed to have been a teacher!
It showed that Reichsfuhrer Himmler was right: intellectual training had nothing to do with real intelligence—that was in the blood. Or… sometimes he wondered if she was as dull as she seemed. Perhaps it would be better just to liquidate her. Two were enough, surely, or there were thousands more…
No. That was how Kube had gotten it, up around Minsk: one of them had smuggled an antipersonnel mine under the bed and blown them both to bits. Frightened but not completely desperate, that was the ticket.
Breakfast repaired his spirits; the ration situation was definitely picking up, not like last winter when they'd all been gnawing black bread in the freezing dark. Real coffee, now that the U-boats were keeping the English too busy for blockades; good bacon and eggs and butter and cream. He glanced around the room with satisfaction as he ate; it was furnished with baroque elegance. Pyatigorsk had been a health resort for Tsarist nobles with a taste for medicinal springs at the foot of the Caucasus, and the Commissars had not let it run down. Not bad for a Silesian peasant's son, brought up to touch the cap to the Herr Rittermeister, the Waffen-SS offered a career open to the talents, all right. No social distinctions at the Bad Tolz Junkerschul, the officer's training academy. No limits to how high a sound Aryan could rise; in the Wehrmacht he'd have been lucky to make Unteroffizier, with some traitorous monocled "gentleman" telling him what to do.
Well, piss on the regular Army and their opinion of Felix Hoth. Felix Hoth now commanded a regiment of SS-Division "Liebstandarte Adolf Hitler." The Leader's own Guards, the victors of Minsk, Smolensk, Moscow, Kharkov, Astrakhan. The elite of the New Order… and just finishing its conversion from a motorized infantry brigade to a Panzer division. He glanced at the mantel clock with its plump cupids. 0530. Good, another half hour and he'd roust the second Panzergrenadier battalion out—surprise inspection and a four-kilometer run. Good lads, but the new recruits needed stiffening. Not many left of the cadre—not many of the men who had jumped off from Poland a year ago. And as soon as they finished refitting they'd be back in the line—real fighting out on the Sverdlosk front instead of this chickenshit anti-partisan work.
The situation reports had come up with breakfast; they were a real pleasure. The trickle of equipment from the captured Russian factories was turning into a steady flow, not like the old days when the Wehrmacht had grudged the SS every bayonet, and they'd had to make do with Czech and French booty. The SS could improvise; if the supply lines to the Fatherland were long, seize local potential! Ivan equipment: their armor and artillery were first-rate. He winced at the memory of trying to stop that first Russian T-34 with a 37mm antitank gun.
Burning pine forest, the smell like a mockery of Christmas fires. Burning trucks and human flesh, the human wave of Russian troops in their mustard-yellow uniforms, arms linked. Urra! Urra! The machine guns scythed them down, artillery firing point-blank, blasting huge gaps in their line, bits and pieces of human flung through the forest and hanging from the trees… and the tank, low, massive, unstoppable, its broad tracks grinding through the swamp.
Aim, range 800, pull the lanyard… crack-whang! He'd frozen for a moment in sheer disbelief, the reload in his hand. A clean hit, and the thick-sloped plate had shed it into the trees like… like a tennis ball. Left only a shallow gouge, crackling and red as it cooled. Coming on, shot after shot rebounding, grinding over the gun, cutting Friedrich in half.
He'd lain there looking up and not even bleeding for a second, then it had all come out…
Hoth looked down at his right hand; half the little ringer was missing. He had been very lucky; jumping on the deck of a tank and ramming a grenade down the muzzle of its cannon was not something you did with any great hope of survival. Automatic, really; not thinking of living, or of the Knight's Cross and the promotion…
With a smile on his thick-boned, stolid face he strode to the window and pulled open the drapes. There they were, spread out in leaguer three stories below, across the tread-chewed lawns of what had once been a nobleman's park. Dawn was just breaking, reaching beams to gild the squat, grey-steel shapes, throw shadows from the hulls and long cannon. Tanks in the outer ring, then the assault guns, infantry carriers (praise Providence, all the motorized infantry on tracks at last!), soft transport. Russian designs, much of it. Improved, brought into line with German practice, pouring out of Kharkov and Stalingrad and Kirovy Rog, with technicians from Krupp and Daimler-Benz to organize, and overseers from the SS Totenkopf squads with stock-whips to see that the Russian workers did not flag at their eighteen-hour days.
Not really necessary to pull into hedgehog like this, but it was good practice and the partisans seemed damnably well informed. Suicide parties with explosive charges had infiltrated more than once. Perhaps more hostages, he thought, turning to the east and taking a deep breath of fresh, crisp spring air with a pleasant undertang of diesel oil.
The aircraft were difficult to spot, coming in low out of the dawning sun. He squinted, his first thought that it was a training flight…
The smile slid slowly off his face. Too many, too fast, too low; at least 450 km, hedgehopping over poplars and orchards. Two engines, huge radials; low-wing monoplanes, their noses bristling with muzzles, long teardrop canopies… One 50mm auto-cannon, six 25mm, the Luftwaffe intelligence report ran through his head. Five tonnes of bombs, rockets, jellied petrol… Draka ground-attack aircraft, P-12 "Rhino" class. The nominal belligerence of the Domination had suddenly become very real.
There was no time to react; the first flight came in for its strafing run even as the alarm klaxon began to warble. He could hear the heavy dumpa-dumpa-dumpa of the 50mm's, see the massive frames of the Rhinos shudder in the air with recoil. Crater lines stitched through the mud, meaty smacks as the tungsten-cored solid shot rammed into wet earth, then the heavy chunk as they struck his tanks, into the thinner side and deck armor. The lighter auto-cannon were a continuous orange flicker, stabbing into the soft-skinned transport. Something blew up with a muffled thump, a soft soughing noise and flash; petrol tanker, spraying burning liquid for meters in every direction. Vehicles were flaming all over the fields about the house, fuel and ammunition exploding, early-morning fireworks as tracer and incendiary rounds shot through the sky trailing smoke. The crews were pourin
g out of hutments, racing through the rain of metal to their tanks and carriers, and falling, their bodies jerking in the grotesque dance of human flesh caught in automatic-weapons fire. The attackers were past; then another wave, and the first returning, looping for a second pass.
"Todentanz," he murmured. Dance of death. The telephone rang: he picked it up and began the ritual of questions and orders, because there was nothing else to do. And nothing of use to do; this was a quiet sector, and he had been stripped of most of his antiaircraft for the east, where the enemy still had some planes. The rest were flackpanzers, out there with the rest…
Engine rumble added to the din of blast and shouts; some of the Liebstandarte troopers were reaching their machines, and a percentage of crews were always on duty. A four-barreled 20mm opened up, one of the new self-propelled models. The ball turret traversed, hosing shells into the air; a Draka airplane took that across a belly whose skin was machined from armorplate, shrugged it off in a shower of sparks. Another was not so lucky, the canopy shattering as the gun caught it banking into a turn. Unguided, it cartwheeled into a barracks; building and wreck vanished in a huge, orange-black ball of flame as its load of destruction detonated. The blast blew the diamond-pane windows back on either side of him, shattering against the stone walls. He could feel the heat of it on his face, like a summer sun after too long at the swimming-baths, when the skin has begun to burn, taut and prickling. Another Rhino wheeled and fired a salvo of rockets from its underwing racks into the flackpanzer that had killed its wingmate. Twisted metal burned when the cloud of powdered soil cleared, and now the others were dropping napalm, cannisters tumbling to leave trails of inextinguishable flame in their wake, yellow surf-walls that buried everything in their path…
Standartenfuhrer Hoth had been a young fanatic a year ago. Only a year ago, but no man could be young again who had walked those long miles from Germany to the Kremlin; who had stood to break the death ride of the Siberian armor as it drove for encircled Moscow; who had survived the final nightmare battles through the burning streets, flushing NKVD holdout battalions from the prison-cellars of the Lubyanka… That year had taken his youth; his fanaticism it had honed, tempered with caution, sharpened with realism. His face was sweat-sheened, but it might have been carved from ivory as he held the field telephone in a white-fingered grip.
"Shut up. They are not attacking the barracks because they are at the limit of operational range and must concentrate on priority targets," he said tonelessly. "Get me Schmidt."
The line buzzed and clicked for a moment, but the switchboard in the basement was secure. Probably overloaded, to be sure, came a mordant thought. One part of his mind was raging, longing to run screaming into the open, firing his pistol at the black-grey vulture shapes. He could see the squadron markings as some of them flew by the manor at scarcely more than rooftop height; see the winged flame-lizard that was the enemy's national emblem, with the symbolic sword of death and the slave-chain of mastery in its claws.
Fafnir, he thought. The reptile cunning, patience to wait until all the enemies are weakened…
And another part wished simply to weep, for grief of loss at the destruction of his work, his love, the beautiful and deadly instrument he had helped to forge…
"Sch-Schmidt here," a voice at the other end of the line gasped. "Standartenfuhrer, air raid—"
"And Stalin is dead, is this news?" he used the sarcasm deliberately, as a whip of ice.
"No—sir, Divisional H.Q. in Krasnodar, too, and, and—reports from the Gross Deutschland in Grozny, the Luftwaffe…"
"Silence." His voice was flat, but it produced a quiet that echoed. The sound of aircraft engines was fading; the raid was already history. You did not fight history, you used it. He looked south, to the pass.
"You will attempt to contact Hauptsturmfuhrer Keilig in the village. There will be no reply, but keep trying."
"Ja wohl, Herr Standartenfuhrer."
"Call Division. Inform them that the Osserian Military Highway is under attack by air-assault troops."
"But, Standartenfuhrer, how—"
"Silence." An instant. "You will find Hauptman Schtackel, or his immediate subordinate if he is dead or incapacitated. Tell him to prepare a reconnaissance squadron of Puma armored cars; also my command car, or a vehicle with equivalent communications equipment. By exactly—" He looked at the clock, still ticking serenely between its pink-cheeked plaster godlets. "—0600 hours, I wish to be under way. He is also to begin formation of a Kampfgruppe of at least battalion size from intact formations, jump-off time to be no later than 1440 hours today. I will have returned and will be in command of the kampfgruppe. Should I fail to return, Obersturmbannfuhrer Keist-mann is to exercise his discretion until orders arrive from H.Q." His voice lost its metronomic quality. 'Is that clear?"
"Zum Befehl, Herr Standartenfuhrer!"
He replaced the receiver with a soft click and turned from the scene of devastation; his eyes had never left it for an instant during the conversation. Turning, he saw that the girl Tina had returned. 'Leave the tray, I will be finishing it," he said. A soldier ate when he could, in the field. "Fetch my camouflage fatigues and kit. Have them ready here within ten minutes."
He paused in the doorway, to give the fires smoking beyond one last glance. "My loyalty is my honor," he quoted to himself, murmuring: the SS oath. "If nothing else, there is always that."
* * * *
Valentina Fedorova made very sure that the footsteps were not returning before she crossed to the folder and began to leaf through it with steady, systematic speed. Her fluent German she had learned in the Institute; almost as a hobby, she had a gift for languages. The memory that made a quick scan almost as effective as the impossible camera was a gift as well, one that had been very useful these past few months. Not that she had expected much besides a little, little revenge before she was inevitably found out, before the drum was beaten in the town square for another flogging to the death. She raised the lid of the coffeepot, worked her mouth, spat copiously. Then she crossed to the window, allowing herself the luxury of one long, joyous look before laying out the uniform. She smiled.
It was the first genuine smile in a long time.
"Burn," she whispered. "Burn."
* * * *
It was odd, Eric thought, how it was easy to remember the mind's construct of a battle, the shape and direction of it, when the personal faded into a blur of shapes, sounds, smells, sharp bursts of emotion. Not what you might expect; after all, a "battle" was a thing you made in your mind, while street fighting was continuous alertness, total focus, reflexes key-triggered for the death that waited around every corner and behind every door.
The men of the Liebstandarte had outnumbered the Draka, but they had been surprised, too shaken to establish a perimeter before the paratroops were in among them—
Sofie's eyes had widened. The muzzle of her machine pistol had come up, straight at him; time froze, the burst cracked past his ear, powder grains burnt his cheek. He wheeled to watch the Fritz tumble down the steps dropping his carbine, clutching at a belly ripped open by the soft-nosed 10mm slugs.
The wounded man's mouth worked. "Mutti," he whispered, eyes staring disbelief at the life leaking out between his fingers. "Mutti, hilfe, mutti—"
A three-round burst from Eric's rifle hammered him back into silence.
Eric looked up, met Sophie's eyes. She was smiling, but not the usual cocksure urchin grin; a softer expression, almost tremulous. Quickly, she glanced aside.
Well, well, he thought. Then: Oh, not now. Aloud, he murmured, "Thanks; good thing you've got steady hands."
"Ya, ah, c'mon, let's get up those stairs, hey?" she muttered, leading the way with a smooth steady stride that took her up the board steps noiselessly, even under the heavy load of the backpack radio.
* * * *
The resistance had been disorganized, split into pockets. But the pockets had held out, squads and sections and lone snipers fighting
with a stolid determination to make their enemy pay a price for the victory, to cost him precious time that might have been used to consolidate against counterattack. The overwhelming firepower of the assault rifles and rocket guns had told, as Eric switched sticks of paratroopers back and forth in a fluid dance. Building local superiority against an opponent denied mobility by the Draka heavy weapons, which raked the streets with fire at the first sight of a German uniform.
* * * *
The 15mm had hammered beside his ear; for a moment part of him wondered how much combat it would take to damage his hearing. This was worse than working in a drop-forging plant. His mouth was dry, filled with a thick saliva no swallowing could clear; there was water in his canteen, but no time for it. The rifles of his lochos took it up, hammering at the narrow slit window twenty meters away, keeping the Fritz machine-gunner from manning his post. The light high-velocity 5mm rounds skittered off in spark-trails; heavy 15mm bullets chewed at the stone, tattering it with craters.
"Damn hovels are built like forts!" one of the troopers snarled, as the ammunition drum of his Holbars emptied and automatically ejected. He scrabbled at his belt for the last replacement, slapped the guide lips into the magazine well, and jacked the cocking lever.
"They are forts," McWhirter grunted. "Sand coons are treacherous. Don't sleep easy without bunkers and firing-slits 'tween them and the neighbors."
Serfdom was too easy on them, he thought viciously. It was the smells that brought it back—rancid mutton fat and spices, sweaty wool and kohl. You could never trust ragheads—Afghans or Circassians or Turks or whatever; they kept coming back at you. Better to herd them all into their mosque and turn the Ronsons on them. He remembered that, from the Panjir Valley in Afghanistan; reprisals for an ambush by the badmash, the guerillas.
The Draka had found the drivers of the burnt-out trucks with their testicles stuffed into their mouths… Ten villages for that; he'd pulled the plunger on the flamer himself. The women had tried to push their children out the slit windows when the roof caught, flaming bundles on hands dissolving into flame as he washed the jet of napalm across them, limestone subliming and burning in the heat. He saw that often, waking and asleep.
Marching Through Georgia Page 11
