Fox On The Rhine

by Douglas Niles

  The man would never formulate his reply.

  The explosion ripped through the confined space with the deafening power of thunder, a blaze of fiery light and a shock-wave that twisted the ground itself. An eruption of smoke and debris choked Brandt, who suddenly found himself lying on his back, staring up at the tattered remnants of the ceiling’s crude wooden paneling. Patches of sky showed through the lumber, a fact that struck him as bizarre.

  What had happened? The colonel couldn’t fully grasp the situation. Looking around, blinking the dust of the explosion from his eyes, he saw Field Marshal Keitel stagger past. The tall man’s hair stood on end, and his face was plastered with soot as he knelt beside a shapeless form to Brandt’s left. Other officers groaned or cried for help while two stenographers stumbled toward the door, which hung limply by a single hinge.

  Idly, with a sense of curious detachment, Colonel Brandt dropped a hand below his own waist, noticing that his legs were gone. He was dying, he realized, though it was a distant thought. The horrific wound didn’t seem to hurt, a fact that surprised him. He noticed a leather shred, the same color as the heavy briefcase, fluttering in the ruins of the smoke-filled room.

  Then he saw Keitel lurch to his feet, the field marshal’s face distorted with a grief so strong that it penetrated even Brandt’s mortal haze. Rubbing a hand across the blasted skin of his face, the chief of staff tried unsuccessfully to conceal his profound distress. His jaw stretched tight by emotion, the field marshal’s words caught in his throat. He looked down again, as if to deny some madness that afflicted his mind. Finally, haltingly, he spoke.

  “Der führer ist tot,” Keitel declared, his voice as dull as the echoes of the assassin’s bomb.

  General Erich Fellgiebel, standing outside the Speer Barracks, spun around in alarm as the sound of the explosion echoed through the Wolf’s Lair. For a moment his mind froze in awful, incomprehensible fear. What have we done? The question resounded through his mind until he roughly pushed it aside. We have taken back the Fatherland!

  The older general’s mind still churned with the conflict between his military oath and his duty to his country as he saw it. It was a difficult choice, a bitter draught from a cup he’d wished would have passed him by. History might brand him a traitor, an oath breaker, and the thought of his reputation forever stained by betrayal was almost too much to bear. He admired the younger Stauffenberg’s stoicism, his aristocratic certainty that his choice was correct, honorable.

  He watched the dust cloud trailing Stauffenberg’s staff car as the colonel and his driver drove away from the Wolf’s Lair without apparent urgency. His coconspirator would board an aircraft for Berlin within a few minutes. Not so long ago he’d thought of the young officer as almost a son. Now, in the end, it seemed as if their roles had reversed. May God be with him... and with the Fatherland.

  Fellgiebel knew that he had his own mission to carry out, but now that the time had come the general’s will strangely deserted him. He knew he had only minutes to live.

  ‘Treachery! Murder! Help--bring the surgeon!” The cries came from the destroyed staff building, and several officers stumbled into the sunlight, caked with dust and debris. Was Hitler among them?

  Fellgiebel gawked, frozen in place, feeling the pulse pounding in his temples. Had they succeeded? What should he do?

  “The führer is slain!” gasped one general, falling to his knees in shock or despair.

  In that admission Fellgiebel found his strength and darted through the door of the communications center. Idle couriers stared in surprise as the general pulled open a large case, withdrawing several long hand grenades. Holding the fragmentation bombs in one hand, he drew his pistol with the other. The wide-eyed radio operator lurched to his feet, staring at the general in disbelief, while the two operators spun around at the telephone switchboard.

  “Back!” snarled the general, gesturing the men away from the signals equipment. Gun in one hand, grenade in the other, he made a formidable picture of persuasion. Stumbling over chairs, the communications staff scrambled toward the doors.

  The general ran to the switchboard and picked up the telephone speaker, barking a series of numbers into the phone. In another moment, the line was answered with a curt “Was?”

  “Die Brucke ist verbrennt!” barked the panting Fellgiebel, before quickly breaking the connection.

  The signal for success--”The bridge is burned!”--would be spread by the conspirators across the Reich, though Fellgiebel now felt a piercing regret at the knowledge that he wouldn’t be alive to see the effect of those momentous words. Arming the grenade, he dropped it behind the bank of the telephone switchboard.

  Next the general fired four shots from his Walther into the cabinet-size radio, each slug splintering tubes and wiring. Fellgiebel reached out and pitched the huge radio onto its side before firing more shots from his handgun.

  He was still shooting as an SS guard burst through the door. Fellgiebel did not look up as the man’s Schmeisser erupted, stitching a line of bloody holes up the general’s back, knocking him onto the switchboard that would never be used again.

  A second later, the grenade behind the telephone switchboard exploded, shredding the panel into lethal shrapnel, simultaneously ripping into the SS guard and tearing away at Fellgiebel’s unfeeling corpse.

  Belorussia, Soviet Union, 1157 hours GMT

  “Die Brucke ist verbrennt!” crackled a voice over the radio. Hauptmann Paul Krueger ignored it--obviously some code phrase that had nothing to do with him. He had other things on his mind as he piloted his Messerschmidt through the clear summer skies.

  This morning had started out bad and gotten worse. A pitifully few fighters were all that remained of the once mighty Luftwaffe on the Russian front, and most of those were in a sorry state of repair. Some otherwise flyable machines had been stripped for parts to make a few craft airworthy. Ammunition supplies were low, trained pilots were scarce, and the creeping carpet of Slavs kept advancing, like a race of army ants, or perhaps cockroaches. Kill a hundred, and a thousand more crawl out from under rocks.

  That was what his fellow pilots, his officer, and especially his maintenance people kept arguing, until his towering fits of rage shut them up. He could see in their eyes they were afraid of him--and rightly so--but their opinions were secretly unchanged. In his mind, that made them effectively Soviet agents and saboteurs, and he would cheerfully have stood them all up against a wall and shot them dead with his own pistol.

  His mechanic, Willi, had approached him, trembling. The anger on Krueger’s face was obvious, and when Krueger was angry, no one but Willi would approach him. “Hauptmann--I’m sorry to tell you, but your wingman won’t be flying today.”

  His glare was enough to stop Willi in his tracks. “It’s spare parts--like always--I just can’t get enough to keep all the planes in the air. The colonel says you’re not going up today.”

  The inner flame rose within Krueger. “Not going up?” he said with deceptive quiet.

  “The colonel says... not without a wingman...” Willi stammered.

  The back of Krueger’s hand slashed across the mechanic’s face, leaving an angry welt where his ring hit flesh. He turned and strode to his plane. Knowing better than to argue, the young mechanic hurried behind him, starting the preflight ritual. There would be no excuse for Krueger’s plane not to fly.

  Krueger was still angry about the failure. The colonel, the mechanics--they thought they had a good excuse, but they were wrong. There was no excuse. First, Krueger knew better. He was an engineer, and a damned good one--and an even better fighter pilot. He knew what was possible. And second, he was German. He was a member of the master race, and so were the others in his Gruppe. The thought that any number of Slav bastards or their crummy American-made airplanes could stop the German knights of the skies was simply, finally, absolutely unacceptable. But his fellows were weak. He could see it in their eyes. They were defeatist, and if they did not change their a
ttitude, they should be shot.

  The führer himself once said, “If the German people despair, they will deserve no better than they get. If they despair, I will not be sorry for them if God lets them down.” He’d written similar statements in Mein Kampf, a book Krueger had read so many times he’d virtually memorized it. The German people through their führer had been given a chance to fulfill their destiny, but if they did not grasp it, they were already doomed.

  Krueger loved to fly and he loved to kill, and nothing would work out the day’s frustrations like some dead and bleeding Slavs. His anger had dissipated as the ground fell away, and finally there was just himself and his machine, alone in the sky and vigilant on the hunt. And it was not long before the hunter found his game.

  Banking his Messerschmidt Bf-109G through a lazy circle, he glared at the long column of Soviet T-34 tanks extending almost to the far horizon. He sat up high in the cockpit, unlike most of his fellow pilots, who crouched low in case of a stray bullet or piece of flak. He wanted to see, and he wanted the world to understand that he had no fear, not of anything the Reich’s enemies could throw at him.

  Nazi artillery fired, and a few bursts of flame, far too few to suit him, illuminated the landscape. In past years, he might have expected to see some Stukas dropping bombs with pinpoint accuracy among the crowded vehicles, but the Stukas were gone, along with most of the rest of the Luftwaffe.

  He felt a fiery impulse to strafe the column, to shatter Russian bodies with the machine guns and cannon of his deadly fighter, but it was impractical. Few of his shells would have penetrated the heavy armor of the tanks--and the Soviets’ accurate antiaircraft fire would have almost certainly brought him down. Today, with no wingman, it was even more dangerous.

  Perhaps if he’d come across a file of the soft-skinned trucks or horse-drawn carts the Soviets used to transport men and supplies, he’d have taken the chance to shred the target, especially if there were gasoline trucks to explode in balls of smoky flame. But those vehicles would be far to the rear, under skies that had become the undisputed province of the Red Air Force.

  They were overbreeding scum, those Slavs, threatening the purity of the Aryan homeland only by dint of sheer numbers, and their awful winters. Cockroaches, the lot of them. The führer’s legions would defeat them; though, and Krueger would carry an avenging torch to purify the land by fire. From his days in the Hitlerjugend, the Hitler Youth, to his earliest commissioning, Krueger had been the most loyal, the most dedicated of Nazis. When weaker men’s faith faltered, Krueger was inspired by thoughts of secret weapons still to be unleashed--though, truth be told, he could not completely believe in them until he himself sat at the controls. He was too much the engineer for that, priding himself on knowing his aircraft inside and out.

  Krueger’s fighter growled along nearly two thousand meters above the level steppe as he contemplated the column. But the tanks were hardly a new sight. He’d observed nearly as many surrounding Stalingrad during the disastrous winter of ’42, and at Kursk, only a year ago--though it seemed now in the distant past--he’d seen an even greater number. Though he’d destroyed many, sending their occupants to hell where they belonged, there were always more.

  A flash of movement darted through his peripheral vision, and Krueger’s attention immediately focused. Two airplanes flew low, past the front of the T-34 column, toward a clump of woods that lay in the Red Army’s path. Flames blasted from the pointed noses of the aircraft, and a series of explosions walked their way into the grove. Abruptly a jet of red fire shot from the treetops. The German tank lurking there--an old Panzer III, to judge from the turret that tumbled across the ground--had been destroyed.

  Krueger dipped his 109 into a shallow dive. The telltale flashes confirmed his identification--the Soviet aircraft were American-made Bell P-39 Airacobras. The planes were heavily armored and, though slow in a climb, possessed a 37-mm cannon that fired through the hollow prop shaft and had proved ideal for destroying German tanks. Too, they were very fast at low altitude--he’d need all the speed of his dive to catch them.

  But catch them, and kill them, he would. Make them pay, make them die in flames. They had no idea who they were up against, and they would not know until it was far too late for it to matter. He’d killed many, so very many, and he was not done yet.

  The descending Messerschmidt accelerated quickly, dropping toward the tail of the trailing Airacobra as the Soviet attack planes continued in their search for enemy armor--so intently that neither pilot noticed the checkered nose of Krueger’s aircraft growing larger to the rear. At this rocketing speed the 109 was hard to control, forcing Krueger to wrestle the stick with both hands, fighting the buffeting pressure of the air as the ailerons grew stiff, and he closed the distance rapidly. Finally he dropped his flaps to slow down while he prepared to fire. With an idle tickle of surprise he noted the unusually square shape of the P-39’s rudder as it filled his sights.

  The 109’s cannon also fired through the prop shaft, and it erupted when the Luftwaffe pilot pressed the trigger. His eyes followed the tracers into the right wing of the Airacobra. Immediately the Soviet pilot pulled his machine into a hard turn to the left, skimming a hundred feet above the ground. The German followed him inexorably, cannon fire hammering across the length of the wing, up the side of the fuselage, and finally into the cockpit.

  Armored glass surrounded the pilot, but it couldn’t stand up to this kind of punishment. Flashes of flame marked the impact of Krueger’s shells, and as the windshield exploded into fragments the Airacobra wobbled through a roll and quickly plunged, upside down, into a marsh. Smoke and water billowed into the air at the moment of impact, but Krueger’s Messerschmidt was already pulling away, wheeling and climbing as his unblinking stare covered the expanse of sky.

  Steadily gaining altitude, the whine of his engine rising to a shriek, the German ace scanned the horizon until he saw a flash of movement. The second Airacobra had wheeled around, and it too climbed--into the skies over the vast Russian horde. A quick look behind and above showed Krueger that his tail remained free of Soviet fighters, so he turned after the ground attack craft.

  The old Daimler-Benz engine cranked out every one of its nearly fifteen hundred horsepower, pistons pounding, spinning the three blades of the propeller and lifting the German fighter through the air. The sound of the motor remained throaty and strong, though a quick check showed Krueger that the temperature began to rise uncomfortably. Yet, even as he soared upward, the Luftwaffe pilot watched with astonishment as the Soviet fighter climbed away. Always before, these stub-winged airplanes had proved easy prey once they tried to gain altitude, but now this machine rose beyond the range of his guns with arrogant ease. Curiously, there was a telltale stream of brown in the ’cobra’s exhaust--a sign of water injection, which he had never before seen in a P-39.

  Cursing, Krueger pressed his throttle, all but pounding on his control panel in his effort to increase the speed of his desperate pursuit, when the confidence of the Soviet pilot was demonstrated still further. The Airacobra wheeled tightly and dived back toward the Messerschmidt!

  Lips clenched over his teeth in a tight smile, Krueger fixed his sights on the diving Bell. The flashing guns on the Soviet fighter winked first, the tracers falling below the 109 as the Luftwaffe pilot steadied his aim. Finally, a few seconds before collision, he pinched off a quick, deadly burst. His shells exploded at the nose of the Airacobra, and flames immediately burst from the fuselage. As the stubby plane screamed into its final dive, Krueger again got a look at that squared, geometrical rudder, noticeably different from the P-39s he’d fought before.

  A form tumbled away from the wreck as flames and smoke billowed into the air, and in another second the canopy of a parachute snapped into view. Bastard thinks he’s safe now, does he? The Messerschmidt curled into a dive, and Krueger watched the Soviet pilot wriggle helplessly as the 109 roared closer. The German snapped off a few rounds from his machine guns, observing with
grim satisfaction as the bullets shredded the Russian’s jerking body, then left him hanging limply in the harness of his chute.

  Flaming tracers of near misses arced past Krueger, and a dim voice in the pilot’s brain told him that this was ground fire. Now he pulled back on the stick and the 109 clawed its way upward, away from the annoying antiaircraft into the tenuous safety of the sky. Other specks appeared to the east, buzzing closer like angry hornets. At least two dozen fighters of the Red Air Force swarmed toward Krueger, their pilots undoubtedly bent on vengeance. The German shrugged away the prospect of the unequal match, banking toward the west and leveling his flight, knowing that if he held full throttle he should outrun the heavy Ilyushins--unless they, too, had suddenly gained some magical impetus of speed, he thought sourly.

  He recalled an intelligence report he’d read a month or two earlier. Supposedly the Americans had developed an improved version of the P-39, dubbed the P-63 Kingcobra. The more he thought, the more Krueger became convinced he’d faced two of these new models. It was reportedly much speedier than the older machine, and when he remembered the brown exhaust the pilot suspected the American designers had in fact added water injection to the engine. And when will we get new models? he thought angrily. More incompetence, more cowardice. If l were in charge of production, there would be no excuses, he thought with a grim smile.

  Only then did the Luftwaffe pilot look down at the temperature gauge, noting calmly that the needle was creeping toward the red. He veered toward the northwest, toward friendly lines and his airbase. Since he could see or feel no sign that the airplane had been damaged, he suspected that the worn pistons had finally begun to score the cylinders. By the time he crossed into Poland and approached his field, the power plant was gasping and sputtering like a dying man.