The Americans quieted to watch the tense negotiation unfold. Animal walked away with an armful of chocolate, cigarettes, and dirty magazines.
“If the lieutenant finds out, you’ll be in big trouble,” Steiner told him.
Animal gave him a menacing smile. “Then we’d better not tell him.”
“You know me, comrade. I don’t mess with guys who stand behind me in battle with a flamethrower.”
The big paratrooper laughed and marched to his bunk with his booty.
Steiner called after him, “You still owe me two smokes, though, Schneider!”
“Nice doing business with you, Jerry,” Grillo said.
“Otto.”
“What?”
“My name is Otto.”
The kid nodded. “Otto it is.” Then he held his Luger high for his friends. “Look what I got!”
His sergeant shook his head. “You just got taken, Grillo.”
The Americans shot glances at each other. Then a third of them jumped up and crowded around Steiner, shouting offers while the Red Devils looked on in silent contempt.
CHAPTER SIX
THE DRAUGR
In the mess hall, Oberfeldwebel Wolff devoured a simple meat and vegetable hash and strong coffee. After months of meager rations, it was an exquisite feast. And the coffee was real coffee, with whole milk and sugar.
Having eaten their fill, his squad rested their elbows on the table and lit their Ami cigarettes with a sigh. Wearing a drowsy smile, Wolff stuffed his pipe with his own tobacco and lit it. Damn, the Americans had the best of everything.
Still no word about Battle Axe Company. The sergeant feared the SS had killed or captured them. Another unsolved mystery in this strange day. He’d survived this long by doing his part and keeping his mouth shut. Honest answers would come in due time, and if they didn’t, welcome to Nazi Germany.
The paratroopers lunged to attention as the doors burst open, revealing Oberst Heilman and other German, American, and British officers. The officers marched in a train to the front of the room and spread out.
RAF men followed and set up a projector and screen.
Wolff doubted it was for their entertainment. Finally, he’d be getting some answers. The sight of massive herds of human beings lurching into concentrated shellfire still haunted him.
Then he spotted the SS man among the officers. Wolff’s eyes narrowed.
“Fallschirmjäger,” Heilman said with his customary fierce scowl. “I have news that will come as a shock, but I trust in your composure as soldiers of the Reich.”
Yeah, thought Wolff. Here it comes.
“We are not fighting Ivan,” the colonel went on. “The situation has changed. The circumstances are unprecedented. Our regiment will be joining our former enemies in a drop on Berlin.”
Treason!
Wolff snarled, seething with rage. The Fallschirm erupted in jeers and shouts.
“Silence!” the oberst roared.
Obedience drilled into them for years, the men quieted.
Heilman’s intense gaze roamed among the men. “Operation Autumn Mist was a complete success. And also a complete failure. Aus der traum.”
Whereas the colonel’s roar had quieted them, that last phrase struck the room completely silent. The dream is over.
The rank and file often said it with fatalistic humor. The line had broken, and high command wanted the regiment to jump into the meat grinder? Aus der traum. The company wasn’t getting artillery support? Aus der traum. Withdraw and dig in all over again fifty meters down the road? Aus der traum!
Spoken by a senior officer, however, it was a very serious statement.
Heilman turned to the tall SS officer. “Obergruppenführer Wolfensohn?”
With his platinum hair neatly combed to the side, bright blue eyes, and square jaw, the SS officer looked every bit the Aryan man the Nazi leadership idealized.
Whoever he is, Wolff thought, he’s a fanatic. Not just SS but a senior group leader, an officer with far-ranging responsibility in the paramilitary organization.
It was bastards like him who’d attacked the Battle Axe.
“Good evening, comrades,” Wolfensohn said. “Sieg heil.” Hail victory.
“Sieg heil,” the Fallschirmjäger grumbled.
“To win the war, the Party began work on a wonder drug to make our soldiers invincible. The Overman project. The Führer sent me personally to a research station in Poland to investigate its potential. It was remarkable. I saw a man turn into a savage fighter. Even after he died, he kept on fighting.”
The paratroopers laughed. The SS officer pursed his lips and waited before continuing, “I was not joking. The problem was he lost his humanity and could not be controlled. I assessed the Overman drug unfit to give to our half-million soldiers preparing for Autumn Mist. But too much was riding on the operation’s success. At the Führer’s command, it was widely deployed along the front.”
Wolff gasped with disgust. He believed Wolfensohn. In desperation, the Nazis had used the Wehrmacht as guinea pigs.
“At first, Overman achieved remarkable success. Then our super soldiers began fighting uninfected comrades. They spread in all directions, attacking all who stood in their way. Their hate was so complete they...fed on the corpses. And then those corpses got up and started fighting too. Because the wonder drug is not a drug at all but a carefully engineered organism bred for violence. A pathogenic bacterium that animates its hosts and drives them to kill and feed. That is Overman. A disease that turns men into draugr. Nachzehrer. Gjenganger.”
The officer paused to let that sink in, though Wolff doubted it could. Nobody laughed this time. There was only a stunned silence. The draugr were men who returned from the dead with superhuman strength to feast on flesh and blood. Undead things out of Viking mythology. Legend had it only a hero could kill them. They had to be beheaded and burned until ash.
The nachzehrer was a creature of German folklore that fed on corpses like a ghoul or the souls of the living like a wraith. Only beheading or a stake through the heart killed it. Similarly, the gjenganger, creatures of Scandinavian lore, were reanimated bodies that returned to murder and spread disease.
The Nazi scientists had found a way to combine all three creatures into a single fact. They hadn’t created soldier soldiers, they’d made monsters. Monsters out of stories mothers told their children to force them to properly behave, brought to life to attack the living.
That’s what Wolff had seen lurching out of the River Meuse.
To wage war, men had built incredible machines capable of slaughter, chemicals that made a man’s lungs foam out his mouth, incredible firebombs that burned cities to the ground. In the draugr, they’d taken the next step by turning man himself into a terrifying weapon. But this weapon couldn’t be controlled.
“I see you remain skeptical,” Wolfensohn said. “We shall correct that.”
The projector began rolling film as the lights turned off. Even the toughest veterans among the Fallschirm gaped with wide eyes at the jerky, silent, black-and-white images of men being torn to shreds. Americans and Germans, allied in their undead state, hurling themselves at the living who fled in sheer terror.
In two hard years of fighting in Russia and Italy, Wolff had seen incredible barbarism and every kind of atrocity. He’d never seen anything like this.
“Entmenscht,” somebody muttered. Bestial, inhuman.
Some of the paratroopers were crying. A man vomited his beef and vegetable hash on the floor, followed by another. Then Wolff’s vision blurred, and he realized he was crying as well.
“God in Heaven,” he gasped. “What have we done?”
“Germany is under attack,” Wolfensohn told the horrified soldiers. “The Allies had enough men to stop the draugr’s advance, but every available combat-ready German unit along the front was committed to Autumn Mist. Many of them went east into the Fatherland as far as Cologne and Bonn. We also administered the Overman germ to troops on t
he Eastern Front, many of whom turned west into the Reich. As a result, we have lost contact with Berlin. It has fallen. The Reserve Army has been defeated. The fate of the Führer is unknown.”
Red-faced, Muller jumped to his feet. “You monsters! You fucking monsters!”
Many of the paratroopers echoed his outraged cries.
The jäger had family in Berlin.
Wolff grabbed the kid’s arm and wrenched him back onto the bench. “Alive or dead,” he hissed, “your father wouldn’t want his son in front of a firing squad.”
Muller lowered his head into his hands, sobbing. Wolff gripped the back of his neck and squeezed, hoping to share his strength. Trying to convey to the young soldier that he was with family right now, Germans who would take care of him.
“Achtung,” Oberst Heilman snapped. “We are no longer facing the possibility of defeat but extinction itself. The nation needs you to be strong.”
The colonel’s words calmed them long enough for Wolfensohn to go on. “I assisted the Wehrmacht and Allies in negotiating a cease-fire. Many of our comrades are right now fighting alongside the British and Americans at the Meuse. The government is broken, however, with Party officials giving contradictory orders. Some love the nation and humanity enough to work with our enemies to save it. Others consider us traitors and will do anything to stop us.”
As the SS battalion had tried at the airfield.
“The British dropped on Poland and found the camp where the experiments were taking place,” the SS officer said. “The next step is Berlin. There, we will find a pure sample of the pathogen and specialized antibodies synthesized to neutralize it. From this, we can create a vaccine to prevent its continued spread. Possibly even a cure for those infected not yet crossed into a mortal state. Maybe even a weapon to allow the dead to rest in peace.”
Heilman stepped in again. “For the next three days, you will train for Operation Valhalla. We will certainly see the hardest fighting of the war, but we will gain victory. Failure means the destruction of the fatherland.”
Wolff didn’t have to think about it. Whatever it took to save Germany from annihilation and prevent this disease from spreading, he’d do it. He stood with a fierce cry, raising his clenched fist.
The rest of the Fallschirm rose to their feet with a roar.
CHAPTER SEVEN
TRAINING
At dawn, the Fallschirmjäger awoke to calisthenics and training. Most of the men had to be issued British parachutes, lacking their own. These had four straps, not two like the German counterpart. As a result, the Tommy paratroopers could steer in the air, though it hardly mattered from a jump height of 250 meters.
Muller marched to the top of the wood platform and jumped into space. His stomach lunged into his throat as he fell the three meters toward the hard ground.
He struck the earth and went into a clumsy roll that left him on his back.
Sergeant Wilkins, the British trainer, clenched his fists. “I thought you were a bloody parachute unit!”
“No excuse, Herr Feldwebel,” Muller gasped.
Actually, he had an excellent excuse. Major airborne operations had all but ceased. He hadn’t received parachute training. Today’s Fallschirmjäger were elite light infantry, not true airborne troops.
It didn’t matter. He wanted to go to Berlin.
“Bloody ball of chalk, this is,” the British sergeant growled. “Get in line, craphat! Do it again.”
“Jawohl, Herr Feldwebel!” Muller cried as the squad groaned. They’d exercised, learned, ate, and trained without pause all day on the cold airfield.
“Good lad,” Wilkins said in German, though it didn’t quite translate. The next man went up to make his practice jump.
The Fallschirm didn’t mind hard training. They’d suffered worse in basic training and in combat. Paratroopers were expected to rush into battle, often against terrifying odds. Many times, they hurried to the front without orders, following a latitude for action unique in the Wehrmacht. They fought to achieve their mission objective until shredded, and even then they’d keep going until victorious or dead. For all this, they took appalling losses.
They were lethargic now, however, their once unquenchable spirit diminished. Few of them slept more than a few hours last night, if at all. They’d lost the war. Their country was being overrun by horrible creatures created by their own leaders, and now they had to make a drop on Berlin to stop the spread.
Aus der traum. The dream really was over, replaced by a nightmare.
“Remember,” said Wilkins, who’d fought the creatures in the Ardennes and Poland, “don’t let them get too close, aim for the head, and never, ever hesitate.”
It sounded simple, but it wasn’t. As the British sergeant had explained, this wasn’t going to be sustained, long-range fire between units moving through cover and concealment to pin and flank the other. In other words, what Muller and the other replacements had trained for, what the veterans knew of battle.
This was going to be getting close enough to fire a reliable headshot against an unarmed man loping right at you, a man who might be wearing a steel helmet. Barring that, a bayonet thrust under the chin up into the brain. The enemy could come singly out of nowhere or rush you in vast numbers.
Miss enough times, allow the undead to get close enough, and you’d find yourself both on the menu and drafted into the army of the undead. If you were bitten but left alive, you had anywhere from three to six hours before you turned, the sergeant had told them.
Colonel Adams sauntered over with his British riding crop to inspect the men. “How are they coming along, Sergeant?”
Muller had learned enough English in his year at university to follow the conversation.
“They’re good soldiers, the best the Jerries have, but we already knew that, sir,” Wilkins said. “I’ll make them good paras.”
The colonel twirled the end of his mustache. “They don’t jump anymore. More than one-half of these fellows haven’t even trained for it, I suspect.”
“Morale’s an issue. They’re a spirited lot, but what we told them last night must have come as quite a shock. Three of them took their own lives last night.”
Muller started at this news. He’d heard about it but dismissed it as rumor.
“All the more reason to get them moving,” Adams said. “The fog over the Channel’s lifted. The operation has been moved up. We’re jumping tomorrow night if the weather holds.”
“Christ.” The sergeant flinched. “Sorry, sir. I meant to say, ‘Splendid idea.’”
Weber hissed, “What are you staring at, Muller? You’ve got an odd look.”
“I’m listening to the Tommies talk about the operation.”
“Oh? What are they saying?”
Muller shushed him and listened. Another paratrooper hit the ground and rolled.
“You feel strongly about the three days?” the colonel asked.
“For an operation like this? Six weeks would do nicely, sir.”
“Monty and Eisenhower won’t hold. You’ve got one more morning and afternoon to teach these men our equipment. The party’s on, Sergeant.” The colonel regarded the Germans with cold hatred. “Quite. Carry on, then.”
Wilkins saluted. “Sir,” he said, pronouncing it sah. He turned to the Fallschirm. “All right, once more around, chaps, then you can go get your scoff.”
Muller returned to the top of the platform and made a flawless last jump.
“Well done, para,” Wilkins told him.
“Dankeschön, Herr Feldwebel.” Muller was ready to go to Berlin.
He wasn’t sure he was ready for what he might find when he got there, however.
The city had gone dark. Most of his memories of the capital were troubled. The hard times of his youth, followed by the stifling paranoia of the Nazis. But he had plenty of happy memories with family and friends. Berlin was home.
His father, mother, sister, aunts and cousins lived there. His university professors, the
loud neighbors, the friendly postman, the swearing butcher, the girl he’d flirted with in class but never had the courage to ask out.
Everyone he ever knew back home was possibly either dead or worse, one of those ravenous things.
Whatever he’d find, Muller had to know.
“Excellent progress today,” Wilkins told them. “Your officers will have an update on the operation schedule. Dismissed.”
The paratroopers marched to the mess hall eager for dinner.
“Did you see the lieutenant make his jump?” Beck said. “It looked like a suicide attempt.”
“We should be so lucky,” Schulte said.
The men chuckled. Reiser had particularly hated a British sergeant ordering him around, snapping, “Aufgewärmter kohl war niemals gut.” Take heed of enemies reconciled and of meat twice boiled. An old German proverb.
“The lieutenant isn’t so bad.” Weber nudged Muller. “Now tell us what the Tommies said.”
Schneider growled behind them, “I’ll bet they said we’re going on a fool’s errand to clean up their mess.”
“What do you mean by that, Animal?” Schulte said. “Their mess?”
The big soldier spat on the ground. “The godless Americans made the germ, not us. They dumped it on Berlin and killed everybody.”
Weber nodded. “And then they made it look like we did it.”
Muller shook his head. Schneider and Weber was expressing the weltanschauung, or world view, of many Germans. Everybody hated Germany, and the entire world had united in a global conspiracy run by Marxists and Jewish bankers. The only answer was kadavergehorsam. Absolute obedience until death.
“Why are they sending us to Berlin for a pure sample of the germ if they already have one?” Schulte wondered.
Schneider had no answer for that. “I don’t know how they think.”
Facts and logic didn’t matter when stacked against weltanschauung.
“They didn’t do anything,” Steiner said. “We did it. Get it through your thick heads. We’re the bad guys.”
The men fell silent until Schneider said, “It’s all part of the plan to liquidate the Aryan race—”
The Front (Book 3): Berlin or Bust Page 4
