The Front (Book 3): Berlin or Bust

by DiLouie, Craig

  Steiner ducked his head and rode straight into this fiery hell.

  The draugr were all around, trembling as they screamed in fiery torment, radiating heat like a furnace.

  Then they were gone, and the freezing cold returned.

  Steiner laughed at the surprised faces of the Red Devils on the other side of the gate as he burst through, streaming sparks and smoke from his smoldering jacket.

  Then a paratrooper tackled him, hurling him off his bike to land hard in the snow. Other Brits gathered around to pack snow against his burning uniform. His raw face began to sting.

  “Get this bloody Kraut on his feet,” a man snapped.

  Hands raised him up and held him fast. Steiner stood on wobbly feet, grateful for their support. His jacket was still smoking as he sketched a salute. “Gefreiter Steiner reporting, Herr Hauptmann.”

  “What are you doing here? Where is your unit?”

  “I have it.”

  The officer fixed him with a fierce glare. “You have the Overman serum.”

  Steiner tapped the thermos dangling from his neck. “Ja. Here.”

  The Brit’s stiff upper lip broke into a smile. “Lieutenant Clarke!”

  Another officer rushed over and stomped his feet as he saluted. “Sah!”

  “Inform Colonel Westall we have the serum.”

  “Sah!”

  “Then kindly ask the jockeys to warm up their planes. We’re going home.”

  The paratroopers let up a ragged cheer and dragged Steiner past some big flak guns toward one of the hangars, where they set him on the cold floor with some blankets. Somebody gave him a steel cup of hot tea, and then they left him alone.

  Reeking of smoke and his face still stinging and flushed, he sipped the tea and watched the RAF crews ready their big transport planes. He was a hero now, which made sense in this insane world but not in any other.

  Setting down his cup, he curled up and went to sleep, hoping that when he awoke, he’d be back in the real world.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE

  THE SIGNAL

  Sergeant Wilkins emptied his carbine into the draugr falling upon Muller. The German maid shrugged off the bullets and knelt next to the wounded soldier.

  She ran her talons lovingly along his cheek before leaning in with her mouth yawning open as far as it would go.

  He rapidly popped his last ten-round magazine into the ammo well and chambered a round—

  The woman’s head burst like a crushed grape. The body followed, keeling over into the splattered snow.

  Wilkins looked around. He hadn’t fired. The German sniper hadn’t either.

  More crashing gunfire brought down the rest of the ghouls.

  He scanned the ruined houses for his saviors.

  “Coming out!” somebody called.

  A squad of paratroopers in red berets emerged from the nearby trees with smoking Stens.

  A wiry para wearing sergeant’s stripes crouched in front of him. “I’m Sergeant Bayley. Who the devil are you, and what are you doing here?”

  “Sergeant Wilkins,” he rasped.

  “You’re one of Colonel Adams’ commandos, aren’t you?”

  Wilkins nodded. “You arrived in the nick of time.”

  “We were in the neighborhood and heard the motorcycle and shooting,” Bayley said. “That got our attention. When we heard, ‘Waho Mohammad,’ we made a dash for it.”

  Wilkins grinned. Anytime, anywhere a paratrooper heard the war cry of the airborne, they came running. This time, it had saved his life.

  Bayley tilted his head at the Germans lying on the road. “And what about these men? Fallschirmjäger?”

  “That man there has a sample of the Overman serum. We need to get him to the airfield. Can you help?”

  The paras already were. One poured sulfa onto Muller’s gut wound and taped a compress over it. Another helped Schulte sit up and offered him a canteen.

  “That’s why we’re out here on recon patrol,” Bayley told him. “With all the gunfire going on around the city, we were starting to wonder if any of the poor sods would make it. They’re nails, Sergeant.”

  The slang was short for, ‘tough as nails.’ In this case, tough as Red Devils, a nod of respect for a worthy adversary.

  “They are,” Wilkins agreed. Those that were still alive, anyway. If they were nails, the draugr were the hammer.

  Just as he’d be Lieutenant Reiser’s, if he ever met that bastard again.

  No need to tell Sergeant Bayley about the German officer’s attempted murder. Relations between the British, Americans, and Germans were complicated enough already, their alliance fragile. Wilkins would harbor his grudge until later, if there was a later. For now, he had to complete his mission.

  “Can you walk?” Bayley said. “Your leg’s a mess, mate.”

  Wilkins grit his teeth at the prospect. “I could use some assistance, if you don’t mind.”

  The paratroopers hauled him and the Germans to their feet. Bayley led the way with his Sten, followed by a cheerful Welshman who supported Wilkins as he hobbled along. Another two of the men hauled the groaning Muller between them. Schulte and the rest of the squad brought up the rear, the sniper stumbling and looking pale.

  “Hang in there, Yohann,” Wilkins said, wincing at every step that sent pain ripping through his calf. “You can make it.”

  At the sound of a Red Devil speaking German to Fallschirmjäger as if they were comrades, the Welshman shot him a sidelong glance. “War makes strange bedfellows, eh?”

  Wilkins could only chuckle. “It certainly does, mate.”

  A series of flares popped into the air over the nearby rooftops.

  “That’s the signal,” Bayley said. “The battalion’s moving out.”

  Wilkins chewed his lip. Either somebody else had made it through with the serum, or command was writing off the operation. “We’d best make haste.”

  He still had his documents to deliver. They might be vital.

  “Don’t you worry, Sergeant,” said the Welshman. “They’re not leaving without me.”

  As they cleared the ruins of the residential district, the sandbagged walls of Tempelhof Airport came into view. Bayley halted his motley squad and produced an animal call. The Red Devils answered.

  They moved out again, passing through a camouflaged gap in the wall. Then they were on the airfield. Big flak guns aimed at the gray sky. Hangars, one of them crushed by bombs. Fuel lorries and the bodies of Luftwaffe who’d held the airport to the last. The Skytrooper planes lay stacked on the runways, ready to take off. Platoons were assembling in front of them with their gear. Luftwaffe prisoners filed onto one of the planes, hands in the air.

  “The Yanks already bugged out after taking mass casualties,” the Welshman said, ever cheerful even as he shared this disheartening news. “Their op was a total botch job. Dropped right on top of a herd of the buggers. Their airfield wasn’t fortified like ours. They just couldn’t hold it, the poor bleedin’ bastards.”

  Minutes later, Wilkins sat on the ground wrapped in a blanket and drinking hot tea while a medic fussed over his leg. Only now did the stress of his ordeal catch up to him, giving him a trembling fit.

  He’d used up quite a few of his nine lives today.

  Captain Wesley questioned him at length about his operation and its results. It was a long story.

  “And then I shot Hitler in the face,” he said with a grin.

  “Very good,” Wesley sniffed. “I think I’ve got the gist of it, Sergeant. You can tell me the rest later. We’ll be moving out momentarily.”

  Wilkins went on grinning after the captain left. Of course, the man wouldn’t believe he’d taken out der Führer himself. It was a story nobody would really believe except maybe Colonel Adams and of course Jocelyn.

  No matter. He knew he’d done it.

  He’d just wanted to hear himself say the words aloud.

  No matter how chuffed he was, in the big scheme, he knew, it didn’t matt
er. Revenge was sweet, but in this case, it didn’t change the game. The draugr had no leader. They didn’t fight for ideology or resources or territory. They fought for its own sake because that’s what they were programmed to do.

  Programmed by the Nazis. By Hitler’s order.

  Yes, revenge was sweet.

  Thunder to the north, the rolling roar of a pitched battle commencing.

  “Captain!” he called after Wesley.

  The officer turned. “Yes, Sergeant? What is it? We’re quite busy.”

  “That’s the Germans shooting. They’re in action.”

  “Yes. What of it?”

  “They’re alive. The planes should stand down until they get here, eh?”

  Captain Wesley snorted with amusement. “Carry on, Sergeant.”

  Wilkins gaped at the officer’s back as he strode off across the tarmac. The battalion had the serum. They were leaving. They would not spare a man nor even a single bomb or bullet from an escort plane, which were needed at the Meuse.

  As for the Fallschirmjäger, they would have to fend for themselves.

  Those men were home, right smack in the middle of the mess their leaders had created, and they could clean it up.

  One could even say there was a bit of justice to it.

  Wilkins looked over at Muller shivering in his blankets. Schulte was mopping sweat from the boy’s forehead. Beyond them, Steiner sat huddled in his charred jacket, a vacant smile plastered on his face. They’d sacrificed everything to get the serum here. The rest of the regiment out there, they were sacrificing right now.

  No, leaving them behind wasn’t justice. That was old thinking. There were no sides anymore, only humans fighting to survive against a rising tide of undead. The Red Devils wouldn’t leave their countrymen to die, nor the Americans. They should treat the Germans the same. If they didn’t, they’d never truly be allies.

  Telling that to the likes of Captain Wesley would be a wasted effort. As with his tale about shooting Hitler, the man simply wouldn’t believe it.

  A squad of paras arrived to hustle them onto their designated transport.

  Orders were orders. They were leaving Berlin.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR

  BATTLE CIRCLE

  The Belle-Alliance-Platz was a circular treed plaza named after the Battle of La Belle Alliance, what the Prussians called the Battle of Waterloo. Large derelict tenements overlooked the 100-meter-wide plaza, some of them heavily damaged by bombs, one of them smoking from a dying fire.

  Three major avenues fed into the plaza from the north. Another road wrapped around the buildings’ southern side. That made four entrances and exits, all of which the Fallschirmjäger barricaded with furniture plundered from apartments. Overall, it wasn’t a bad defensive position for the regiment to regroup and hole up until Eagle Company arrived with the serum.

  Oberfeldwebel Wolff looked around and wondered how quickly they could move out. He’d only arrived minutes ago, but the sporadic gunfire had become a constant chatter at the entry roads. He was here with the Overman serum safe in its canister looped over his shoulder; the regiment should leave now while it could.

  He did a quick count and estimated the 3FJR only had around 200 men left. They faced a hard fight getting to the airport.

  Some of the men wore bandages. They were wounded. Worse, bitten. As good as a death sentence. Their ammunition had been taken away. They carried spades and bayonets. Before they became ghouls, they were resolved to die fighting for their comrades.

  Leutnant Reiser returned glowing. “The oberst is very pleased with us, Herr Wolff.”

  As long as he had the serum, the regiment could accomplish its mission. “That is good, Herr Leutnant.”

  “Very pleased. You understand what this means.”

  “Verstanden, Herr Leutnant.” Even now, the lieutenant was gunning for an Iron Cross, though medals no longer meant anything.

  “Ja, we are moving out now to the airport. You will have your own honor guard.” A special squad that would protect him. “As a hero of the Reich.”

  “Jawohl, Herr Leutnant.”

  The paratroopers packed up their gear and formed up for the march. Snow fell in big flakes. They fluttered like moths onto Wolff’s uniform and left gray smudges. It wasn’t snow. It was ash from some distant fire. The ash of the Reich.

  There was no more Reich, only the Fallschirmjäger. Only his duty.

  He added, “Any word from Eagle, Herr Leutnant?”

  “Nein,” Reiser said, still strangely cheerful. “We will hope for the best but assume they did not survive.”

  Wolff had lost half his squad in the pell-mell flight from the Reichstag. More good men he’d trained and mothered and led to their deaths.

  “Maybe they didn’t have any Englishman to put out as bait,” he said.

  The lieutenant cackled. “Herr Wilkins is a hero of the Reich as well, in his own way.”

  Wolff glowered. “Sometimes, Herr Leutnant, you really are a pig.”

  He instantly regretted saying it, especially with Beck, Weber, Braun, and Engel within earshot. As a paratrooper, his training placed supreme value on obedience and respect for superior officers.

  Reiser only chuckled. “And you are too sentimental, like an old woman. If the company is dead, they died for a good cause. Look around you. We can stop this nightmare and rebuild the German nation. There is no greater cause to die for.”

  Wolff could think of one, which was dying for the men who fought at his side, this type of self-sacrifice being the only noble act left in this war. But the point was taken. Eagle had died for something, not just a hill or a crossing.

  They’d died to save the human race.

  He was just tired of it all. The war’s endless degradation, waste, and horrors. A part of him longed for his own warrior’s death. His own self-sacrifice.

  “There isn’t a greater cause,” he agreed as the first of the planes hummed overhead.

  The paratroopers looked up as the Skytroopers reached for the sky. The giant winged beasts climbed the air, gaining altitude as they headed northwest.

  Back to the North Sea. Back to the United Kingdom.

  One by one, the paratroopers lowered their gaze to the ground. The Americans had already evacuated. Now the British were leaving.

  The Fallschirmjäger weren’t going anywhere.

  “They’re coming back for us, right, Herr Oberfeldwebel?” Beck said. “Right?”

  Wolff spat and said nothing. The English, it seemed, themselves weren’t above cruel pragmatism.

  The paratroopers buzzed with this realization. Officers hurried to the regimental headquarters for information and orders. The buzz rose to shouts of anger and panic.

  “Betrayed,” Reiser snarled. His hand twitched near the Luger in its holster, but there was nobody to shoot this time, nobody to punish.

  “That means Steiner or Muller made it,” Wolff said. “Or one of the other squads carrying the serum. Somebody in our platoon survived.”

  No greater cause, he wanted to tell the lieutenant. Now it’s your turn to die for it. Expendable, used up, and thrown away like so many others since this war began.

  He looked around at the paratroopers. The wave of anger and panic that rippled through the regiment’s survivors had spent itself. The men’s faces hardened. They were on their own, but it wasn’t the first time.

  And Wolff’s cause still existed. It was right here, with these men.

  “I expected this all along,” Weber said. “It’s all a global plot—”

  “Silence!” Reiser fumed. “There is nothing we can do except wait for the oberst to issue new orders.”

  The gunfire at the barricades intensified. There was nobody else in the entire city for the draugr to fight. The separate actions by the Allied invasion force had drawn the ghouls to different flashpoints, and now they were consolidating.

  Here, at the Platz.

  “We will hold,” Reiser said. “We’ll butcher the lot o
f them and take the city.”

  The riflemen grinned at their lieutenant’s pluck. Wolff nodded dutifully, thought he knew the truth. They’d be dead by the end of the day.

  Pluck they had. What they didn’t have was enough ammunition.

  The splashes of gunfire at the barricades escalated to a steady rolling thunder. Through the plaza’s bare trees, Wolff spotted a special weapons platoon setting up KURZ 81-mm mortars. The first shells whumped out of their tubes.

  More shooting at the rear. They were now surrounded. The battle had become what the soldiers called a kessel. A cauldron battle. Encirclement. Like at Stalingrad.

  The survivors of Eagle Company tensed as the shooting went on. The gunfire slackened as units replaced others on the line.

  Soon, Wolff thought. Either they’ll stop coming, or we’ll run out of bullets.

  “Permission to go to the front,” he said.

  “Go,” Reiser said with disgust.

  Wolff wasn’t a hero of the Reich anymore. He dropped the canister of Overman serum on the ground and made his way through the milling paratroopers to reach the nearest barricade. Fallschirmjäger sat on the ground writing farewell letters, sharing their provisions, enjoying a final Ami cigarette before they took their turn on the line. An entire platoon passed bottles they’d plundered, singing the Horst Wessel like their lives depended on it.

  The fighting at the barricade was intense and deafening. The paratroopers crouched behind their stacks of household furniture, pouring lead into the lurching hordes that filled the avenue.

  And beyond them came the red banners, eagles and the hooked crosses of swastikas. The SS were coming. Hitler’s bodyguard. Past the shambling throng, they marched in neat formation in their black uniforms, rank after rank bristling with bayonets, grunting their chant.

  Sie, sie, sie—

  No, he realized, it wasn’t sie they were chanting, the word for you.

  It was sieg.

  Victory.

  Taking his time, Wolff found a place on the line behind a beautiful old writing desk and propped his FG42’s bipod on it. The draugr continued their inexorable advance, dying by the dozen but steadily gaining ground. A mortar round landed in their midst, sending bodies cartwheeling through the air.