Or, of course, it might not. But he was sure of one thing. He didn’t need to worry about standing in a bread line. Even if peace broke out, whoever ran the Reich would need bomber pilots. Like security men, bomber pilots were a vital part of the modern state.
Arno Baatz peered out a second-story window in Münster’s Rathaus. Just the quickest of glances, and then he pulled away. The soldiers out there wanted to kill him—and the rest of the Wehrmacht men and Waffen-SS soldiers and prison guards and secret policemen still holding this part of town against the traitors and bandits who’d murdered the Führer.
Somewhere out there was Adam Pfaff, with his goddamn gray-painted Mauser. The stinking son of a bitch sneaked away even before everybody knew for sure Hitler had died. So did two other men from Baatz’s squad. He wanted to kill them, and he didn’t want them to kill him.
He glanced down at the swastika armband he wore. Part of him wished he could take it off and slip away himself. Things didn’t look good for National Socialist supporters in Münster. The perimeter kept shrinking. Arno had always backed authority. Now, though, he looked to have guessed wrong about who authority was going to be.
A 105 fired not far away. The shell slammed into a building his side still held. Part of the stonework front fell in. But an MG-42 kept snarling from the ruins. A lot of the people who still wore the swastika were stubborn indeed.
Which looked to mean they would wind up stubborn and dead. No reinforcements had come in; the other side held all the territory around Münster. Arno glanced down at the armband again. If he took it off so he looked as if he could belong to either side …
If he did that and the SS caught him, they would shoot him out of hand. One redheaded bastard with a Schmeisser specialized in executing anyone suspected of halfheartedness. The way he shot people, they took a long time to die.
So if you were going to do a bunk, you had to make sure you made it. Otherwise, you were better off sticking tight. The traitors were out to kill the people still loyal to the Party, yes, but they weren’t especially out to kill them slowly.
That 105 blasted the nearby building again. More of it collapsed. A fire sent black smoke into the sky. The MG-42 barked more defiance at the men who’d chosen the Committee for the Salvation of the German Nation.
An SS top sergeant stomped into the room where Arno sheltered. “Come on with me,” he said. “We’re going to counterattack. We’ve got to take out that 105. It’s slaughtering us.”
Arno gulped. If the traitors had two brain cells to rub together, they’d protect their artillery with machine guns and machine pistols. Any try at taking it out would be suicidal. He couldn’t say that, not unless he wanted to meet his own side’s redheaded executioner. He did ask, “How good do you think our chances are?”
The SS man just looked at him. With those gray eyes and rocky cheekbones, the fellow might have stepped straight off one of Mjölnir’s recruiting posters. “We’ve got to try,” he said, which told Baatz everything he needed to know. “They’ll kill us for sure if we don’t get rid of it. If we do, we can hold out a while longer.”
Worst of it was, he was right. Arno fell in behind him. They went through the Rathaus, combing out men who could join in the assault. When they had a couple of squads’ worth, the SS noncom seemed satisfied. Arno still didn’t think the force was big enough. He kept his mouth shut. He had no more idea than the soldier from the Waffen-SS about where they could scrape up more fighters.
They were about to move out when two shells from the 105 slammed into the Rathaus’ upper floors, one after the other. Debris thundered down in front of the doorway through which they’d go. A great cloud of dust and grit rose. Arno coughed and rubbed at his eyes. He suddenly felt grateful to the SS man. He was pretty sure one of those rounds had burst on or in the room where he’d sheltered. If he hadn’t vacated, he’d probably be chopped meat right now.
“Come on! Follow me!” Himmler’s superman charged out through the dust. The others poured after him. No matter how solid the Rathaus was, it seemed more a trap than a shelter now.
Bullets sparked off paving stones and cracked by as the Germans on the other side spotted them on the move. One man from the strike force went down with a horrible screech. The rest kept running for the nearest pile of rubble behind which they could throw themselves.
Arno belly-flopped down in back of some bricks that had belonged to a chimney. The explosion that knocked them off their building hadn’t blasted them all apart. They might even keep gunfire off of him … till he had to move again, anyhow.
He glanced over his shoulder. Yes, that was fresh smoke he smelled. The Rathaus was burning. Whatever happened to him out here, it wouldn’t be so bad as roasting back there.
All the same, he felt as naked as a de-shelled snail in a Frenchman’s garden. Out of the corner of his eye, he saw motion ahead. That had to be an enemy. He snapped off a couple of quick shots. The other guy went down, either hit or diving for cover.
Schmeissers and a couple of captured Russian PPDs chattered. While the men with them made the traitors keep their heads down, the others, Arno among them, scurried ahead. He’d just found new rubbish to shelter him when the 105 started smashing up some more of the Rathaus. Whichever side won this fight, Münster would have some rebuilding to do when it ended.
“Forward!” No one seemed to have issued the Waffen-SS man any doubts. Forward they went, and then forward again. Downtown Münster had plenty of ruins and wreckage to hide inside and behind. They lost a couple of men. They shot a few men fighting for the Salvation Committee.
That worried Arno. The guys on the other side had to know they were attacking. If those guys weren’t dopes—and not all of them would be—they had to have a pretty fair notion of where the loyalists were heading. If they knew that, they could shift troops to stop them.
Baatz was about halfway to the 105 when he stopped caring. He couldn’t have said why, but he did. He wanted to make it to the gun. He wanted to take out the crew. Whatever happened next … would happen. He might get back. He might not. Why borrow trouble?
He shot a traitor, then quickly ducked down behind some shattered stonework. The enemy soldier’s buddy rattled the wreckage with a burst from his submachine gun, but he didn’t hit Arno. The 105 boomed again. More of the Rathaus fell in on itself. More of it fell into the flames, too. Sure as hell, coming out here was better than staying back there would have been.
The attackers were taking flanking fire now. No other loyalist bands seemed to be in the neighborhood. They soaked up more losses, but they kept advancing. Arno had no idea whether the other side’s medics patched up wounded loyalists or cut their throats.
Blam! Now Arno knew exactly where that goddamn 105 sat. When he slithered around the next corner, he was almost sure he could fire at the artillerymen who served it.
Before he could, a Panzer IV clanked around that corner, heading straight at him. “Fuck you!” he shouted—it wasn’t fair that the stinking thing should be flying an Imperial German flag on its radio aerial.
Its cupola was open, the commander looking out. Arno fired at him. The panzer man tumbled inside, whether hit or not Arno didn’t know. The SS sergeant flung a grenade, hoping it would follow the traitor in the black coveralls down through the cupola. But it bounced off the glacis plate and burst harmlessly on the paving. The bow machine gun sparked to life. Arno dove for cover.
“Come on, Adi! Step on it!” Hermann Witt shouted.
“I’m doing the best I can, Sergeant,” Adi Stoss answered. “Some of these streets are narrower than the panzer, dammit.”
From everything Theo could see, Adi was right. Like so many medieval towns, Münster hadn’t been built with motor vehicles in mind. And it really hadn’t been built with panzers in mind. Every time Adi had to make a tight turn, he bit out chunks of buildings that fronted the street too closely.
None of which cut any ice with the panzer commander. “Never mind the best you can. Just get t
here!” he said. “That’s the best-sited gun we’ve got. It’s knocking the shit out of them. We can’t let the goddamn Nazis kill the crew or smash the breech block.”
The same message dinned in Theo’s earphones. He hoped it was genuine, and not leading them into a trap. Both men who backed the Salvation Committee and their foes used the same radio sets, the same frequencies, the same communications doctrine. Each side did its best to confuse the other, and each side’s best seemed plenty good.
He’d used the panzer’s bow gun more than he ever had in Russia. Fighting in a city turned out to be like that. He’d used the firing port in the side of the hull, too, keeping troublemakers at a distance with his Schmeisser.
He worried that somebody would toss a Molotov cocktail out a third-story window, say, and into the fighting compartment through the open hatch atop the cupola. That was one more thing you didn’t need to fret about so much in Russia. Steppes and farm villages didn’t grow three-story buildings.
One more corner. “There they are!” Witt yelled from the cupola. He yelled again a moment later, this time in pain. He fell back into the panzer like a red squirrel diving into a hole in a spruce. Then he gave another yell: “Canister! Blow the shitheads away!”
Theo was already working them over with the bow machine gun as the round slammed into the breech. He knocked down a rather plump fellow with a swastika armband just before the enemy soldier could jump behind a stone wall. Then he swept the machine gun to the left and hit the guy who’d thrown a grenade. That fellow was close enough for Theo to make out the SS runes on his collar patches. Theo’s lips peeled back from his teeth in a savage smile. He’d always wanted the chance to shoot some SS men. Now he had it.
And then the canister round swept away everything in the first hundred meters of its path that might have been alive. He’d already seen the horrible things canister did to mere flesh and blood. That the flesh and blood out there wanted to kill him made him feel a little better about using it so, but only a little.
That some of the flesh and blood out there had hurt one of the rare men he counted a friend made him feel much better about using it so. He turned to look back over his shoulder and asked, “How the hell are you, Hermann?” Anxiety made his voice break like a fourteen-year-old’s.
Witt gave back a grin almost as much a death’s head as his panzer man’s emblem. “My God! It talks!” he said, and Theo decided he wasn’t going to parley with the Grim Reaper right this minute. But his left hand was clenched around his right upper arm, and bright red blood dribbled out between his fingers. “Flesh wound,” he went on. “I’m pretty sure it missed the bone. I can wiggle my fingers and all.” As if to prove it, he shaped a filthy gesture with his right hand.
Adi spoke in tones of professional interest: “Will they award you a wound badge for stopping one when you’re fighting other Germans?”
“Now you can ask me if I give a fuck,” Witt answered. “Lothar, help me get a wound bandage on this thing. Maybe you’d better stick me, too. It hurts pretty good. If the morphine leaves me too dopey to run the panzer, I figure you jerks can probably cope for a while. In the meantime, keep going till we can shoot at the Rathaus. We’ll help that 105 blow up the rats in it.”
“You probably aren’t right at death’s door,” Adi said, which perfectly echoed Theo’s thought. “And blowing up the Rathaus here will be a pleasure. Oh, you bet it will.”
He’d grown up around Münster, or maybe in it. Theo knew that much about his tight-lipped crewmate. Adi’d had to do something, well, far out of the ordinary to need to make it into the Wehrmacht, too. After all this time together, Theo still wasn’t sure what that might have been. Whatever it was, did records of it linger in the Rathaus?
If they did, no wonder Adi wanted to help knock the place flat. When the panzer edged up behind a heap of smashed junk that let its gun bear on the Rathaus, the driver whooped: “Hey-hey! It’s already on fire!”
“We’ll help it along,” Witt said, and then, “Hurry up with that shot, Lothar. This business of stopping a bullet isn’t a whole lot of fun.”
Theo looked down at his left hand. He was missing a finger there. He had but didn’t particularly rejoice in a wound badge. He’d caught a French bullet, not a German one. As far as what they did, the difference in nationality didn’t seem to matter.
Lothar Eckhart got Witt bandaged and injected. Then the panzer’s big gun started pouring HE shells into the Rathaus. Each burst turned more of the fine old building into fine modern junk. Several of the bursts started fresh fires, too. With hot metal fragments tearing through what probably amounted to cubic kilometers of paper, that was anything but surprising.
As the fires grew and spread, men in Feldgrau and others in black started scrambling out of the Rathaus. The panzer crew fired more HE rounds at the doorways: the range was too long for canister. Theo added bursts from the bow gun every now and again. Eckhardt chimed in with some from the coaxial machine gun in the turret, too. Neither one of them felt any great warmth for the diehard National Socialists.
Diehards they might be, but they did die. Some of them lay very still after they got shot. Others thrashed like a cat hit by a car. Theo concentrated on turning thrashers into still ones. He was putting them out of their misery—and he was making sure they wouldn’t get up and start shooting at the panzer again.
Some of the Nazis made it to piles of brick and stone and God knew what in front of the Rathaus or off to the side. They did shoot back. Every once in a while, a rifle round would ring off the hardened steel of the Panzer IV’s front plates. If no one was standing up in the cupola, though, you could fire rifles at a panzer from now till doomsday without doing worse than chipping the paint.
Theo glanced back at Hermann Witt again. “How are you, Sergeant?” he asked.
“Well, I’ve been better, but the morphine’s working, so I’ve been worse, too—a few minutes ago, say.” Witt’s voice seemed to come from far away, but he didn’t just close his eyes and go to sleep, the way a lot of people who got stuck did. He might not be thinking any too fast, but he was still thinking straight. After a longish pause to work things through, he went on, “I’ll be laid up for a while. Till you clowns get a new commander, Adi, I’m putting you in charge.”
“Me? That’s got to be the dope talking, Sergeant.” Adi sounded amazed and horrified at the same time.
Witt shook his head as if in slow motion or underwater. But he sounded very sure as he answered, “Nah. Theo doesn’t want it”—which was an understatement, as he had to know—“and you’re both senior to Lothar and Kurt. So tag—you’re it.”
“But—” Adi protested helplessly.
“I know what you mean. That won’t matter, either, not under the Salvation Committee. Or it better not. So do what he tells you, you lugs,” Witt said. Theo nodded. He didn’t think the Salvation Committee would act stupid in the same ways the Nazis had. If it did, well, the country would need a revolution against the revolution.
When you were a civilian in a town where they were fighting a civil war, what could you do but hunker down and hope you didn’t get killed? Sarah Bruck and her parents did exactly that. They got hungry. The power didn’t always stay on. But they lived far enough away from the Rathaus and the cathedral that only a few stray artillery shells came down anywhere close by.
Sarah looked at the hole one of them made in the street with amazement. Her father eyed it with something more like amusement. “Believe me, dear, you put that next to the crater a five hundred-kilo bomb makes and you’d never even notice it,” Samuel Goldman said.
“I believe you. I’ve seen those, too,” Sarah answered. “But this isn’t a little hole in the ground even if it doesn’t have a bigger one next to it.”
He considered that with professional deliberation before nodding. “Mm, you’re not wrong,” he said, as if giving her the accolade.
He went out later that afternoon. He wouldn’t say where he was going. He came back carry
ing a cloth sack. When he opened it, he took out tinned meat, tinned cabbage, tinned potatoes, even tinned bread. “Where did you get this stuff?” Sarah gasped.
Father shrugged. “I have a few things saved for a rainy day. This looked rainy enough to use one or two.”
“But—” Sarah said.
“But—” her mother echoed. Hanna Goldman found words to add to that: “How could you have kept them, Samuel? How many times did the Gestapo search the house? Four or five, at least.”
Samuel Goldman looked professorial again: professorially scornful. “What do blackshirts know about black-figure potsherds? Not much! Not even enough to steal them. But there are still a few people here in town who know a little more.”
Sarah thought she remembered that black-figure pots were older than their red-figure counterparts. She wasn’t even sure of that; it might have been the other away around. So she knew very little, if at all, more than the Gestapo men did. What looked like a broken chunk of a vase hadn’t even seemed worth lifting to them. Evidently, that was their mistake.
“Did you get anything close to what they’re really worth?” Mother asked.
He shrugged. “I got enough to keep us eating for a few days—maybe till the fighting dies down and we can spend money instead. The way things are right now, that’s good value for what they’re worth, especially when the other choices are nothing, nettle soup, and dandelion salad.”
Hanna Goldman had no answer for that. Neither did Sarah. Her clothes hung looser on her every day. Her belly growled all the time. At bottom, you were an animal. When the animal started starving, it wanted to eat, and it didn’t care how it got fed.
The animal inside Sarah was much happier after they opened some of those tins. Her father still seemed discontented. “I should have got some tobacco, too,” he muttered. His pouch was empty, and he couldn’t go hunting cigarette butts unless he wanted someone to shoot him.
Last Orders: The War That Came Early Page 37
