Watch on the Rhine lota-7

by John Ringo

  Its knees buckling, the mortally wounded Kessentai slumped to the floor of its tenar, whimpering like a nestling plucked from the breeding pens for a light snack. Pilotless, the tenar followed its default programming and settled gently to the ground, its bulk causing the frozen grass and soil to crunch below it.

  * * *

  As soon as the sound of Rosenblum’s shot carried to him, the waiting Benjamin gave his “clacker,” the detonator for the claymore, a quick squeeze followed by another.

  The first squeeze had been sufficient however, as it was in almost every case. A small jolt of electricity raced the short distance down the wire to the waiting blasting cap. This, tickled into life, exploded with sufficient power — heat and shock — to detonate its surrounding load of Composition Four plastic explosive.

  The C-4 shattered the resin plate containing the ball bearings. Though these did not entirely separate, indeed at least one piece that took off down range consisted of thirteen ball bearings still entrapped together, not less than three hundred projectiles of varying weight and shape were launched.

  The near Posleen had its two front legs torn off almost instantly and took further missiles in its torso. It fell to its face. The slightly farther one, facing inward, was struck by one missile in its haunches and another two in its neck. Both shrieked with surprise and pain. The further Posleen took off, bleeding, at a gallop.

  From either side of Benjamin came two more explosions. He could only hope that those claymores did their work well.

  * * *

  Little Maria Walewska, eleven years old, was trying to sleep, fitfully, against her mother’s warmth. The girl was not awakened by the sound of the alien’s flying machine, whining down to rest about twenty meters away, nor even by the distance muffled shot that was the cause of that.

  Instead, it was the five distinct flashing explosions that came from the other side of the guarded human “encampment” that brought her from her fitful sleep.

  Maria turned her little head in the direction of the explosions, but could see nothing. Something, many things, passed overhead, sounding like a flight of angered bees.

  Then she heard the screaming of her guards as the bees descended to strike.

  * * *

  “Human soldiers!” Benjamin screamed repeatedly as he ran forward, submachine gun at the ready. He had his doubts that the words would be understood, was pretty sure — in fact — that they would not be, since they were spoken in Hebrew. But, understood or not, surely the Poles could distinguish human speech from alien and draw the correct conclusion.

  Benjamin’s first burst of fire went into the nearest of the Posleen guards, the one missing both legs. Its head came apart in a blooming flower of yellow bone, teeth and blood.

  To either side of Benjamin the two other Israeli soldiers likewise screamed as they ran. They, too, fired at any Posleen they crossed, seemingly dead or seemingly hale.

  It was called, “taking no chances.”

  * * *

  “Let’s take our chances and run for it,” shouted a standing Pole. Without waiting for encouragement the Pole took off to the north. He had not run a dozen meters before one of the guard’s railgun rounds exploded his chest. That example was enough to make all who saw fall to the ground and cling tight to Mother Earth.

  * * *

  Nestled against the earth, as soon as Rosenblum saw the God King’s body reel from his shot and the sled begin to settle he turned his attention to other, still-standing, Posleen. Automatically, his right hand stroked the straight pull bolt to chamber another round. The machine gun team, engaging from Rosenblum’s left front, was bowling over the Posleen on that side of the encampment. Many of them, he saw, acted as if they had been wounded and stunned. Despite their erratic movements, the machine gun team scythed them down.

  “Well, volume of fire is their mission, after all,” Rosenblum muttered. “But precision is mine.”

  Whereupon, the sergeant settled his sights “precisely” upon a Posleen guard, then lifting its weapon to shoot at the Poles.

  * * *

  Maria and her mother stared helpless, wide-eyed, and open-mouthed as one of their captors, one already bleeding from a roughly torn hole in its chest, lifted its weapon to spray them. They kept that stare even as the Posleen was struck again by something that traveled with a sharp, menacing crack overhead.

  Taking a .338 Lapua from straight on, the alien was thrown back on its haunches, dead in that instant.

  * * *

  Benjamin stopped not an instant while donating a staggering, disoriented, alien a killing burst from his submachine gun. Still shouting “Human soldiers!” at the top of his lungs, he soon reached the edge of the cluster of humans at the center of the encampment. From here on out, he knew, he would have to control his fire more carefully. He shouted out as much to dimly perceived Israelis to either side of him.

  Reaching the center of the human circle, Benjamin heard one more crack pass overhead — Sergeant Rosenblum in action. The line of tracers the machine gun had been drawing across his front on the far side of the Poles suddenly ceased. Benjamin looked around frantically for other signs of alien resistance but saw none.

  He queried into his radio, “Any of them left?”

  The radio answered, “Rosenblum here. I see none standing… Machine gun team. I think we got them all… Bar Lev here… none standing… Tal… scratch one last on this side.” Benjamin heard a final burst, Tal’s last victim, off to his right.

  He issued a final command, “Perimeter security… Rosenblum come on down,” before settling, exhausted, on his weary, black clad, Israeli ass.

  * * *

  Under the moonlight, a little blond Polish girl stood before him, her hand outstretched as if wanting to touch her deliverer, though fearing to.

  Benjamin smiled and took the girl’s hand. Then he stood, picking the girl up, and called out, again in Hebrew unintelligible to the Poles, “To whom does this little girl belong?”

  Maria’s mother, though still in a degree of shock, came over and took her from Benjamin. She turned away, briefly, before turning back with a sob and throwing her arms around her Hebrew deliverer. Benjamin patted the woman, in no very intimate way, before disengaging.

  Rosenblum, his sniper rifle slung, stood on the deck of the grounded tenar. “We’ve got a live one here,” he announced, unslinging the rifle. “Firing one round.”

  “Wait,” ordered Benjamin, not quite certain as to why he hesitated. Possibly he just wanted to see one of the hated invaders in agony. He threaded his way among the mostly still-prostrate Poles; then joined the sergeant at the alien’s sled.

  Looking down he saw a badly, almost certainly mortally, wounded God King, leaking its life’s blood out onto the deck. The alien moaned, eyes open but poorly focused. From somewhere on the sled itself came the chittering, squealing, snarling and grunting sounds Benjamin presumed to be the aliens’ tongue.

  “Pity the creature doesn’t speak Hebrew, or we Posleen,” Rosenblum observed.

  At that the tenar’s grunting and squealing redoubled for something over a minute. When it subsided the machine announced, “I can now.”

  It was too late, and the exhaustion of combat too profound, for Benjamin to be surprised at this. It had been a war of wonders all along, after all.

  Instead he asked of the alien machine, “What is this one saying?”

  “The philosopher Meeringon is asking you in the name of the Path and the Way to end his suffering.”

  “Philosopher?” Benjamin queried. “Ah, never mind.” He thought for a minute or two before continuing, “Tell this one we will grant his request… for a price.”

  The Israeli waited while the machine translated. “’The demand of price for boon is within the Way,’ Meeringon says.”

  “Good. Ask Meeringon, ‘Why?’”

  * * *

  The body of the mercifully killed God King cooled beside the tenar; Benjamin had been as good as his word.

/>   “Go back to the boat,” he ordered Rosenblum. “The machine says it will carry you without problem. Once there use the boat to get to the friendly side. Don’t risk trying to cross on this machine; they’ll blast you out of the sky on sight. When you get there, find someone higher up than me. Pass the word of what the Posleen have in store. Set up a retrieval for these civilians if you possibly can. We should be along in a couple of days.”

  “Sir, you really should be going, not me. You can explain this better.”

  Benjamin took a look at Maria and her mother, then swept his gaze across the other Poles. “Sometimes, Sergeant, one really must lead from the rear. Now go.”

  * * *

  Just my fucking luck, thought Rosenblum, standing in the freezing fog in a trench on the Niesse’s western bank. Just my luck to run into these fucks. Though he shared the basis of the uniform with the German SS, he did not share a language and felt an almost genetic hatred of them.

  Still, he had to admit the bastards were polite, sharing their food and cigarettes with the half-frozen Jew with the Mogen David on his collar rather than their own Sigrunen. Another SS-wearing man entered the trench. The Germans seemed both pleased and anxious to see the man appear from the fog.

  Thus, unable to communicate with the Germans, Rosenblum was surprised when he heard the new arrival say, in perfect Hebrew with just a trace of accent, “My name is Colonel Hans Brasche, Sergeant. What news have you from the other side?”

  Interlude

  All along the front the fighting had died down. Only at the river’s edge in Mainz was there any appreciable combat action, a steady stream of reinforcing men and aliens butchering each other among the ruins. In part this was due to separation of the combatants by the River Rhine’s broad swift stream. More of it was due to simple exhaustion, and the gathering of what strength remained for the final battle.

  On the west bank, the Posleen put much of their strength into building simple rafts of wood to be towed across by the tenar of their God Kings. Along the eastern bank, the Germans and what remained of European forces under their command worked frantically in the winter-frozen soil to create a new defense in depth for the anticipated assault.

  On the other side of Mainz from the river, thresh and captured threshkreen were gathered in a mass. All along the Rhine, smaller groupings of thresh were gathered outside of artillery or patroling range, one group behind each planned crossing point.

  Only three bridges remained undestroyed over the great river. To the north stood one, guarded by the fortress Ro’moloristen called, after the human practice, “Eben Emael.” To the south, at the newly German again city of Strasburg, old fortresses held the People at bay. In the center, at Mainz where human and Posleen remained locked in a death grip, the bridges also stood.

  Ro’moloristen had gifted his chieftain with a different stratagem for each.

  Chapter 17

  Headquarters, Commander in Chief-West, Wiesbaden, Germany, 1 February 2008

  The twenty-year-old-appearing Mühlenkampf did not quite catch the self-imposed irony. Ten years ago, he thought, selling used cars at the sprightly age of ninety-eight, I would have enjoyed this. Now I am just too old.

  For the word had come down, from the Kanzler through his chief of staff, Generalfeldmarschall Kurt Seydlitz, that the former CiNC-West was deposed and that he, Mühlenkampf, was to relinquish command to his own exec and assume control of the battle in the west.

  Mühlenkampf, personally, thought this unfair. The former commander had held the Siegfried line inviolate for longer than anyone should have expected. That this defensive belt had ultimately fallen was due to nothing more than the sheer weight of numbers the alien enemy had thrown against it. Further, the new field marshal doubted he — or anyone — could have done any better.

  In deference to his new position, Mühlenkampf had relinquished his SS uniform and donned the less ornate but more traditional field gray of the Bundeswehr. Gone were his Sigrunen, gone his black dress.

  Well, no matter. My old comrades have their symbols back; their pride, traditions and dignity restored. What does it matter to me? I wore the field gray for many years before I joined das Schwarze Korps.

  Rolf, the aide de camp, interrupted Mühlenkampf’s reveries. “Field Marshal, you have an appointment in half an hour, at the field hospital for Charlemagne.”

  * * *

  There were no longer enough French soldiers left to keep the hospital filled. Instead, German wounded were being sent for what care and restoration could be provided. Some wore field gray, others the black of the SS. Isabelle found she did not much see a difference. They bled the same color, the same color as had the French soldiers she had cared for. Some wept with pain while others bit through their own tongues to keep from crying out. Perhaps the black-clad ones wept a tiny bit less, but if so she could not perceive much difference.

  The sufferer was the age of her own son, Thomas — fifteen or perhaps sixteen at most. Black clad he was, with a black-and-silver Iron Cross already glittering by his pillow. Below that pillow the boy’s body stopped about two feet short of where it should have.

  Some Boche high muckity muck had come by that morning and pinned it by the legless boy. Isabelle had understood not one word that had been spoken, though she had seen the beginnings of tears in the too-young Boche general’s eyes.

  She barely understood the semi-intelligible moans of the boy now. Only, “Mutti, mutti,” came through clearly.

  Well, so what if he wears black? My own son does now, too. Am I to hate him for that?

  The boy was by far the worst on the ward. None of the doctors expected him to live. And his cries for his mother touched the Frenchwoman’s heart. She picked up a stool and sat down beside him, taking his hand in her own.

  Once or twice during the night the boy’s eyes opened. Yet the eyes were unfocused, he knew not where he was. He only knew he was in pain and that he wanted his mother to stop it.She whispered to him what little German she knew, stroking his fever-wracked face.

  Just before sunrise the boy’s eyes opened for a final time. This last time they focused. Clearly, though in high school French, he said, “Thank you, madame. Thank you for taking my own mother’s place.”

  In Isabelle’s hand the boy’s hand went limp as the eyes lost their focus for the final time.

  * * *

  Weary with fatigue, Thomas De Gaullejac found it difficult to keep his eyes open, let alone in focus. Tracers flying over Mainz still scarred the night, leaving further imprints on his retinae and making focus more difficult still. Lack of sleep and catch-as-catch-can rations did not help matters.

  Across the river, as Thomas knew from Sergeant Gribeauval, Mainz’ last defenders were preparing to cross before their last line of retreat, the sole remaining bridge, was cut. Already, all the wounded practical to carry had been brought back by bridge or ferry. What would happen to the others, those too badly hurt to move, he did not care to think about.

  But his own possible futures the boy had to consider. “Sergeant?”

  “Yes, boy,” Gribeauval answered without taking his night vision goggles away from the firing port from which he scanned the river below and the air above that.

  “Sergeant… if I am hit… and you must leave me behind… ?”

  “Don’t worry about it, son,” said the sergeant, understanding immediately. “We’ll leave nothing behind for the aliens.”

  Thomas felt a little rush of relief. At least his body would not become mere food. “Thank you. One other thing?”

  “Yes?”

  “My mother, Isabelle De Gaullejac? Could you let her know? At least try to find her?”

  Gribeauval answered honestly. “Son, I can’t promise to be alive to promise that.”

  The frigid bunker congealed for a while in silence, while Gribeauval continued to scan.

  “Sergeant?”

  “Yes, Volunteer De Gaullejac?” answered Gribeauval, just a trace of irritation tainting h
is voice.

  “I thought I should let you know; if it falls to me to do so, I am not sure I can drop the bridge with people on it.”

  “Son, if you don’t drop that bridge at the first sign of aliens on it, I’ll shoot you myself,” Gribeauval said. Then, relenting a bit, he continued, “Do you think that any people that might be on the bridge would not prefer a clean quick death to blast, fall or frozen river to being turned into a snack?”

  “I honestly don’t know, Sergeant. I doubt I can speak for all of them.”

  * * *

  Tiger Anna, Oder-Niesse Line, 1 February 2008

  Hans had moved his command vehicle forward to the water’s edge to ensure that Benjamin and his charges made it across the river in safety. He had also moved a battalion of self-propelled 155-millimeter guns to a position far enough forward to provide support for Benjamin for the last part of the trip back. He was unwilling to order men to cross over, given the fate that had befallen most of the patrols sent forward. Nonetheless, a company of the Brigade Michael Wittmann had volunteered to cross over with rubber boats to help the Poles back.

  Though the artillery battalion had been in almost constant employment, Benjamin had managed to bring out better than four fifths of the civilians he had rescued. These were even now heading for a safe place in the rear. Benjamin, naturally, and his three remaining men — Tal had bought it to a random railgun round — were the last to leave. Exhausted, filthy and starved, they were simply carried to the waiting boats by the company that covered the retrieval. The SS men rowed the Jews back.