Steiner said, “Uh-oh, here comes one of the ass—heil Hitler, comrade!”
“Heil Hitler,” the soldier said, raising his hand in a lazy salute. “Leutnant Ludwig Fuchs, Sixteenth Panzergrenadiers, at your service. Always a pleasure to meet Fallschirmjäger. You are the Reich’s greatest heroes.”
The Reich. The Nazi empire that was supposed to endure a thousand years.
Wolff fixed him with a cryptic stare. “Your unit is also well-known.”
“We must compare notes sometime. I feel we have much to teach each other. Such as where my comrades and I can find company this evening. We’ve only just arrived in Genoa. I thought you would make a suggestion.”
“I know just the place, Herr Leutnant,” said Steiner.
“A clean establishment,” the Waffen-SS officer added.
“Ja, it’s—”
“With a fair price.”
“Have you ever heard of Abrielle’s?”
After Steiner gave him directions where the SS would find nothing but an empty, bombed-out tenement, Wolff asked, “Do you have any information about Operation Autumn Mist, Herr Leutnant?”
“Surely, Oberfeldwebel, you already know it was a complete success. Our armies are advancing on Paris as we speak.”
“Of course, but how was such a great victory accomplished?”
“A new super weapon developed by our brilliant Führer.”
Muller couldn’t guess what the weapon might be that could defeat the Allied armies so decisively. He’d all but given up hope of victory. Still skeptical, he wondered what this particular victory was going to cost Germany in the end.
“So we’ll be heading to the Eastern Front.”
“If at all,” Fuchs said. “The same weapon has been deployed against Ivan.”
“This could be the end, Herr Leutnant?” Muller asked. “The war could be over?”
Around the table, the paratroopers’ faces shined with hope. Muller would miss his chance to find himself in combat, but he couldn’t begrudge these men their longing for peace.
The SS officer smiled. “The end is coming very soon, comrades.”
CHAPTER TWO
ORDERS
“Achtung,” Leutnant Klaus Reiser shouted. Attention! “The captain is about to call assembly. Schnell, schnell, you idiots.”
The men groaned from their sleep sacks in the empty warehouse where the Army had billeted them. Most had slept in their uniforms, too drunk to undress.
Otto Steiner rolled onto his side and smacked his lips. “Ja, schnell.” Hurrying up sounded good. He’d do it as soon as he finished his dream.
Greta smiled and reached out to him—
Reiser kicked him in the ribs. “Get up, pig-dog.”
The gefreiter jumped to his feet and made a show of straightening his uniform. “Jawohl, Herr Leutnant. Einsatzbereit.” Yes, indeed, Lieutenant. Ready for action.
Standing behind the lieutenant, Oberjäger Schulte eyed him with a slight smile, his handsome face glowing from his night of wild sex. Jäger Beck, the rifleman the squad had forgotten in the dance hall bathroom, had also managed to rise early.
“Schnell, schnell, Steiner,” Schulte said as if saying, tsk, tsk.
“Ja, Steiner,” Beck chimed in. “Schnell.”
“I should have let you drown in shit in that bidet, Wolfgang.”
“Schnell,” the lieutenant roared at them all.
Reeling with hangover, the platoon flinched and hurried as the lieutenant commanded. Steiner took a swig from his water bottle and spat. Poured more into a tin and lathered his face for shaving.
The last lieutenant had led the platoon in a counterattack among the rocks surrounding the monastery at Cassino. A tank shell punched his head clean off. Hunched over his MG42 machine-gun, Steiner had seen it all. One moment, the dashing young officer exhorted his men to glory. The next, the air vibrated around the space where his head had been.
Steiner would never be able to erase that image from his mind. The headless body wobbling and still holding the upraised Luger, which fired once in final defiance before dropping. He remembered thinking: That’d look great on a propaganda poster. Fight to the death, comrades, and beyond!
Reiser joined the platoon in Genoa and had been itching to get into combat ever since. He struck Steiner as a halsschmerzen, an itchy-necked commander out for glory so he could win the Knights Cross of the Iron Cross medal, the coveted tin necktie. A typical Prussian bastard who felt that anything worth doing was worth overdoing, and that not overdoing was the same as failing.
Commanders like that took big risks in the field. As fanatic as the SS but for personal rather than national glory.
Steiner turned from his mirror. “Any word on why the company is having an assembly, Herr Leutnant?”
“Ja,” sneered Reiser. “We are going to England.”
The paratroopers glanced at each other and smirked at the second-lieutenant’s attempt at humor.
“Did you hear that, kid?” Steiner asked Muller as he finished his shave. “We’ll be drinking Schnapps in London!”
The rifleman looked up from his kit. “What?”
“Maybe the SS arschloch was right. Germany’s enemies all capitulated thanks to a magical weapon the Führer cooked up. Maybe we really are going home.”
Muller nodded glumly, the poor romantic fool.
Out in the courtyard, the band started playing the Horst Wessel Song. The company was mustering. Assembly had started.
“Schnell, schnell,” Steiner said with a grin, wiping his face clean. “Hurry up and wait.” He opened his prized tin of Scho-Ka-Kola and ate a piece of the bittersweet dark chocolate as a make-do breakfast. Then he buttoned his tunic, pulled on his steel helmet, and followed his comrades outside.
Eagle Company, 3rd FJR, mustered by platoon in a neat U-shaped formation as the band played its stirring march. A paratrooper regiment consisted of 2,600 men, comprised of three combat battalions of 850 men each plus battalion headquarters, communications platoon, and battalion supply train. Each combat platoon boasted a strength of forty men organized into three nine-man squads. Sixteen rifles, nine machine pistols, and six machine-guns.
Of course, these numbers only existed on paper now. Combat, illness, and accident had reduced the regiment to just 800 men and Hauptmann Werner’s Eagle Company similarly to sixty combat effectives. These paratroopers stood at parade rest in the cold in their blue-gray Luftwaffe (Air Force) uniforms. Highly disciplined and well trained, they were the best and they knew it.
Steiner thought it comical that he counted among them. He’d volunteered for the paratroopers to impress a girl back in his hometown. Greta Fischer, a big-breasted Aryan beauty who idolized the Führer. Her great bosom heaved and her cheeks blushed as she talked about German boys giving their lives in droves at the front. Steiner didn’t know if it was the mass death or the garish pageantry of it all that aroused Greta’s passion, he didn’t care. He just wanted in on it.