“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 of 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.
The most unnerving thing about them was they didn’t know fear.
That and their blazing white eyes.
He lined up his first shot using the barrel’s iron sights and squeezed the trigger. The semi-automatic rifle fired a single round that obliterated a ghoul’s face.
Wolff fired again, again. One by one, he and his comrades thinned the draugr ranks, only to face another eager wave.
The SS were close now.
“SIEG! SIEG! SIEG! SIEG!”
They broke into a run as they charged under their eagles and swastikas. The front ranks went down. The rest swarmed over the barricades.
“Fall back!” an officer howled.
Wolff stepped back, FG42 barking at his shoulder as he drained the twenty-round magazine. He popped in a fresh mag and kept retreating, firing as he went.
Behind him, tenement windows burst along the plaza. Hundreds of draugr poured out of them like maggots boiling from wounds. They were burrowing through the buildings to spill out into the plaza. Soldiers and civilians, old and young, men and women and children with glowing white eyes.
All of them consumed by rage and hungry.
Officers screamed orders to fall back. Wolff retreated, still firing, while the platoons formed up in a battle circle at the center of the plaza. Out of ammunition, many paratroopers had already fixed bayonets.
Wolff jogged to his squad, where Reiser stood fuming at the coming horde. “Now what, Herr Leutnant?”
“Now we die for nothing,” the lieutenant snarled.
On the other side of the battle circle, the Fallschirmjäger fought hand to hand.
Not for nothing, Wolff thought as the last plane roared overhead, returning to England. If he died today, he’d die knowing he did it to save the world.
Atone for what Germany had done to it.
And for the men next to him.
Officers barked commands at their men. The orders passed along the line. The regiment would strike south and fight their way out of the kessel.
“Gehen,” Reiser shrieked. “Los, los, los!”
“Glück ab!” Wolff roared and charged with the rest.
CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE
HOME
Filthy and frozen to the bone, Sergeant Wilkins hobbled across the tarmac on his crutches until he reached the base’s administrative offices.
Colonel Adams’ orderly greeted him at reception. “The colonel will be with you in just a moment, Sergeant. Care for a cup of char?”
Wilkins blinked. “Char?”
The orderly looked at him with a pleasant expression. “Or would you rather take some time to get cleaned up?”
“I’ll take some char,” Wilkins said.
“Have a seat.”
The sergeant lowered himself into one of the waiting chairs with a pained grunt. A clock ticked on the wall, which only accentuated the grating silence. He studied the small reception room for threats.
He jumped as the door opened and the orderly came in with a steaming mug.
“Here you are, Sergeant,” the kid said. “Nice and hot.”
Wilkins nodded and drank. The thick tea’s heat filled his chest. Instead of sharpening his senses, however, the hot drink lulled him into a mental drift.
Then he was back on the snow-packed street, running for his life from a mob of bloodthirsty ghouls—
He started awake, spilling some of the scalding tea on his lap.
The inner office door swung open to reveal Colonel Adams. “You’d better get in here, Sergeant.”
Wilkins struggled to regain his feet.
“Leave the tea,” Adams added. “I suspect you could use something stronger.”
He hobbled into the colonel’s office and again underwent the painful process of lowering himself into the chair facing the drab RAF desk.
Colonel Adams poured stiff drinks and handed him one. “To your successful mission, Sergeant.”