–
The mirror in the bathroom of the ground-floor flat Gustav Hozzel was defending hadn’t broken. He couldn’t guess why not; almost everything else in the place had. But he got his first good look at himself for a couple of weeks.
He looked like an Ami, but that was the uniform’s fault. It was filthy and badly worn. So was he. Aside from looking like an American, he looked like hell. His whiskers were at that haven’t-shaved-in-five-days stumblebum stage. More of the ones on his chin were coming in white.
His eyes…It wasn’t that the bags under them would hold enough to take him to Brazil. That just meant he was desperately short on sleep. No Frontschwein ever got enough or, too often, any. The look in them worried him more. They were the eyes of a man who’d seen too much, done too much, and knew he had too much more to see and do.
A lot of Landsers on the Eastern Front had had eyes like that from the end of 1943 on. They knew they wouldn’t whip the Ivans. And they knew they had to keep fighting anyway. It wasn’t despair. Damnation came a lot closer.
No doubt he’d had that look himself in the old days. Now he had it again. He’d been a kid then. He’d seen all the hideous things that could happen, but somehow he’d been sure they would always happen to someone else. He wasn’t sure of that any more. He knew too well anything could happen to anybody.
“Surrender!” a Red Army soldier shouted in German. “We’ll treat you well if you do!”
All the emergency militiamen in the block of flats burst out laughing. They wouldn’t have believed that Quatsch in the last war, let alone this one. “Yob tvoyu mat’!” one of them shouted back. As some of the Ivans could Deutsch sprechen, so a good many Germans had picked up bits of filthy Russian. What other kind was worth learning?
Of course, yelling Fuck your mother! at people with guns had a price. The Russians started hosing down the building with four heavy machine guns on the same mount. They hadn’t played with that kind of toy the last time. The Germans had; the Americans, too. It made a dandy light flak weapon to chase off low-flying raiders or maybe even shoot them down.
And, if you pointed it at a ground target, it also did a grand job of chewing that to pieces, along with anyone unlucky enough to be inside. When the mechanized death rattle started outside, Gustav threw himself flat. That was all he could do, that and pray. Hiding behind something wouldn’t help. What could you hide behind to keep off a slug as big as your thumb?
The one drawback to the monster was that it gobbled ammo at a rate even industrial giants like the Russians and Americans found ridiculous. A minute went through a couple of thousand cartridges. On the other hand, the bullets from those cartridges went through anything this side of a tank out to a kilometer and a half.
They were shooting a little high. Part of the upper stories of the block of flats collapsed with a rending crash-luckily, not the part right above Gustav. And he’d never look in that mirror again. The Russians must have bought themselves about seven hundred years of bad luck.
He hoped like anything they had. As soon as the quad gun stopped, he started shooting. He wasn’t the only one, but the return fire was thinner than it would have been before the Russians turned their creature loose. Unless your men were all hiding down in the cellar, they’d take casualties.
He got a glimpse of somebody with fancy shoulder boards sending soldiers forward. A burst snarled from his PPSh. The Russian officer clutched at himself as he fell over. Dead or wounded, Gustav didn’t care. The bastard was out of the fight. With luck, whoever took over for him wouldn’t know what the plan was. Russians without plans panicked at any little thing. With plans, they would trample you and mash you flat.
They kept coming without missing a beat, so evidently the plan was to clear out the blocks of flats right around here. Gustav smelled smoke, fresh and strong. Red Army heavy machine guns could fire incendiary rounds. Or any ordinary hot slug might have set something on fire above his head.
Time to leave, then. Burning a building down was one of the oldest ways to clear it of foes, and still one of the best. Time to leave, before he couldn’t get away. He fed the PPSh a fresh magazine, then bade that bathroom a none too fond farewell. Small sparkling pieces of the mirror crunched under the soles of his boots.
The rest of the flat was in even worse shape. When he got out into the hallway, he almost bumped into Rolf. They both started to raise their weapons, then stopped when they realized they were on the same side. “Sorry about that,” Gustav said with a sickly grin.
“It’s all right. That shit happens.” The ex-LAH man’s grin seemed more wolfish than sickly. “Don’t want to stay in the oven till you bake all golden brown?”
“Fuck golden brown. Fuck you, too,” Gustav said. “Let’s get the hell out of here.”
Rolf started whistling something as they hurried down the stairs to the cellar. Gustav didn’t recognize it at first. Then he did, and almost tripped and broke his neck. It was “Heigh Ho! Heigh Ho! It’s off to work we go,” the dwarfs’ song from Snow White. Where the devil did that come from?
After another second or two, it made…some sense, anyhow. In German lore and legend, dwarfs were mostly underground beings, miners and tunnelers and the like. The German militiamen in Bochum and Essen and now Duisburg used the same skills. The cellars on this block and the next one over all had tunnels running from one to the next. You could move through them, as the two Germans were doing now, or, if you had to, you could fight in them.
“I haven’t had so much fun in I can’t remember when,” Gustav said as they tramped through the darkness toward the next block farther west.
“You want fun, go play with yourself,” Rolf answered. “We’ve got to stop the Russians. They’ve trampled almost the whole Vaterland now.”
“I never would have noticed if you hadn’t told me,” Gustav said. “Why the hell do you think we’re in goddamn Duisburg when we started out in Fulda?”
“But if Stalin conquers the whole Reich, he’ll Bolshevize it,” Rolf said, as if that were the worst thing he could imagine.
Gustav could think of worse ones. “If Stalin takes the whole Reich, odds are he’ll kill both of us by the time he does.”
“If all the Vaterland bows down to the hammer and sickle, I don’t want to live.” Rolf still sounded like a Waffen-SS man, all right.
“I want to live,” Gustav said. “I want to throw him out of my country. I want to kill Russians. I’m not so very interested in dying myself, thank you very much.”
“Sometimes death in battle is necessary for the higher good.” Rolf couldn’t strike a pose here in the gloom, but he sounded as if he wanted to.
It wasn’t that he was wrong: more that an asshole who was right remained an asshole. “If you want to get killed, don’t let me stop you,” Gustav said. Then he froze as a flashlight beam speared him and Rolf from out of the black ahead.
“Come on, chuckleheads!” said a German voice behind the beam. “We’re going to blow this tunnel in a couple of minutes, to keep the Ivans from following you guys.”
That got Gustav and Rolf moving, as the soldier with the flashlight no doubt meant it to. Gustav wondered what kind of fieldworks they had on the next block, how long they could hold them, and how many Russians would die attacking them. He lit a smoke. He was starting to like Luckies. And he was still in there fighting.
26
It was past closing time. Gently but firmly, Daisy Baxter had herded RAF and USAF men out of the Owl and Unicorn into the blacked-out streets of Fakenham. Some of them were liable to fall off their bicycles on the way back to the base at Sculthorpe. They might get knots on their noggins and scrapes on their knees. They were unlikely to smash themselves up the way they could driving drunk in motorcars.