–
Ivans with machine pistols had holed up inside a grocery store in Lippstadt. Gustav Hozzel cautiously peered round the corner at the strongpoint.
“They picked a hell of a place to dig in,” Rolf grumbled from behind him. “They plug up the way forward but good. And with all the food in there, they can hang on for days.”
“Could be,” Gustav said. Like most Germans who’d fought in the east, he’d seen how Russians could keep fighting longer than anybody sensible would figure, and do it on next to no supplies.
Max Bachman shook his head. “Lippstadt’s been under Russian control for a while now. What makes you guys think that store isn’t bare as a stripper’s chest?”
“Huh,” Gustav said thoughtfully. “You’ve got something there.”
“Yeah. Maybe sulfa drugs will cure it, though,” Rolf put in.
“Funny. See? I’m laughing.” But Max spoke without heat.
“I know what I’d like to use to pry those Ivans out of there. A Flammenwerfer’d do the job neat as you please,” Rolf said.
“Go ahead. You first.” Like most Frontschweine, Gustav hated flamethrowers, his own side’s hardly less than the Russians’. Yes, they could drive people out of places that would hold for a long time against other weapons. But he’d never seen or heard of anybody who carried one being taken prisoner.
“I’ll do it,” Rolf said. “Wouldn’t be the first time.”
Gustav lit a cigarette so his face wouldn’t give away what he was thinking. He hadn’t known that his comrade in arms had used a Flammenwerfer during the last go-round, but he would have been lying had he said the news amazed him. Rolf liked hurting things and killing things a little too much for even the guys on his side to be easy around him.
“Unless you feel like fressing a tonne of beans and lighting your farts, we haven’t got a flamethrower,” Max pointed out, which made even the Leibstandarte Adolf Hitler veteran laugh. Practical as usual, Max went on, “What can we do with what we have got?”
“Why don’t we just shout for them to come out and give up?” Gustav said.
“Go ahead. You first,” Rolf told him.
Which meant the Waffen-SS puke would think he was yellow unless he went ahead and did it. “Up yours, Rolf,” Gustav muttered. Louder, he went on, “Let’s see if I can find a white cloth bigger than my snotrag.” The shop they crouched in front of proved to be a coffeehouse. Gustav yanked a cloth off a table. Before he showed himself, he told Rolf, “I get killed trying this, I’ll fucking haunt you.”
Rolf nodded. “You can join the club.” He was tough to rattle.
Shaking the tablecloth around the corner before he went himself, Gustav gave the Red Army men a chance to see it. Still waving it, he stepped out where they could see him, too. “You Ivans!” he shouted-some of them were bound to know scraps of German. “Come out! Surrender! We won’t hurt you if you do-soldiers’ honor!”
You never could tell with Russians when things got strange. When they were proceeding according to plan, they’d keep going no matter what, as hard to divert or slow as a wrecking ball. But when they had to think for themselves or deal with the unexpected, you had no idea ahead of time what they’d do.
Nothing happened here for three or four minutes. The Ivans might have been holding their own little soviet inside the grocery. They didn’t shoot him for the sport of it, the way they easily might have. He took that as a good sign. Standing there in the street waving his stupid tablecloth, he didn’t know how else to take it.
And then, when he was getting antsy enough to want to dive back into cover, damned if the Russians didn’t come out, one after another, their hands clasped on top of their heads. They came, and they came, and they came some more. It reminded him of swarms of clowns piling out of a little trick car in the circus. He’d figured four or five of them, tops, were defending the grocery. Dizzily, he counted seventeen men in Red Army khaki.
The Ivan in front came up to him. “No hurt us?” he said in broken German. “Soldiers’ honor?”
“Soldiers’ honor,” Gustav promised, and raised his right hand with the first two fingers crooked as if swearing an oath in court. Then he pointed back around the corner. “You-all of you-come with me.”
They came. Rolf stared at them, goggle-eyed. Max looked pretty well sandbagged, too. “Fuck me up the asshole,” Rolf said. “I didn’t think you’d bring back a whole division.”
“Neither did I,” Gustav said, “but here they are.” He caught Max Bachman’s eye. “How about the two of us take ’em back? I promised they’d get treated all right.”
“Hey!” Rolf said. “What about me?”
“I promised they’d get treated all right,” Gustav repeated. “You stay here and keep an eye on things. Or get some other guys and clean the weapons out of that grocery if you want.”
He’d seen that the ex-LAH man was still atrocity-prone. It wasn’t as if he had a snowy-white conscience himself. Nobody who’d lived through the war on the Eastern Front came away clean. But he aimed to keep the promise he’d made to those Russians. It might have been more for his own sake than for theirs, but he did. And that meant not letting Rolf have any more to do with them than he could help.
The quirk of Max’s eyebrows said he got that. He climbed to his feet and hefted his American Springfield. When Gustav picked up his own AK-47, a couple of the Ivans nodded to themselves. They knew they made a good weapon there, one fine enough for even the other side to covet. One of them helpfully took three magazines off his belt and held them out to Gustav. He took them with a nod of thanks.
Gesturing with the assault rifle, he said, “Come on, you sorry sacks of shit-get moving.” The Russian who spoke a little German translated that for his buddies. By the way some of them tried to keep from grinning, he translated it literally.
Off the prisoners went. Gustav and Max walked to either side of their column, guiding them through Lippstadt and out to the open country west of it like a couple of herdsmen’s dogs keeping a flock of sheep going the way it was supposed to.
Pretty soon, three jeeps came up the road toward them. The Ivans stepped off onto the soft shoulder to let them by. Gustav couldn’t tell by looking whether the men in the jeeps were Amis or Germans-they wore the same uniforms he and Max did.
Instead of passing the Red Army men and their captors, the lead jeep stopped, which meant the others did, too. “Jesus Christ!” the man in the passenger seat said in English. “What the hell have you got here?”
Gustav understood him the way that Russian POW understood German. He had fragments of English, but only fragments. Max knew a good bit more. He was the one who said, “Gustav, he capture them. Now we take them back.”
“Goodgodalmightydamn!” the American said, running it together into one word the way a German might with Himmeldonnerwetter! Then he came out with some more English that Gustav couldn’t catch.
Max translated for him: “He says there are some U.S. intelligence guys a kilometer or two down the road. They can question the Ivans.”
“That should work out all right.” Gustav wanted to get back to it. The fighting in Lippstadt hadn’t stopped just because he’d cleared the grocery. He nodded to the Americans in the jeeps, then used his Kalashnikov to urge the POWs on again. “Marschen!”
March they did. The jeeps chugged on toward the town. Gustav opened a new pack of Old Golds and lit a cigarette. Seeing how hopeful the Ivans looked, he tossed one of them the pack. They all took a smoke. With American bounty at his disposal, he knew he could get more. Rolf would have called him a softy. To hell with Rolf, he thought, not for the first time.
14
Back before she met Bill, Marian Staley had worked as a clerk-typist for Boeing. That was a big company to begin with, and it had swollen like an inflating balloon under the pressure of World War II. The Shasta Lumber Corporation wasn’t in the same league, or even in the one below.