Acceleration shoved Hans-Ulrich against the back of his armored seat. He hoped Sergeant Dieselhorst was well strapped in-that same acceleration would be trying to tear him out of his rear-facing seat.
Hans-Ulrich spotted three or four gun pits close together. He steered toward them as his altimeter unwound. You had to be careful to pull up. In Spain, a whole flight of Stukas had smashed into the ground because they didn't start to come out of their dives till too late.
There was an automatic gadget that was supposed to make you pull up. Hans-Ulrich had quietly disconnected it. He wanted to stay in control himself, not trust his life to a bunch of cams and cogs.
As he dove, the wind-driven sirens on his mainwheel legs screamed. Even inside the cockpit, the noise was unearthly. During training, he'd heard it from the ground. Coupled with the engine's roar, it sounded as if a pack of demons and the hounds of hell were stooping on the target.
He watched the Dutch artillerymen scatter like ants from a kicked anthill. They weren't cowards, not in any ordinary sense of the word. The poor bastards were just up against something they'd never known, never imagined, before. Rudel had wanted to run, too, that day on the training field.
And nobody had bombed him. He yanked the switch that loosed the bombs, then pulled back on the stick for all he was worth. The Stuka's airframe groaned as it went from dive to climb, but the plane was built to take it. His own vision went red for a few seconds. That was the danger point. The dive bomber could pull more g's than the pilot could.
But color came back to the world. Clarity came back to Hans-Ulrich's thoughts. For a little while there, all he'd remembered was that he had to hang on to the stick. He gathered himself. "You good back there, Albert?"
"Hell of a roller coaster, Herr Leutnant," Dieselhorst answered. "You blew that battery to kingdom come, too. I saw the bombs go off. Right on target."
"Good. Good," Rudel said. "I thought I aimed them right, but I'm pulling up by the time they go off."
"You'd better be," Sergeant Dieselhorst said. They both laughed. Why not? Laughing came easy when the war was going well.
And then tracers flamed past the cockpit. Dieselhorst's machine gun chattered. A Dutch Fokker fighter-like the Ju-87, a monoplane with landing wheels that didn't retract-zoomed past, much too close for comfort. The enemy pilot sent Rudel an obscene gesture as the Fokker flew off.
"Gott im Himmel!" Hans-Ulrich said. "Where the devil did he come from?"
"Beats me," the rear gunner answered. "I thought our fighter pilots were supposed to keep that kind of Scheisse from happening."
"Theory is wonderful," Rudel said. Sergeant Dieselhorst laughed again, but shakily.
The Stuka flew back toward the Reich for more fuel and more bombs. Hans-Ulrich spotted a column of trucks and buses heading east, toward the fighting. The trucks were painted the grayish green of Dutch army uniforms. A convoy bringing troops and supplies to the front-had to be.
Hans-Ulrich dove again, not so steeply this time. His thumb rested on the firing button atop the stick. He had two forward-firing machine guns mounted in his wings. The Ju-87 seemed to stagger in the air as his bullets stitched through the convoy.
A bus ran into a truck. The bus caught fire. Another bus rolled off the road and into a ditch. Soldiers bailed out of their vehicles and ran like hell. It was almost like going after partridges with a shotgun.
Almost. Some of the Dutch soldiers didn't run very far. They un-slung their rifles and started shooting at the Stuka as it roared away. Infantrymen didn't have much of a chance against aircraft, but no denying the balls on these guys. And damned if a bullet from somewhere didn't clang through the Stuka's tail assembly. A few meters farther forward…
My armor would have stopped it, Hans-Ulrich thought. That's what it's there for. Reassuring to remember you had eight millimeters of steel at your back, five millimeters under you, and four millimeters to either side. It wouldn't keep everything out, but it beat the hell out of not having any.
Soldiers fired green flares. That was the German recognition signal. They didn't want their own Stukas shooting them up. Hans-Ulrich waggled his wings to show he'd seen.
He bounced in on a dirt strip a few kilometers inside the German border. Groundcrew men and armorers cared for the Stuka. Hans-Ulrich rolled back the canopy so he could stand up and stretch. "You've got a couple of bullet holes, sir," a groundcrew man reported.
"I know I got hit at least once," Rudel answered. "Anything leaking? All my gauges are good, and the controls answer."
"No leaks," the man assured him.
"Well, then, I'll worry about it later," he said. "Mach schnell, bitte. We've got a war to fight, and no time to waste."
Five minutes later, he was airborne again. ONE OF THE THINGS ALISTAIR WALSH had forgotten about war was what a bloody balls-up it made of traffic. Or maybe things had been different in 1918. By the time he got to the front then, all the civilians had run off. Either that or they'd got killed. Anyhow, they weren't around to get in the way.
Things were different now. The Dutch and the Belgians hadn't expected the Nazis to jump on them. Sergeant Walsh didn't know why they hadn't-his opinion was that they were a pack of goddamn fools-but they hadn't. Now that the shells were bursting and the bombs came whistling down, half of the locals decided they really wanted to go to some place where things like that didn't happen.
And so they did. Whatever small respect Walsh had acquired for the Belgian army during the last go-round dissolved like his stomach lining in the presence of cheap whiskey. He didn't particularly expect the Brussels Sprouts to fight. (He knew damn well the Germans would fight, and hoped the French would, too. About all other foreigners he remained deeply pessimistic.) But couldn't they at least act like traffic police?
On the evidence, no. Now that the balloon had gone up, the Belgians weren't threatening to shoot at anybody who crossed their sacred border. The British Expeditionary Force, the French Seventh Army to its left, and the French First Army to its right were moving into Belgium to take up positions to throw back the Germans. They should have done that sooner, but King Leopold kept saying no. So they were doing it now.
Or they were trying to.
When lorries and tanks and long columns of khaki-clad men on foot headed east, and when mad swarms of autos and horsecarts and donkey carts and handcarts and terrified men, women, and children on foot headed west, and when they all ran headlong into one another…
Nobody went anywhere. The lorries and tanks tried to push forward. Drivers screamed in English, which mostly didn't help. Not many Englishmen knew enough French to do them any good-if French would have done them any good, which wasn't obvious. If Belgian troops had channeled the refugees down a few roads and left the rest open for the soldiers who were trying to save their miserable country for the second time in a generation…
Too much to hope for, plainly.
"We're not going to make our stage line today, are we, sir?" Walsh asked before the first day was very old.
"Too bloody right we're not," his company commander agreed.
Planes flew off toward the east. That, at least, was reassuring. Till now, the RAF had left the Germans alone. The Luftwaffe had also left the BEF alone, but Walsh didn't think about what that meant. He got his first lesson a little past noon.
The day was chilly, but only partly cloudy. The sun had risen late and would set early. It hung low in the sky, a bit west of south. The English soldiers were trying to fight their way through yet another clot of refugees. These people were gabbling in Flemish, or possibly Dutch. Whichever it was, it sounded enough like German to raise Sergeant Walsh's hackles.