Someone in the squadron voiced on the radio what Hans-Ulrich was thinking: "Now-did he get word out before we shot him down?"
"We'll find out," somebody else said in sepulchral tones.
And they did. English fighter planes rose to meet them: biplane Gladiators, monoplane Hurricanes, and a handful of new, sleek Spitfires. The RAF fighters bored in on the Luftwaffe bombers. They wanted no more to do with the escorts than they had to. The 109s and 110s couldn't hurt their country. Bombers could.
What was going on higher in the sky, where the Heinkels and Dorniers had escorts of their own? Rudel couldn't check. He was too busy trying to stay alive. Even a Gladiator could be dangerous.
Sergeant Dieselhorst fired a burst. "Get anything?" Hans-Ulrich asked.
"Nah," the rear gunner answered. "He'll bother somebody else, though." That suited the pilot fine.
Cannon fire from a nearby Me-110 knocked down a Hurricane. A moment later, another Hurricane bored in on the two-engined German fighter. That combat didn't last long. The Hurricane easily outturned the 110, got on its tail, shot it up, and shot it down.
Hans-Ulrich saw he was over some kind of city. He thought it was Dover, but it might have been Folkestone or any other English port. It lay by the sea-he could tell that much. And he could tell it was time to unload the frightfulness he'd brought across the ocean. He yanked the bomb-release lever. The Stuka suddenly felt lighter and nimbler.
"Now we get the devil out of here?" Dieselhorst's voice came brassy through the speaking tube.
"Now we get out of here," Hans-Ulrich agreed. No point in lingering. The Stuka sure wasn't agile enough to dogfight against a British fighter.
A broad-winged He-111, afire from the nose back, plunged into the North Sea just off the coast from the town that was probably Dover. An enormous cloud of steam and smoke rose: a couple of thousand kilos' worth of bombs going off when the Spade hit. Hans-Ulrich hadn't seen any parachutes. Four men dead, then.
"You know what happens next, don't you?" Dieselhorst said.
"What's that?" Rudel asked. He looked every which way. He didn't see any Indians, which was what Luftwaffe pilots called enemy planes. That let him ease back on the throttle a little. The Continent loomed ahead. He'd probably make it to the airstrip.
"They come over tonight or tomorrow night and bomb the crap out of some of our towns," Dieselhorst said. "Where does it end? With our last two guys coming out of the ruins and going after their last guy with a club?"
"That's not for us to worry about. That's for the Fuhrer." But Hans-Ulrich couldn't leave it there. "As long as we've got two guys and they've got one, as long as our two get their one, we win. And we're going to. Right?"
"Oh, yes, sir," the gunner answered. Nobody could or wanted to imagine Germany losing two wars in a row. Losing one had been bad enough.
But when Hans-Ulrich put down at the Belgian airstrip, he waited and waited, hoping against hope that more Stukas would come home safe. A few had returned before him. A few more straggled in afterwards. But so many were lost over England or the North Sea…The squadron would need a new CO, among other reinforcements. Hans-Ulrich hoped the Reich would have two men with clubs coming out of the ruins, not just one. EVERY NIGHT, THE PANZERS IN Sergeant Ludwig Rothe's platoon reassembled-or they tried to, anyhow. By now, Rothe's crew was the most experienced one left in the platoon. Neither he nor his driver nor his radioman had got badly hurt. Given how thin-skinned Panzer IIs were, that was something close to miraculous.
Rothe had commanded the platoon on and off on the drive across the Low Countries and into France. Lieutenants and their panzers were no more invulnerable to flying shells than anybody else. But the platoon had an officer in charge of it again: a second lieutenant named Maximilian Priller.
He was dark and curly-haired. He had a whipped-cream-in-your-coffee, strudel-on-the-side Viennese accent. Before the Anschluss, he'd served in the Austrian Army. Like a lot of German soldiers, Rothe looked down his nose at Austrians as fighting men. He had nothing bad to say about Lieutenant Priller, though. No matter how Priller talked, he knew what to do with panzers.
"Our next stop is Coucy-le-Chateau." Priller pointed the place out on a map he unfolded on his knees. His German sounded funny in Ludwig's ears, but he spoke fluent French. "Well, not our next stop-where we go through next. It's only about five kilometers ahead. We ought to drive the enemy out by the middle of the morning. Questions, anybody?"
"Do we soften them up with artillery first, or do we break through with the panzers?" another sergeant asked.
"With the panzers. That way, we've got surprise working for us." Priller cocked an eyebrow. "We see who gets the surprise-us or them."
The four sergeants who commanded the other panzers in the platoon all chuckled, Ludwig among them. It was laugh or scream, one. Maybe the French troops in front of the Germans would panic and flee. On the other hand, maybe they'd be waiting with panzers of their own, minefields, antitank guns: all the things that made life in the panzer force so…interesting.
"We've bent them back a long way," Max Priller said. "If we break through here, we drive the sword into their heart. We want them all disordered. Then we can race them to Paris. Better than even money we win."
"Paris…" Ludwig and a couple of the other sergeants said together. Back in the Middle Ages, knights went on quests for the Holy Grail. In the twentieth century, Paris was the Holy Grail for Germany. The Kaiser's army had come so close. Armchair generals kept talking about von Kluck's turn. If he hadn't made it, or if the Russians hadn't caused so much trouble off in the East…
Russia was making trouble again. The Wehrmacht had done well here, or Ludwig thought it had. In a month, it had knocked Holland, Belgium, and Luxembourg out of the fight. The radio said German bombers were giving England hell to pay back the British terror raids on German cities. Maybe this attack would have gone smoother in better weather. Only God could know something like that, though.
"Tell your men," Priller said. "We go at 0600."
It would still be dark. Somebody'd get a surprise, all right. Well, what could you do? Rothe went back to his panzer. Fritz was toasting some bacon he'd liberated from a farmhouse. Theo was swapping tubes in and out of the radio, trying to figure out which one was bad.
Fritz looked up from the little cookfire. "It's going to be bad," he said. "I can see it on your face. How bad is it?"
"We hit the town up ahead at 0600," Ludwig answered bluntly.
Theo paused with a tube in each hand. He looked down at them, muttering; Rothe guessed he was remembering which one he'd just pulled and which was about to go in. Fritz stared up from the sizzling slab of bacon. "Fuck," he said.
"I know," Ludwig said. "What can you do, though?" He pointed to the bacon. "Is that done? Let me have some if it is."
Off in the distance, some guns opened up. French 75s, Ludwig thought, recognizing the reports. The damned things dated back to before the turn of the century. They'd been the great workhorses of the French artillery during the last war; Ludwig's father swore whenever he talked about them. They could fire obscenely fast. This time around, German 105s outranged them. That did you no good if you ended up on the wrong end of things, though.
These shells came down a good distance away. Fritz cut the bacon into three pieces. "Well, maybe we'll surprise them," he said. "They don't seem to know where we're at…Here you go, Sergeant."
"Danke." Ludwig blew on his share, then took a bite. It tasted about the same as bacon would have back home. He might have had it boiled there, but he might not, too. He gulped. "Yeah, maybe we will," he said, and bit into the bacon again.