Groundcrew men were already bombing up his Stuka and fueling it when he went out to the revetment. Sergeant Dieselhorst was grabbing a premission cigarette a safe distance away. "What's on the plate?" Dieselhorst asked.
"Chaumont. Railroad bridge," Hans-Ulrich said.
"Ach, so." The sergeant's cheeks hollowed as he took one last drag. He crushed the butt underfoot. "Flak'll be thick enough to walk on," he said mournfully. "They know what those bridges are worth."
"You can always bow out," Hans-Ulrich said. The rear gunner sent him a reproachful look. Rudel gestured toward the Ju-87. "Well, come on, then. Heil Hitler!"
"Heil!" Dieselhorst echoed. Whatever he thought of the rumored coup, he didn't say much. He just did his job. That wasn't the worst attitude for a noncom-or anyone else-to have.
Inside the plane's cabin, he and Hans-Ulrich went through their preflight checks. Everything came up green. With all the flying the planes were doing, the groundcrews had to work miracles to keep so many of them airborne. So far, the mechanics and armorers seemed up to it.
A groundcrew man spun the prop. Hans-Ulrich fired up the engine. Another groundcrew man sat on the wing to help guide him as he taxied out of the revetment and onto the airstrip's chewed-up grass. The ground crewman hopped off with a wave. Rudel gave him one, too. When he got the takeoff signal, he gunned the Stuka. It bounced down the runway and lurched into the air. It might not have been pretty, but it flew, all right.
Chaumont wasn't far on the map, but it was far enough: farther than the Kaiser's army had ever got. "We have company," Sergeant Dieselhorst said, distracting Rudel.
He looked around, making sure he'd read the noncom's tone the right way. Yes, those were Messerschmitts flying with the Stukas, not Hurricanes or French fighters streaking in to attack them. Chaumont was important, then. Flights over France, unlike those across the Channel, didn't always get escorts laid on.
Hans-Ulrich saw the flak well before he reached the target. It did look thick enough to walk on. Yes, the enemy also knew how important Chaumont was. Hans-Ulrich muttered to himself, but didn't say anything out loud. He didn't want Dieselhorst worrying any more than necessary. Worrying as much as proved necessary would likely be bad enough.
Hurricanes streaked at the Stukas maybe a minute and a half later. The 109s zoomed away to meet the British fighters. Hans-Ulrich had seen over England that that was the best way to hold off enemy planes. Sticking too close to the bombers you were escorting gave attackers a big edge.
Sometimes the enemy got through no matter what you did. Sergeant Dieselhorst's machine gun chattered. Rudel saw a couple of Stukas diving for the deck, hoping to outrun the Hurricanes on their tails. He wished them luck, and feared they'd need it.
He started his own dive for the railroad bridge sooner than he'd intended to, which also meant it had to be shallower. That gave the antiaircraft gunners plenty of time to fire at him. Shells burst all around his Stuka. He hung on to the stick as tight as he could-it was like driving a car on a badly rutted dirt road. Puffs of evil black smoke came closer and closer. A few bits of shrapnel rattled off the plane or tore into it-luckily, only a few.
Trying not to think about anything else, Hans-Ulrich bored in on the bridge. The viaduct had three levels, towering more than fifty meters above the river it overleaped. Some plump, pipe-smoking, mustachioed French engineer of the last century must have been proud of himself for designing it. Rudel yanked at the bomb-release lever. With a little luck, he'd make that Frenchman's grandchildren unhappy.
As soon as the bombs fell free, the Stuka got faster and friskier. More flak burst behind it, in front of it, all around it. And Sergeant Dieselhorst's voice rang tinnily through the speaking tube: "You nailed the fucking bridge! It's going down!"
"Danken Gott dafur!" Rudel said. He sped back toward the east, keeping his gauges at the edge of the red till he was sure he'd made it to German-held territory. If one of the Hurricanes had chosen to chase him, red-lining the gauges wouldn't have done much good. The Stuka made a fine dive-bomber, but a poor tired donkey in a sprint on the flat.
He got down. To his surprise, Colonel Steinbrenner trotted up before his prop stopped spinning. "Rudel!" the colonel said. "They swore you'd got shot down again. They said nobody could go into that kind of fire and come out the other side in one piece."
They, whoever they were, hadn't tried it themselves. Hans-Ulrich shrugged. He hadn't thought-much-about going down. All he'd thought about was doing his job. Letting the other get in the way would have distracted him. It might have given him cold feet. Now that he'd made it through, he wondered why the devil it hadn't.
Shrugging again, he said, "I'm here. The bridge is down."
"There's an Iron Cross First Class!" Steinbrenner said.
Medals weren't the biggest thing on Rudel's mind-nowhere close. He did say, "Make sure Dieselhorst gets one, too. He kept the enemy fighters off my back."
"He'll be taken care of," the wing commander promised. Hans-Ulrich believed him. Back in the last war, enlisted men always got the shitty end of the stick. The Fuhrer understood that-he'd seen it for himself, in four years at the front. He'd sworn things would be different this time around, and he'd meant it. Some of the vons left over from the last round might not like it, but too bad for them.
Hans-Ulrich climbed out of the cockpit. Behind him, Sergeant Dieselhorst was coming out, too. "Made it," the noncom said with a wry grin.
"Ja." Hans-Ulrich nodded. "And do you know what we won? Besides the Eisenkreuz, I mean?"
"What's that?" Dieselhorst asked.
"A chance to have just as much fun again tomorrow, or maybe later on today," Rudel answered.
The rear gunner and radioman made a wry face. "Hot damn!" he said. JOAQU IN DELGADILLO LOOKED ACROSS THE Straits of Gibraltar to Africa. That was better than looking at Gibraltar itself. The British had fought like fourteen different kinds of demon to hold on to the Rock. In the end, it didn't do them a peseta's worth of good. Spain's gold and scarlet flew over Gibraltar for the first time in more than two hundred years.
Posters slapped onto walls or fences still standing boasted of the return to Spanish sovereignty. OURS AGAIN! they shouted, and GOOD-BYE TO ENGLAND! Glum British POWs moped behind barbed wire. The people who'd lived in Gibraltar were mostly Spaniards. The ones left alive after the fight seemed just as disheartened as the enemy soldiers. General Sanjurjo's men were making them sorry they'd backed the Union Jack.
A couple of Condor Legion German airmen walked by, gabbing in their incomprehensible guttural language. Delgadillo wondered why they didn't choke to death every time they opened their mouths. One of them nodded to him and said, "Buenos dias." Sound by sound, the words were in Spanish, but no one who heard them would have dreamt they came from a Spaniard's throat.
"Buenos dias," Delgadillo answered politely. Even if they did talk as if their mouths were full of glue, they'd done Marshal Sanjurjo a lot of good. German bombers had helped flatten the British defenses here, for instance, and made British battleships keep their distance.
That thought made Joaquin look west instead of south. If the Royal Navy wanted to cause trouble, it still could. And it might: not only to pay Spain back for reclaiming Gibraltar but to keep the Straits open so British and French ships could pass into and out of the Mediterranean.
He'd faced fire from big naval guns before German planes pounded them into silence. If he never had to do that again, he'd light a grateful candle in church. Once was twice too often. They were much, much worse than land-based artillery-and that was more than bad enough.
The Condor Legion men were looking out to sea, too. One of them-not the one who'd spoken before-asked, "Where is your engineering officer?" He spoke better-not well, but better.