Cars honked like maniacs as they rattled along. They had headlamps masked with black paper or cloth so only a tiny slit of light came out: with luck, not enough to see from 20,000 feet. The faint glow wasn't enough to let drivers see much, either. Every so often, the sound of crunching bumpers and frantic cursing punctuated the night.
Another couple of steps and Alistair bumped into somebody else. "Excuse me," he repeated resignedly.
"Pardon," said his victim: a woman.
They both stepped forward again, trying to go around each other, and bumped once more. "Bloody hell," Walsh said. You could be as foul-mouthed as you pleased in a country where most people didn't know what you were talking about.
But the woman laughed. "I was thinking the same thing," she said, her English better than the barman's.
"Sorry," Alistair mumbled.
"Don't worry," she answered. "My husband would say that when he was alive. He was a soldier from the last war."
"You were married to a Tommy?" Walsh asked.
"That's right," she said. "My father was a butcher. My brother got killed at Verdun, and so Fred took over the business. Better than he could have done in England, he always said. But he died five years ago…and now we have war again."
"Too right we do." Walsh wondered what the hell to say next. Verdun was gone, lost, this time around, though not with the titanic bloodbath of 1916. He couldn't very well ask a woman where the maison de tolerance was. He wondered if he could talk her into taking him home with her. If she was used to British soldiers (though he was no damned Englishman-by the way she sounded, her Fred had come from Yorkshire or thereabouts)…
Before he could find anything, she said, "Maybe you should go left at the next corner. It's not far at all-only a few meters. Good luck, Tommy." Then she was nothing but fading footsteps on the street: this time, she stepped around him nimbly as a dancer.
Alistair laughed at himself. So she wasn't a widow who needed consoling-not from him, anyhow. "Too damned bad," he muttered. "She'd be better than what I could pay for." And then, thoughtfully, "Left, is it?"
He didn't think in meters, but he could make sense of them. You had to if you were going to fight on the Continent. He found the corner by stepping off the curb. He didn't fall on his face, which proved God loved drunks. He didn't get run over crossing the street, either-no thanks to the French drivers, most of whom tooled along as if they could see for miles, not six inches past their noses if they were lucky.
A long block down the street, he bumped into somebody else. "'Ere, myte, watch yourself," growled an unmistakable Cockney.
"Oh, keep your hair on," Walsh retorted, not only showing he was from Britain himself but suggesting he had the bulge to deal with any ordinary soldier. He paused. He still couldn't see much, but his ears told him a long file of men stood here breathing and muttering and shuffling their feet. A light went on in his head, even if it illuminated nothing out here. "Is this the queue for-?"
"You fink Oi'd wyte loike this for anyfing else?" the Cockney answered.
"I suppose not," Walsh said. Fred's widow knew soldiers, all right, and knew what they'd be looking for. If she knew he also wouldn't have minded looking for her…well, that was how the cards came down. She might have been better, but this wouldn't be bad-not while it was going on, anyhow. Later, he'd likely wonder why he wasted his money on some tart who'd forget him as soon as he got off her.
But that would be later. The queue lurched forward a few feet. Somebody joined it behind Alistair, and then somebody else. He wished he could light a cigarette, but that was against the blackout rules, too. One more thing he'd have to wait for. Well, it wouldn't be long. BREAKFAST AT THE AIRSTRIP WAS rolls and strong coffee. Hans-Ulrich Rudel longed for milk. By the way a lot of the Stuka pilots and rear gunners went on, they longed for schnapps or whiskey. He didn't care what they drank, as long as it didn't hurt what they did in the air. They sassed him unmercifully. He'd got used to that-by all the signs, he was the only teetotaler in the Luftwaffe. He didn't much like it, but he couldn't fight everybody all the time.
And then someone said something different to him: "What do you think of the new wing commander?"
"Colonel Steinbrenner?" Rudel shrugged. "He seems like a good enough officer-and I'm sure he's a good German patriot."
"Do you think Colonel Greim wasn't?" asked the other pilot, a new fish. Was he Maxi or Moritz? Moritz, that was it.
Hans-Ulrich shrugged again. "He'd still be in charge of the wing if the powers that be thought he was. Me, I say 'Heil Hitler!' and I go about my business. What else can you do?"
Moritz started to say something, stopped, and then tried again: "The war hasn't gone the way everybody hoped it would when it started."
"And so?" Rudel gulped coffee. He needed help prying his eyelids open-like most flyers these days, he was chronically short on sleep. And this brew would do the trick, too, which meant it had to come from captured stock. But he could see some things even with his eyes closed. "How many wars do go just the way one side thinks they will beforehand? Do we toss out the Fuhrer because things aren't perfect?"
"Of course not," Moritz said quickly.
"Of course not," Hans-Ulrich agreed. He hadn't expected his colleague to say anything else. That the other man might not dare say anything else never crossed his mind. He believed in Fuhrer and Party at least as strongly as he believed in his father's stern Lutheran God. Till the latest political upheavals, he'd assumed everybody else felt the same way. "This foolishness isn't doing the war effort any good."
Moritz looked down into his coffee mug. Then he eyed Hans-Ulrich again. "Which foolishness?" he asked quietly. "The coup, or what's happening now to anybody who might have known anything about it?"
"Why, the coup, of course." Rudel's answer was as automatic as the mechanism that pulled a Stuka out of a dive. Only after it came out did he fully realize what the other man had said. "I could report you for that!" he exclaimed. He almost said, I should report you for that!
"Ja. I know," Moritz answered. "But think first. Would I go up there to get my ass shot off if I weren't loyal to the Vaterland?"
Nobody without a death wish would fly a Stuka if he weren't doing it for his country. Even so, Hans-Ulrich said, "You can't be loyal to the Vaterland if you're not loyal to the Fuhrer. We'd lose for sure if anyone else tried to run the war, or if we bugged out of it. We'd stab ourselves in the back, the same way we did in 1918."
"No doubt," the other pilot said. Was that agreement, or was he just trying to get Hans-Ulrich out of his hair? Hans-Ulrich knew which way he'd bet. He didn't know what to do next. Anyone who wondered about vengeance was less loyal to the Party and the Fuhrer than he should have been. But if you were a brave pilot, and you hurt the French and British every time you flew…
Rudel was still chewing on that when he headed off to hear Colonel Steinbrenner's morning briefing with the rest of the pilots. His ankle still hurt, but he could walk on it and use the Stuka's aileron controls. That was all that counted.
"If we can break through north of Paris, we have them," Steinbrenner declared. "Then we wheel around behind the city, the way we would have done it in 1914 if von Kluck hadn't run short of men and turned too soon."
He was in his forties-old enough to remember von Kluck's turn, maybe old enough to have been one of the footsloggers who made it and then got hurled back from the Marne. By the way he spoke, he still took it personally a generation later.