The armored column of which the personnel carrier was a part turned right, rumbling toward the Fuhrer 's palace. The panzers and APCs had to go slowly and carefully to keep from crushing people under their tracks. Adolf Hitler Platz wasn't jammed sardine-tight, the way the little square in front of Rolf Stolle's residence had been. It would hold more than a million people. At the moment, it held tens, perhaps hundreds, of thousands.
"Wehrmachtor SS?" somebody called nervously.
"Bugger the SS with a pine cone," the machine gunner answered, and fired another burst into the air. "We're thereal soldiers, by God, and if those blackshirted pricks don't know it they'll find out pretty goddamn fast!"
The whoops that came from the crowd said that was what they wanted to hear. But SS men held the Fuhrer 's palace. Sandbagged machine-gun nests outside the entrance were plenty to keep the people at a respectful distance. Panzers and armored personnel carriers laughed at machine guns-though Heinrich, on the outside of the armor plate, wouldn't laugh if they opened up. And if the SS had machine guns here, it probably had antipanzer rockets, too.
Heinrich didn't see any Waffen — SS armor. Maybe Lothar Prutzmann had figured he wouldn't need it here once he'd got hold of Stolle. That only went to show he wasn't as smart as he thought he was.
Or does it show I'm not as smart as I think I am?Heinrich wondered. Would Waffen — SS panzers suddenly charge out of the night, their cleated steel tracks tearing up the pavement like those of the Wehrmacht machines? He shrugged. If the officer in charge of the Wehrmacht armor couldn't anticipate a threat like that, he didn't deserve his shoulder straps.
A blackshirt in front of the entrance stepped forward, his hands conspicuously empty. Try as he would to hold it steady, his voice quavered a little when he asked, "What do you want?"
"Globocnik!" Half a dozen Wehrmacht panzer commanders hurled the acting Fuhrer 's name in his face.
One of them added, "We know he's in there. We saw him come in this afternoon."
The crowd of angry civilians with the Wehrmacht men took up the cry: "Globocnik! Globocnik! We want Globocnik!" In a different tone of voice, those shouts would have warmed any politician's heart. As things were, if Heinrich had been Odilo Globocnik, he would have been looking for a place to hide.
Licking his lips, the SS man said, "You are speaking of the rightful Fuhrer of the Greater German Reich and of the Germanic Empire. He orders you-he commands you-to disperse."
Maybe the panzer commanders answered. If they did, they couldn't make themselves heard even with bullhorns. The crowd's roars drowned them out. "Heinz Buckliger is the rightful Fuhrer!" people shouted, and, "We won't take orders from Globocnik!" and, "Down with the SS!" Heinrich gleefully joined that last chant. He liked the others, but that one hit him where he lived.
"This is nothing but treason!" The SS man had got his nerve back. He sounded angry now, not frightened. "We will not surrender him!"
"Then you're going to be mighty sorry," one of the Wehrmacht panzer commanders said. The crowd bayed agreement.
"So will you, if you try to take him," the SS man answered.
He was used to making people afraid. He was good at it, too. After all, fear was his stock in trade. The German people had had almost eighty years in which to learn to fear the SS. But today, as Heinrich had seen in front of Rolf Stolle's residence, fear was failing. And intimidating men in panzers that carried big guns was a lot harder than scaring civilians who couldn't fight back.
Jeers and curses rained down on the SS man's head. More rained down on Odilo Globocnik's head. Was he listening, there inside the Fuhrer 's palace? With a strange, snarling joy Heinrich had never known before, he hoped so. The SS man, in his own coldblooded way, had style. He clicked his heels. His arm shot out toward the crowd in a Party salute. He spun on his heel, executed an about-face of parade-ground perfection to turn his back on the Wehrmacht soldiers and the people, and marched away to his comrades.
And, to a certain extent, his intimidation worked even against his formidable foes. He might have been-Heinrich thought he was-bluffing when he warned that the SS could make the Wehrmacht sorry. But the panzers' cannons and machine guns waited tensely-waited for they knew not what. A nightjar swooped out of the darkness to snatch one of the moths dancing in the air around the palace lights. The sudden, unexpected streak of motion made men from the SS and the Wehrmacht turn their heads towards it. If it had startled one of them into tightening his finger on a trigger…
Heinrich never knew exactly how long the impasse lasted. Somewhere between half an hour and an hour was his best guess. What broke it was a high, clear sound that pierced both the yells from the crowd and the diesel rumble of the armored fighting vehicles: the sound of one man laughing.
The man was a Wehrmacht panzer commander. Like his fellows, he wore radio headphones. He laughed again, louder this time, and raised a bullhorn to his mouth. "Give it up, you sorry bastards!" he blared. "Prutzmann's blown his brains out. The Putsch is falling down around your ears."
"Liar!" one of the SS men shouted, an odd desperation in his voice-it wasn't I don't believe you but I don't dare believe you.
"You've got your own radios," the Wehrmacht panzer commander answered through the bullhorn. "You can find out for yourselves. Go ahead. I'll wait." He theatrically folded his arms across his chest.
There in the glare of the panzers' lights, an SS radioman did call…whom? Somebody at Prutzmann's headquarters, Heinrich supposed. He could tell when the radioman got his question answered. The fellow suddenly sagged, as if his skeleton had turned to rubber. He spoke to the officer who'd parleyed with the Wehrmacht soldiers. The officer clapped a hand to his forehead in an altogether human gesture of despair: the kind of gesture Heinrich had never imagined seeing from an SS man.
Little by little, the officer pulled himself together. He stepped forward again. "You seem to be right," he called bleakly to the Wehrmacht panzer commander. "What do you want from us?"
"Give us Globocnik," the Wehrmacht man said. "The rest of you lousy sons of bitches can go back to your barracks. We'll deal with you later if we decide you're worth the trouble."
The SS officer drew back to hash things out with his comrades. Heinrich couldn't hear a word they said through the growl of the armored fighting vehicles' engines and the shouting and oaths from the crowd. Those soon coalesced into a chant of, "Globocnik! Globocnik! Give us Globocnik!" Heinrich happily howled it along with everybody else.
When a squad of blackshirts with assault rifles turned and went purposefully into the Fuhrer 's palace, he stopped chanting and thumped Willi on the shoulder. "They're going to get him!" he exclaimed. "They really are!"
"Either that or they're going to try to sneak him out of here," Willi said. "This place has got to have more secret escape routes than Brazil's got coffee beans."
"Their buddies will pay for it if they do that," Heinrich reminded him. "And besides, who'd want to rally behind Odilo Globocnik? Prutzmann, maybe. Whatever else he was, he was sly. But Globocnik? He was never anything but a false front for other people to work behind."
Willi thought that over, then nodded. "Well, when you're right, you're right." He grinned at Heinrich. "You should try it more often." Heinrich snorted.
A shot rang out inside the Fuhrer 's palace. Hearing it over the engine, Heinrich jerked and almost fell off the armored personnel carrier. "Is that Globocnik taking Prutzmann's way out?" he said. "Or was he 'shot while attempting to escape'?" The familiar SS euphemism for an execution had a fine ironic flavor here.