“They’re trying to clean us out, too,” Lemp remarked as stuttering machine guns dueled outside.
“That’s why I gave you the Walther, sir,” the lieutenant said patiently.
Lemp had no idea how he’d do, shooting it out with the other side through doors and around corners. This wasn’t the kind of warfare he’d trained for. Regardless of whether he’d trained for it, it was the kind of warfare he had.
They’d started down the hall toward the next room when a tremendous blast of noise staggered them all. “Good God!” Lemp exclaimed. “What the devil just blew up?”
“Nothing,” the lieutenant answered. Lemp could barely hear him; his ears were stunned. The younger man went on, “That was Gneisenau’s broadside. She’s with us.”
“Good God!” Lemp said again. He’d known the battle cruiser was in port, but it hadn’t meant anything special to him. Why should it have? He’d had nothing to do with battle cruisers-not till civil war broke out, anyhow. But the Gneisenau mounted nine 280mm guns. They could throw their enormous shells at least thirty kilometers. Nothing on land could stand up to that kind of bombardment. Nothing anywhere could, except for the thickest armor on a few battleships. “What are they shooting at?”
“Beats me,” the lieutenant said cheerfully. “Whatever it was, it isn’t there any more.”
He was bound to be right about that. Bombs from a Stuka might do for the warship. Lemp couldn’t think of anything else that would. The Gneisenau ruled as far as its great guns would reach.
They knocked on the next door. A captain opened it. “Which side are you on?” the petty officer demanded.
The captain’s answer was proud and prompt: “I am loyal to the legitimate government of the Grossdeutsches Reich.” In case anyone doubted what that was, his right arm shout up and out. “Heil Hitler!”
His answer was proud and prompt-and wrong. Both petty officers shot him, one in the chest, the other in the face. He shrieked and crumpled. Lemp’s stomach tried to turn over. No, this wasn’t the kind of killing he was used to.
Gunfire inside the barracks made a couple of officers stick their heads out into the hallway to find out what was going on. One of them hastily ducked back into his room and slammed the door behind him. The other man fired at Lemp and his comrades with a service pistol.
He was only ten or twelve meters away, but he missed. He missed three times in quick succession, as a matter of fact. He probably hadn’t won a marksman’s badge when he qualified with the pistol back in the day, and chances were he hadn’t fired it more than two or three times in all the years since.
Combat was the hardest school around. The officer never got a chance for his fourth shot. The lieutenant loosed three quick, professional bursts from his Schmeisser. You didn’t really need to aim the machine pistol. You just had to point it, which was much simpler. Down went the pro-Nazi officer.
He wasn’t down for the count, though. He groped for the pistol, which he’d dropped when he fell. One of the petty officers shot him through the head. He kept thrashing even after that, but to no purpose, not with his brains splashed on the linoleum and the white-painted wall.
“Come on,” the lieutenant said. “We’ll clean up this floor and go on to the next.” Lemp numbly followed. He hadn’t fired a Walther for quite a while himself. Have to get my hands on a Schmeisser, he thought.
Ivan Kuchkov had seen a lot in his days fighting the Hitlerites. One of the things he’d seldom seen, though, was a German coming forward under a large flag of truce. Oh, every once in a while one side or the other would ask for a cease-fire to pick up the wounded. But that was just a little pause in the business of killing one another. This felt different.
The approaching German here wasn’t a sergeant, or even a captain. He was a colonel with a gray mustache. And he spoke Russian, something not many Fritzes did.
“I would like to be taken back to your high command!” he called as he strode forward. “I am here to ask for a truce along a broad stretch of front. Perhaps we can have peace.”
Beside Kuchkov, Sasha Davidov looked as if his eyes were about to bug right out of his head. “I never heard a German talk that way before,” the Zhid whispered. “I never knew Germans could talk that way.”
“Me, neither,” Ivan said. “ ’Course, chances are it’s all moonshine and horseshit.”
“I wouldn’t be surprised,” his point man answered. “What’ll you do, though?”
“I’ll fucking well take him back to Lieutenant Obolensky, that’s what,” Ivan said. “Let him figure it all out. That’s what officers are for.”
He stood up, showing himself amidst the tall grass and bushes. The German colonel turned to come straight toward him. “Good day, Sergeant,” he said in that accented schoolboy Russian.
“Yob tvoyu mat’,” Ivan answered with a nasty grin. The Fritz turned red, so he understood it. Well, tough luck. Ivan gestured with his PPD. “Come along with me, bitch.”
He didn’t have far to go to find Lieutenant Obolensky. The young company commander was only a couple of hundred meters to the rear. He slid out from behind some bushes and said, “Well, Comrade Sergeant, what have you got here?”
“Prick’s a Nazi colonel, Comrade Lieutenant,” Ivan said, which was obvious anyhow. “Wants to fucking parley with our brass.”
“Does he always talk like that?” the German asked plaintively.
“Da,” Lieutenant Obolensky said. That made the Fritz blink. Obolensky went on, “Tell me who you are and what you want.”
“I have the honor to be Karl-Friedrich von Holtzendorf. I am a staff officer attached to Army Group Ukraine,” the German said. “As you may have heard, there has been a change of government and a change of policy in the Reich.”
“Hitler screwed the pooch, so you got rid of him,” Ivan said. Obolensky held out his hand with the palm flat to the ground, trying to shush him. Ivan made a disgusted face. He didn’t want to waste politeness on a bastard who wore Feldgrau.
To his surprise, Colonel von Holtzendorf nodded. “That is about the size of it, Sergeant, yes. We are trying to find reasonable terms to end these unfortunate conflicts.”
“One man’s reasonable is another man’s outrageous,” Obolensky observed. Kuchkov would have said the same thing, but he would have put more oomph into it.
“I understand that,” von Holtzendorf said. “I have come to find out what terms your military and your government believe to be reasonable. Can you please radio your army-group-no, you say your front-headquarters and let them know I am coming?”
“I’ll send you back to regimental HQ,” Obolensky said. “They should have a radio, if it’s working. If it’s not, they’ll take you back farther. Sooner or later, you’ll get where you want to go.”
Karl-Friedrich von Holtzendorf’s left eyebrow jumped toward the bill of his high-crowned cap. If he’d been wearing a monocle in that eye like a Nazi officer in a movie, it would have fallen out. Ivan understood why the Fritz looked so scandalized. He was sure every company-maybe every section-in the Wehrmacht had a radio set. He was also sure almost all of them worked almost all the time. The Germans were great for using lots and lots of fancy equipment.
It helped them only so much. The Red Army was great for using lots and lots of Russians-and every other folk in the Soviet Union. Had it had the Hitlerites’ fancy gear, it might not have had to spend so many men. Fungible, Ivan thought once more. But you did what you could with what you had. The Red Army had soldiers, and used them … and used them up.
“Comrade Sergeant, tell off three men. You and they will take Colonel von Holtzendorf”-Obolensky pronounced it Goltzendorf, since Russian had no h sound-“to regimental headquarters. About four kilometers that way.” He pointed northeast.