“Forward!” No one seemed to have issued the Waffen-SS man any doubts. Forward they went, and then forward again. Downtown Münster had plenty of ruins and wreckage to hide inside and behind. They lost a couple of men. They shot a few men fighting for the Salvation Committee.
That worried Arno. The guys on the other side had to know they were attacking. If those guys weren’t dopes-and not all of them would be-they had to have a pretty fair notion of where the loyalists were heading. If they knew that, they could shift troops to stop them.
Baatz was about halfway to the 105 when he stopped caring. He couldn’t have said why, but he did. He wanted to make it to the gun. He wanted to take out the crew. Whatever happened next … would happen. He might get back. He might not. Why borrow trouble?
He shot a traitor, then quickly ducked down behind some shattered stonework. The enemy soldier’s buddy rattled the wreckage with a burst from his submachine gun, but he didn’t hit Arno. The 105 boomed again. More of the Rathaus fell in on itself. More of it fell into the flames, too. Sure as hell, coming out here was better than staying back there would have been.
The attackers were taking flanking fire now. No other loyalist bands seemed to be in the neighborhood. They soaked up more losses, but they kept advancing. Arno had no idea whether the other side’s medics patched up wounded loyalists or cut their throats.
Blam! Now Arno knew exactly where that goddamn 105 sat. When he slithered around the next corner, he was almost sure he could fire at the artillerymen who served it.
Before he could, a Panzer IV clanked around that corner, heading straight at him. “Fuck you!” he shouted-it wasn’t fair that the stinking thing should be flying an Imperial German flag on its radio aerial.
Its cupola was open, the commander looking out. Arno fired at him. The panzer man tumbled inside, whether hit or not Arno didn’t know. The SS sergeant flung a grenade, hoping it would follow the traitor in the black coveralls down through the cupola. But it bounced off the glacis plate and burst harmlessly on the paving. The bow machine gun sparked to life. Arno dove for cover.
“Come on, Adi! Step on it!” Hermann Witt shouted.
“I’m doing the best I can, Sergeant,” Adi Stoss answered. “Some of these streets are narrower than the panzer, dammit.”
From everything Theo could see, Adi was right. Like so many medieval towns, Münster hadn’t been built with motor vehicles in mind. And it really hadn’t been built with panzers in mind. Every time Adi had to make a tight turn, he bit out chunks of buildings that fronted the street too closely.
None of which cut any ice with the panzer commander. “Never mind the best you can. Just get there!” he said. “That’s the best-sited gun we’ve got. It’s knocking the shit out of them. We can’t let the goddamn Nazis kill the crew or smash the breech block.”
The same message dinned in Theo’s earphones. He hoped it was genuine, and not leading them into a trap. Both men who backed the Salvation Committee and their foes used the same radio sets, the same frequencies, the same communications doctrine. Each side did its best to confuse the other, and each side’s best seemed plenty good.
He’d used the panzer’s bow gun more than he ever had in Russia. Fighting in a city turned out to be like that. He’d used the firing port in the side of the hull, too, keeping troublemakers at a distance with his Schmeisser.
He worried that somebody would toss a Molotov cocktail out a third-story window, say, and into the fighting compartment through the open hatch atop the cupola. That was one more thing you didn’t need to fret about so much in Russia. Steppes and farm villages didn’t grow three-story buildings.
One more corner. “There they are!” Witt yelled from the cupola. He yelled again a moment later, this time in pain. He fell back into the panzer like a red squirrel diving into a hole in a spruce. Then he gave another yelclass="underline" “Canister! Blow the shitheads away!”
Theo was already working them over with the bow machine gun as the round slammed into the breech. He knocked down a rather plump fellow with a swastika armband just before the enemy soldier could jump behind a stone wall. Then he swept the machine gun to the left and hit the guy who’d thrown a grenade. That fellow was close enough for Theo to make out the SS runes on his collar patches. Theo’s lips peeled back from his teeth in a savage smile. He’d always wanted the chance to shoot some SS men. Now he had it.
And then the canister round swept away everything in the first hundred meters of its path that might have been alive. He’d already seen the horrible things canister did to mere flesh and blood. That the flesh and blood out there wanted to kill him made him feel a little better about using it so, but only a little.
That some of the flesh and blood out there had hurt one of the rare men he counted a friend made him feel much better about using it so. He turned to look back over his shoulder and asked, “How the hell are you, Hermann?” Anxiety made his voice break like a fourteen-year-old’s.
Witt gave back a grin almost as much a death’s head as his panzer man’s emblem. “My God! It talks!” he said, and Theo decided he wasn’t going to parley with the Grim Reaper right this minute. But his left hand was clenched around his right upper arm, and bright red blood dribbled out between his fingers. “Flesh wound,” he went on. “I’m pretty sure it missed the bone. I can wiggle my fingers and all.” As if to prove it, he shaped a filthy gesture with his right hand.
Adi spoke in tones of professional interest: “Will they award you a wound badge for stopping one when you’re fighting other Germans?”
“Now you can ask me if I give a fuck,” Witt answered. “Lothar, help me get a wound bandage on this thing. Maybe you’d better stick me, too. It hurts pretty good. If the morphine leaves me too dopey to run the panzer, I figure you jerks can probably cope for a while. In the meantime, keep going till we can shoot at the Rathaus. We’ll help that 105 blow up the rats in it.”
“You probably aren’t right at death’s door,” Adi said, which perfectly echoed Theo’s thought. “And blowing up the Rathaus here will be a pleasure. Oh, you bet it will.”
He’d grown up around Münster, or maybe in it. Theo knew that much about his tight-lipped crewmate. Adi’d had to do something, well, far out of the ordinary to need to make it into the Wehrmacht, too. After all this time together, Theo still wasn’t sure what that might have been. Whatever it was, did records of it linger in the Rathaus?
If they did, no wonder Adi wanted to help knock the place flat. When the panzer edged up behind a heap of smashed junk that let its gun bear on the Rathaus, the driver whooped: “Hey-hey! It’s already on fire!”
“We’ll help it along,” Witt said, and then, “Hurry up with that shot, Lothar. This business of stopping a bullet isn’t a whole lot of fun.”
Theo looked down at his left hand. He was missing a finger there. He had but didn’t particularly rejoice in a wound badge. He’d caught a French bullet, not a German one. As far as what they did, the difference in nationality didn’t seem to matter.
Lothar Eckhart got Witt bandaged and injected. Then the panzer’s big gun started pouring HE shells into the Rathaus. Each burst turned more of the fine old building into fine modern junk. Several of the bursts started fresh fires, too. With hot metal fragments tearing through what probably amounted to cubic kilometers of paper, that was anything but surprising.