“Oh, my first concubine was a Circassian; Father gave her to me as a fourteenth birthday present. I was the envy of the county—she cost three hundred aurics.” He thrust the memory from him. There was the work of the day to attend to. “Next . . . ”
Standartenführer Felix Hoth awoke, mumbling, fighting a strangling enemy that he only gradually realized was a mass of sweat-soaked bedclothes. Panting, he swung his feet to the floor and hung his head in his hands, the palm heels pressed against his eyes. Lieber Herr Gott, but he’d thought the dreams had stopped. Perhaps it was the vodka last night; he hadn’t done that in a while, not since the first month after Moscow. He was back in the tunnels, in the dark, but alone; he could hear their breathing as they closed in on him and he could not even scream . . .
“Herr Standartenführer?” The question was repeated twice before it penetrated. It was one of his Slav girls—Valentina, or Tina, whatever; holding out a bottle of Stolichnaya and a glass. The smell of the liquor seized him with a sudden fierce longing, then combined with the odors of sweat and stale semen to make his stomach twist.
“No!” he shouted. His hand sent it crashing to the floor. She stood, cringing, to receive the backhanded slap. “You stupid Russki bitch, how many times do I have to tell you not in the morning! Fetch coffee and food. Schnell!”
The effort of rage exhausted him; he fought the temptation of a collapse back onto the four-poster bed. Instead, he forced his muscles into movement walking to the dresser and splashing himself with water from the jug, pouring more from the spirit-heater and beginning to shave. Sometimes he thought she was more trouble than she was worth, that he should find a good orderly and only send for her when he needed a woman. You expected an untermensch to be stupid, but it was what, five months now since he had grabbed her out of that burning schoolhouse in Tula and she still couldn’t speak more than a few words of German. His Russian was better. And she was supposed to have been a teacher!
It showed that Reichsfuhrer Himmler was right: intellectual training had nothing to do with real intelligence—that was in the blood. Or . . . sometimes he wondered if she was as dull as she seemed. Perhaps it would be better just to liquidate her. Two were enough, surely, or there were thousands more . . .
No. That was how Kube had gotten it, up around Minsk: one of them had smuggled an antipersonnel mine under the bed and blown them both to bits. Frightened, but not completely desperate, that was the ticket.
Breakfast repaired his spirits; the ration situation was definitely picking up, not like last winter when they’d all been gnawing black bread in the freezing dark. Real coffee, now that the U-boats were keeping the English too busy for blockades; good bacon and eggs and butter and cream. He glanced around the room with satisfaction as he ate; it was furnished with baroque elegance. Pyatigorsk had been a health resort for Tzarist nobles with a taste for medicinal springs at the foot of the Caucasus, and the Commissars had not let it run down. Not bad for a Silesian peasant’s son, brought up to touch the cap to the Herr Rittermeister; the Waffen-SS offered a career open to the talents, all right. No social distinctions at the Bad Tolz Junkerschul, the officer’s training academy. No limits to how high a sound Aryan could rise; in the Wehrmacht, he’d have been lucky to make Unteroffizier, with some traitorous monocled “gentleman” telling him what to do.
Well, piss on the regular Army and their opinion of Felix Hoth. Felix Hoth now commanded a regiment of SS-Division “Liebstandarte Adolf Hitler.” The Leader’s own Guards, the victors of Minsk, Smolensk, Moscow, Kharkov, Astrakhan. The elite of the New Order . . . and just finishing its conversion from a motorized infantry brigade to a Panzer division. He glanced at the mantel clock with its plump cupids—0530. Good, another half-hour and he’d roust the second Panzergrenadier battalion out—surprise inspection and a four-kilometer run. Good lads, but the new recruits needed stiffening. Not many left of the men who had jumped off from Poland a year ago. And as soon as they finished refitting they’d be back in the line—real fighting out on the Sverdlosk front instead of this chickenshit antipartisan work.
The situation reports had come up with breakfast; they were a real pleasure. The trickle of equipment from the captured Russian factories was turning into a steady flow, not like the old days when the Wehrmacht had grudged the SS every bayonet, and they’d had to make do with Czech and French booty. The SS could improvise; if the supply lines to the Fatherland were long, seize local potential! Ivan equipment: their armor and artillery were first-rate. He winced at the memory of trying to stop that first Russian T-34 with a 37mm antitank gun.
Burning pine forest, the smell like a mockery of Christmas fires. Burning trucks and human flesh, the human wave of Russian troops in their mustard-yellow uniforms, arms linked. Urra! Urra! The machine guns scythed them down, artillery firing point-blank, blasting huge gaps in their line, bits and pieces of human flung through the forest and hanging from the trees . . . and the tank, low, massive, unstoppable; its broad tracks grinding through the swamp.
Aim, range 800, pull the lanyard . . . crack-whang! He’d frozen for a moment in sheer disbelief, the reload in his hand. A clean hit and the thick-sloped plate had shed it into the trees like . . . like a tennis ball. Left only a shallow gouge, crackling and red as it cooled. Coming on, shot after shot rebounding, grinding over the gun, cutting Friedrich in half. He’d lain there looking up and not even bleeding for a second, then it had all come out . . .
Hoth looked down at his right hand; half the little finger was missing. He had been very lucky; jumping on the deck of a tank and ramming a grenade down the muzzle of its cannon was not something you did with any great hope of survival. Automatic, really; not thinking of living, or of the Knight’s Cross and the promotion . . .
With a smile on his thick-boned, stolid face, he strode to the window and pulled open the drapes. There they were, spread out in leagues three stories below, across the tread-chewed lawns of what had once been a nobleman’s park. Dawn was just breaking, reaching beams to gild the squat, gray-steel shapes, throw shadows from the hulls and long cannon. Tanks in the outer ring, then the assault guns, infantry carriers (praise Providence, all the motorized infantry on tracks at last!), soft transport. Russian designs, much of it. Improved, brought into line with German practice, pouring out of Kharkov and Stalingrad and Kirovy Rog, with technicians from Krupp and Daimler-Benz to organize, and overseers from the SS Totenkopf squads with stock whips to see that the Russian workers did not flag at their eighteen-hour days.
Not really necessary to pull into a hedgehog like this, but it was good practice and the partisans seemed damnably well informed. Suicide parties with explosive charges had infiltrated more than once. Perhaps more hostages, he thought, turning to the east and taking a deep breath of fresh, crisp spring air with a pleasant undertang of diesel oil.
The aircraft were difficult to spot, coming in low out of the dawning sun. He squinted, his first thought that it was a training flight . . .
The smile slid slowly off his face. Too many, too fast, too low; at least 450 km/h, hedgehopping over poplars and orchards. Two engines, huge radials; low-wing monoplanes, their noses bristling with muzzles, long teardrop canopies . . . One 40mm autocannon, six 25mm, the Luftwaffe intelligence report ran through his head. Five tonnes of bombs, rockets, jellied petrol . . . Draka ground-attack aircraft, P-12 Rhino class. The nominal belligerence of the Domination had suddenly become very real.