He flew straight and level, changing course only as Mouradian aligned them more closely on the railway line. "Now, Ivan!" Mouradian bawled through the speaking tube, and the stick of bombs fell free.
As soon as they did, Yaroslavsky swung the bomber into a hard turn and mashed down the throttle. Even Polish fighters could outrun the SB-2, and if Messerschmitts were in the neighborhood…
Messerschmitts were in the neighborhood. The slab-sided fighters tore into the SB-2s that had pressed deeper into Poland. A blast from the dorsal machine-gun turret said one of them was thinking about coming after Sergei's plane. "Gutless whore!" Ivan yelled. "He's running like a prick with the clap!"
"Too bad!" Sergei said. He exchanged a look with Mouradian. They wore identical shaky grins. No matter how the Chimp felt, neither was sorry that German hadn't kept chasing them. No, not a bit, Sergei thought, and came down on the throttle even harder. A GROUNDCREW MAN WALKED UP to Hans-Ulrich Rudel at what had been a French airstrip till the Wehrmacht overran it. These days, Stukas flew out of it to pummel the former owners and their English allies. "Excuse me, Lieutenant…" the enlisted man said, and stood there waiting.
"What's up, Franz?" Rudel asked. The mechanic had served in the trenches in the last war. He still recalled the strict and formal discipline of the Kaiser's army, which made him seem out of place in Germany's new, more easygoing military.
"Colonel Steinbrenner wants to see you right away, sir," Franz said.
"What kind of trouble am I in?" Hans-Ulrich assumed he was in one kind or another. He was a white crow in the squadron: a teetotaling minister's son didn't mix well with most of the hard-drinking, hard-wenching pilots. They teased him, and he shot back. There hadn't been any brawls yet, but it was bound to be only a matter of time. Even his rear gunner thought him a queer duck.
But Franz only shrugged. "Sir, you think a colonel tells me anything like that?"
Hans-Ulrich didn't. He walked over to the colonel's tent. Everything all around was green. The air was soft and sweet and mild with spring… if you didn't notice the faint death-reek that lay under the sweetness. Rudel's nose was used to it, so most of the time he didn't. This morning, for some reason, he did.
An unfamiliar Kubelwagen was parked next to the tent. The little utility vehicle was built on a Volkswagen chassis. Production of passenger cars, naturally, was on hold for the duration. A Kubelwagen could take four people almost anywhere, and carry a machine gun, too. If you didn't need armor plate or a cannon, what more could you want?
He ducked into the tent. "Rudel, sir, reporting as ordered."
"Yes, yes." Colonel Steinbrenner nodded to the two men standing next to the folding table that served as his desk. "These gentlemen have some questions they want to ask you."
The gentlemen in question didn't wear Luftwaffe blue-gray. Instead, their uniforms were somber black, with SS runs on one collar tab. The older SS man said, "So you're Rudel, are you?"
"That's right," Hans-Ulrich answered automatically.
"Good. Come with us," the blackshirt said.
"What's going on?" That was also an automatic yelp.
"Just come. We'll talk about it later," the SS man answered.
Numbly, Rudel went. Was this what Russian officers felt when somebody from the NKVD came for them? He didn't know; he'd never been a Russian. He did know people at the airstrip stared as he climbed into the Kubelwagen with Himmler's hounds. The younger one started up the machine. As it rolled away, Hans-Ulrich wondered if he'd ever come back.
After a little more than a kilometer, the driver pulled off the narrow, winding road and stopped. Everything was very quiet. A couple of black cows grazed in an emerald meadow. Off in the distance, a French farmer guided a horse-drawn plow. He probably would have used a tractor before the war, but where would he get gas for it now? The plow might have been sitting in the barn since his father put it there. But you did what you could with what you had.
What were the SS men going to do with him? The older one lit an Overstolz from a pack he took out of his breast pocket. When he held out the pack, Hans-Ulrich shook his head. "That's right," the blackshirt said, as if reminding himself. "You don't drink, either, do you?"
"What if I don't?" Rudel said. "Were you going to give me a cigarette before you put one between my eyes?"
The two big men in black looked at each other. Then, as if on cue, they threw back their heads and laughed like loons. A jackdaw flew out of a nearby tree, chattering in annoyance. "That's not what we brought you out here for," the younger one said. Tears leaked from the corners of his eyes. He dabbed at them with his sleeve before dissolving in giggles again. "Oh, dear!" He couldn't stop laughing-he was helpless as a baby.
And his partner wasn't in much better shape. Had Rudel needed to, he thought he could have disarmed them both without breaking a sweat. Evidently, though, he didn't need to. What he didn't understand was why he didn't need to. "Well, what did you bring me out here for?" he asked irritably.
"Nice to know our reputation goes ahead of us," the older one said. Did he mean it? Hans-Ulrich, already at sea, had trouble telling. The SS man gathered himself. He finally went on, "As a matter of fact, Rudel, we wanted to talk to you because you're known to be loyal."
"Huh?" Hans-Ulrich knew the uncouth noise made him sound like a moron, but it was what came out of his mouth.
"Because you're known to be loyal," the SS man repeated patiently. Maybe he had a small child at home, and didn't mind saying the same thing over and over again. Or maybe-since he didn't wear a wedding ring-he'd just done a devil of a lot of interrogations. "We want to root out disloyalty wherever we find it. People whose loyalty we trust can help us do that. This colonel in charge of your squadron, for instance… Has he ever done anything or said anything to make you think he's not doing all he can for the Reich and the Fuhrer?"
"Colonel Steinbrenner? Never," Rudel said at once. Telling the truth was easy, and came as a relief.
"He's replacing somebody who wasn't reliable," the younger SS man said, tactfully reminding his superior of something he might have forgotten.
"Ja, ja," the other blackshirt said, not so patiently this time. If he had forgotten, he wasn't about to admit it. "But so what? That doesn't mean he walks on water himself, not by a long shot."
"As far as I know, he's a good National Socialist," Hans-Ulrich said.
"Wunderbar. Maybe he does walk on water, then. What about the other people in your squadron?" the older man persisted. "Anybody saying rude things about the Fuhrer because the offensive's slowed down a little bit?"
The offensive in France hadn't slowed down. It had stopped. No matter how German radio tried to disguise that, it was obvious to anyone who spent time at, or over, the front. The Wehrmacht hadn't taken Paris. It hadn't wheeled around behind the city from the north: the goal in 1914 and now again a generation later. It was scrambling to try to cover its long, weak southern flank against French counterattacks. It wasn't trench warfare of the sort that had murdered so many of the Kaiser's soldiers, but German troops weren't storming forward to glory right this minute, either.
Cautiously, Hans-Ulrich answered, "Nobody's very happy about it. I'm not very happy about it myself."
That last sentence made the older SS man close his mouth on a question. Rudel could guess what it was. He would have wanted to know exactly who was unhappy, and what the unhappy people had said. Easy to put a noose around someone's neck with testimony like that. But the blackshirt had to see Rudel wouldn't say anything worth hearing, not if he admitted he wished the war were going better.
"What about your crewmate, Sergeant What's-his-name… Dieselhorst?" the younger SS man said. "Some people have told us funny stuff about him."