Colonel Steinbrenner blinked, then started to laugh. "Well, you've got me there. Go ahead-talk to them. See what happens. Maybe they'll come up with something. Or maybe they'll tell you you're out of your tree. Who knows?"
Head full of his grand new idea, Rudel hurried away. The first person he talked to was Sergeant Dieselhorst. The rear gunner and radioman rubbed his chin. "That'd be a nice trick if they can do it," he said. "Can they?"
"I don't know," Hans-Ulrich said. "I sure want to find out, though."
He interrupted the armorers' skat game. They heard him out, then looked at one another. "That just might work," one of them said when he finished. "Mount the breech in a sheet-metal pod so it's more aerodynamic…"
That hadn't even occurred to Hans-Ulrich. "Wonderful!" he exclaimed. "Could you fellows rig up a gun like that?"
They looked at one another again. The fellow who'd spoken before-his name was Lothar-said, "Well, sir, that's not gonna be so easy. We're Luftwaffe guys, you know? How do we get our hands on a couple of infantry cannon?"
"Oh." That hadn't occurred to Hans-Ulrich, either. He wondered why not. Probably because he was so hot for the idea, he ignored problems. Other people didn't, though. He supposed that was good. Well, most of him did. Every once in a while, you wanted things to be easy.
"Talk to the engineers, sir," Lothar said. "They've got more pull than we do. If anybody can get hold of that kind of shit-uh, stuff-they're the guys."
So Rudel talked to the engineers. They visited forward airstrips every so often: they wanted to find out how the Stukas were doing in combat so they could get ideas for improving the planes the factories would turn out next month or next year. (A few weeks earlier, Hans-Ulrich wouldn't have believed that the war could still be going on next year. Now, however much he regretted it, he realized anything was possible.)
They heard him out. When he started, they listened with glazed eyes and fixed smiles, the way an adult might listen to an eight-year-old talking about how he intended to fly to the moon on an eagle's back. But he watched them come to life as he talked. When he finished, one of them said, "I will be damned. We could probably do that. And it sounds like it'd work if we did."
"It does," another engineer said. He might have been announcing miracles.
"You don't need to sound so surprised," Hans-Ulrich said sharply.
"Lieutenant, we hear schemes like this wherever we go. Well, not like this, but schemes." The second engineer corrected himself. "Most of them are crap, nothing else but. Somebody has a harebrained notion, and he doesn't see it's harebrained 'cause he's harebrained himself. And so he tries to ram it down our throats."
"And he gets pissed off when we tell him all the reasons it won't work," the first engineer added. "I mean really pissed off. A rear gunner took a swing at me when I told him we couldn't give a Stuka an electronic rangefinder-they're too big and too heavy for an airplane to carry. One of these days, maybe, but not yet."
"An electronic rangefinder?" Hans-Ulrich asked, intrigued in spite of himself.
"You don't know about those?" the engineer said. Rudel shook his head. The man looked-relieved? "In that case, forget I said anything. The fewer people who do know, the better."
Hans-Ulrich started to complain, then decided not to. Plenty of projects were secret. If the Frenchmen shot up his plane the next time he went out, and they made him bail out and captured him, the less he could tell them, the better off the Reich would be. The engineer was dead right about that. Hans-Ulrich did say, "But you think my idea is practical?"
"Hell with me if I don't," the man answered. Hans-Ulrich frowned; he didn't like other people's casual profanity. The engineer didn't care what he thought. The fellow went on, "The ammunition may get a little interesting, but that's the only hitch I see."
"We could adapt the firing mechanism from the 109's 20mm cannon," his colleague said.
"Hmm. Maybe we could," the other man said. Their technical colloquy made as little sense to Hans-Ulrich as if they'd suddenly started spouting Hindustani. But he understood the key point. They thought the panzer-busting gun would work, and they thought it was worth working on. He wondered how long they would need to come up with a prototype.
And he wondered if they would let him try it out. "COME ON, damn you." Joaquin Delgadillo gestured with his rifle. "Get moving. If you were just a stinking Spanish traitor, by God, I'd shoot you right here."
The International sitting in the dirt glared at him. He wouldn't hold a rifle any time soon; a bullet had smashed his right hand. Blood soaked into the dirty bandage covering the wound. "What will you do to me instead?" he asked. Some kind of thick Central European accent clotted his Castilian. It wasn't German. Joaquin had heard German accents often enough to recognize them. But he couldn't have told a Czech from a Hungarian or a Pole.
"They'll want to question you," he answered.
"To torture me, you mean," the Red said.
Delgadillo shrugged. "Not my problem. If you don't start walking right now, I will shoot you. And I'll laugh at you while you die, too."
"Your leaders are fooling you. No matter what you think you're fighting for, you won't get it if that fat slob of a Sanjurjo wins," the International said. "All you'll get is-uh, are-tyranny and misery."
He came very close to dying then. Joaquin nearly shot him; the main thing that kept him from pulling the trigger was the thought that the Red's smashed hand made a good start on torture by itself. The interrogators could just knock it around a little, and the International would sing like a little yellow bird from the Canaries.
If the fellow hadn't got up when Delgadillo jerked the rifle again, he would have plugged him, and that would have been that. But the International did. He stumbled off toward the Nationalists' rear, Joaquin close enough behind him to fire if he tried anything cute. A wounded right hand? So what? He might be a lefty. You never could tell, especially with the Reds.
A bullet cracked past, a couple of meters over their heads. They both bent their knees to get farther away from it. "So you genuflect in that church, do you?" Joaquin said.
"Not many who don't," the International answered. "I want to live. Go ahead-call me a fool."
"If you wanted to live, you should have stayed away from Spain," Joaquin said. "This isn't your fight."
"Freedom is everybody's fight, or it ought to be," the Central European said. "If you don't have freedom, what are you? The jefe's donkey, that's what, with a load on your back and somebody walking beside you beating you with a stick."
That scream in the air was no ordinary bullet. "?Abajo!" Delgadillo yelled as he hit the dirt.
The International flattened out, too. He yowled like a wildcat when he banged the wounded hand, but he didn't pop up again, the way a lot of men would have. The shell-it had to be a 155-burst less than a hundred meters away. Fragments whined viciously overhead. The Nationalists weren't going to take Madrid away from the Republic, not like this they weren't. In fact, the Republicans and their foreign friends had pushed Marshal Sanjurjo's men out of the university at the northwestern edge of town. It was embarrassing, to say nothing of infuriating.
Which only made the International luckier still that Joaquin hadn't shot him out of hand. Sergeant Carrasquel would have told him he was wasteful if he had. That was another good reason to hold back. No one in his right mind wanted a sergeant giving him a hard time.
When no more shells fell in the neighborhood, Joaquin cautiously rose. "Get up!" he snapped.