"Practice," the veteran sniper repeated. "When I think you're ready, we'll go out to a hide at night, and you can start potting froggies. Pick ones well back of the line, if you can. They're more apt to be careless back there, anyhow. And if you do that, they'll think it was me, and they'll go buggier than they would if you showed a different style."
"I understand. But what I do if I spot the Czech asshole with the antipanzer rifle?" Willi asked.
"Dispose of him," Puttkamer said at once. "You think I'll be mad? You think I'll be jealous? Not a chance, kid. I'll get you promoted. I'll get you a medal. I'll get you so fucking drunk, you'll still have a Katzenjammer three days later. That's our number one piece of business right now-dealing with that son of a bitch. You hear?"
"I hear." Willi not only heard, he believed. Awful Arno would have tried his hardest to grab the credit if Willi did anything worth noticing. If Oberfeldwebel Puttkamer wasn't like that, more power to him.
Baatz watched and sneered and made rude comments as Willi got used to his new weapon. Willi ignored him for a while. Then, as if by accident, he did get the corporal in the crosshairs. He didn't have a round chambered. His finger was nowhere near the trigger. Awful Arno found something else to do in a hurry even so.
After a few days, Puttkamer said, "Well, kid, let's find out how you do." After dark, he led Willi out to a shell hole that had a shattered door splayed half across it. "Get under there. Whatever you do, don't move where they can see you till tomorrow night-and they won't see you then, either. Wait. When you get a target, service it. Need to know anything else?"
"Don't think so," Willi answered. Puttkamer set a hand on his shoulder, then silently crawled away.
Willi slithered under the scarred door and went to sleep. When he woke up, the sun had risen behind him. Hidden by shadows, he ate black bread with liver paste on it. He looked through his binoculars. It was getting on toward noon when he spotted a Frenchman in a kepi striding along importantly half a kilometer behind the enemy line.
Slowly, slowly, he moved the Mauser into position and picked up the Frenchman in the telescopic sight. He made sure nothing was out in the sunlight to give him away. Pierre or Gaston or whoever he was seemed not to have a care in the world. Willi took a deep breath. He let it out. He pulled the trigger-gently, as if with a lover's caress.
The Mauser kicked: not too hard, since it was pressed tight against his shoulder. The magnified Frenchman in the sight took another step. Then he fell over. Willi didn't move. He didn't shout or whoop or even light a cigarette. All the same, he knew he'd just joined the club.
That night, two men brought what was left of Marcus Puttkamer back in a shelter half. From the neck up, he pretty much wasn't there. The bullet that killed him must have caught him right under the chin and blown off most of his head. He looked worse than Sergeant Fegelein had, which wasn't easy. Willi realized his new club had higher dues than he wanted to pay. A STUKA SCREAMED DOWN out of the hazy, gray-blue sky. Staff Sergeant Alistair Walsh fired a couple of shots at it. He knew that was long odds, but he did it anyhow. What did he have to lose?
Bombs fell from the dive-bomber. It leveled off only a couple of hundred yards above the machine-gun nest it was attacking, then roared away. Sandbags, the gun and tripod, and bodies and pieces of bodies arced through the air.
"Hell," Walsh muttered. "Bloody fucking hell. This is where I came in."
When the German blow fell in the west the winter before, the Luftwaffe had had things all its own way for a while. In France, it didn't any more; the RAF and the French were making the Fritzes pay for everything they got there. But that was France. Here in Norway, the deck still seemed stacked in the Nazis' favor.
Before the Germans jumped them, the Norwegians hadn't had much of an air force of their own. They flew Italian Caproni bombers, Dutch Fokker monoplane fighters, and English Gloster Gladiators: biplanes outdated by both Hurricanes and Spitfires. They didn't fly very many of any of them. The Luftwaffe could reach this part of Norway from newly occupied Denmark, and from airfields captured farther south in the country: Oslo was firmly in German hands.
More Stukas dove, their sirens wailing like damned souls. More British strongpoints in front of Trondheim went up in smoke and fire. The Stukas flew away. They'd bomb up again, maybe refuel, and pretty soon they'd come back to blow up more of the defenses around the town.
Somewhere out to sea, there was supposed to be a Royal Navy carrier. The planes that took off from its flight deck might help till England and France could bring in land-based fighters. Then again, they might not. Walsh had seen a Stuka outrun an English Skua. The lumbering German dive bombers couldn't get out of their own way. What did that say about the poor miserable Skua? Nothing good, surely.
Jock pointed south. "Are those bloody fucking German tanks?" the Yorkshireman asked.
Walsh looked, too. Safe enough: no German foot soldiers close yet. How long would that last, though? Not long enough, plainly. "Afraid they are, chum," the NCO said.
"Well, what do we do about them?" Jock pressed.
The ideal answer would have been Turn our own tanks loose on them. Walsh saw no English, French, or Norwegian tanks. He wasn't sure there were any Norwegian tanks to see. There were a few Bren-gun carriers: tankettes, some people called them. They carried two men and a machine gun, and were well enough armored to keep out rifle bullets. If the other side had no tanks at all, tankettes were world-beaters. If, on the other hand, they ran up against real armor, they were doomed. And those were real tanks coming. Not first-rate real tanks, maybe: Panzer IIs, or perhaps captured Czech models. Anything that mounted a cannon was plenty to put paid to a Bren-gun carrier.
Thrushes chirped among the tussocks. Fieldfares, wheatears: birds of the far north. One of them plucked a worm from the newly turned dirt in a bomb crater and swallowed it. Walsh laughed in spite of himself. Sure as hell, it was an ill wind that blew no one any good.
An officer had some field glasses. After staring through them, he said, "Those are Czech T-35s."
Wonderful, Walsh thought. Always good to know what's about to do you in. Before long, he saw that the young lieutenant was right. The Czech machines were bigger than Panzer IIs. Their road wheels were much bigger. And they carried bigger cannon: 37mm against the German tanks' 20mm guns.
The men in the Bren-gun carriers had guts. They rattled out ahead of the position the Tommies, poilus, and squareheads were manning. They would stop the German tanks if they could. Trouble was, Walsh knew too damn well they couldn't. He also knew they knew they couldn't.
Somewhere along the line, there were said to be a couple of antitank cannon. Walsh had no idea where they were. They weren't anywhere close by, so they were unlikely to make any difference in the upcoming fight. His hand shook when he lit a Navy Cut. Nothing was likely to make any difference in the upcoming fight.
Jock's thoughts were running on a similarly gloomy track. "We need the bloody fucking cavalry riding in to chase off the bloody fucking Indians, is what we need," he said.
"Too right we do," Walsh agreed. "This isn't what they call a Hollywood ending. Wrong bloody side is winning."
For some little while, he paid no attention to the rising buzz in the air. If he noticed it at all, he assumed it came from more Luftwaffe aircraft. But it didn't. Damned if those weren't Skuas, winging in from off the ocean. They could carry bombs as well as chasing planes faster than they were. Whatever bad things you could say about the Blackburn Skua-and you could say plenty-it was, by God, faster than a tank.
Walsh pointed into the sky. "It's the bloody fucking cavalry!"