Last Orders: The War That Came Early (39 page)

Hans-Ulrich Rudel stood to stiff attention in front of the folding table that served Colonel Steinbrenner as a desk. “Reporting as ordered, sir,” he said, saluting. “What do you need?”

“To ask you a question,” the squadron CO said. “Whatever you tell me, I promise it won’t be held against you.”

Whenever somebody told you something like that, he didn’t mean it. Even a preacher’s son like Hans-Ulrich got that. “One of
those
questions, is it?” he said with a wry grin.

Steinbrenner, though, wasn’t grinning. “Yes, I’m afraid it is,” he answered, and his voice sounded as somber as if he were officiating at a graveside service.

“Well, then, you’d better ask me, hadn’t you?” Rudel said. Any trace of amusement vanished from his voice, too.

“All right. Here goes.” But the colonel paused to light a cigarette and drag deep before he continued, “If you were ordered to bomb a German city in a state of rebellion against the
Führer
and the
Grossdeutsches Reich
, would you do it? Could you do it?”

No wonder he hesitated! That wasn’t what anybody would call a small question. Hans-Ulrich knew what the proper military answer was.
Zu Befehl, Herr Oberst!
Anything else was less than his duty, less than his oath to Adolf Hitler. All the same … No, it wasn’t a small question. He tried to come back with a question of his own: “Is that what you are commanding me to do, sir?” You were—just barely—permitted to make sure you clearly understood your orders.

But all Steinbrenner said, in a voice like stone, was, “Answer what I asked you, please.”

“Bomb German civilians?”

“German civilians revolting against the government of the
Grossdeutsches Reich
.”

“Sir, I—” Rudel came to an unhappy stop. Fighting Germany’s enemies was an honor, a privilege. Telling him who Germany’s enemies were was the
Führer
’s job. But if the
Führer
told him the German
Volk
were Germany’s enemies … Had he been a pinball machine, his eyes would have read
TILT
. “Sir, I just don’t know,” he finished after that stop.

“Thank you,” the squadron CO said. “You’re dismissed.”

“Sir?” Too much was happening too fast.

“Dismissed.” Steinbrenner cut off the syllables as if with a scissors. In case two-syllable words had suddenly got too hard for Rudel, he chose some shorter ones: “Get the fuck out of here.”

Hans-Ulrich left. Not to put too fine a point on it, Hans-Ulrich fled. Mere combat didn’t faze him—he had its measure. If you lived, you lived. If you died, you died. You did your best to live. But the unknown terrified even the bravest.

A lot of men would have gone to the officers’ tent and got smashed. If you couldn’t think straight, you didn’t need to worry about what you couldn’t—or didn’t want to—understand. But drowning his sorrows had never been Rudel’s style. Obeying orders no matter how he felt about them had never been a problem before. Now, all of a sudden, it was.

The trouble was, the airstrip didn’t have many places where someone could go to be by himself. The first one he thought of was the revetment that sheltered his Stuka. But when he got there he found Albert Dieselhorst fiddling with the trim tabs on the plane’s tail.

“Morning, sir. What’s cooking?” Dieselhorst took a longer look and found a different question: “Good God! Who stepped on your tail?”

“Colonel Steinbrenner did,” Rudel answered.

“Why?” the radioman and rear gunner demanded. “You haven’t even screwed any
Mischlings
I know of since we got to Belgium. You’re a
good
boy … uh, sir.”

“Danke schön,”
Hans-Ulrich said in a distinctly hollow voice. “No, I wasn’t naughty—not that way, anyhow.”

“What
did
you do, then?”

“I didn’t do anything. It’s what the colonel asked me.” Hans-Ulrich explained just what that was.

Sergeant Dieselhorst stared at him.
“Der Herr Gott im Himmel!”
he burst out, and then added several comments even more pungent. Once he’d got those out of his system, he asked, “And what did you answer?”

“I said I didn’t know whether I could do it or not.”

“Huh.” The sergeant eyed him thoughtfully. “I’ll tell you one thing, so you know. If they ever give you orders like that, I sure as hell don’t want to sit in the back seat.”

“You’ll end up in all kinds of hot water if you try to refuse,” Hans-Ulrich pointed out.

“I understand that. Believe me, I do. I’ve been in the service a lot longer than you have.” Dieselhorst hawked and spat on the dirt near the Stuka’s tailwheel. Shaking his head, he went on, “I don’t think they’ll give you orders like that, though.”

“Why not? Why would they ask me something like that if they aren’t serious about it?”

“Oh, I’m sure they’re serious about it. Matter of fact, I’m sure they’re crapping their drawers about it.” The veteran set a hand on Rudel’s shoulder. “But Colonel Steinbrenner asked
you
. If you aren’t the guy in the squadron who’s most loyal to the people in power, fuck me if I know who is. And
you
told him you weren’t sure you could bomb your own people. Suppose somebody who doesn’t like the Party so much takes his Stuka up. Where will he put his bombs? On the rebels? Or on the shitheads who tried to make him bomb them?”

“That would mean civil war!” Hans-Ulrich yipped.

“Very good,” Dieselhorst said, with the air of a teacher congratulating a short-pants kid who’d aced an exam. “But doesn’t it seem to you like we’ve already got a civil war? Why would they be asking you about bombing Germany if we didn’t?”

Hans-Ulrich opened his mouth. Then he closed it again. He realized he had no good answer for that. He didn’t even have a bad answer for it.

Sergeant Dieselhorst patted him on the back. “You’re doing fine,” he said, still as teacher to student, or maybe more like father to son. The age difference between them wasn’t that large, but the difference in worldliness probably was. Dieselhorst went on, “Keep going down that road and you’ll make it to grown-up yet.”

“Oh, fuck you!” Hans-Ulrich shook off the sergeant’s hand. Dieselhorst laughed like a loon, which only irked the younger man more. He said, “You’re so smart, what would you have told the colonel if he asked you something like that?”

“You gave him a good answer. And he knows how honest you are, so he has to take it seriously,” Dieselhorst replied. “I might have said the same thing. Or I might have told him there’s no way I’d do anything against my own people, because there isn’t.”

“The SS might make you change your mind,” Hans-Ulrich remarked.

“Sir, the blackshirts can make anybody promise anything—I give you that,” Dieselhorst said. “But they can’t make you keep your promise once you take off. There’s no room in the cockpit for some asshole to hold his Luger to your head. They know it, too. They’re not all stupid. Only lots of them.”

That was also heresy or disloyalty or insubordination or whatever you wanted to call it. Or maybe it was just the attitude of a man who saw what he saw and knew what he knew and tried to get along as best he could.

“Like I say, sir,” he went on earnestly, “I don’t think it’ll come to that, honest to God. If you don’t want to start dropping bombs inside of Germany, nobody wants to.”

Was that faint praise? Or was it faint damn? Hans-Ulrich decided to take what he could get. “Thanks,” he said, and left it right there.

Somewhere up ahead, there were Germans. Somewhere up ahead, there always seemed to be more Germans. Ivan Kuchkov had started to think the Hitlerites stamped out soldiers in a factory somewhere near Berlin. He shared the conceit with the men in his section. He gave them orders; they were stuck listening to him unless they really wanted to get the shit piled on their backs.

“They turn the fuckers on a lathe,” he said, warming to his story, “and then they spray on the gray uniforms the way we paint trucks.”

“I almost believe it, you know?” Sasha Davidov said.

“What? They don’t make kikes the same way?” Ivan gibed.

The scout shook his head. “Afraid not, Comrade Sergeant. If they did, there’d be more of us. No, we fuck like everybody else.”

“Like hell you do,” Kuchkov said. “You’ve got those clipped cocks. Probably shortens the recoil when your gun goes off.”

As the Red Army men laughed, Davidov said, “I knew there had to be some kind of reason for it.” He didn’t sound pissed off or anything. That was good. Ivan had no use for him as a Jew, but he made a damn fine point man. And somebody who could see trouble before it saw
him was a better life-insurance policy than even a full drum on your PPD.

“Where was I?” the sergeant went on. “Oh, yeah. They machine the fucking Fritzes. They paint the uniforms on the cunts. And then … You guys ever seen a bottle factory? One where the bottles trundle by on a fucking belt and this machine stamps the caps on ’em, bang, bang, bang? You know what I’m talking about, assholes?” He waited for them to nod, then finished, “Well, that’s how Hitler’s pricks get the helmets on their knobs.”

“It’s cheap work,” Sasha said. “A bullet goes right through one of those things.”

Kuchkov picked up his own helmet. While he wasn’t in action, he just wore a forage cap. He hefted the ironmongery. “Sure, bitch. And this’ll keep out everything up to a goddamn 105, right?”

Sasha Davidov didn’t answer. Everybody knew a German helmet was better than the Soviet model. Ivan had had that thought himself, too many times to count. Never mind the steel—even the leather and pads that made the thing tolerable to wear—were of higher quality than their Red Army equivalents. It was
such
a fucking shame that wearing one would make his own side put holes in it.

One of his men asked, “Comrade Sergeant, are you criticizing Soviet production?”

The guy was a new replacement. His name was Mikhail … Mikhail Something. Ivan couldn’t remember his surname or patronymic. But he knew danger when he heard it. “Not me,” he answered without missing a beat. “Nobody’s helmet keeps out bullets. Anything that could’d be so goddamn heavy, it’d make your stupid head fall off.”

He waited. Mikhail didn’t say anything else. The prick was on the lean side, and kind of pale. By the way he talked, he came from Moscow. Piece by piece, none of that meant anything. But when one of your boys shot a political officer … The NKVD could build a case any way they pleased.

Sasha Davidov sat there by the fire, not quite looking at Ivan. The skinny little
Zhid
’s cheeks hollowed more than usual when he sucked in smoke from a
papiros
. He needed a shave. The dark stubble on his
cheeks and his big nose made him look like a blackass from the Caucasus.

Jews were different, though. Get in trouble with a blackass and he’d come after you and cut your liver out. Get in trouble with a Jew and two years later you’d be in a camp somewhere north of the Arctic Circle and never quite sure how you wound up there. Jews liked revenge cold, not hot.

But they and blackasses had one thing in common. They were mostly too goddamn smart for their own good. Sasha could see that this Mikhail was trouble, same as Kuchkov could. And the two of them had been together for a long time now. Sasha could probably see what Kuchkov had in mind to do about it, too.

Whatever the Jew saw, he didn’t say anything about it. He didn’t even raise a dark, ironic eyebrow. He just sat there, leaning toward the flames and smoking the
papiros
till he’d burnt every milligram of tobacco in the paper cigarette holder.

He won’t rat on me
, Ivan thought. In the USSR, that was the touchstone of trust.
Zhid
or not, Sasha passed. He and Ivan had saved each other’s nuts plenty of times. Mikhail, on the other hand …

Soviet officers used up men the way they used up machine pistols and tanks and planes. Ivan had joked about the Germans’ manufacturing soldiers. His own superiors behaved more as if they thought their side did. Doing this or that would cost so many men, so many machines. So when they did this or that, they didn’t care a bit if they lost that many tanks and that many soldiers. They even had a word for that; Ivan had heard them use it. The troops and the equipment were
fungible
, was what they were.

And if Soviet officers had an attitude like that, what kind of attitude was a hard-nosed Soviet sergeant likely to have?

Next morning, Ivan booted his men out of their bedrolls before any light showed in the eastern sky. “C’mon, you whores,” he growled. “We’re gonna shove ourselves up the Fritzes’ cunts before they’ve pissed away their morning hard-ons.” Somebody laughed. Ivan rounded on him. “What’s so fucking funny?”

“Nothing, Comrade Sergeant,” the soldier said quickly. “I serve the
Soviet Union!” It was as soft an answer as he could give. If he’d tried to explain about mixed metaphors, Ivan would have knocked the crap out of him.

They ate black bread and sausage. Some of them gulped their hundred-gram vodka ration to keep from worrying about what might happen pretty soon. Kuchkov drank some of his, but not all. Sasha Davidov didn’t touch any. At the point, he needed to stay alert as a hunted rabbit.