Last Orders: The War That Came Early (45 page)

And he hoped Germany itself and the German armed forces were feeling good and calm and peaceful, whether churchgoing or not. Hitler and the Nazis had been running the country for more than eleven years. They’d had plenty of time to plant their doctrines in people’s heads, plenty of time for those doctrines to flower and fruit.

Off in the distance, a Schmeisser opened up. An MG-42 answered it. Yes, not everyone would be thrilled to see the
Führer
overthrown. Which side was the Schmeisser-toter on, and to which side did the machine gunner belong?

Before Theo could do more than frame the question, somebody right here in the crowd of panzer crewmen shouted, “They can’t get away with plotting against the
Führer
!”

“The hell they can’t!” somebody else yelled. Yes, the chickens were coming home to roost, and they weren’t wasting any time doing it.

With a meaty thud, somebody’s fist connected with someone else’s jaw. Somebody yelled “Death to the traitors!” at the same time as somebody else yelled “Down with the Nazi swine!”

In an instant, the panzer crews were flailing away, sometimes one against another, sometimes man against man inside a single crew as some showed they were for Hitler and others against him. Theo stuck out a leg and tripped a man he knew to be a loudmouthed Nazi. When he scrambled to his feet, one boot just happened to connect with the back of the loudmouth’s head. It was only an accident, of course. Of course.

He wasn’t astonished to discover that Adi had flattened another Party sympathizer. If you were sitting next to somebody like that, what were you supposed to do? Wait till he flattened you? Not likely!

“Back to the panzer!” Sergeant Witt shouted. “My crew, back to the panzer!”

Theo couldn’t remember the last order he’d liked better. Inside the Panzer IV, they’d be safe from the slings and arrows of outraged National Socialists. And they could do some slinging and arrowing of their own if they had to.

On which side would they do it, though? Theo was sure of where he and Adi stood. He was pretty sure about Hermann Witt, too. Eckhardt and Poske, though … They’d never shown any sign of wanting to give Adi grief. That argued their hearts were in the right place.

Someone got in front of Adi and fell down quite suddenly. Whoever he was, he didn’t get up again. They scrambled into their panzer, slammed the hatches shut, and dogged them.

“Fire it up, Adi,” Witt said. “I won’t shoot first, but this is liable to be a big mess. We’ll take cover and figure things out later.”

“I’ll do it, Sergeant,” Stoss said. “That sounds like a terrific plan.” The engine rumbled to life.

Theo put on his radio earphones just in time to hear somebody say, “Our regiment stands behind the Committee for the Salvation of the German Nation. We will obey orders coming from the Committee.”

Schmeissers started barking, almost surely inside the encampment. As Adi put the Panzer IV in gear, another panzer’s main armament bellowed. Not all the regiment seemed ready to stand behind the Salvation Committee. Theo had wondered whether the coup would touch off a civil war. He wasn’t wondering any more.

Julius Lemp had always admired Colonel General Guderian. From everything he could see, the man got as much out of his panzers as anybody was likely to get. With every country’s hand—and factories—raised against the
Reich
—what could be more important?

He’d wondered about that for a long time. Now he had an answer. The Committee for the Salvation of the German Nation could be. Or the forces fighting the Committee could be, depending on who won.

They were going at it hammer and tongs. Kiel sounded as if it were
in the middle of the world’s biggest fireworks display. If you looked out the window, you might think it was. Tracers and shell bursts lit up the night sky, now here, now there, now suddenly all over the place.

Of course, if you looked out the window you were also liable to get killed. Plenty of bullets that weren’t tracers were flying around. Rifles, submachine guns, and MG-34s and MG-42s added to the hideous cacophony. And a barracks hall across the courtyard from the one where Lemp was staying had taken a direct hit from a 105 round—or maybe it was a 155. Whatever it was, it had knocked down half the building and set the wreckage on fire. Sailors were hosing down the burning rubble and pawing through it, looking for people who might still be alive.

The really scary thing was, Lemp had no idea which side had shelled that barracks, or why. If something had come down over there, something could come down on this hall, too. He could die without having any idea why, or even who’d killed him.

He hadn’t signed up for that. (He’d signed up so he could surprise people on the other side and send them to the bottom, but he didn’t dwell on such things right this minute.)

Most of the
Kriegsmarine
, he judged, would go along with the Salvation Committee. Naval officers tended to be conservative professionals who had no great love for the Nazis.

Naval officers, yes. Ratings? Ratings might be another story. Or they might not. With a small start, Lemp realized he knew less than he should about what kind of politics ratings had. Some of them liked Hitler—he knew that. The ones who didn’t … The ones who didn’t commonly had sense enough to keep their mouths shut about it.

Someone knocked on the door.

The knock on the door in the middle of the night. Everyone’s worst nightmare, in the
Reich
no less than in the USSR. In ordinary times, at least you knew what to say when they came for you. Chances were a thousand to one it wouldn’t do you any good, but you tried. How could you even try, though, when you weren’t sure which faction the goons out there belonged to?

Lemp thought about pretending not to be there. But if they broke
down the door (or just opened it—it wasn’t locked), things would go worse for him afterwards. The Committee or the Party? The lady or the tiger? He’d know in a second.

He opened the door.

Two petty officers with Mausers and a lieutenant with a Schmeisser scowled at him from the hallway. “Which side are you on?” one of the petty officers growled.

They didn’t tell him which side they were on. He’d either be right or he’d be dead. “The Committee,” he said. If not for the
Gestapo
man with the lizardy blinks and tongue licks who’d plucked Nehring from his boat for no visible reason, he might well have answered the other way. He hated the idea of going against duly constituted authority. But when duly constituted authority was a pack of hooligans, he hated giving in to it even more.

Had he answered the other way, he would have been lying in a pool of his own blood a few seconds later. As things were, the armed men grinned like fierce baboons. “There you go, sir!” the petty officer said. Now he gave Lemp his title of respect.
Now I’ve earned it
, Lemp thought dizzily.

“Have you got a weapon?” the lieutenant asked.

“No. It’s back in my cabin on the U-boat,” Lemp answered. “I didn’t think I’d need to go shooting things up.”

“Here. Use this, then.” The lieutenant pulled a Walther pistol from his belt. Gingerly, Lemp took it. The lieutenant went on, “Come with us. We’re cleaning out the Nazi turds.”

“They’re trying to clean us out, too,” Lemp remarked as stuttering machine guns dueled outside.

“That’s why I gave you the Walther, sir,” the lieutenant said patiently.

Lemp had no idea how he’d do, shooting it out with the other side through doors and around corners. This wasn’t the kind of warfare he’d trained for. Regardless of whether he’d trained for it, it was the kind of warfare he had.

They’d started down the hall toward the next room when a tremendous blast of noise staggered them all. “Good God!” Lemp exclaimed. “What the devil just blew up?”

“Nothing,” the lieutenant answered. Lemp could barely hear him; his ears were stunned. The younger man went on, “That was
Gneisenau
’s broadside. She’s with us.”

“Good God!” Lemp said again. He’d known the battle cruiser was in port, but it hadn’t meant anything special to him. Why should it have? He’d had nothing to do with battle cruisers—not till civil war broke out, anyhow. But the
Gneisenau
mounted nine 280mm guns. They could throw their enormous shells at least thirty kilometers. Nothing on land could stand up to that kind of bombardment. Nothing anywhere could, except for the thickest armor on a few battleships. “What are they shooting at?”

“Beats me,” the lieutenant said cheerfully. “Whatever it was, it isn’t there any more.”

He was bound to be right about that. Bombs from a Stuka might do for the warship. Lemp couldn’t think of anything else that would. The
Gneisenau
ruled as far as its great guns would reach.

They knocked on the next door. A captain opened it. “Which side are you on?” the petty officer demanded.

The captain’s answer was proud and prompt: “I am loyal to the legitimate government of the
Grossdeutsches Reich
.” In case anyone doubted what that was, his right arm shout up and out. “
Heil
Hitler!”

His answer was proud and prompt—and wrong. Both petty officers shot him, one in the chest, the other in the face. He shrieked and crumpled. Lemp’s stomach tried to turn over. No, this wasn’t the kind of killing he was used to.

Gunfire inside the barracks made a couple of officers stick their heads out into the hallway to find out what was going on. One of them hastily ducked back into his room and slammed the door behind him. The other man fired at Lemp and his comrades with a service pistol.

He was only ten or twelve meters away, but he missed. He missed three times in quick succession, as a matter of fact. He probably hadn’t won a marksman’s badge when he qualified with the pistol back in the day, and chances were he hadn’t fired it more than two or three times in all the years since.

Combat was the hardest school around. The officer never got a chance for his fourth shot. The lieutenant loosed three quick, professional
bursts from his Schmeisser. You didn’t really need to aim the machine pistol. You just had to point it, which was much simpler. Down went the pro-Nazi officer.

He wasn’t down for the count, though. He groped for the pistol, which he’d dropped when he fell. One of the petty officers shot him through the head. He kept thrashing even after that, but to no purpose, not with his brains splashed on the linoleum and the white-painted wall.

“Come on,” the lieutenant said. “We’ll clean up this floor and go on to the next.” Lemp numbly followed. He hadn’t fired a Walther for quite a while himself.
Have to get my hands on a Schmeisser
, he thought.

Ivan Kuchkov had seen a lot in his days fighting the Hitlerites. One of the things he’d seldom seen, though, was a German coming forward under a large flag of truce. Oh, every once in a while one side or the other would ask for a cease-fire to pick up the wounded. But that was just a little pause in the business of killing one another. This felt different.

The approaching German here wasn’t a sergeant, or even a captain. He was a colonel with a gray mustache. And he spoke Russian, something not many Fritzes did.

“I would like to be taken back to your high command!” he called as he strode forward. “I am here to ask for a truce along a broad stretch of front. Perhaps we can have peace.”

Beside Kuchkov, Sasha Davidov looked as if his eyes were about to bug right out of his head. “I never heard a German talk that way before,” the
Zhid
whispered. “I never knew Germans
could
talk that way.”

“Me, neither,” Ivan said. “ ’Course, chances are it’s all moonshine and horseshit.”

“I wouldn’t be surprised,” his point man answered. “What’ll you do, though?”

“I’ll fucking well take him back to Lieutenant Obolensky, that’s what,” Ivan said. “Let him figure it all out. That’s what officers are for.”

He stood up, showing himself amidst the tall grass and bushes. The
German colonel turned to come straight toward him. “Good day, Sergeant,” he said in that accented schoolboy Russian.

“Yob tvoyu mat’,”
Ivan answered with a nasty grin. The Fritz turned red, so he understood it. Well, tough luck. Ivan gestured with his PPD. “Come along with me, bitch.”

He didn’t have far to go to find Lieutenant Obolensky. The young company commander was only a couple of hundred meters to the rear. He slid out from behind some bushes and said, “Well, Comrade Sergeant, what have you got here?”

“Prick’s a Nazi colonel, Comrade Lieutenant,” Ivan said, which was obvious anyhow. “Wants to fucking parley with our brass.”

“Does he always talk like that?” the German asked plaintively.

“Da,”
Lieutenant Obolensky said. That made the Fritz blink. Obolensky went on, “Tell me who you are and what you want.”

“I have the honor to be Karl-Friedrich von Holtzendorf. I am a staff officer attached to Army Group Ukraine,” the German said. “As you may have heard, there has been a change of government and a change of policy in the
Reich
.”

“Hitler screwed the pooch, so you got rid of him,” Ivan said. Obolensky held out his hand with the palm flat to the ground, trying to shush him. Ivan made a disgusted face. He didn’t want to waste politeness on a bastard who wore
Feldgrau
.

To his surprise, Colonel von Holtzendorf nodded. “That is about the size of it, Sergeant, yes. We are trying to find reasonable terms to end these unfortunate conflicts.”

“One man’s reasonable is another man’s outrageous,” Obolensky observed. Kuchkov would have said the same thing, but he would have put more oomph into it.

“I understand that,” von Holtzendorf said. “I have come to find out what terms your military and your government believe to be reasonable. Can you please radio your army-group—no, you say your front—headquarters and let them know I am coming?”

“I’ll send you back to regimental HQ,” Obolensky said. “They should have a radio, if it’s working. If it’s not, they’ll take you back farther. Sooner or later, you’ll get where you want to go.”

Karl-Friedrich von Holtzendorf’s left eyebrow jumped toward the bill of his high-crowned cap. If he’d been wearing a monocle in that eye like a Nazi officer in a movie, it would have fallen out. Ivan understood why the Fritz looked so scandalized. He was sure every company—maybe every section—in the
Wehrmacht
had a radio set. He was also sure almost all of them worked almost all the time. The Germans were great for using lots and lots of fancy equipment.