Last Orders: The War That Came Early (49 page)

“Says who?” Sergeant Dieselhorst broke in.

Hans-Ulrich gaped at him. He’d taken the idea for granted for so long, he had no idea where he’d got it. It was all over
Mein Kampf
, of course, but that wouldn’t impress Dieselhorst.

And the sergeant repeated, “Says who? We’ve tried to conquer the damn thing twice now in my lifetime, and look what it’s got us. If we snag a peace without reparations and without sanctions, we can make like an ordinary country for a change. I’m sorry, sir, but I’ll be damned if I can get a hard-on about being part of the
Herrenvolk
. I’d sooner go to a tavern and drink beer.”

“But what about the Bolsheviks?” Hans-Ulrich asked.

“Christ, what about ’em? They’re in Russia, and they’re welcome to the goddamn place, as far as I’m concerned. I don’t want to go back there again—I’ll tell you that,” Dieselhorst said. “The Bolsheviks in Germany and the ones in Hungary and the ones everywhere else but Russia got stomped after the last war, and just what they deserved, too.”

“There’s Spain. Spain’s turned as red as a baboon’s behind.”

“And it’s fucked up the same way Russia was: a few rich people on top and a big old swarm of hungry ones on the bottom.” Dieselhorst paused a moment before adding, “You ask me, the Nazis were taking Germany down that road.”

Rudel automatically looked around to see who might have heard the dangerous crack. He shook his head in wonder. If the Salvation Committee won, you wouldn’t have to worry about speaking your mind … for a while, anyhow. That might make the change worthwhile.

Or, of course, it might not. But he was sure of one thing. He didn’t need to worry about standing in a bread line. Even if peace broke out, whoever ran the
Reich
would need bomber pilots. Like security men, bomber pilots were a vital part of the modern state.

Arno Baatz peered out a second-story window in Münster’s
Rathaus
. Just the quickest of glances, and then he pulled away. The soldiers out there wanted to kill him—and the rest of the
Wehrmacht
men and
Waffen
-SS soldiers and prison guards and secret policemen still holding this part of town against the traitors and bandits who’d murdered the
Führer
.

Somewhere out there was Adam Pfaff, with his goddamn gray-painted Mauser. The stinking son of a bitch sneaked away even before everybody knew for sure Hitler had died. So did two other men from Baatz’s squad. He wanted to kill them, and he didn’t want them to kill him.

He glanced down at the swastika armband he wore. Part of him wished he could take it off and slip away himself. Things didn’t look good for National Socialist supporters in Münster. The perimeter kept shrinking. Arno had always backed authority. Now, though, he looked to have guessed wrong about who authority was going to be.

A 105 fired not far away. The shell slammed into a building his side still held. Part of the stonework front fell in. But an MG-42 kept snarling from the ruins. A lot of the people who still wore the swastika were stubborn indeed.

Which looked to mean they would wind up stubborn and dead. No reinforcements had come in; the other side held all the territory around Münster. Arno glanced down at the armband again. If he took it off so he looked as if he could belong to either side …

If he did that and the SS caught him, they would shoot him out of
hand. One redheaded bastard with a Schmeisser specialized in executing anyone suspected of halfheartedness. The way he shot people, they took a long time to die.

So if you were going to do a bunk, you had to make sure you made it. Otherwise, you were better off sticking tight. The traitors were out to kill the people still loyal to the Party, yes, but they weren’t especially out to kill them slowly.

That 105 blasted the nearby building again. More of it collapsed. A fire sent black smoke into the sky. The MG-42 barked more defiance at the men who’d chosen the Committee for the Salvation of the German Nation.

An SS top sergeant stomped into the room where Arno sheltered. “Come on with me,” he said. “We’re going to counterattack. We’ve got to take out that 105. It’s slaughtering us.”

Arno gulped. If the traitors had two brain cells to rub together, they’d protect their artillery with machine guns and machine pistols. Any try at taking it out would be suicidal. He couldn’t say that, not unless he wanted to meet his own side’s redheaded executioner. He did ask, “How good do you think our chances are?”

The SS man just looked at him. With those gray eyes and rocky cheekbones, the fellow might have stepped straight off one of Mjölnir’s recruiting posters. “We’ve got to try,” he said, which told Baatz everything he needed to know. “They’ll kill us for sure if we don’t get rid of it. If we do, we can hold out a while longer.”

Worst of it was, he was right. Arno fell in behind him. They went through the
Rathaus
, combing out men who could join in the assault. When they had a couple of squads’ worth, the SS noncom seemed satisfied. Arno still didn’t think the force was big enough. He kept his mouth shut. He had no more idea than the soldier from the
Waffen
-SS about where they could scrape up more fighters.

They were about to move out when two shells from the 105 slammed into the
Rathaus’
upper floors, one after the other. Debris thundered down in front of the doorway through which they’d go. A great cloud of dust and grit rose. Arno coughed and rubbed at his eyes. He suddenly felt grateful to the SS man. He was pretty sure one
of those rounds had burst on or in the room where he’d sheltered. If he hadn’t vacated, he’d probably be chopped meat right now.

“Come on! Follow me!” Himmler’s superman charged out through the dust. The others poured after him. No matter how solid the
Rathaus
was, it seemed more a trap than a shelter now.

Bullets sparked off paving stones and cracked by as the Germans on the other side spotted them on the move. One man from the strike force went down with a horrible screech. The rest kept running for the nearest pile of rubble behind which they could throw themselves.

Arno belly-flopped down in back of some bricks that had belonged to a chimney. The explosion that knocked them off their building hadn’t blasted them all apart. They might even keep gunfire off of him … till he had to move again, anyhow.

He glanced over his shoulder. Yes, that was fresh smoke he smelled. The
Rathaus
was burning. Whatever happened to him out here, it wouldn’t be so bad as roasting back there.

All the same, he felt as naked as a de-shelled snail in a Frenchman’s garden. Out of the corner of his eye, he saw motion ahead. That had to be an enemy. He snapped off a couple of quick shots. The other guy went down, either hit or diving for cover.

Schmeissers and a couple of captured Russian PPDs chattered. While the men with them made the traitors keep their heads down, the others, Arno among them, scurried ahead. He’d just found new rubbish to shelter him when the 105 started smashing up some more of the
Rathaus
. Whichever side won this fight, Münster would have some rebuilding to do when it ended.

“Forward!” No one seemed to have issued the
Waffen
-SS man any doubts. Forward they went, and then forward again. Downtown Münster had plenty of ruins and wreckage to hide inside and behind. They lost a couple of men. They shot a few men fighting for the Salvation Committee.

That worried Arno. The guys on the other side had to know they were attacking. If those guys weren’t dopes—and not all of them would be—they had to have a pretty fair notion of where the loyalists were heading. If they knew that, they could shift troops to stop them.

Baatz was about halfway to the 105 when he stopped caring. He couldn’t have said why, but he did. He wanted to make it to the gun. He wanted to take out the crew. Whatever happened next … would happen. He might get back. He might not. Why borrow trouble?

He shot a traitor, then quickly ducked down behind some shattered stonework. The enemy soldier’s buddy rattled the wreckage with a burst from his submachine gun, but he didn’t hit Arno. The 105 boomed again. More of the
Rathaus
fell in on itself. More of it fell into the flames, too. Sure as hell, coming out here was better than staying back there would have been.

The attackers were taking flanking fire now. No other loyalist bands seemed to be in the neighborhood. They soaked up more losses, but they kept advancing. Arno had no idea whether the other side’s medics patched up wounded loyalists or cut their throats.

Blam!
Now Arno knew exactly where that goddamn 105 sat. When he slithered around the next corner, he was almost sure he could fire at the artillerymen who served it.

Before he could, a Panzer IV clanked around that corner, heading straight at him. “Fuck you!” he shouted—it wasn’t fair that the stinking thing should be flying an Imperial German flag on its radio aerial.

Its cupola was open, the commander looking out. Arno fired at him. The panzer man tumbled inside, whether hit or not Arno didn’t know. The SS sergeant flung a grenade, hoping it would follow the traitor in the black coveralls down through the cupola. But it bounced off the glacis plate and burst harmlessly on the paving. The bow machine gun sparked to life. Arno dove for cover.

“Come on, Adi! Step on it!” Hermann Witt shouted.

“I’m doing the best I can, Sergeant,” Adi Stoss answered. “Some of these streets are narrower than the panzer, dammit.”

From everything Theo could see, Adi was right. Like so many medieval towns, Münster hadn’t been built with motor vehicles in mind. And it
really
hadn’t been built with panzers in mind. Every time Adi
had to make a tight turn, he bit out chunks of buildings that fronted the street too closely.

None of which cut any ice with the panzer commander. “Never mind the best you can. Just get there!” he said. “That’s the best-sited gun we’ve got. It’s knocking the shit out of them. We can’t let the goddamn Nazis kill the crew or smash the breech block.”

The same message dinned in Theo’s earphones. He hoped it was genuine, and not leading them into a trap. Both men who backed the Salvation Committee and their foes used the same radio sets, the same frequencies, the same communications doctrine. Each side did its best to confuse the other, and each side’s best seemed plenty good.

He’d used the panzer’s bow gun more than he ever had in Russia. Fighting in a city turned out to be like that. He’d used the firing port in the side of the hull, too, keeping troublemakers at a distance with his Schmeisser.

He worried that somebody would toss a Molotov cocktail out a third-story window, say, and into the fighting compartment through the open hatch atop the cupola. That was one more thing you didn’t need to fret about so much in Russia. Steppes and farm villages didn’t grow three-story buildings.

One more corner. “There they are!” Witt yelled from the cupola. He yelled again a moment later, this time in pain. He fell back into the panzer like a red squirrel diving into a hole in a spruce. Then he gave another yell: “Canister! Blow the shitheads away!”

Theo was already working them over with the bow machine gun as the round slammed into the breech. He knocked down a rather plump fellow with a swastika armband just before the enemy soldier could jump behind a stone wall. Then he swept the machine gun to the left and hit the guy who’d thrown a grenade. That fellow was close enough for Theo to make out the SS runes on his collar patches. Theo’s lips peeled back from his teeth in a savage smile. He’d always wanted the chance to shoot some SS men. Now he had it.

And then the canister round swept away everything in the first hundred meters of its path that might have been alive. He’d already seen the horrible things canister did to mere flesh and blood. That the
flesh and blood out there wanted to kill him made him feel a little better about using it so, but only a little.

That some of the flesh and blood out there had hurt one of the rare men he counted a friend made him feel much better about using it so. He turned to look back over his shoulder and asked, “How the hell are you, Hermann?” Anxiety made his voice break like a fourteen-year-old’s.

Witt gave back a grin almost as much a death’s head as his panzer man’s emblem. “My God! It talks!” he said, and Theo decided he wasn’t going to parley with the Grim Reaper right this minute. But his left hand was clenched around his right upper arm, and bright red blood dribbled out between his fingers. “Flesh wound,” he went on. “I’m pretty sure it missed the bone. I can wiggle my fingers and all.” As if to prove it, he shaped a filthy gesture with his right hand.

Adi spoke in tones of professional interest: “Will they award you a wound badge for stopping one when you’re fighting other Germans?”

“Now you can ask me if I give a fuck,” Witt answered. “Lothar, help me get a wound bandage on this thing. Maybe you’d better stick me, too. It hurts pretty good. If the morphine leaves me too dopey to run the panzer, I figure you jerks can probably cope for a while. In the meantime, keep going till we can shoot at the
Rathaus
. We’ll help that 105 blow up the rats in it.”

“You probably aren’t right at death’s door,” Adi said, which perfectly echoed Theo’s thought. “And blowing up the
Rathaus
here will be a pleasure. Oh, you bet it will.”

He’d grown up around Münster, or maybe in it. Theo knew that much about his tight-lipped crewmate. Adi’d had to do something, well, far out of the ordinary to need to make it into the
Wehrmacht
, too. After all this time together, Theo still wasn’t sure what that might have been. Whatever it was, did records of it linger in the
Rathaus
?

If they did, no wonder Adi wanted to help knock the place flat. When the panzer edged up behind a heap of smashed junk that let its gun bear on the
Rathaus
, the driver whooped: “Hey-hey! It’s already on fire!”

“We’ll help it along,” Witt said, and then, “Hurry up with that shot, Lothar. This business of stopping a bullet isn’t a whole lot of fun.”

Theo looked down at his left hand. He was missing a finger there. He had but didn’t particularly rejoice in a wound badge. He’d caught a French bullet, not a German one. As far as what they did, the difference in nationality didn’t seem to matter.