Last Orders

CHAPTER 2

Shibe Park was a pretty good place to see a ballgame no matter where you sat. With the Philadelphia A’s duking it out with the St. Louis Browns to see who’d have bragging rights to seventh place and who’d mope in the basement, Peggy Druce felt as if she had the grandstand to herself.

She didn’t quite. A couple of thousand other optimists raised a cheer for Connie Mack’s men. But, though she’d bought a ticket well back in the lower deck, the ushers didn’t fuss when she moved down closer to the action. When you had a small crowd in a big ballpark, nobody worried about such details.

From right behind the third-base dugout, she could hear the players chattering among themselves. They cheerfully swore at one another and at the umpires. As far as they were concerned, they were by themselves out there. A delicately raised woman might have been shocked-they talked as foully as soldiers. Peggy found herself more amused than anything else. The filthy language held no malice she could find.

“Hot dogs! Get your hot dogs!” a vendor shouted. Peggy got herself two. At her request, the man slathered them with mustard and onions. She liked onions. And she was here by herself. If her breath smelled strong, she wouldn’t offend anyone she cared about.

She got herself a couple of sacks of roasted peanuts, too, and a bottle of beer, and then another bottle of beer. She was good for the long haul, in other words. The game would have been more fun with Herb sitting next to her and complaining about how lousy the Athletics were.

But Herb wasn’t there. Herb wouldn’t be there. She glanced down at her left hand. Yes, she could still see the pale line on her fourth finger, the line where her wedding ring had shielded the skin from the sun for so long. She didn’t wear a ring on that finger any more, though. Why should she, when she wasn’t married any more? Herb had gone on a trip to Nevada for the government, and he’d Reno-vated her while he was there.

Now that he was back in Philadelphia, they were both doing their best to be civilized about it. He’d been more than generous in the settlement. She had the house and the Packard. He was living in a flat near his law office and driving a ratty old Hupmobile.

The war and the long separation it forced on them had killed their marriage as surely as a U-boat’s torpedo killed the luckless sailors aboard a destroyer. Peggy didn’t want to be divorced. But being married hadn’t been a whole lot of fun lately, either.

The A’s went ahead, 3–2, in the bottom of the fourth. There were a lot of short fly balls. The horsehide didn’t go smack! off the bat, the way Peggy was used to. It made kind of a dull thud instead. The cork that livened up the center of the ball was a strategic national resource these days. She didn’t know what they were using instead. By the way the ball didn’t move, she suspected it was a cheap grade of cement.

But the Philadelphia cleanup hitter somehow caught one square. He put it over the head of the Brownies’ center fielder. It rolled all the way to the base of the center-field fence. In Shibe Park, that was 468 feet from the plate. The batter wasn’t a gazelle on the bases, but he didn’t need to be. He didn’t even have to slide to score on his inside-the-park homer.

She whooped and hollered and raised a beer bottle high in salute. A gray-haired man sitting a few seats down from her was cheering, too. They grinned at each other, the way people will when they’re both rooting for the same team. Then he said, “Now let’s see if we can hold on to it.”

“It’s only the Browns,” Peggy answered. “They’re as rotten as we are, or just about. Half their guys are in the Army.” Half the Athletics were, too, but she didn’t dwell on that. She was a fan, not a sportswriter.

In the top of the fifth, the first St. Louis batter took four in a row high and wide and trotted down to first base. The second Brownie up swung at the first pitch and missed. Over in the St. Louis dugout on the first-base side, the manager screamed “Shit!” at the top of his lungs. Everybody in the park must have heard him. In his shoes, Peggy would have said the same thing. If the pitcher was wild, you wanted to make him throw a strike before you started flailing away.

He eyed the runner, went into his stretch, and delivered again. And the Brownie batter swung again. This time, he lofted a lazy pop foul. The third baseman ran toward the stands to see if he could get it. But he ran out of room-it came down in the seats.

It came down, in fact, in the hands of the guy sitting a few seats away from Peggy. He made a smooth two-handed catch, a catch that said he’d played the game a time or three.

“Sign him up!” yelled a leather-lunged fan a bit farther back. Any nice catch in the stands meant you’d hear that. With the goons the A’s had in the outfield, it might not even have been a terrible idea.

The gray-haired man looked as pleased with himself as if he were seven years old. Peggy didn’t blame him. “I’m so jealous,” she said. “I’ve been coming to games since before the turn of the century, and I never once got a foul ball even before they started letting you keep them. This is about as close as I ever came, as a matter of fact.”

He tossed the baseball up and down a couple of times. Then, to her amazement, he tossed it to her. She managed to catch it-not so neatly as he had, but at least it didn’t land on the concrete and roll away. “Enjoy it,” he said. “Give it to your son so he can play with it.”

He could have said grandson; she’d admitted she was no spring chicken. But he was too nice. “I don’t have kids,” she said. She’d miscarried with Herb till her doctor told her she’d be putting herself in danger by trying again. After that, it was French letters and perversions. She wondered what kind of mother she would have made. She’d never get the chance to find out now.

“No?” He raised a busy eyebrow. “Too bad.” He touched the brim of his fedora. “I’m Dave-Dave Hartman.”

Peggy gave her own name. Meanwhile, the Browns’ batter struck out. Their manager gave him more hell when he glumly slammed his bat into the rack in the dugout.

She and Dave kept talking while the game moved forward. She found out he was a master machinist currently between jobs because he had a bad back and the shop he’d been working for didn’t want to give him a chair while everybody else had to stand in front of a lathe.

“Well, to heck with ’em, then,” Peggy said, full of irate sympathy.

“That’s what I told ’em,” he answered. “ ’Course, I might’ve put it a little stronger-yeah, just a little.”

“I sure hope you did.” Peggy nodded emphatically.

By then, he’d slid over till he was only a couple of seats from her so they could talk more readily. When the fellow with the tray of beer bottles came by, Dave held up his hand with two fingers raised. He handed Peggy one of the bottles. “Well, thank you,” she said, and reached over with it. They clinked. They drank. They smiled.

They talked through the rest of the game. She found out he was a widower with two grown sons and a granddaughter. She told him of her own status. He thoughtfully scratched his chin. “A guy who’d toss out a gal like you, he’s gotta be kind of a jerk, you want to know what I think,” he said at last.

Peggy wasn’t used to thinking of Herb as a jerk. He’d always struck her as plenty smart. “I don’t know,” she answered after some thought of her own. “We weren’t in love any more-heaven knows that’s true. We still liked each other okay, but we were just going through the motions.”

“That’s a darn shame,” Dave said.

The A’s won the game, 5–3. When they walked out of the park together, Peggy found herself giving him her phone number. He touched the brim of his hat again and walked toward a bus.

As she walked toward the trolley that would take her home, Peggy was surprised at herself. No, she was astonished at herself. She’d met somebody. She didn’t know what would come of it. She didn’t know if anything would. She didn’t much care, either. The thing was done. She hadn’t even imagined that much. Why should she have? She hadn’t needed to worry about it for more than thirty years. But it could. That was pretty astonishing all by itself.

An air-raid siren howled in the middle of the night. Hans-Ulrich Rudel leaped from his cot, threw on a helmet-he’d been sleeping in his Luftwaffe tunic and trousers-grabbed his boots, and ran for the nearest slit trench in his stocking feet.

He jumped down into the trench a few seconds before bombs started falling on this stretch of western Belgium. While the ground shuddered under him, he pulled on first one boot and then the other.

Nights were short at this season of the year. But this airstrip wasn’t far from the front. French bombers could easily come here under cover of darkness. So could the RAF, whether taking off from bases inside France or from across the Channel. He didn’t know whether the enemy flyers were specifically after this Stuka squadron or whether they were doling out presents all over German-occupied territory.

He also didn’t know whether that mattered. Night bombing was the next thing to dropping blind. Sometimes it wasn’t the next thing, but rather the same thing. You flew by dead reckoning, maybe by your navigator’s star sights that might or might not be worth anything. You looked down through the bombsight, and you probably couldn’t see much of anything. You dropped anyhow, hoping for the best, and you got the devil out of there.

One bomb burst was followed a split second later by a much bigger explosion. Cowering in the trench a few meters away from Hans-Ulrich, Sergeant Albert Dieselhorst said, “Somebody got lucky there.”

“If that’s how you want to put it,” Rudel replied.

His radioman and rear gunner chuckled, then abruptly cut it off. “I don’t much care about the bombs or shells or whatever the hell that was. But I’m afraid some good guys got blown to the devil along with them.”

“I’m afraid of the same thing,” Hans-Ulrich said. “I’m worried about the munitions, too, though. The enemy throws them at us as though he hasn’t got a care in the world. We need to be careful with what we use.”

“That’s-” A far closer bomb interrupted Dieselhorst. For a split second, Rudel feared it would collapse the trench wall on them, even though boards and sticks shored up the dirt. When it became clear that wouldn’t happen, Dieselhorst laughed shakily. “Where was I before I pissed myself?”

He might have been joking. Or he might not. Hans-Ulrich never had fouled his drawers, but he’d come close several times. When you thought you were going to die in the next few seconds, the animal in you could take over. People who’d been through the mill laughed at such things because they knew it could happen to them, too.

As for the other part of the question … “I don’t know where you were going with that. You’d just started whatever it was.”

“Ach, ja.” Dieselhorst paused for a moment, perhaps to nod. Then the older man went on, “Now I remember. I was starting to say that I’d noticed we needed to watch what we threw at the other side, but I didn’t know you had, too.”

“Well, I have,” Hans-Ulrich replied with a touch of pique. He knew the sergeant thought he was painfully naive. “No matter how it looks to you, I’m not a hundred percent blind.”

“Whatever you say, sir,” Dieselhorst said: agreement that felt like anything but.

The bombers rumbled on to the east. Hans-Ulrich and the other Luftwaffe men booted out of sleep tracked them by their engines’ drone, by the thumps from the bombs they kept dropping, and by the Germans’ searchlights and flak barrages. One burning bomber fell out of the sky and split the night with a thunderous blast when it hit the ground.

Twenty minutes later, the enemy bombers came back overhead, now homeward bound. “I hope you all crash when you land, you bastards,” Dieselhorst said. “That’s what you deserve for waking me up in the middle of the night.”

Hans-Ulrich stared in surprise toward the spot in the dark his voice was coming from. He’d felt that way about the Russians-he didn’t know any German who didn’t. But the English or French flyers were just doing their jobs, the same as he was. In war, your job involved hurting the people on the other side. Hans-Ulrich felt no personal malice when he flew here. He rather hoped the enemy planes would get back safe. He just wanted the bombs they dropped to miss.

Most of them would. In night bombing, you had to lay down a carpet of explosives to do any good at all. Flying the Stuka was a very different business. The dive-bomber was like an artillery piece with wings. He could put a 500-kilo bomb on top of a fifty-pfennig piece-or within a few meters of one, anyhow, which was commonly better than good enough.

He could if enemy fighters didn’t give him grief, anyhow. Even the biplane fighters of the newly hatched war outclassed the Ju-87 in air-to-air combat. Today’s English, French, and Russian machines treated them as snacks-there was no other word for it. If Bf-109s and FW-190s couldn’t protect Stukas from enemy planes, the dive-bombers were doomed.

Logically, that meant scrapping the Stuka and replacing it with something that had a better chance of surviving. Indeed, some FW-190s carried bomb racks these days, so they could do some of the same job as the Ju-87. But the ugly old dive-bombers with the inverted gull wings soldiered on. With the Reich under pressure from both east and west, Reichsmarschall Göring didn’t want to lay aside any weapon that could hurt the foe.

After a few hours of fitful sleep, Hans-Ulrich gulped ersatz coffee and oatmeal enlivened with bits of ham in the squadron’s field kitchen. A gourmet forced to down such fare would have slit his wrists. Rudel wasn’t so fussy. As long as they fed him enough to fill his belly, he wouldn’t complain.

He also didn’t complain to discover that the bomb which had almost buried him hadn’t cratered any of the airstrip’s runways or planes. It came down near the joining of the north-south and east-west runways. It made an enormous hole in the ground there, but a work crew with snow shovels cleared the dirt it threw on the runways in an hour or so.

While the Luftwaffe troops in undyed cotton drill worksuits got the airstrip ready to operate, groundcrew men hauled the Stukas out of their revetments, fueled them, and bombed them up. Colonel Steinbrenner, the squadron commander, briefed his flyers: “We’re going after two railroad bridges just inside French territory.” He whacked a map with a pointer to show where the bridges were. “Taking them out will help keep the froggies from moving men and matériel into Belgium.”

He didn’t say it would stop the French from doing that. Even Hans-Ulrich, who worked hard not to think about politics, noticed as much. The war wasn’t going the way Germany’d wished it would when it started. She kept on all the same. What else could she do? Admitting defeat was worse. The Volk had seen that after the last fight.

Up in the sky, sucking in rubber-tasting oxygenated air, Rudel didn’t have to worry about any of that. He followed the Stukas ahead of him; more followed his plane. As Steinbrenner had promised, Messerschmitts escorted the Ju-87s toward the railway bridges.

French fighters jumped the German planes before they reached their targets. The French aircraft industry started behind the Reich’s. After so much war, though, it had almost caught up. As the two sides’ fighters spun through the air in wild fury, the Stukas dove toward the deck and sneaked southwest, in the direction of the bridges.

Hans-Ulrich dropped his bombs from not far above treetop height. As he hauled his pig of a plane around, Sergeant Dieselhorst whooped in the rear-facing back seat: “Frenchies won’t be using that bridge for a while!”

“Good,” Rudel said. An antiaircraft shell burst behind the Stuka. It bucked in the air, but didn’t seem hurt. He gunned it back to Belgium and what should be safety as fast as it would go.

Ivan Kuchkov wasn’t in a penal battalion. The Russian sergeant didn’t care about anything else. The Germans could still kill him, of course. They’d come too close too many times. The Ukrainian bandits who called themselves nationalists could still do him in, too. Those were the chances you took when you served the Soviet Union.

But his own side wouldn’t just throw him away like a shitty asswipe. Penal battalions got officers and men who’d screwed up badly enough to piss off the guys set over them in a big way. Stavka shuffled them around the long front and threw them in where things were hottest. Clearing a path for the troops behind them was what they were for.

Minefield in front of an entrenched Nazi position? No problem, Comrade Colonel! The boys in the penal battalion will find those mines! They’ll find them with their feet while the German machine gunners shoot down the ones who don’t blow up. Then you won’t waste so many soldiers who might actually be good for something.

German tanks in the neighborhood? No Red Army tanks to drive them off? Don’t worry, Comrade Major General! We’ll hand the lads in the penal battalion magnetic limpet mines. They can run forward and stick them on the Fascists’ side armor! The tanks will be firing at them while they run? So will German foot soldiers? That’s hard luck, all right. But the dumb cunts should have known better than to wind up in a penal battalion to begin with.

If you lived through whatever suicidal mission they sent you on, they gave you back your old rank and put you in an ordinary unit again. You’d wiped away your sin, the way you could in an Orthodox monastery by penance. They did if they felt like it, anyhow. Otherwise, they stuck you in another penal battalion and gave you a new chance to expend yourself. That was how they talked, as if you were a shell casing or a worn-out boot.

One of the sentries in Ivan’s section had shot-had not just shot but killed-the regimental political officer when the stupid politruk wouldn’t give him the password. The company CO didn’t dare cover it up, any more than Ivan had when he found out about it. Somebody would blab, and then all their dicks would go on the chopping block.

So the NKVD came down on poor Vitya Ryakhovsky, and on Ivan, and on Lieutenant Obolensky, too. And in the end, the Chekists decided sending them to a battalion like that would be more trouble than it was worth-too fucking many forms to fill out if they did.

Ivan neither read nor wrote. If scribbling stuff on a bunch of papers was that big a pain in the ass, he was goddamn glad to be illiterate. (He’d also heard that the Nazis shot Russians they captured who could read and write. He didn’t know for sure that that was true, but it sounded like something the Hitlerites would do. It was one of the few things having to do with Germans that he didn’t need to worry about.)

So here he was, still down in the Ukraine with his old unit. So was Lieutenant Obolensky. So was poor Vitya. Ivan didn’t make the mistake of thinking all was forgiven or forgotten. He knew better. They were watching. They were waiting. As soon as they saw the chance, they’d give him one in the nuts if the Germans hadn’t taken care of the job for them by then.

Maybe, just maybe, the Germans wouldn’t be able to do it. He’d developed a healthy respect for Hitler’s pricks. He’d been fighting them since the war broke out. He’d been a Red Air Force bombardier then. After he bailed out of his burning SB-2, he’d kept fighting on the ground. Nobody could ever say that the Fritzes didn’t know what they were doing. Nobody could ever say the bastards weren’t brave, either. They wouldn’t have been anywhere near so much trouble if they weren’t brave.

But they were stretched too thin these days, when they had to fight the Red Army here in the East and the English and French on the other side of their country. Like a hungry peasant padding out wheat flour with ground peas, the Nazis here in the Ukraine padded their lines with Romanians and Hungarians.

Both sets of Fascist jackals wore khaki darker than the Red Army’s. Figuring out which was which could be confusing. The Hungarians used German-style helmets. The Romanians had a different model, domed on top but long fore and aft.

The other interesting thing was that Hitler’s little chums couldn’t stand each other. The Nazis didn’t dare stick a Romanian unit next to one full of Magyars. They had to keep Germans between their allies. Otherwise, the Hungarians and Romanians would go at each other and forget all about the Russians they were supposed to be fighting.

More and more Red Army soldiers and tanks and planes swarmed into the Ukraine. The Germans kept hitting back as hard as they could. The Hungarians and especially the Romanians began to realize they weren’t bound for glory. They threw down their rifles and threw up their hands whenever they saw the chance. They figured their odds were better in the gulag than in fighting it out. Ivan thought that showed they were morons, but it wasn’t his worry.

Stavka understood the enemy’s woes. The big pushes went against soldiers in khaki, not against the pricks who wore Feldgrau. When the Hungarians and Romanians didn’t give up, they fell back. That meant the Germans on their flanks had to fall back, too, or else risk getting cut off.

Most of the time, that was what it meant, anyhow. Ivan had just finished robbing a Romanian who was sobbingly glad not to get killed out of hand. The swarthy jerk in the brownish uniform had hardly anything worth taking. But he did carry a folding German entrenching tool. Ivan had wanted one for a while. It took up less room than the ordinary Soviet short-handled spade. And you could use it as a pick if you locked the blade at right angles to the handle. It was a nifty piece of work.

He’d just stuck it on his own belt when German 105s to the south opened up on the fields through which the Red Army was advancing. A moment later, German shells started screaming down from the north, too. If that didn’t mean a counterattack to slice off the head of the oncoming Russian column, Ivan was even dumber than he gave himself credit for.

He forgot about the Romanians. The enemy’s good players were coming. “Hit the dirt, fuckers!” he yelled to his own men.

The Red Army men did, all except for a couple of raw replacements who stood around twiddling their foreskins because they’d never been shelled before. The Romanian who’d been about to shuffle back into captivity flattened out among the growing stalks of wheat, too. Marshal Antonescu’s boys might not be the fiercest soldiers ever hatched, but they weren’t virgins at this business, either.

Ivan used his new toy to dig himself a little scrape in the rich, bread-smelling black earth. Even a shallow hole with the dirt thrown up to either side might keep you from getting gutted like a barnyard goose at a wedding feast. You could also fight with an entrenching tool if you had to.

When Ivan heard a Soviet tank’s cannon fire, he knew for sure the Germans were coming. When he heard the tank’s machine guns go off, he knew they were just about here. He carried a PPD submachine gun: an ugly little piece of stamped steel that could slaughter anything out to a couple of hundred meters.

A Russian T-34 blew up. The Red Army had more tanks, many more, but the Germans had just about caught up in quality. When there were Tigers in the neighborhood, they’d gone ahead. Ivan didn’t see any of the slab-sided monsters, which made him feel a little better, anyhow.

He did see the wheat stalks rippling as Fritzes crawled through them. He hosed down the area in front of him with the machine pistol. Shrieks and thrashing among the battered crops said he’d done somebody a bad turn.

But the Germans didn’t want to be driven away here. When mortar bombs started whispering down, Ivan decided he’d had enough. “Back!” he shouted. “Come on, you bitches! Back! We’ll get the cocksuckers the next time.”

He wanted to make sure there’d be a next time. If they hung around here much longer, there was liable not to be. And so he retreated. If his superiors didn’t like it … they’d stick around and get killed.

A new Panzer IV. Theo Hossbach almost smiled as he eyed the factory-fresh machine. Inside the fighting compartment, it smelled of leather and paint. They hadn’t swabbed it down with gasoline. That was what they used to mask the odor of rotting flesh, the stench that said the last crew hadn’t made it even if they’d salvaged the panzer.

With Theo’s crew, it was just the opposite. They’d bailed out after a hit from a T-34 knocked a track off their last Panzer IV. As far as the radioman and bow gunner knew, that panzer was a write-off. But none of the five men in black coveralls got so much as a scratch. For a crew that had to abandon ship, so to speak, that was amazing luck.

Theo opened and closed his left hand. One finger there was only a stub: a souvenir of the last time he’d fled a crippled panzer, back in France. He’d got out of the Panzer II all right. Trouble was, they didn’t stop shooting at you after you made your escape. He’d been hit running for cover. It hardly seemed fair.

Adalbert Stoss, the driver, smacked his new mount’s armored flank with rough affection. “Another horse to put through the paces,” he said.

“I thought you’d talk about scoring goals in it,” Sergeant Hermann Witt said. The panzer commander grinned. Theo found himself nodding. Adi Stoss was the best footballer he’d ever seen.

But Adi didn’t rise to the gibe. All he said was, “My main goal is coming out of this mess in one piece.” He ran a hand through his dark, wavy hair. “What else can we hope for?”

A National Socialist Loyalty Officer would have thundered forth bromides about victory and conquest and smashing the Jews in the Kremlin and the hordes of Slavic Untermenschen those Jews led. Nobody in the panzer crew thought that way, though. They’d all seen and been through a lot. Theo knew too well that they weren’t going to be part of a triumphal parade through Red Square. Hell, they’d never made it into Smolensk, much less Moscow. Once you came to grips with that, what could possibly matter more than getting home with two arms and two legs and two eyes and two balls?

Adi, if course, had more things to worry about even than the rest of the panzer men. He had to worry about Soviet panzer cannon the same way they did. But the country whose uniform he wore-and wore well-could be more dangerous to him than the Ivans were.

Theo said nothing about that. His crewmates would have been surprised if he had. He surprised them every time he opened his mouth, because he did it as little as he possibly could. He lived almost all his life inside the bony box bounded by his eyes, his ears, and the back of his head.

He would have said even less than he actually did if the Wehrmacht, in its infinite wisdom, hadn’t made him a radioman. He couldn’t believe that the aptitude tests he took when he got conscripted said he was ideal for the slot. Maybe they’d been short of men for the school and just grabbed the first five file folders that happened to be lying on the table. Or maybe some personnel sergeant back in Breslau owned a truly evil sense of humor.

Years too late to wonder about that now. When the Wehrmacht told you to do this, this was what you did. Oh, you could tell them no. But that was how you found out about what places like Dachau and Bergen-Belsen were like on the inside. Sensible Germans knew such bits of knowledge came at too high a cost.

Sergeant Witt clambered up onto the new panzer’s turret. The panzer commander opened a hatch and slid inside. His voice came from the bowels of the machine: “All the comforts of home!”

“Oh, yeah?” That was Lothar Eckhardt, the gunner. “Where’s the bed? Where’s the broad with the big tits in the bed?”

Witt’s head popped out of the hatch. “Don’t worry about that, Lothar. You’ve got a bigger gun here than you do in the bedroom.” All the panzer crewmen laughed, some more goatishly than others. Theo didn’t count laughter against his starvation ration of speech.

“Right, Sergeant,” Eckhardt said with exaggerated patience. “But I have more fun with the one I’ve got on me. And I don’t need Poske here to help me shoot it off, either.” He nudged the loader, who was standing next to him.

Kurt Poske pushed back. “You’d better not. You’d be some kind of fairy if you did.”

Witt flipped a limp wrist. “Come on, girls,” he said in a lisping falsetto that would have won him a pink triangle in a camp. “Why don’t you see how you like it in here?”

Theo found his spot in the right front of the panzer hull only a little different from the same seat in the last Panzer IV. But no rungs were welded to the inside of the machine to hold his Schmeisser. He stowed the personal-defense weapon between his feet. Sooner or later, somebody in the company repair crew could take care of it for him.

Adi didn’t have a place to hang his machine pistol, either. He couldn’t stash it the way Theo had, not when his feet needed to work the brake and clutch and accelerator. He set it behind Theo’s radio set. “Just for the time being,” he said apologetically. Theo nodded. That didn’t count against his speech ration, either.

“Fire it up, Adi,” Hermann Witt said, and Stoss’ finger stabbed the starter button on the instrument panel in front of him. The motor roared to life at once. That was what a fresh battery would do for you. The engine noise was higher and smoother than it had been in the old machine. This power plant hadn’t been worked to death shoving twenty tonnes of panzer across the rutted, unforgiving Russian landscape.

Yet.

As the panzer rumbled and rattled up toward the platoon’s assembly area, Theo hooked himself back into the regimental radio network. Shifting frequencies, he heard different voices in his earphones. He had to do some talking of his own, to let the owners of those voices know this panzer and its crew were attached to them. Since those words were strictly line-of-duty, he didn’t feel obliged to count them.

They didn’t stay assembled in the area for very long. Half an hour after the Panzer IV joined its mates, they moved out to try to blunt a Russian westward thrust. The Reich didn’t have the bit between its teeth in Russia any more. Now hanging on to some of what it had gained in happier times was as much as it could hope for.

The new panzer clanked past the burnt-out hulk of a German armored car. Fifty meters farther on sat the chassis of a Russian T-34, with the turret blown off and upside-down beside it. Theo did use a word: “Tiger.”

“You bet it was,” Adi agreed. The German heavy tank’s fearsome 88 could devastate a T-34 like that. A Panzer IV’s long-barreled 75 could kill one, but couldn’t smash it that way. And a T-34 could kill a Panzer IV just as readily, while a Tiger’s thick frontal armor laughed at anything the Russian machine threw at it.

And then Witt shouted, “Panzer halt!”

“Halting.” As Adi spoke, he trod hard on the brake.

At Witt’s orders, the turret traversed to somewhere between two and three o’clock. The gun rose slightly. Theo could just see it move. A shell clanged into the breech. “Fire!” Witt yelled.

“On the way!” Lothar Eckhardt answered. As he spoke, the big gun roared. Flame leaped from the end of the muzzle, and out to either side of the recoil-reducing muzzle brake.

Then Theo used another word: “Hit!”

Flame and smoke burst from a Russian panzer he hadn’t even seen till the big gun spoke. It was more than a kilometer away. When he peered out through the armor glass in his narrow vision slit, he couldn’t tell whether the crew escaped. Part of him hoped so-they were members of his guild, in a manner of speaking. But they’d try again to kill him if they did. Maybe hoping they died fast and without much pain was better.