Last Orders

CHAPTER 20

Colonel Steinbrenner climbed up onto a wooden crate so everybody in the squadron could see him. Hans-Ulrich Rudel was up near the front of the crowd anyway, as usual. Even by German standards, he was compulsively punctual. And he wanted to hear what the squadron CO had to say.

Sergeant Dieselhorst stood behind Rudel and to his left. A cigarette dangled from the corner of Dieselhorst’s mouth. That and his elaborately uninterested expression made him look like an American gangster. Hans-Ulrich didn’t own enough of a death wish to tell him so.

Steinbrenner raised a hand. The flyers and groundcrew men fell silent. Everybody wondered what was going on. The colonel had summoned them all, but he hadn’t said why.

“The Führer’s going to talk tonight,” Steinbrenner said. “Some of you will already know that, but I want to make sure nobody misses it. This is supposed to be one of the most important speeches he’s given since the war started. You’ll want to hear it for yourselves instead of getting it by bits and pieces from the newscasts and the papers.” His arm shot up and out in the Party salute. “Heil Hitler!”

“Heil Hitler!” the men echoed, returning the gesture as they shouted the slogan.

Hans-Ulrich wanted to hear Hitler speak. Part of what made the Führer so marvelous was that, while you listened to him, all your doubts disappeared. Rudel had plenty of doubts he needed to exorcise.

“Good,” Steinbrenner said. “I hope that, after he speaks, we’ll have a better notion of where we’re going and what we’ve got to do to get there. Whatever it is, for Germany’s sake, we’ll do it.”

“Heil Hitler!” the Luftwaffe men chorused again. Along with most of the others, Hans-Ulrich gave the Party salute once more. The squadron commander returned it.

As the men drifted apart, Albert Dieselhorst came up alongside Hans-Ulrich. “Well, that was interesting,” the radioman and rear gunner remarked.

“Interesting how?” Rudel asked.

“Mm, for one thing, the colonel talked to us about this speech himself. He didn’t give the job to Major Keller. I would’ve guessed the National Socialist Loyalty Officer would have told us about political stuff.”

“That’s true. I hadn’t thought about it, but it is,” Hans-Ulrich said. “Whatever the Führer’s going to say, then, it must be important-especially since he’s speaking from Münster.”

“Yes. Especially.” Sergeant Dieselhorst’s voice was dry. Neither of them seemed to want to take that any further. The less you said about a place where rebellion still bubbled, the better off you were. After they walked on for a few more steps, Dieselhorst added, “And the colonel didn’t say anything about what’ll be in the speech.”

“I guess he doesn’t know,” Hans-Ulrich said.

Dieselhorst nodded. “I guess you’re right. But that’s interesting, too. Most of the time, when the big cheese is going to come out with one of these fancy speeches, the brass has a pretty good idea of what he’ll say ahead of time. They need to know which way to jump, and they need to get us peasants ready to jump that way.”

“Huh.” That hadn’t occurred to Hans-Ulrich, either. He eyed his worldly crewmate. “All these things you know, all these things you think about, how come you’re not a Party Bonz yourself?”

The sergeant started to say something, then plainly decided not to. After a few more steps, he took another shot at it: “I never much wanted to have anything to do with politics, sir. You have to tell too many lies to too many people. Doesn’t matter a bit which side of the fence you’re on. You just do. It’s part of the game, the same way dive brakes are part of the Stuka’s game.”

“Huh,” Rudel said again. “I never looked at it like that.”

“Of course not, sir. You think telling a lie’s a sin.” Dieselhorst sounded amused and indulgent, the way a father might while talking about his little boy’s antics. “I’m just not very good at it, and I don’t think it’s much fun. So I’m better off here in the Luftwaffe than I would be working in some Gauleiter’s office.”

Hans-Ulrich started to deny that he thought lying was sinful. As Dieselhorst had before him, he caught himself. He couldn’t deny it unless he felt like lying himself-which would indeed be a sin. You could put a preacher’s son in the cockpit of a warplane. You could even turn a preacher’s son into a good National Socialist. What you couldn’t do was make him forget who his father was, and what his father stood for.

All he did say, then, was, “I guess I wouldn’t make such a great politician, either, then.”

That got a laugh out of Sergeant Dieselhorst. “Maybe not. Each cat his own rat, or that’s what they say.”

“Is it?” Hans-Ulrich hadn’t heard it before, but he’d long since decided that Dieselhorst had done and heard all kinds of things he hadn’t.

He realized Germans wouldn’t be the only ones listening to this speech. It would go all over the world by shortwave. It would be history in the making. That made him want the sun to speed across the sky and set so he could find out what was on the Führer’s mind.

It gave Dieselhorst different ideas. “What do you want to bet every Luftwaffe pilot who flies anything faster than a Stuka will be over Münster and its approaches while Hitler’s talking to make sure the RAF doesn’t drop any bombs on him?”

Hans-Ulrich hadn’t thought of that, but he nodded. “Makes sense to me.”

He ate supper without paying much attention to what went into his mess tin. Considering the stews the field kitchen turned out, that might have been just as well. After he cleaned up the kit, he joined the crowd of Luftwaffe men gathered in front of a radio hooked up to a truck battery. At the moment, someone was playing Bach on a piano. Some of the flyers and groundcrew men looked bored. Rudel enjoyed the music; he’d been listening to it since he was a baby. That was another souvenir from his father.

Then the Bach program ended. The radio played “Deutschland über Alles” and the “Horst Wessel Lied”: national anthem and Party anthem. That was what they always did before they broadcast anything important.

“Here is the beloved Führer of the Grossdeutsches Reich, Adolf Hitler, speaking to the German Volk and to the world from the city of Münster,” gabbled an announcer with an excited voice.

“People of Germany, I have come to Münster to tear up treason by the roots,” Hitler declared. “It is because of treason that our war against the Jew Bolsheviks of Moscow and the Jew capitalists of London and Paris and New York City has not gone as well as we should have hoped. They are not content with corrupting the peasant Untermenschen and mongrel factory workers they exploit. No! Instead, they whisper their filthy venom into German ears as well.”

He had an Austrian accent and an Austrian habit of peppering everything he said with particles: little words that added emphasis but that many, maybe even most, German-speakers would have left out. But his voice was such a splendid instrument that even such tics seemed not to matter-no, seemed to disappear-after a sentence or two.

“When Germans seek to rise against the German state and seek to hinder the struggle against Bolshevist barbarism, they cannot be doing this on their own. No, they must be incited by outside agitators, and by the filthy, wicked Jews still resident in the Reich. And they must be punished for their betrayal of Volkisch ideals. They must be, and they shall be!” Hitler’s voice rose and grew more urgent. “We will make them bend the knee! We will make them tremble in fear. We will-”

The speech abruptly broke off. There was a noise that might have been a shot or might have been an explosion. Then only the soft, staticky hiss of the carrier wave came out of the radio.

Theo Hossbach sprawled on the grass with the other crewmen from his panzer and the rest of the regiment, listening to the Führer telling the world about what he was going to do to Münster and the people who lived there. The radio was turned up loud so everyone could hear in spite of the noise from all the airplanes overhead.

And then, all of a sudden, the speech stopped. Theo heard a kind of a bang from the radio. At almost the same time, he heard kind of a bang from the direction of Münster.

“Scheisse!” one of the men in black panzer coveralls said loudly. He got up and whacked the radio with the heel of his hand. It went on hissing, but the Führer’s speech didn’t come back. He said “Scheisse!” again, even louder than the first time.

Adi Stoss leaned toward Theo. “The trouble’s not in the set, is it?” he murmured.

Since Theo was a radioman, he supposed he was the logical one to ask. He hadn’t checked out the radio, though, and he hated being wrong even more than he hated talking in general. All the same, some kind of answer seemed called for. “I … wouldn’t think so,” he said reluctantly.

That hiss went on and on, probably for two or three minutes. More bangs and booms came from the direction of Münster, though not from the radio set. That might not have meant anything much. You could hear bangs and booms from Münster almost every night. The people in town who didn’t fancy the regime used darkness as a camouflage cloak to help them strike at its backers. The timing now seemed intriguing, though.

“Change the frequency,” someone suggested. “See if we can pick up something somewhere else.”

“No, leave it.” Hermann Witt spoke up with a panzer commander’s authority. “Something funny’s going on. The Führer’s station wouldn’t crap out for no reason at all.”

There was another interesting point. Had Hitler’s station crapped out not for no reason but for some reason? If it had, what would that reason be?

No sooner had that thought crossed Theo’s mind than a voice started coming out of the radio. It wasn’t Hitler’s voice. Instead of sounding like a professional rabble-rouser, this fellow seemed tired unto death and had a harsh, abrupt Prussian way of talking.

“Good evening, people of Germany and people of the world,” he said. “I am Colonel General Heinz Guderian. I find myself heading the Committee for the Salvation of the German Nation.”

“The what?” Several people there in front of the radio said the same thing at the same time.

“As I speak to you, Adolf Hitler is dead,” Guderian went on. “We have removed him from power because he led Germany into a war that did not succeed, and because he threw away any chance of a fair result by bringing the United States of America into the European conflict. We took this step with great reluctance, but we also took it with great resolution. Even more than in the last war, the United States is an enemy Germany cannot hope to overcome.”

“Sweet Jesus Christ!” a panzer crewman exclaimed not far from Theo. “What do we do now?”

“Some people may not be happy that we have assumed authority in this way,” Guderian continued, which had to rank as one of the champion understatements of all time. “This being so, we need to make it very plain that the Nazi Party is no longer the ruling party in Germany, and is no longer the only party in Germany. As I speak, forces loyal to the Salvation Committee are arresting Göring, Goebbels, Hess, and Himmler.”

“Sweet Jesus!” That same voice rang out again.

“Soldiers of the Reich, sailors of the Reich, flying men of the Reich, obey your officers and carry on. We have taken this action to secure an honorable peace, and we believe we can,” Guderian said. “Men who would not confer with Hitler because of his endless lies will do so with our trustworthy officers and civilian representatives. All sides must see that peace is preferable to the past five and a half years of slaughter and destruction. God will surely bless our cause. Thank you, and good night.”

“Deutschland über Alles” rang out again. The “Horst Wessel Lied” didn’t. That told Theo the Salvation Committee was running the radio station, anyhow.

More Bach poured out of the radio set. It was good, calm, peaceful, churchgoing music, music that advertised a good, calm, peaceful, churchgoing Germany to the listening world. Theo hoped the listening world was paying attention. He also hoped the Salvation Committee could get away with the coup-and that Guderian hadn’t been lying through his teeth when he talked about the Committee’s program.

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.

It helped them only so much. The Red Army was great for using lots and lots of Russians-and every other folk in the Soviet Union. Had it had the Hitlerites’ fancy gear, it might not have had to spend so many men. Fungible, Ivan thought once more. But you did what you could with what you had. The Red Army had soldiers, and used them … and used them up.

“Comrade Sergeant, tell off three men. You and they will take Colonel von Holtzendorf”-Obolensky pronounced it Goltzendorf, since Russian had no h sound-“to regimental headquarters. About four kilometers that way.” He pointed northeast.

“I serve the Soviet Union!” Ivan said. He nodded to the German. “Don’t get your pussy lost, sweetheart. I’ll be back fast as a fart.”

He grabbed two tough guys and Sasha Davidov. “I don’t want to have anything to do with that goddamn Nazi shithead,” the Jew said.

“Not even to tell him how many knots you feel like tying in his dick?” Ivan asked slyly.

“Well, when you put it that way …” Davidov came along with no more backtalk. Ivan chuckled to himself. If you knew what made somebody tick, you could get him to do anything you wanted.

Grubby Red Army Jew and aristocratic Wehrmacht officer eyed each other with undisguised suspicion and loathing. Kuchkov had Colonel von Holtzendorf keep carrying the white flag. “Wouldn’t want one of our fuckers shooting you by mistake. That’d be such a cocksucking shame,” he said.

“I think so,” the German agreed. “I would not want that, either.”

“No-way better they should shoot you on purpose,” Sasha said.

“I am trying to stop the fighting,” von Holtzendorf said. “I don’t know if I can, but I am trying.”

“And how much did you try the last few years?” the Jew returned. “They don’t give medals like that to peacemakers.” The colonel wore the German Cross in Gold and the Iron Cross First Class on his chest, as well as the ribbon for the Iron Cross Second Class and two wound badges. No, he hadn’t always been a peacemaker. Germans usually wore their medals in the field, even if it gave their foes a better shot at them. Pride came in all shapes.

Von Holtzendorf shrugged. “I fought in the last war, too. I have two sons in the Wehrmacht, one north of here and the other in Belgium. They would be about your age. If I succeed in this, maybe none of my grandsons will have to find out what sleeping in a trench is like.”

“Alevai,” Davidov said. That wasn’t Russian or, evidently, German either. He didn’t explain it. Instead, he went on, “Did you people really get rid of Hitler?” Unlike Lieutenant Obolensky, he could say h.

“We did. We had to,” the colonel answered. “He went too far.”

“He got you into this cunt of a war, and you didn’t fucking win it,” Ivan translated.

“Among other things,” von Holtzendorf said. “Finally, among too many other things.”

“Is Himmler dead, too?” Sasha asked.

“I … think so. There are conflicting reports,” Colonel von Holtzendorf replied. “It is certain, though, that the SS still resists the Salvation Committee.”

Ivan laughed, but only to himself. If the Germans had bought themselves a civil war, how were they going to fight the foreign enemies they’d made for themselves? He chuckled again. If he could see that, he was sure people like Stalin and Molotov could, too.

They got to the tents housing regimental headquarters in less than an hour. The sight of a Fascist colonel made the place bubble like a forgotten kettle of shchi. Ivan wasn’t thrilled about turning von Holtzendorf loose, but he did. And what would come of it … well, who the hell could say?