West and East

Chapter 13

Theo Hossbach, Heinz Naumann, and Adalbert Stoss sat at the north-easternmost corner of Poland. A scrawny chicken roasted above a fire. Naumann reached out to turn the stick on which the bird was spitted. "Well, we're here," the panzer commander said morosely. "We did what they brought us to Poland to do. Hot damn!" He gave the chicken another turn.

"Hot damn," Stoss echoed. Theo, as usual, kept his mouth shut. It wasn't that he disagreed with his crewmates; he just didn't feel like talking.

With some help from the Poles, the German panzers had smashed through the Red Army and cut a hell of a lot of Russians in this invaded chunk of Poland off from their homeland. Now German and Polish troops were methodically mopping them up.

That was all very well. It would have been better than all very well if only the Russians hadn't just poured across the rest of the Polish border. How hard could the Poles fight? If the Russians cut a couple of railroad lines… Theo glanced over at their Panzer II, an angular shadow in the long, slowly deepening northern twilight. In spite of the surprising Soviet panzers, it had come a long way and done a lot of hard fighting without taking much damage in return.

But it ran on gasoline. If the gasoline couldn't get through, the machine was nothing but nine tonnes of scrap metal. A dead turtle, a shell without legs. And, in that case, Theo and Heinz and Adi were nothing but three foot soldiers. The only problem with that was, they didn't have rifles and they didn't have helmets. Well, if you were going to piss and moan about every little thing…

"So what's going through your thick head now, Theo?" Naumann asked. Like Ludwig Rothe before him, he recognized Theo wouldn't say much on his own. Unlike the late Ludwig, he kept trying to get answers anyway.

"Gasoline." Theo doled out a word.

"Now why would you worry about something like that?" Adalbert Stoss said. "It's not like we need it or anything."

"Heh," Naumann said, sounding as laconic as Theo usually did. The panzer commander looked around. There wasn't much to see, nor would there have been on a sunny noon: a burnt-out farmhouse and a barn (that was where the chicken must have come from), some crops growing out in the fields, and a couple of dead Russians just starting to bloat and stink a hundred meters or so past the barn. Heinz shook his head. "If the world ever needed an enema, you'd plug it in right here, by God."

Somewhere a couple of kilometers away, a machine gun opened up. All three panzer men leaned toward the noise. "Russian piece," Stoss said.

"We might have captured it," Naumann said. And so the Germans might have; you used anything you could get your hands on. Theo had seen that in France. If it could hurt the other guy, you grabbed it, turned it around, and started shooting it at him.

Another machine gun spoke up to answer: an unmistakable German MG-34. "They might have captured it," Adi Stoss said, grinning.

Heinz didn't grin back. He made a sour face instead. Theo didn't like that. The rivalry between driver and panzer commander hadn't gone away after Adi ducked Heinz in that French creek. Naumann had the rank, and maybe the meanness. But, while he was no weakling, he wasn't in Stoss' league for muscle. Theo hoped trouble wouldn't come of it. He wished he could do something, but had no idea what to do. Working with artillery fuses was nothing next to this.

"We'll sleep in shifts tonight," Naumann decreed. "We all sack out at once, we're liable to wake up with our throats cut." He glared a challenge at Adi Stoss. Adi only nodded back; what the sergeant said made obvious sense. Heinz muttered to himself. Yes, he wanted an excuse to come down on the driver. If he didn't find one, chances were he'd go and invent one.

Theo drew the first watch. The panzer crew had long since doused the fire. Blankets would do on a mild summer night, and why advertise where you were? Theo held on to his pistol. If some Russian sneaked inside of thirty meters before trying to pot him with a Mosin-Nagant, he could defend himself with some hope of hitting back. Otherwise… Well, the weight in his hand was comforting, anyhow.

The moon, swelling toward full, spilled pale light from low in the south. Moonshadows stretched long. They looked black as the inside of whatever Satan used in place of a soul. Anything could hide in them, anything at all.

Not that the Russians needed such advantages. They could hide in places where most people wouldn't even find places. Then they'd wait till you went by and shoot you in the back. They carried next to no food-only ammo and grenades and sometimes vodka. If they wanted to eat, they had to scavenge from the countryside. And they did. Theo's stomach growled, reminding him of the chunk of chicken in there. But the Reds were the prize chicken thieves.

Here and there, off in the distance, rifle shots and occasional bursts of machine-gun fire marred the night's stillness. The Russians were supposed to have been cleared out of this stretch of Poland, no matter what was going on farther south. Some of them hadn't got the word, though. They didn't fight with a great deal of skill, but they had no quit in them.

In due course, Theo woke Adi Stoss. He jumped back in a hurry, because Adi came awake with a trench knife in his hand. "Oh. It's you," the driver said then, and made the knife disappear.

"Me," Theo agreed.

Adi yawned and sat up. "Anything going on?"

"Nothing close."

"That's all that matters," Stoss said.

"Ja." Theo hesitated. He thought he had a better chance talking to the driver than to the panzer commander… and Naumann lay a few meters away, snoring like a sawmill. "You ought to take it easy on Heinz. He doesn't like it when you give him grief."

"You think I have fun when he rides me?" Stoss returned.

"He's a sergeant," Theo said, as if that explained everything. If you'd been in the army for even a little while, it damn well did.

"I don't care if he's a fucking field marshal," Adi answered. "Nobody's going to call me a kike."

So that still rankled, did it? Theo didn't suppose he should have been surprised. "He didn't mean anything by it," he said.

"Ha!" One syllable carried a tonne's weight of disbelief.

Theo gave it up. He didn't know what else he could do. "Just be careful," he said.

"Ja, Mutti," Adi answered indulgently. Yes, Mommy chased Theo under his blanket, as Stoss had no doubt intended it to do.

Dawn came early. Black bread spread with butter from a tinfoil tube and ersatz coffee made a breakfast of sorts. Heinz Naumann, who'd had the last watch, turned to Theo and said, "See if we've got any new orders. Or are they just going to have us sit here with our thumbs up our asses?"

"I'll find out," Theo said. Climbing back into the panzer felt good. So did putting on the earphones and hooking into the radio net. Like anyone else, Theo enjoyed doing things he was good at, and Wehrmacht training made damn sure he was damn good at using the panzer's radio set.

When he stuck his head out of the hatch in front of the engine compartment, Heinz barked, "Well?"

"We're ordered to motor back to the railhead at Molodetschna," Theo reported. "Further orders when we get there."

"Himmeldonnerwetter!" Naumann burst out. "Why'd we come all the way up here, then? A round trip to fucking nowhere, with the chance of getting shot or blown up thrown in for a bonus!"

"Gasoline at the railhead?" Stoss put in. "We've got enough to get there-I think so, anyhow-but not much more than that."

"Wunderbar," Heinz said sourly. "What do we do if we run dry? Hoof it?"

"See if we can get a tow, if we're close," Adi answered. "If we can't… Well, d'you want to stick around?"

"Here? Christ, no!" Heinz said. Theo felt the same way. There were stories about what the Reds did to Germans they caught. Theo didn't know if those stories were true, and he didn't want to find out, either. He slid back into the Panzer II. The other crewmen also came aboard. The reliable little Maybach engine fired up right away. Off they went, back in the direction they'd come from. THE FRENCH LIEUTENANT EYED VACLAV JEZEK with what might have been sympathy. He gargled something in his own language. Vaclav looked back blankly. He didn't understand a word. Even if he had, he wouldn't have let on.

Benjamin Halevy turned French into Czech: "He wants your antitank rifle. They're obsolete, he says. They don't penetrate the armor of the latest German tanks."

"Tell him no," Vaclav said at once. The heavy weight on his right shoulder, the recoil bruises that never got a chance to heal up, had become a part of him.

More French from the lieutenant. He couldn't just demand; Vaclav was a foreign ally, not somebody under his direct command. "He wants to know why you're so enamored of an outmoded weapon."

"Why I'm so what?" Vaclav scratched his head.

"Why you like it so much."

"Why didn't you say so in the first place? Tell him the Germans still have plenty of old tanks and armored cars, and my beast'll do for them. Tell him I've got a decent chance of killing a man from a kilometer and a half away with this baby, too."

Sergeant Halevy spoke in French. So did the French officer. Halevy translated: "He says it wasn't intended as a sniper's rifle."

"I don't give a fuck what it was intended for. It works," Vaclav declared.

He and the lieutenant stared at each other in perfect mutual incomprehension. To the logical Frenchman, that antitank rifle was made to destroy tanks. If it couldn't do the job for which it was made, it was useless. Vaclav had found it could do other things better than the ordinary rifle he'd carried till he took the big piece from a casualty.

"It will be your responsibility." The lieutenant sounded grave even when Vaclav couldn't understand him. After Halevy translated, the French officer seemed more like Pilate washing his hands.

"That's fine," Vaclav said at once. What was wrong with these people? He had less trouble understanding Germans. He hated their guts, but at least he could see what made them tick. Something else occurred to him. He rudely pointed at the young lieutenant. "You're discontinuing these rifles, right?"

"Oui." The Frenchman couldn't have been haughtier. "That is what I am trying to explain to you."

"Yeah, yeah. That means you're going to shitcan all the rounds that go with it, too, aren't you?"

Sergeant Halevy raised a gingery eyebrow. "Hey, boy, I see where you're going." He translated for the lieutenant yet again.

"Mais certainement," the French officer replied. Again, to him, if the rounds couldn't kill tanks, they couldn't do anything.

Vaclav had a different idea. "Don't throw 'em out. Give 'em to me. I'll be the-waddayacallit?-the official obsolete rifle-toter, and I'll get the guys in my squad to lug what I can't. They know what this baby can do." Even if you don't, asshole. He affectionately patted the antitank rifle's padded stock. With a bit of luck, he wouldn't have to quarrel with stuck-up French quartermaster sergeants any more.

With a bit of luck… How much would the nasty little gods in charge of war dole out? Have to wait and see.

"This is most irregular," the French officer said after the Jew translated one more time.

"Fine. It's irregular," Vaclav said. "But if it's officially irregular…" Maybe that would get through to the lieutenant.

The fellow eyed him. "You go out of your way to be difficult, n'est-ce pas?"

"To the Nazis, sure. Not to anybody else." Vaclav lied without hesitation. He was difficult with anybody who got in his way. The jerks on your own side would screw you over worse than the enemy if you gave 'em half a chance.

After more back-and-forth between Halevy and the Frenchman, the lieutenant threw his hands in the air and strode off. "He says, have it your own way," Halevy reported. "He'll see that you get the ammo. He'll probably see that you end up ass-deep in it-he's not real happy with you."

"I'd rather have too much than not enough," Jezek said.

He wondered if he meant that when he got two truckloads of wooden crates full of the thumb-sized cartridges the antitank rifle fire. No, he couldn't very well burden the Czechs in his squad with that load. Each man's share would have squashed him flat.

That meant dealing with a quartermaster sergeant after all. Fortunately, this wasn't the guy he'd almost murdered a few months earlier. Benjamin Halevy sweetened up the French noncom, and the fellow seemed amazingly willing to hang on to most of the ammo and issue it as needed.

"What did you say to him?" Vaclav asked.

"I asked him how he'd like to be the official"-Halevy bore down on the word-"keeper of what's left of the antitank-rifle ammunition. He jumped at the chance."

Vaclav laughed. "Swell! You know more about dealing with these people than I do, that's for sure." He sent the quartermaster sergeant a suspicious stare. "Now, will he turn loose of the stuff when I need it, or will he decide he has to keep it because it's too important to fire off?"

Halevy spoke more French. The supply sergeant raised his right hand, as if taking an oath. "He says he'll be good," the Jew reported. Vaclav decided he'd have to take that-it was as good as he'd get. And if the Frenchman turned out to be lying, threatening to blow a hole in him with the antitank rifle ought to get his attention.

Now that Vaclav had enough ammunition for months if not years, he found that he had little to do with it. The Germans had pulled most of their armor out of this sector. They were digging in for all they were worth; it might have been 1916 over again. The French kept promising offensives, then stopping in their tracks whenever the boys in field-gray shot back at them.

Without tanks and armored cars to shoot at, he started doing just what he'd told the snooty young French lieutenant he'd do: he sniped at the Germans from long range. Behind their lines, the Wehrmacht men moved around pretty freely. They didn't think anyone could hit them from the Allies' positions. One careful round at a time, Vaclav taught them they were wrong.

"Congratulations," Benjamin Halevy told him one day.

"How come?" Jezek asked.

"Prisoners say the Nazis really want the son of a bitch with the elephant gun dead," Halevy answered.

It was a compliment of sorts, but it was one Vaclav could have lived without. He hoped he could go on living with it. He was a careful sniper. He never fired from the same place twice in a row. He didn't move from one favorite spot to another. As often as not, he didn't know whether he'd shift to the left or right till he tossed a coin to tell him. If he couldn't guess, the Germans wouldn't be able to, either. He made sure nothing on his ratty uniform shone or sparkled (that was easy enough). He fastened leafy branches to his helmet with a strip of rubber cut from an inner tube to break up its outline.

German bullets started cracking past him more often than they should have even so. Regretfully, he decided the prisoners had known what they were talking about. When one of those bullets knocked a sprig off his helmet camouflage, he realized the Germans had to have a sniper of their own hunting him.

That made for a new kind of game, one he wasn't even slightly sure he liked. It wasn't army against army any more. The Germans didn't think of him as one more interchangeable part in an enormous military machine. They wanted him dead, him in particular. This was personal. He could have done without the honor.

When he complained, Sergeant Halevy said, "All you have to do is put down the antitank rifle and go back to being an ordinary soldier."

"I'm killing a lot more Germans than the ordinary soldiers are," Vaclav said.

"Then you'd better figure they'll do their goddamnedest to kill you," Halevy replied.

Vaclav started hunting the German sniper. He found a brass telescope in an abandoned farmhouse (it wasn't as if the officers on his side would give him field glasses-perish the thought!) and painted it a muddy brown so it wouldn't betray him. He also had to be careful not to let the sun flash off the objective lens and give him away.

The German was good. Jezek might have known he would be. Well, he wasn't so bad himself. That he still prowled and hunted proved it. He took shots at other Nazis as he got the chance. Somewhere over there, a German with some kind of fancy rifle of his own was waiting for a mistake. If Vaclav made one, he wouldn't have to worry about making two-or about anything else ever again. JULIUS LEMP STUDIED HIS ORDERS. He turned to his executive officer. "Well, Klaus, what do you think of these?"

Klaus Hammerstein blinked. He'd served on the U-30 with Lemp since before the war started, but as a lowly Leutnant zur See till the previous exec got tapped for a command of his own. Now, newly promoted to Oberleutnant zur See, and to second in the chain of command, Hammerstein had to deal with his skipper in a whole new way. "They're interesting, that's for sure," he ventured.

"Interesting. Ja." There was barely room for two people in Lemp's curtained-off little excuse for a cabin. You worked with what you had, on the boat and with the crew. "What do these orders make you wonder?" Lemp pressed. If Klaus didn't have what it took to swing it as the executive officer, they both needed to find out right away.

The kid studied them again. "How many other boats are getting orders just like these right now?" he said after a pause only a little longer than it should have been.

And Lemp nodded, pleased. "There you go! That's exactly what I'd like to find out." Naval high command wouldn't tell him, of course. Anything he didn't urgently need to know was something he shouldn't know. What he didn't know, he couldn't spill if things went wrong and he got captured.

"I could ask around," Klaus said.

"Don't," Lemp told him, not without regret. "Anybody who told you would be breaking security. Better not to tempt somebody-and better not to give the Gestapo an excuse to come down on us."

"Oh," Hammerstein said, and then, "Right." Lemp's head went up and down once more, crisply this time. Things went better when you didn't need to worry about looking over your own shoulder… quite so much, anyhow.

Two days later, the U-30 chugged out into the North Sea. The men ate like pigs. You had to get rid of the fresh food first, because it wouldn't keep. They'd go back to sausage and tinned sauerkraut and hard-baked bread soon enough-too soon, really. Boiled beef, stewed chicken, fresh cabbage, even some peaches… Lemp gobbled down his share. He might have eaten a little more than his share. He was the skipper, after all. But his pants still fit all right, so he couldn't have been too much of a greedyguts.

Gerhart Beilharz put the Schnorkel through its paces. Lemp was less nervous about the gadget than he had been when it first got installed. It hadn't misbehaved too badly, and it did come in handy every now and then. Lemp still would have liked it better if the brass had given it to him as a reward rather than a punishment.

The tall engineer said, "It's working the way it's supposed to, Skipper."

"All right." Lemp hoped it was. He was also more willing to believe Beilharz than he had been when the beanpole came aboard with the Schnorkel. Beilharz had to be two meters if he was a centimeter. He needed his Stahlhelm, all right. U-boats weren't built with people his size in mind.

This was a different kind of patrol. Instead of telling him to go out into the Atlantic to torpedo freighters traveling between the Americas and England, the orders over which he and Klaus had puzzled instructed him to stay in the North Sea and patrol north and south between two fixed parallels of latitude. He was to sink anything he saw, and to be especially alert for Royal Navy warships.

That codicil kept him scratching his chin. The Royal Navy wasn't in the habit of pushing into the North Sea. As long as it could keep German surface vessels bottled up-which it hadn't managed with the Admiral Scheer-it kept its distance, leery not only of U-boats but also of land-based airplanes.

So why did his orders talk about enemy warships as if expecting them to rush into the path of his patrol? It made for a nice strategic question, one that gave both officers and ratings something to chew on. Lemp had his own opinion-or rather, his own suspicion. He didn't voice it; even on a U-boat, people were often reluctant to contradict the skipper. He was amused to discover he wasn't the only one to arrive at that suspicion. Amused, yes, but not surprised. If you could read a map and thought a little about how and where the war was going, it was one of the things that seemed likely.

Likely, of course, didn't have to mean true. It might prove nothing but so much moonshine. Lemp knew how much he didn't know. The ratings sounded much more confident than he did. They didn't worry about what they didn't know. From his days in school, Lemp remembered Socrates going on about such things.

Socrates had got sunk for his trouble. Lemp intended to be on the other end of the bargain. At the moment, though, it looked like no bargain at all. No Royal Navy battleships or carriers, destroyers or corvettes-hell, no Royal Navy tugs or garbage scows-showed themselves in his patrol zone. From what the radio operator could pick up, things were also quiet elsewhere.

No freighters bound from Norway to England or the other way lumbered past, either. Petrels skimmed by the U-30. One landed on the radio aerial atop the conning tower. It seemed surprised to find an island in the middle of the sea. After a minute or two, it flew off.

One of the ratings on watch up there let his binoculars down onto his chest and grinned at Lemp. "Do we sink the sea birds, Skipper?" he asked. "They're the only things in the neighborhood."

"Bad luck!" another sailor said, and everybody else nodded. You didn't hurt petrels, not for anything.

"I was only kidding," the first man protested.

"Don't worry about it, Erich," Lemp said. "We know you didn't mean anything by it." By their expressions, not all the ratings agreed, but they let it lie-for now. Lemp wondered if Erich would get himself a set of lumps after he went below. He hoped the others wouldn't rack the sailor up to the point where he couldn't carry out his duties. A U-boat needed every man it carried.

He was also willing to bet that, as long as Erich was still able to walk, he wouldn't let out a peep about what had happened to him. Officers didn't need to know-and certainly didn't need to notice-everything that went on aboard a warship.

Or maybe the rating escaped his expected fate, because the very next day a sailor fishing from the conning tower caught an enormous cod. If that wasn't good luck, Lemp didn't know what would be. The sailors gutted the big fish and threw the offal overboard.

"Now what do we do with it?" somebody wondered.

"I know how to make codfish balls," another sailor said.

A wit piped up: "What do we do with the rest?"

"Funny, Michael," Lemp said amidst groans. "You should take it on the stage-or anywhere else a long way from here."

But, for lack of other suggestions, they let the volunteer have his way. And the codfish balls, eked out with flour, proved surprisingly good. Lemp put a commendation in the log. It might earn the amateur cook a promotion when the U-30 came home.

In the meantime, they patrolled. They saw ocean, and more ocean, and more ocean still. They saw petrels. Some were gray. Some were black. Some were gray and black. A birdwatcher probably would have gone into ecstasies about them. Lemp took them for granted, as long as no one talked about doing them in.

Still no freighters. No Royal Navy ships, either. Only long days and short, light nights. Twilight never quite left the northern sky, and the dimmer stars remained unseen. The weather was good-as good as it ever got in the North Sea, anyhow. It might almost have been a pleasure jaunt. If only the accommodations were fancier, Lemp thought. The Strength through Joy cruises do a better job.

It didn't take long for the patrolling to get to be first routine, then dull routine. Lemp fought that as best he could. Taking things for granted was one of the easiest ways to get yourself killed.

No ships. No planes. No suspicious smoke smudges on the horizon. No stalking a quarry. No crash dives when someone came stalking you, either. Back and forth. Back and forth again. Nothing. Lots of nothing. Lemp got bored, too. He worked all the harder on account of it. He made sure the crew did, too.

The U-30 didn't travel very far. It could stay at sea as long as it had fuel and food. No orders to do anything else came over the radio. Back and forth one more time, and then one more time after that. ARNO BAATZ GLOWERED at Willi Dernen. "I've got my eye on you," the corporal warned. "You may have fooled that SS fellow, but I know damn well you had something to do with Storch lighting out for the tall timber."

Awful Arno was right. So was a stopped clock, twice a day. Most days, that put it two up on Baatz. "I don't know what happened to Wolfgang," Willi said, for what had to be the hundredth time. "Maybe he did light out, but he was always a good soldier till people started giving him grief. Or maybe a shell came down right on top of him. We were catching hell from the Frenchies that day, remember. Sometimes there's nothing left to bury, you know?" He eyed his squad leader. "It could have happened to you."

"And you would have been happy if it did?"

"You said that. I didn't. I don't mean it, either." Willi didn't aim to let Awful Arno pin an insubordination rap on him. He also didn't particularly hope Baatz would get blown to nothingness on the instant. That would be too quick, too easy. If the sniper with the monster rifle nailed Awful Arno right in the knee, though…

A German sniper prowled the lines these days, too, hunting the Frenchman or Czech or whatever he was. A rifle made for knocking out panzers did horrid things to flesh and bone. Sometimes a hit on the arm or leg would kill just from the shock of the impact. The sooner the expert with the scope-sighted rifle-he was an Oberfeldwebel named Helmut Fegelein, a grizzled veteran of the last war-disposed of the bastard with the big rifle, the happier everybody would be.

Everybody except the enemy sniper, of course. But Willi wasted no sympathy on him. Every so often, that big, distinctive boom! would echo from the trenches off in the distance. And then, as often as not, some German who'd been careless or naive would fall over screaming-or sometimes just twitching.

"Fucker's good," Fegelein allowed, spooning up a stew of cabbage and sausage and potatoes from his mess tin. "I've got a couple of shots at him, but he's still in business."

"How come you missed?" Awful Arno asked.

Fegelein looked through him. The senior noncom didn't have to put up with Baatz's bullshit the way Willi did. "You try it, sonny boy," he said. "You got a split second at extreme long range, and maybe you hit and maybe you don't. He stays well back, too-that antipanzer rifle's got more reach reach than a Mauser."

Willi smiled at his corporal. Sonny boy, was it? He liked that, and liked it all the better because Awful Arno obviously didn't. "You ought to get closer, then-that's all I've got to say," Baatz remarked.

"If that's all you've got to say, keep your big fat dumb mouth shut," Fegelein answered. "I didn't come here to get my head blown off, either. This guy hasn't been doing it for long, or I never would have got a shot at him at all. But he's sharp. He keeps learning. I haven't got a glimpse of him for a day and a half. If I were talking to most people, I'd tell 'em to keep their heads down till I nail him."

"But not me?" Baatz reddened with anger. "Why not?"

"Because you don't have enough brains in there to worry about getting 'em blown out," the sniper answered. "If he shoots you in the ass, though, you're liable to end up with a concussion."

Somebody behind Awful Arno guffawed. Willi would have, if he were sitting where Baatz couldn't see him doing it. And Baatz couldn't even round on the miscreant, not with Fegelein's cold gray gaze pinning him down. People talked about sniper's eyes. Willi hadn't seen any examples of that unfailing, scary watchfulness before. But the Oberfeldwebel had it in spades.

"Were you a sniper in 1918, too?" Willi asked him as they washed out their tins side by side.

"Nein." Fegelein shook his head and lit a small, stinky cigar. "I was an assault trooper. I carried a machine pistol and a big sack of grenades. I started this business in one of the Freikorps after the war. I'd had it up to here with fighting the other guys at twenty meters. They don't have to be good to kill you at that range-just lucky. I figured I'd give myself better odds. I got into the Reichswehr in… was it '21 or '22? Anyway, I've been doing this ever since."

"Makes sense to me," Willi said. "The farther away the enemy stays, the better I like it."

That chilly stare appraised him for a moment. Sure as hell, Willi felt as if he were in the crosshairs. Then Fegelein gave him a smile-a thin smile, but a smile. "Yeah, I've heard a lot of guys go on like that," the sniper said. "Half the time, it's right before they do something that gets 'em a Ritterkreuz."

"I don't want one," Willi said with great sincerity.

Helmut Fegelein only shrugged. "Sometimes you want the medal, sometimes the medal wants you. When the time comes, you'll know what needs doing. That piece of crap you've got for a corporal, now…"

Willi laughed out loud. "You mean Awful Arno?" Sure as hell, Fegelein was a keen judge of character.

The veteran chuckled. "Is that what you call him?"

Belatedly, Willi realized he might have stuck his foot in it. An Oberfeldwebel could land a Gefreiter in all kinds of trouble for badmouthing another noncom senior to him. "Well…" Willi said reluctantly.

"That's what you call him when you don't think anybody'll gig you for it," Fegelein said, which was perfectly true. The sniper reached into his pocket and pulled out the stogies again. He offered Willi one. "Here you go. I don't blab. I remember what I called the jerks who ordered me around."

Next morning, the son of a bitch with the antipanzer rifle potted a captain-knocked him off a motorcycle, in fact. And that evening, as darkness descended, Fegelein did go out into the no-man's-land between the lines. "About time," Arno Baatz said-but not where the Oberfeldwebel could hear him.

Willi didn't see Awful Arno volunteering to go out there. He couldn't say that, but thought it very loudly. Baatz strutted off to do some of the important things corporals did. One of those things was to make sure Willi stood sentry in the middle of the night and broke up his sleep. As always, Willi appreciated it.

Come morning, he saw no sign of Helmut Fegelein. The sniper was out there somewhere, sprawled in a shell hole or under one piece of wreckage or another. He had his rifle and he had a hunter's patience. Somewhere farther off, the enemy sniper had the same patience and an even nastier weapon.

The antipanzer rifle thundered, its report distinctive even though it came from a long way northwest of the trench in which Willi waited. Fegelein's piece stayed silent. Either he didn't spot the enemy or he had no chance to hit him from wherever he hid.

Fegelein came in after dark. He slipped past the German pickets, which was bound to raise officers' blood pressure. If all the Frenchmen out there were as good as he was, they could do it, too. And if cows pissed gasoline, the Reich wouldn't have to worry about running low on fuel.

Some time in the middle of the night, the sniper vanished again. Maybe he was going back to the same hidey-hole, or maybe he changed his lair daily like a hunted wolf. Willi thought he would have if he were doing that job. He thanked heaven he wasn't.

No sign of the Oberfeldwebel when the sun came up. He'd be waiting-or, for all Willi knew, he'd be sound asleep right now. Who was going to tell him he couldn't do that if he felt like it?

Sweat ran down Willi's face. Summer was coming in, all right. When he pushed his way through the Ardennes in the middle of winter, he'd thought the war would be over by now. "Shows what I knew," he muttered.

Then the antipanzer rifle spoke again, seemingly right in front of him. A split second later, a Mauser in no-man's-land answered. Willi's ears told him about where the shot came from, but he still couldn't spot Fegelein.

He couldn't, but the enemy sniper could. That goddamn elephant gun fired once more, as soon as it could have after the man using it worked the bolt. Silence returned, punctuated only by the skrawks of frightened crows.

Helmut Fegelein didn't come back for supper after sundown. Willi guessed he wasn't hungry any more, and never would be again.