Berlin or Bust

^{CHAPTER TWELVE} DISORIENTED

Gefreiter Steiner struck the ground and rolled to a dazed stop. His parachute floated away across the snow like a startled ghost. Somehow, he’d undone all four clips on his harness and shrugged it off along with his Mae West.

He sat up and surveyed his surroundings. Deep snow barely illuminated by starlight and the waning moon. A line of trees, probably a hedgerow. The black silhouette of a distant farmhouse, which he intended to avoid as if it were Dracula’s castle. Several kilometers away, the wreck of a downed C-53 blazed energetically, having taken God knew how many German souls with it.

On an ideal drop, the planes would fly as close together as possible at low altitude over a visible target. That was the best way to drop paratroopers in a very tight dispersion. It also wasn’t what happened. The German interceptors had wreaked havoc on the American transports, scattering the sticks.

The skies were quiet now. And he was lost.

You aren’t lost, he thought. You’re closer to home than you’ve been in eighteen months.

He was quite a ways from Meissen, his hometown on the Elba River, near Dresden. Still, this drop felt like a homecoming, even if he returned as an invader.

Liberator, he told himself. It was all a matter of perspective.

God, he missed the old war. His side had been losing, but at least things were simple.

Weapons banged around him with yellow light bursts, mostly Lugers. Two men shouted at each other before the wind swept their voices away and delivered a blood-curdling scream from somewhere else.

Steiner jumped to his feet fumbling for his own Luger and found the .45 pistol he’d received in trade. An excellent trade, actually; it was a solid handgun. Their tanks couldn’t stand up to the Tigers and Panthers, but otherwise the damned Amis had the best of everything and a seemingly inexhaustible supply of it.

Gone was his fleeting death wish born of shame from serving a regime that created the monstrous super soldiers. He’d challenged the Americans to punish him, but he hadn’t thought they’d actually kill him. He’d figured they’d rough him up a bit and scratch his shame’s itch. Now he had zero wish to die, especially by being chomped on by carnivorous corpses.

Another pair of Lugers popped in the dark. The flashes oriented him. The strong wind hadn’t taken him as far afield as he’d thought. If he was right, First Squad and some of his own squad was just on the other side of the hedgerow, along with a weapon container for the platoon.

Right now, for him, happiness was a machine-gun. He felt naked without it. The MG42 was one of the most brutal infantry weapons of the war, and he had one of his very own. Weighing only twelve kilos, the bipod-mounted medium gun blasted anything in front of it with up to 1,500 rounds per minute.

Though it was rugged and able to function in dust and mud, so many were lost that they were hard to get these days. Many squads made do with the lighter MG34, which had a tendency to jam. Steiner jealously guarded his MG42 and took care of it as if his life depended on it, which it did. He longed to get his hands on it again and hoped Weber and Braun, his assistant gunners, had survived the drop.

Time to move before this scheisse sandwich got any worse. Damn this jumping at night. It was hard enough to organize after a jump in daylight.

Steiner crept to the hedgerow with his .45 held out in front of him, ready to punch a hole in anything that moved. The hedge was thicker than it had looked in the dying moonlight. He flailed through the branches, growling at real and imagined terrors, and spotted a group of figures moving around a weapons container downed in the middle of a field. They froze and looked his way, some appearing to have weapons raised.

Steiner let out a bird call.

One of the figures said, “Halt, wer da?” Stop, who goes there?

“Are you real?” Steiner called out.

“Get your ass over here, Otto,” Animal said.

He hurried across the field, grunting at the effort of trudging across a thick blanket of snow. “Give me my goddamn MG.”

He spotted Oberfeldwebel Wolff, Schneider, Weber, Beck, Braun, Engel, and two shooters from First Squad.

“Have you seen the leutnant?” Wolff asked him as he approached.

“Nein.” Steiner smiled as he hoisted his beloved MG. “When I do a bird call, you’re supposed to answer.”

“You bring a friend?”

The men raised their weapons again as another figure thrashed through the hedgerow and walked up to them.

“Friend,” the thing rasped.

Animal torched it with a burst from his flamethrower. The creature kept on advancing without breaking its stride. Then it pitched forward into the snow with a high-pitched squeal that went on for an unnerving amount of time.

“Scheisse,” Beck said. “Scheisse, scheisse, scheisse.”

“Gefreiter Schneider,” said Wolff, “conserve your fuel. Your weapon is our last resort.”

“Verstanden, Herr Oberfeldwebel.” Understood, Master Sergeant.

The sergeant said, “We’re kilometers from the drop zone. We can’t wait for the others. We have to get to the assembly point.”

The paratroopers continued to load up on as much ammo as they could carry, mostly linked ammo belts for the MG42. Weber hauled out the skis and poles, which would get them through the snow much faster until they reached the city.

Wolff checked his compass and pointed. “Berlin, east. We’ll go in that direction and keep looking for landmarks. If we run into Spandau, we know we have to head south. If we run into the Havel, we wait for the rest of the regiment. Is that clear, Fallschirmjäger?”

“Clear, Herr Oberfeldwebel,” they murmured.

“Contact!” Beck raised his bolt-action rifle and fired a round, which triggered the entire squad to shoot wildly into the dark.

“Cease fire!” Wolff roared. “Is the target down?”

“Fucking idiots!” a voice yelled from the darkness.

“Oh,” Steiner said. “That’s Schulte.”

The sniper walked toward them dusting snow from his sleeves. “I’m glad your aim is no better than your judgment, Wolfgang.”

“His judgment ain’t bad,” Animal said. “You have to know by now we’re all dying to shoot you, Erich.”

Schulte retrieved his scoped K98 rifle and loaded a clip of five cartridges into the internal magazine. “I’m in the company of true heroes.”

Oberfeldwebel Wolff shook his head. “Let’s go then, heroes.”