Coup d'Etat

Chapter 17

Something was wrong. Peggy Druce knew that. She also knew she was afraid she knew what it was. The complicated, inside-out reasoning should have made her laugh. Instead, it left her more afraid than ever.

Most of the time, she would have taken the bull by the horns. She had a low tolerance for bull generally, as even the Nazis came to understand. Without that low tolerance, she knew she would still be stuck in Europe. But going nose to nose with somebody you couldn’t stand was one thing. Going nose to nose with the man you loved more than anyone else in the world was something else again. Boy, was it ever!

Most of the time, Herb also spoke freely, at least when he was talking with her. He might be (might be, hell! — he was) more circumspect than she was in public, but she always got to find out what was on his mind. Or she had, till she got back from England.

Of course, if this went wrong it would blow up in her face. She knew that, too. Did she ever! And what was liable to happen if it did… What was liable to happen if it did was plenty to make her keep her big trap shut for months. Not talking about something, though, could prove as toxic as talking about it obviously was. That silent poison might be slower-acting, which didn’t mean it wasn’t there.

And so, one Thursday evening after dinner and a couple of highballs, Peggy said, “Herb, I think we need to talk.”

Her husband neatly folded his copy of the Daily News (the evening paper, so he and Peggy wouldn’t have to depend on the radio or wait for tomorrow morning’s Inquirer to keep up with what was going on), stubbed out his cigarette in the pocket of a bronze ashtray shaped like a baseball glove, and said, “What’s cookin’?”

Even though Peggy was sitting down, her knees wanted to knock. All the same, she said, “I think you know. About us.”

Herb made a small production out of firing up another Pall Mall. He held out the pack to her. She got up, took one, let him light it for her, and retreated to her chair. He dragged deeply, then blew a long stream of smoke toward the ceiling. He looked up at the smooth plaster as if watching for enemy bombers, but all there was to see was the smoke disappearing little by little.

His sigh might have come straight from Camille. “Damn,” he said without heat. “Who told you?”

“Who told me what?” Peggy echoed foolishly.

“I figured you were bound to hear sooner or later. I thought you must have already. Otherwise, you wouldn’t have said ‘We need to talk’ like that.” Herb sounded resigned, and a bit mad at himself. “Or maybe you would. Who the… Who knows? But people do gossip.”

“And what do people gossip about?” Peggy chose to rephrase that: “Why would people gossip about you?” Listening to herself, she thought she sounded resigned, too. She didn’t think she sounded mad at Herb, which was good.

He sighed again, even more deeply. He knocked ash into the bronze glove and set the cigarette down. Then, staring down at the comfortably shabby Persian rug under his slippers, he said, “You know, you were away from home a lot longer than we thought you would be when you headed for Europe.”

“I sure was,” she agreed. “What about it?”

He kept looking at the rug, which wasn’t like him. “Even then, I told myself I’d tell you if you ever asked me. Dammit, I messed around with one of the girls from the typing pool for a month or so. It didn’t mean anything, and I’m sorry I did it, but it happened.”

“You’re sorry now,” Peggy said. “What about then?”

“Then…” He looked up-he seemed to make himself look up-with a familiar crooked smile on his face. “Then I got so sick of playing with myself, I might’ve ended up in bed with somebody a lot homelier than Gladys.”

Peggy knew she couldn’t have picked Gladys out of a police lineup of clerk-typists, assuming there was such a thing. That was probably just as well. She also knew Herb had just handed her the moral advantage. If she wanted to hang on to it, she could. But she realized that was another kind of slow-acting poison. The idea was to air things out on both sides… wasn’t it? That seemed to be their only chance of getting back to where they had been.

And so she let out a sigh of her own. “Well…” she said, and then bogged down. This was even harder than she’d expected. Herb was a man, dammit. How would he take what she was about to come out with? She hadn’t got up on her high horse, but that didn’t necessarily mean he wouldn’t. If he did… she’d deal with it as best she could, that was all. “Well,” she repeated, and then made herself go on: “Well, it’s not like you were the only one.”

There. It was out. Now-would the sky fall? Herb’s eyes widened. He started to say something, then shook his head and visibly swallowed it. As she had, he tried again a moment later. He managed one word: “You?”

“ ’Fraid so, hon.” Peggy didn’t want to look at him now.

“I’ll be-” Whatever Herb would be, he didn’t want to finish it. Peggy didn’t suppose she could blame him. “How’d that happen?” he asked after a long, long pause.

“It was after the opera in Berlin. I got smashed. I thought the guy who took me was a fairy, but he turned out not to be. Not all the time, anyway.” Peggy still felt like a jerk about Constantine Jenkins, which did her no good whatsoever.

“Only the once?” Herb asked.

“Yeah,” Peggy said, and left it right there. It was true. She would gladly have told him she’d swear on a stack of Bibles, but she knew her man. That would have left him more inclined to doubt her, not less.

“How about that?” he said, more to himself than to her. He looked at his cigarette. Most of it had burned away while they were talking. So had most of Peggy’s. Herb put his out. She did the same. He started to take another one, then stuck the pack back in his pocket instead. He gathered himself. “I guess you’ve got the edge on me, ’cause I did it more than once. Not a whole lot more than once, but I did, dammit.”

“You don’t sound exactly proud of it,” Peggy said.

“Nope.” Herb eyed her. “Neither do you.”

“I was snockered,” Peggy said. “And I was dumb. I don’t want to mess around. It’s more trouble than it’s worth.”

“Amen!” Herb said, as if responding to a sermon from Father Divine. He might have had the same thought, for he added, “You can sing that in church.”

Peggy said, “Maybe now we can quit looking at each other out of the corners of our eyes, the way we have been.”

“That’d be good.” Herb lit another Pall Mall after all. Peggy made a small pleading noise, so he gave her one, too. He went on, “I wondered if you’d noticed we were doing it.”

“Uh-huh.” Peggy nodded. This felt like going to the dentist. Any minute now, the novocaine would wear off. And how much would things hurt then?

“It ought to get better now that it’s out in the sun and air,” her husband said. “As long as it stayed covered up, it was going to go bad. And there isn’t much worse than gas gangrene.” Such glancing references were as close as Herb came to talking about things he’d seen Over There.

The only thing Peggy knew about gas gangrene was that it sounded horrible. No. She knew something else: she didn’t want to think about it, not right this minute. She had something else in mind. “We ought to celebrate getting it out in the open,” she declared.

“Celebrate, huh?” Herb gave her another crooked smile. She nodded back. The smile straightened-some. “The wench grows bold,” he said.

“Damn right,” Peggy answered.

Up the stairs they went. Peggy didn’t know if it was a celebration, but it was pretty good. Better than it had been while they both kept secrets? She thought so. She hoped so. She also hoped it would keep getting better again. That was the point to all this, wasn’t it?

She also wondered if she could find some way to do Gladys a quiet bad turn, whoever the round-heeled little chippy was. And there was one more thought Herb didn’t need to know anything about.

Alistair Walsh wanted to fight the Germans. That was the point of putting on the uniform again, wasn’t it? The only trouble was, he-and the rest of the British Army-had no convenient place to do so. Land in the Low Countries or France and they’d get slaughtered. Land in France they couldn’t. England and France weren’t at war with each other-and a good thing, too, as far as Walsh was concerned. Even RAF planes avoided French airspace when they flew off to bomb Hitler’s towns.

Would French fighters really rise to try to help the Luftwaffe shoot down English bombers? If they did rise, how hard would the French pilots fight? Nobody seemed to want to find out, or to have the nerve.

“By God, your Excellency, I wish Churchill were still alive,” Walsh told Ronald Cartland in the pub near Parliament. “He’d make the froggies show whether they meant it or not.”

“Nothing halfhearted about Winston,” the MP agreed, draining his whiskey and waving to the barmaid for a reload. He was catnip to the female of the species, no two ways about it. Walsh knew she wouldn’t have come over half so fast for him. He drank whiskey or brandy or anything else he could find on the Continent. When he could get a pint of decent bitter, he liked that better.

Sooner or later, Parliament would start working again. The provisional government kept promising elections soon, and also kept pushing back the day. People were starting to grumble. Walsh worried lest creeping Chamberlainism reassert itself when the votes were finally cast. If that happened, then what? Another coup d’etat? He wouldn’t have been a bit surprised.

Cartland asked, “Did you catch Musso’s speech on the shortwave last night?”

“Afraid I didn’t,” Walsh admitted. “Wouldn’t have done me much good if I had, either. When I go to one of those restaurants with the red-and-white checked tablecloths, I can tell the dago with the pencil behind his ear I want a plate of spaghetti and meatballs. My Italian starts and stops right there.”

“Ah,” Cartland said politely. “I should have thought of that. Can’t say I ever studied it myself, not in any formal way. But I speak French and I did endless Latin, so I can muddle along after a fashion.”

I’ll bet you can, Walsh thought, without either rancor or envy. The MP would have picked up his education at some posh public school, and then at Cambridge or Oxford. Walsh often thought he’d got his own, such as it was, at a jumble sale. Considering how easily he might have spent his whole life grubbing coal out of a seam, he hadn’t done too badly for himself.

And… “So what did the bugger with the big chin say, then?”

“Called us traitors to the cause of Europe, if you can imagine the cheek.” As any aristocrat might have, Cartland seemed more affronted than anything else. “He said that, since Hitler was busy giving Stalin what-for and didn’t have time for puppies like us-”

“Puppies?” Walsh broke in. “Musso has the gall to call us puppies?” He wanted to laugh and to haul off and punch somebody, both at once. He would have felt that way if a waiter in one of those checked-tablecloth eateries had called him the same thing, too.

“He did indeed,” the MP replied, sipping from his fresh drink. “He said he’d have to go on and let us have a proper hiding himself, since Adolf was busy.”

“And then you wake up!” Alistair Walsh exclaimed. “The Fritzes, now, they’re proper soldiers, say what you will about the bleeding Fuhrer. But the Italians?” It came out of his mouth as Eye-talians, which only made his pique plainer.

“Quite.” Cartland spoke with the same frozen disgust a society matron might have used in carrying a dead rat from the drawing room by the tail.

In his mind’s eye, Walsh studied a map. The clearer the mental picture got, the more it enraged him. “He’s mad as a balloon, he is,” the Welshman said, with the air of a judge sentencing a bungling burglar. “Barking mad! How does he propose hiding us when we hardly even touch?”

“He could cause trouble for Egypt from Libya, I suppose, and for Malta from Sicily. He might even use Abyssinia and Italian Somaliland to go after British Somaliland-assuming he’s balmy enough to want British Somaliland, I should say.” Ronald Cartland, plainly, had been eyeing mental maps longer than Walsh and spreading them wider.

Walsh had never been stationed in British Somaliland. He knew several regulars who had, though. From everything he’d heard, Cartland was spot-on. Chances were not even the Somalis wanted to drive their sheep and camels through land so miserable-not that Italian Somaliland was any improvement.

He wasted no more time worrying about the Horn of Africa. Even if Mussolini’s legions there carried all before them, all they would have was the goddamn Horn of Africa. Egypt, on the other hand… “Wouldn’t be so good if the bloody Italians”-he pronounced it the same way he had before-“paraded through Alexandria or took the canal away.”

“No. It wouldn’t.” If Cartland’s laconic agreement wasn’t British understatement at its best, Walsh didn’t know what would be.

The veteran noncommissioned officer did some more considering. Ronald Cartland was better suited to the General Staff than he would be himself if he lived to be a hundred, which didn’t mean he couldn’t cope at need. His calculations were quick and, he thought, accurate. “Musso’d need more than luck to bring it off. He’d need a miracle, or as near as makes no difference.”

“I’ve heard that before from others,” Cartland said. “I like it better from you. I respect your judgment.”

“Thank you very much, sir.” Walsh suspected pleasure was making his ears turn pink. He was happier-prouder, anyhow-than he would have been had the pretty young barmaid whispered a suggestion that they go find a room together. He didn’t despise animal pleasure-far from it. But the opinion of a man he admired was a weightier business altogether.

“For what? For telling the truth?” Cartland waved his gratitude away as unnecessary.

“For thinking it is the truth.” Walsh wasn’t about to let the aristo get away with that. He was going to be grateful, dammit, and that was all there was to that.

“Have it your way, Sergeant.” Now the MP spoke in a way Walsh understood completely, like a junior officer addressing a senior noncom. Officers had rank and class on their side. Sergeants had experience and the knowledge that came with it. More often than not, that left the advantage with them. Senior officers knew what their juniors often didn’t: sergeants were more important to the army than subalterns.

“If I had my way, sir, I’d go to Egypt right now. That’s the kind of thing Mussolini would try, and I’d love to be there to help give him what he deserves,” Walsh said.

“Is that truly what you want? If it is, I daresay I can arrange it.”

Walsh felt like whooping and turning handsprings. All he did was give back a small, dignified nod. He didn’t even smile, not where Ronald Cartland could see him do it. But what was the point to having well-connected friends if you didn’t make the most of it once in a while?

“Egypt…” Cartland said in musing tones. “Have you been there before?”

“I spent a year-well, not quite-in Cairo in the Twenties.” Walsh remembered the amazing heat and the crowding and the smells, which made your nose sit up and take notice even after you’d been on a battlefield. “Not much like good old Blighty, but we need to hang on to it even so.”

“That we do. Lord knows how we’d manage without the Suez Canal,” Cartland said. “My sister and I visited once. I’ll never forget the Pyramids. That was in the Twenties, too: well before the Depression. Perhaps we were there at the same time.”

“Yes, sir. Perhaps we were.” Long odds, Walsh thought, but so what? Keeping your officers happy and interested in you was yet another skill sergeants needed to cultivate. And getting back into action would be good, even if he was only going up against the dagos.

Theo Hossbach still had trouble getting used to the radioman’s position in a Panzer III. For two and a half years, he’d stayed hidden away from the war. The radio set in a Panzer II lent itself to that. Now, all of a sudden, he could see out. He not only could, he had to. Along with the radio, he had an MG-34 to take care of.

How many Ivans had he done for by now? He’d lost track. In a way, that embarrassed him. When your occupation was something as serious as killing people, shouldn’t you remember how many you were responsible for? But to do that properly, he should have started counting as soon as the original Panzer II rolled across the frontier separating Germany and Czechoslovakia. He’d been part of a killing team since 1 October 1938, after all. The score from the obsolescent machine’s little cannon and machine gun went partly to his credit-or to his blame, depending on how you looked at things.

The only trouble was, any kind of count along those lines was impossible. Because he hadn’t been able to see out, he didn’t even know where to begin. He couldn’t very well ask Ludwig Rothe or Fritz Bittenfeld, either. They were both dead, as was Heinz Naumann.

Adi Stoss might be able to give him an approximate score for the second Panzer II, and for this newer, larger machine. Theo didn’t plan to ask him about it. If they ever did talk seriously, they had other things to hash out first. Besides, might be able to wasn’t the same as could. Theo didn’t know-he’d never asked-whether Adi was running his own tab.

And, the way things worked these days, keeping track of how many Russians you slaughtered wasn’t the only game in town, or the most important one. Making sure the Russians didn’t slaughter you had become much more urgent. Their light tanks were nothing German panzers couldn’t handle. Even in a thinly armored Panzer II, Theo hadn’t worried about them much.

But the KV-1 was a whole different kettle of cabbage. Yes, it was clumsy and slow, but it was about the size of a whale. A Panzer III, the Wehrmacht ’s main battle machine, could hurt it only by luck or from behind. Had the Ivans had more of the damned things or used them with greater skill, the KV-1s could have been even worse news than they were anyhow.

As for the T-34… It was hot inside the Panzer III, but thinking about the Reds’ newest and finest panzer made Theo shiver all the same. It had all the KV-1’s virtues-a powerful engine, thick armor, and a big gun-and, so far as he could see, none of the other beast’s vices. T-34s weren’t slow and clumsy. Anything but, in fact. And whoever’d come up with their armor scheme deserved the biggest, gaudiest medal Stalin could pin on him.

German engineers had never considered armor shape, except perhaps insofar as the simplest shapes were also the easiest to manufacture. If you needed more protection in a particular place, you made your steel plates thicker there. But all those plates were pretty much vertical. Czech, French, and English designers worked from the same basic principles. It wasn’t as if there were any other way to go about things.

Except there was. Relying on the Russians’ inborn simplicity and fondness for the brute-force approach didn’t always pay. Some Soviet designer had had a better idea-a much better idea, as a matter of fact. If you sloped your panzer’s armor at, say, a forty-five degree angle, a lot of shells that would have penetrated vertical plate ricocheted away instead. And even the ones that did dig into the armor had to go through more of it to do damage: for shots coming in from most directions, sloped plate was effectively thicker than the same amount of vertical armor would have been.

Once you saw the stuff in action-once you watched your best shots bounce off a T-34 without hurting the metal monster-the idea seemed obvious. Everything seemed obvious after you banged into it nosefirst. But if it was so goddamn obvious, how come no German engineer in a clean white lab coat had twiddled with his slide rule till he came up with it first?

The Russians were Untermenschen, weren’t they? Hitler and Goebbels loudly insisted they were. If they were Untermenschen, though, and the swastika-following Aryans were Ubermenschen, why did the Red Army have better panzers? If the Ivans just had more panzers (which they also did), that wouldn’t have been so corrosive to Nazi ideology. The USSR was a hell of a big country. Having seen more of it than he’d ever wanted to, Theo knew that right down to his toes. And he also knew the T-34-and, to a lesser degree, the KV-1 as well-made every German panzer look like a model from the year before last.

He said as much to Adi. The Panzer III’s layout put them side by side at the front of the hull. Not only that, Theo trusted Adi further than he trusted… well, just about anybody else. You couldn’t count on people to keep quiet if security forces started hurting them. Short of that, Theo was sure Adi would never betray him. He was pretty sure Sergeant Witt wouldn’t, either, but only pretty sure. The new guys who fattened up the crew? He hadn’t made up his mind about them yet. It wasn’t as if there was any hurry.

Adi nodded. “They’re mighty good, all right. Not perfect, but mighty good.”

“Not perfect? Close enough!” Theo was stung into volubility, or as close to it as he came. “The gun? The armor? Der Herr Gott im Himmel, the armor! The diesel engine, so they don’t burn the way our beasts do?”

“Ja, ja.” Adi sounded like a man indulging a little boy. That infuriated Theo till the driver went on, “The commander’s up in the turret all by himself, though, the way Hermann was with the

Panzer II. He’s got to shoot the cannon, fire the machine gun, and command the panzer. And he’s got more panzer to command than Hermann did with the II.”

“Oh.” Theo thought that over. He didn’t need long. With a sheepish shrug, he admitted, “You’re right.”

Stoss shot him a sour look. “How am I supposed to have a proper argument with you when you go and say things like that?”

“Sorry,” Theo answered. “But I’m not going to lie.”

“Too bad. We could probably keep wasting time till sundown if you did,” Adi said. “Now we’ve got to find ourselves something else to talk about instead.” Irony glinted in his dark eyes. He could come out with something like that, confident Theo wouldn’t take him seriously. Plenty of soldiers would have.

They didn’t need to look for a new topic for very long. Off to the left, at the edge of an apple orchard, a Russian machine gun snarled to malignant life. The water-cooled Russian gun was much heavier and clumsier than a modern, air-cooled MG-34. It didn’t shoot as fast, either. Once in position, though, it made a more than adequate murder mill.

“Panzer halt!” Hermann Witt’s voice traveled the speaking tube from the turret to the front of the hull.

“Halting,” Adi answered as he hit the brakes. Witt traversed the turret-smoothly and quickly, with the hydraulics. In case of battle damage, he could also use a hand wheel and gearing to crank it around. It was too big and heavy for him to wrestle it into place with handles, as he could have in a Panzer II.

The cannon spoke twice. After a moment, though, the Russian machine gun spat more defiant death at the Germans. Back in the turret, Sergeant Witt swore. Theo would have, too. He presumed the panzer commander knew what he was aiming at and had hit it. If the machine-gun crew was still in business, it was operating out of a concrete emplacement.

Witt snapped, “Armor-piercing!” The cannon fired twice more. This time, Witt grunted in satisfaction. “Got the fuckers!” he said. “Some poor, sorry shithead lugging a flamethrower won’t have to try to fry them before they puncture him instead. Forward, Adi!”

“Forward,” the driver echoed, putting the Panzer III back in gear. In a low voice-too low for Witt or either of the new guys in the turret to hear-he went on, “Who knows what all else is lurking in the trees? Our foot soldiers will find out. Oh, won’t they just!”

That same thought had occurred to Theo. He wouldn’t have said it out loud, not even quietly to a friend he trusted. There lay one of the big differences between him and Adi Stoss. They had others, of course, but the fact that Adi would speak his mind seemed the most important. It did to Theo, anyhow.

To Hans-Ulrich Rudel, the woods southwest of Smolensk looked like, well, woods. They were less manicured than a carefully maintained German forest would have been. The Ivans had so much land, they had forests coming out of their ears. They had everything coming out of their ears, from iron and coal to wood to people. That was the only possible reason they were giving the Reich so much trouble.

From 3,000 meters overhead, Hans-Ulrich wouldn’t have been able to tell that the panzers in front of the woods belonged to the Wehrmacht if some of them hadn’t draped themselves in swastika flags as an identification symbol. Even seeing the banner that united Party and Reich didn’t leave him a hundred percent sure. The Reds sometimes captured those flags and used them as shields against the Luftwaffe.

Hans-Ulrich chuckled, there alone in the cockpit. A swastika flag might keep German planes from bombing Soviet panzers. But how many of the enemy panzer outfits that used it had suffered attacks from the Red Air Force? That kind of crap happened too often even to Germans who’d carefully briefed their air support about the ruse of war they were using. Given the Russians’ slipshod procedures, they were bound to go through it even more.

“These are the right woods, aren’t they?” Rudel asked through the speaking tube. He wanted to make certain he didn’t do anything idiotic.

Sergeant Dieselhorst’s quick “You bet, sir” went a long way toward reassuring him. Dieselhorst might not respect the Fuhrer as much as he should, but he was the kind of man who went to extraordinary lengths to keep from endangering anybody on his own side. Sure enough, he went on, “The river curls behind the trees and then goes into them, just like it does on the map. For a change, the map and the landscape match up great. We’re where we ought to be, all right.”

“Good. If I put the bombs in amongst the trees, then, they’ll come down on top of the Russians,” Hans-Ulrich said. Using Stukas for a job ordinary bombers might have done wasn’t efficient. A blind man could see that. But if no ordinary bombers could be spared, bombs from Stukas were better than nothing-as long as they landed where they were supposed to.

He yanked hard on the bomb-release lever. The explosives under the Ju-87’s wings and attached to the fuselage’s midline fell away. He watched the bombs tumble down toward the treetops-but only for a moment, because Sergeant Dieselhorst’s rear-facing machine gun suddenly gave forth with a long burst. “A Rata! A fucking Rata!” Dieselhorst yelled.

The names Marshal Sanjurjo’s soldiers and their German allies had hung on Russian fighters in the Spanish Civil War stuck, even if the Germans were facing them thousands of kilometers from Spain these days. Biplane Polikarpovs were Chatos; the shape of the cowling for their radial engines made the nickname fit.

Later Polikarpov monoplanes also had flat noses, but the Spaniards and Legion Kondor flyers called them Ratas — Rats-to distinguish them from the biplane fighters. They were no match for a Bf-109. When you flew a Ju-87, though, that seemed much less comforting.

Bullets slammed into the Stuka from behind. The Rata flashed past and swung into a tight turn, obviously intending to make another pass, this time from dead ahead. No matter how grossly inferior to a 109 the Polikarpov fighter was, it could outrun and outmaneuver a dive-bomber as if the Junkers plane were nailed in place in the sky.

Rudel did everything he could. He fired bursts from his twin forward-facing 7.92mm machine guns. He tried to turn away from the ugly little monoplane with the big red stars on its green-painted fuselage. The Rata looked as if it were homemade, possibly by someone who didn’t know much about airplanes. But Hans-Ulrich might have been trying to fly a rooster against a hawk.

A bullet scarred the Stuka’s windscreen. If that hadn’t been made of thick armor glass, the round would have scarred Rudel, too, or more likely left him too dead to heal and scar. More rounds hit the armored engine compartment and the wing. Even if the engine was armored, the instrument panel screamed that the Ju-87 was losing fuel at a hideous rate and overheating even faster. Some of those rounds got home despite the protection.

The engine coughed, farted, ran smoothly for a few seconds, and then coughed again. Smoke started pouring out of it.

“You there, sir?” Sergeant Dieselhorst sounded worried, and with good reason, too.

“I’m here,” Hans-Ulrich answered. “I was hoping you were.”

“We going to have to bail out?”

“Well…” Hans-Ulrich didn’t want to say yes. German parachutes left a lot to be desired, even if merely having a parachute would have made a pilot from the last war jealous. The idea of coming down near-or maybe among-the Ivans didn’t thrill him, either. But the engine coughed one more time, then crapped out altogether. A Stuka glided better than a brick, but not a whole lot better. Sometimes the outside world answered questions for you. “Yeah, Albert, we’ve got to bail out.”

Dieselhorst tried to make light of it. “Not like we’ve never done this before, right?”

“Right.” Rudel’s voice sounded hollow, even to him. They’d been shot down once before, over France. Had the poilus caught them, they probably would have been taken prisoner. No guarantees with the Ivans, none at all.

But if they didn’t get out now, they were guaranteed dead. Pilot and rear gunner had separate sliding cockpit canopies. Maybe that wasn’t such a terrific design feature. If one of them got stuck…

They didn’t, not this time. And neither Hans-Ulrich nor Dieselhorst mashed himself to strawberry jam by hitting the tail as he scrambled free of his enclosure. Nothing left to do but fall, yank the ripcord, and hope. Later, Rudel realized he should have done some praying while all that was going on. He consoled himself by remembering he was just a trifle busy at the time.

Whump! When the chute filled with air, it felt as if a mule kicked him right in the chops. His vision grayed out for a moment. Then color and motion came back to the world.

He floated downward. Off to his left, Sergeant Dieselhorst waved to him from under another silk canopy. Hans-Ulrich waved back. He yanked on the lines to spill wind from one side of the canopy and steer himself away from the Red-infested woods. He also anxiously looked around for that Rata. Russian fighter pilots had the charming habit of machine-gunning helpless parachuting German flyers. It wasn’t sporting, but they didn’t care. To his relief, the Rata was nowhere in sight.

Russian soldiers on the ground did fire at him and Dieselhorst. A bullet thumped through the taut silk above him. If the hole turned into a tear… He’d regret that all the way down, but not afterwards. He didn’t worry about a bullet thumping through him till he’d almost reached the ground. He wondered why the devil not. Stupidity came to mind.

As the ground rushed up below him, he had to worry about his landing. He’d sprained an ankle-only luck he hadn’t broken it-the last time he came down in a chute. He didn’t want to be out of action for weeks now. He bent at the knees and at the waist, as training suggested. Another Russian bullet cracked past him, too close for comfort. Training never talked about distractions like that.

Thud! He made it. Not a pretty landing, but the moving parts all seemed to work. He cut himself free of the parachute, then grabbed for his Luger-soldiers were loping toward him. But his hand fell back: they wore Feldgrau, and helmets of a familiar shape.

Now-did they realize he was a countryman? “Good job!” one of them yelled, waving. Hans-Ulrich grinned and waved back-they did. He looked around. Albert Dieselhorst was free of his chute and on his feet, too. They’d be flying again as soon as they got a new bus.