Last Orders

CHAPTER 17

Julius Lemp wished the U-30 were out patrolling in the North Sea or the North Atlantic. He even wished his U-boat were hunting Russian freighters and warships in the Baltic. Any time a man wished he were out in the Baltic, he had to hate wherever he was.

Where he was was Kiel. He and his men remained confined to the naval base. The powers that be didn’t trust them to attack the enemy. The powers that be also didn’t seem to trust them not to attack their own comrades.

After a lot of wire-pulling, Lemp finally secured another audience with Admiral Dönitz. The commander of the German U-boat fleet gave him a stony stare. “I hope this will be interesting,” he said.

“So do I … sir,” Lemp answered. “Do you really think that if you turn us loose we’ll head up the Rhine and start sinking barges and tugboats? Or shell our own fortifications here?”

“Certain people … have wondered about these things,” Dönitz said, plainly choosing his words with no little care. “The political situation is, ah, increasingly delicate.”

“Is it?” Lemp said. The radio and the newspapers admitted no such thing-but then, they wouldn’t. No one in the officers’ club admitted any such thing, either. But then, you had to be an idiot to speak freely in the officers’ club these days. By now, Himmler’s various security services had swept up most of the fools who couldn’t dog their hatches.

“It is.” Dönitz spoke with chill certainty. “There are at the moment certain, ah, unfortunate disagreements over some policies between the Führer and, ah, a faction within the General Staff. And if you tell anyone I told you that, I will call you a liar to your face and I will make sure you envy the fate of a destroyer that hits a mine. Do you understand me?”

“Yes, sir,” Lemp replied. “You have a way of making yourself very plain, sir.”

He hoped to make the admiral smile. No such luck. Dönitz’s eyes stayed as cold and gray as the North Sea at this season of the year. “And you and your men have a reputation for raising trouble, here and up in Norway. So is it any wonder some people don’t want to let you out of port in a U-boat stuffed with torpedoes and 88mm shells?”

The unfairness of that took Lemp’s breath away. “Sir,” he said stiffly, “the only reason the lads kicked up their heels a little in Namsos was that it made an impossible liberty port. No girls, hardly any beer … You know what a U-boat patrol is like, sir. You know how the men want to blow off steam afterwards.”

“They almost blew up the town,” Dönitz said. “Twice.”

Lemp had wondered whether that would come back to haunt him. He’d never dreamt it would come back to haunt him like this. “Sir, what happened in Namsos had nothing to do with politics,” he insisted.

“And, no doubt, you will also tell me your desire to keep on your boat an electrician’s mate the SS found unreliable had nothing to do with politics, either.” Dönitz was, or affected to be, implacable.

“Nehring was a good electrician’s mate. He was the best one in the boat, in fact. I didn’t want some thumb-fingered idiot screwing with my batteries. Was it his fault he came from Münster?”

“Ah, so that was why the SS didn’t trust him, is it?” the admiral said. “Münster is … Münster is a running sore. I don’t know what else to call it, and I wish I did.”

“Sir, Nehring was about as political as your ashtray,” Lemp said, which was nothing less than the truth. “They pulled him off the boat because they had the vapors, not on account of anything he did.”

“Right now, Lemp, coming from Münster is a political act,” Dönitz replied. “You may not like that. The people who come from Münster may not like it, either. But they will not be trusted by the present government, any more than they would be if they were Jews.”

What he said came from his mouth as if he were reading from an official report. How did he feel about the present government and its politics? How did he feel about that General Staff faction he’d mentioned? He had to have opinions. God didn’t issue human beings without them. What they were, though, Lemp couldn’t divine.

He did say, “Right now, I’d take a Jew who was as good an electrician’s mate as Nehring. The rating they gave me isn’t terrible, but he’s not that good. Jews served in U-boats in the last war, didn’t they?”

“They did.” Dönitz bit off the two-word admission. “They do not now. They will not now. And have you any idea how thin the ice is under your feet, Lemp? I have but to repeat what you said now and you will end up envying whatever happened to your Nehring.”

“If I thought you were the kind who repeated such things, sir, I wouldn’t have said it,” Lemp answered. “But I thought you were someone who wanted people to tell him the truth. Maybe I was wrong.”

“Maybe you were,” Dönitz agreed, which made frigid chills run up Lemp’s spine. The admiral continued, “In politics, truth is whatever those in power say it is. As military men, we have to recognize that.”

“Even when the truth looks different to us?”

“Even then. If the truth looks different to you, the leaders will think that is because you are betraying them.”

Even when what they see as the truth leads us into a two-front war, and one we’re losing? Lemp wondered. No wonder Münster was a running sore, in that case. He’d got away with one piece of frankness, just barely. Dönitz’s scowl said he wouldn’t get away with two. All he said, then, was, “Please send us out to sea, sir.”

The commander of the U-boat fleet read his mind entirely too well. “That is not necessarily an escape for you, either,” Dönitz said.

“No? Then I’d always be sure who the enemy was.” Lemp decided to poke again after all.

To his disappointment, he didn’t faze the admiral. “Maybe not. But you might leave me with the feeling that I had blood on my hands.”

“I joined the Kreigsmarine to fight, sir,” Lemp said. “If the Royal Navy sinks me, they get the credit. You don’t get the blame.”

“At the start of the war, I would have agreed with you,” Dönitz answered. “Now … Now I’m not so sure. Our losses have gone up alarmingly the past few months. I feel as if I have blood on my hands every time I send out a U-boat.”

He was a cold-blooded, cold-hearted Navy officer, not Lady Macbeth. That he should say such a thing amazed Lemp. All the same, the U-boat skipper came back with, “Anyone can have a run of bad luck, sir. And we’ve handed the limeys more grief than they’ve given us.”

“I am not quarreling with your courage. I am quarreling with your equipment,” Dönitz said. “England has ways to detect and attack our U-boats for which we’ve found no good countermeasures. Our slide-rule pushers are not even sure they understand all of them.” He held up a broad-palmed hand. “None of that is to leave this room.”

“Yes, sir.” Lemp was too worried by the admission even to think of protesting. “I know their hydrophones beat the devil out of anything they had in the last war, but-”

Dönitz cut him off: “It’s more than that. It’s worse than that. Any time a U-boat surfaces, it seems, an enemy plane or warship rushes at it. It has to be radio detection. We have that, too-we use it to watch for enemy bombers. But we have not been able to build a detector to sense whatever they’re using. It may as well be black magic.”

Lemp thought about some of the RAF and Royal Navy attacks he’d been through. They’d come out of nowhere-or so it seemed to him-and they’d come straight at the U-30. Without a good crew and some luck, he wouldn’t be standing here to listen to the U-boat force commander’s lament.

“None of this is to leave the room, either,” Admiral Dönitz added.

“I wouldn’t think of it, sir,” Lemp answered honestly. He couldn’t stay, and now he couldn’t go out, either. He was in as much trouble as the rest of the Reich.

Staff Sergeant Alistair Walsh crouched in some bushes. He had a chicken-wire cover on his tin hat with branches stuck up in it, so he looked something like a bush himself. His uniform, khaki to begin with, was splotched with mud and grass stains. From more than a few feet away, no one who didn’t already know he was there would have had the slightest idea.

The only trouble was, the Germans didn’t care. They had a couple of MG-42s in the ruins of the Belgian farm buildings ahead, along with what seemed like all the ammunition in the world to feed them. They’d fire a burst, traverse a little, and fire another one. They weren’t particularly aiming, or Walsh didn’t think they were. They just wanted to kill anyone who might be in front of them, whether they could see him or not.

Jack Scholes crawled over to Walsh. Only the buttons on the front of his battledress tunic kept him from getting lower to the ground than he was. A snake would have been proud to own him as a cousin. Without raising his head even a quarter of an inch, he said, “Captain ’ammersmif says we’ve got to tyke out them bloody MGs.”

“Jolly good,” Walsh answered sardonically: it was anything but. “And does he say how we’re supposed to do it?”

The tough little Cockney shook his head without getting it any higher off the ground. “ ’E wants you to ’andle it.”

“He would,” Walsh said without heat. This was what he got for being a veteran staff sergeant. Subalterns, lieutenants, even captains were suppose to lean on men like him. Men like him kept junior officers from making too many mistakes that got them and a raft of soldiers killed.

It wasn’t even as if Captain Hammersmith were wrong. They did need to take out those machine guns. Otherwise, the Fritzes would go on murdering Tommies within a two-mile-wide semicircle in front of their position for as long as they had ammo. And, being Fritzes, they would have piles of it.

But attacking the MG-42s would get more men killed. They had plenty of open ground in front and on both flanks, and more soldiers in field-gray to the rear. Coming straight at them, you needed to have made out your last will and testament beforehand, because chances were you wouldn’t stick around to take care of it afterwards.

“Have we got trench mortars? Can we get trench mortars?” Walsh asked. If he could drop bombs down on top of the Germans, he’d solve the problem on the cheap. The new company commander should have been able to figure that out for himself, no matter how unweaned he was.

“Oi’ll arsk ’im,” Scholes said, and slithered away.

“Don’t come back if we have got them,” Walsh called after him. “Don’t give the Germans the chance at you.”

He pulled his entrenching tool off his belt and started digging the best scrape he could while flat on his belly. He piled the dirt up in front of him and behind the bush. You commonly needed four sandbags’ worth of dirt to stop a rifle-caliber round: somewhere between a foot and a foot and a half, all well tamped together. Moving that much earth took a while. Well, he had nothing better to do with his time.

And damned if Jack Scholes didn’t come crawling back. “Ain’t got no fuckin’ mortars,” he reported.

“Bloody hell,” Walsh said. As soon as he finished with this scrape, he was happy enough to stay here till, oh, 1953. Maybe the Boches would die of old age by then or something. Anything was better than changing that nest in broad daylight.

Anything … He whistled softly. “Wot yer got, Staff?” Scholes asked. He sounded sure Walsh had something. Coming up with things was what a staff sergeant was for-or he thought so, anyhow. In that, he differed little from the captain.

“Tell him we’ll try a night attack to settle them,” Walsh said.

“ ’E wants it done now,” Scholes said dubiously.

“Then he can take care of it himself, and I’ll write his next of kin a kind letter about what a brave bloke he was-if I’m still here to do the writing,” Walsh answered. “Tell him just like that. And say nights are still long-he won’t have to wait till ten o’clock for the show.”

“Oi’ll tell ’im.” Scholes snaked off again. This time, he didn’t come back. Walsh hoped that was because Captain Hammersmith saw reason, not because Scholes stopped something going back or moving forward. Since the captain didn’t order an attack on his own, Walsh thought he had some chance of being right.

The Fritzes stopped hosing down the landscape with bullets as twilight began to deepen. They were an orderly, predictable people-except when they went off the rails and started another world war, of course. They’d packed it in at dusk the night before, too, and the night before that. Nighttime was for rest and food, not for fighting. So they seemed to think, anyhow.

Most of the time, Walsh agreed with them. All kinds of horrible things could go wrong with a night attack. But at least you might take the Germans by surprise with one. And anything seemed better than rushing forward into the storm of lead. They’d tried that at the Somme, and lost a small city’s worth of dead the first day-which didn’t count the wounded, or what happened over the next few excruciating weeks. This would be a smaller slaughter, but not necessarily in proportion to the number of men engaged. Head-on slogging wouldn’t go. A night attack might. And so, a night attack it would be.

Walsh told off two attacking parties. Both would be armed with Sten guns. They’d need to get close, and they’d need to throw around a lot of bullets when they did. They had Mills bombs, too, lots of them, and a bazooka for whatever bunker-busting they’d need to do.

And they had compasses with radium-painted needles that glowed in the dark. With luck, they’d get close to where they were supposed to go. Without luck … Without luck, the captain or someone else would write Walsh’s kin one of those kind letters. Or maybe they’d just get a wire from the Ministry of War.

He didn’t worry about that. He worried about getting where he was going in spite of the cold, nasty drizzle that started coming down. The Germans who served those MG-42s would be nice and dry. They might even be warm. All the more reason to hate the buggers.

Once your eyes got used to it, you could see amazingly well in the dark. Not fine details, no, but plenty well enough to get around. Well enough to navigate, too, if you were careful. And the rain’s dank dripping kept the Germans in their nests from hearing the enemy coming until he was right on top of them.

That turned out to be literally true. Walsh stuck the muzzle of his Sten into the Germans’ firing slit and emptied the whole magazine. The screams that came from inside were at least as much from shock and horror as from pain. He yanked the pin off a grenade and chucked that through the slit, too. One of his men added another. That took care of that.

It did for one MG-42, anyhow. The Germans in the other position fired off a flare and started shooting at whatever the hateful white light showed. But, because of the rain, it didn’t show as much as usual. It also didn’t alert their friends farther back that they were in trouble. And some of the Tommies had already got round behind the second machine-gun nest. They quickly finished it with grenades and submachine guns.

They threw off enough sandbags to get into the nests, plunder the dead, carry off the machine guns, and booby-trap the positions with trip wires and Mills bombs. Then they got out of there. “ ’Ere you go, Staff.” Jack Scholes handed Walsh a prize: a tube of liver paste. “An’ if anyfing’ll ’appy up the captain, loike, this ’ere little game will.”

“If anything will,” Walsh said. “For a little while.” Scholes laughed. Walsh wished he’d been joking.

When a Pe-2 taxied to takeoff, the engines stayed pretty quiet. When you gave them full throttle to get airborne, the roar filled your head. Anastas Mouradian wore a leather flight helmet. He had earphones so he could hear radio messages from his squadron commander and fellow flyers. The roar filled his head anyhow. It seemed to swallow him whole. He often marveled that it didn’t shake his molars right out of his jaw.

By the way Isa Mogamedov’s lips drew back from his teeth as the bomber started its climb, the Azeri was feeling the same way. Seeing Stas’ eyes on him, he said something.

Whatever it was, that all-consuming roar made it unintelligible. Stas cupped a hand behind his ear to show he didn’t get it. Mogamedov obligingly tried again. He shouted and used exaggerated mouth movements so the pilot could read his lips: “Poland this time.”

“Da.” Mouradian nodded to show he’d heard. “We’re moving forward.” He also mouthed the words, feeling much like a ham actor as he did. There were things he didn’t say, too. For instance, he didn’t remark on how long it had been since the squadron could bomb any country other than the USSR. When you said something like that, you put your life in the hands of the person to whom you said it.

Yes, a bomber pilot and copilot/bomb aimer already had their lives in each other’s hands. But that was different. If the Germans-or even the Poles-got one of them, they’d get both of them. The NKVD could pick and choose. Better, far better, not to give the Chekists the chance.

Flak came up at the Pe-2s. Mouradian’s plane bounced in the air like a truck rattling over a rutted road. But no clangs told of steel ripping through the thin aluminum skin. All the gauges stayed steady. The Germans still held part of Byelorussia and the Ukraine. The Red Army hadn’t cleared them out of Latvia and Lithuania yet, either.

But the Pe-2s could hit Poland even so. They could, and they would. Marshal Smigly-Ridz needed to be reminded there was a price for choosing Hitler over Stalin. The Soviet Union had already paid an enormous price because Smigly-Ridz didn’t care to cough up Wilno when Stalin demanded it. That was one more of the things you said to nobody unless you happened to own a death wish.

On they droned. It was a longer flight than most, so Stas kept a wary eye on the fuel gauge. They’d have plenty to get where they were going and back again unless something went wrong. He eyed the gauge anyhow. Getting hit was the most likely way for something like that to go wrong, but far from the only one. A cracked line, a clogged line … The longer you’d been flying, the more possibilities like that you could think of.

He and Mogamedov both spent a lot of their time peering out every which way at once through the cockpit glass. Bf-109s, FW-190s, whatever outdated junk the Poles were flying-if you didn’t spot them before they saw you, you’d go down in flames before you could complain about how obsolete the fighters were. Stas wished he had eyes on stalks like a crawfish so he really could look in two directions at the same time.

The squadron commander’s voice sounded tinnily in his earphones: “That’s Wilno dead ahead. We’ll aim at the railroad yards and the steel mills.”

Railroad connections and factories had made Stalin want the town in the first place. Now his minions would try to wreck them. If you thought about it, it reminded you of a spoiled five-year-old. If I can’t have them, you don’t get to use them, either! The scary thing was, that was probably just what was going through Stalin’s beady little mind.

Yet another thing you couldn’t say. Mouradian could say “Acknowledged,” so he did. He also called into the speaking tube: “Lower the bomb-bay doors, Fedya. We’re almost there.”

“I’m doing it,” the bombardier answered. And Mechnikov did. The wind howled in a new way as it whipped around inside the bomb bay.

Flak started coming up from the guns in and around Wilno. The fire was fierce and accurate. Whether those were Poles or Germans down there, they knew their business.

Stas tipped the Pe-2 into a shallow dive all the same. “A little to the left, Comrade Pilot,” Mogamedov said. “We’re coming up on the train station.”

“A little to the left.” Stas adjusted their course.

“Let them go, Fedya!” the Azeri called to the bombardier. The explosives fell free. The bomb-bay doors closed. Stas yanked the Pe-2 around in a tight turn and scooted for home.

Just in time. Messerschmitts tore into the Red Air Force bombers. One dove past Mouradian’s plane and was gone before he could open up on it. He did see that it was marked with Poland’s two-by-two red-and-white checkerboard rather than the German swastika. So the Poles weren’t flying junk any more, then. Hitler’d sold them fighters worth having.

The machine gun in the dorsal turret chattered furiously. Fyodor Mechnikov saw something worth shooting at, or thought he did. Better to blast away at something that wasn’t there than to let a Fritz-or even a Pole-shoot you from behind.

Two planes trailing smoke and fire spun toward the ground: a Pe-2 and a smaller 109. Mouradian gunned his machine till all the performance gauges cranked well into the red. The groundcrew men could fix the engines later. Or they could if he bought himself a later for the mechanics to fix them in.

He wondered if he should try to get higher. If he did, he and his crewmates would have a chance to bail out in case a 109 shot up the plane. But climbing would cost him speed, and speed was what would get him out of here. A Pe-2 was just about as fast as a Messerschmitt, and had far more range. Going flat out would bring him back to the airstrip with less gas in the tanks than he’d expected, but that was the least of his worries now.

Another bomber from the squadron went down. What made a fighter pilot go after one plane but not another? The size of the red stars on its wings? The way the sunlight shone off the cockpit or the turret and drew his notice? Being in the right place to dive on the Pe-2? Or nothing more than dumb luck? Stas had no answers. He’d never had any answers to questions like those. All he knew was, he was still around to ask them.

Ten minutes put ninety kilometers or so between him and the Polish 109s waspishly defending Wilno. One more check showed only a few scattered Pe-2s close enough to see. When he eased back on the throttles, the engines seemed to sigh in relief. The pointers on the dials fell back to safe levels.

“Another one down,” Mogamedov said, and then, “A few more like that and we don’t come home from one.”

“Afraid you’re right,” Stas said. “But it’s not as if we haven’t known that for a while, is it?”

“No.” After a beat, Mogamedov added, “No wonder so many Russian pilots drink like fish, is it?”

“Mm, maybe not,” Stas said. “But do they drink because they’re pilots and they know they’re going to catch one, or just because they’re Russians? Some of the Russians in the groundcrew pour it down every bit as hard, and they never get off the ground.”

“And some of the pilots would drink like that if they didn’t fly,” Mogamedov allowed. “Not all of them would, though, or I don’t think so.”

“It could be. I may do some drinking myself today once we get down,” Mouradian said.

“Some drinking? Most people do some drinking. Drinking till you can’t see any more-that’s different,” Mogamedov said.

He hardly ever did even some drinking. But, as you didn’t say some things, so you didn’t ask some questions. If he admitted he was a believing Muslim, he would be giving Stas a hold on him. If he denied it, he might be lying. The two of them were all right in the cockpit, and in the officers’ tent. For an Armenian and an Azeri, that would do, and more than do.

Hans-Ulrich Rudel stood to stiff attention in front of the folding table that served Colonel Steinbrenner as a desk. “Reporting as ordered, sir,” he said, saluting. “What do you need?”

“To ask you a question,” the squadron CO said. “Whatever you tell me, I promise it won’t be held against you.”

Whenever somebody told you something like that, he didn’t mean it. Even a preacher’s son like Hans-Ulrich got that. “One of those questions, is it?” he said with a wry grin.

Steinbrenner, though, wasn’t grinning. “Yes, I’m afraid it is,” he answered, and his voice sounded as somber as if he were officiating at a graveside service.

“Well, then, you’d better ask me, hadn’t you?” Rudel said. Any trace of amusement vanished from his voice, too.

“All right. Here goes.” But the colonel paused to light a cigarette and drag deep before he continued, “If you were ordered to bomb a German city in a state of rebellion against the Führer and the Grossdeutsches Reich, would you do it? Could you do it?”

No wonder he hesitated! That wasn’t what anybody would call a small question. Hans-Ulrich knew what the proper military answer was. Zu Befehl, Herr Oberst! Anything else was less than his duty, less than his oath to Adolf Hitler. All the same … No, it wasn’t a small question. He tried to come back with a question of his own: “Is that what you are commanding me to do, sir?” You were-just barely-permitted to make sure you clearly understood your orders.

But all Steinbrenner said, in a voice like stone, was, “Answer what I asked you, please.”

“Bomb German civilians?”

“German civilians revolting against the government of the Grossdeutsches Reich.”

“Sir, I-” Rudel came to an unhappy stop. Fighting Germany’s enemies was an honor, a privilege. Telling him who Germany’s enemies were was the Führer’s job. But if the Führer told him the German Volk were Germany’s enemies … Had he been a pinball machine, his eyes would have read TILT. “Sir, I just don’t know,” he finished after that stop.

“Thank you,” the squadron CO said. “You’re dismissed.”

“Sir?” Too much was happening too fast.

“Dismissed.” Steinbrenner cut off the syllables as if with a scissors. In case two-syllable words had suddenly got too hard for Rudel, he chose some shorter ones: “Get the fuck out of here.”

Hans-Ulrich left. Not to put too fine a point on it, Hans-Ulrich fled. Mere combat didn’t faze him-he had its measure. If you lived, you lived. If you died, you died. You did your best to live. But the unknown terrified even the bravest.

A lot of men would have gone to the officers’ tent and got smashed. If you couldn’t think straight, you didn’t need to worry about what you couldn’t-or didn’t want to-understand. But drowning his sorrows had never been Rudel’s style. Obeying orders no matter how he felt about them had never been a problem before. Now, all of a sudden, it was.

The trouble was, the airstrip didn’t have many places where someone could go to be by himself. The first one he thought of was the revetment that sheltered his Stuka. But when he got there he found Albert Dieselhorst fiddling with the trim tabs on the plane’s tail.

“Morning, sir. What’s cooking?” Dieselhorst took a longer look and found a different question: “Good God! Who stepped on your tail?”

“Colonel Steinbrenner did,” Rudel answered.

“Why?” the radioman and rear gunner demanded. “You haven’t even screwed any Mischlings I know of since we got to Belgium. You’re a good boy … uh, sir.”

“Danke schön,” Hans-Ulrich said in a distinctly hollow voice. “No, I wasn’t naughty-not that way, anyhow.”

“What did you do, then?”

“I didn’t do anything. It’s what the colonel asked me.” Hans-Ulrich explained just what that was.

Sergeant Dieselhorst stared at him. “Der Herr Gott im Himmel!” he burst out, and then added several comments even more pungent. Once he’d got those out of his system, he asked, “And what did you answer?”

“I said I didn’t know whether I could do it or not.”

“Huh.” The sergeant eyed him thoughtfully. “I’ll tell you one thing, so you know. If they ever give you orders like that, I sure as hell don’t want to sit in the back seat.”

“You’ll end up in all kinds of hot water if you try to refuse,” Hans-Ulrich pointed out.

“I understand that. Believe me, I do. I’ve been in the service a lot longer than you have.” Dieselhorst hawked and spat on the dirt near the Stuka’s tailwheel. Shaking his head, he went on, “I don’t think they’ll give you orders like that, though.”

“Why not? Why would they ask me something like that if they aren’t serious about it?”

“Oh, I’m sure they’re serious about it. Matter of fact, I’m sure they’re crapping their drawers about it.” The veteran set a hand on Rudel’s shoulder. “But Colonel Steinbrenner asked you. If you aren’t the guy in the squadron who’s most loyal to the people in power, fuck me if I know who is. And you told him you weren’t sure you could bomb your own people. Suppose somebody who doesn’t like the Party so much takes his Stuka up. Where will he put his bombs? On the rebels? Or on the shitheads who tried to make him bomb them?”

“That would mean civil war!” Hans-Ulrich yipped.

“Very good,” Dieselhorst said, with the air of a teacher congratulating a short-pants kid who’d aced an exam. “But doesn’t it seem to you like we’ve already got a civil war? Why would they be asking you about bombing Germany if we didn’t?”

Hans-Ulrich opened his mouth. Then he closed it again. He realized he had no good answer for that. He didn’t even have a bad answer for it.

Sergeant Dieselhorst patted him on the back. “You’re doing fine,” he said, still as teacher to student, or maybe more like father to son. The age difference between them wasn’t that large, but the difference in worldliness probably was. Dieselhorst went on, “Keep going down that road and you’ll make it to grown-up yet.”

“Oh, fuck you!” Hans-Ulrich shook off the sergeant’s hand. Dieselhorst laughed like a loon, which only irked the younger man more. He said, “You’re so smart, what would you have told the colonel if he asked you something like that?”

“You gave him a good answer. And he knows how honest you are, so he has to take it seriously,” Dieselhorst replied. “I might have said the same thing. Or I might have told him there’s no way I’d do anything against my own people, because there isn’t.”

“The SS might make you change your mind,” Hans-Ulrich remarked.

“Sir, the blackshirts can make anybody promise anything-I give you that,” Dieselhorst said. “But they can’t make you keep your promise once you take off. There’s no room in the cockpit for some asshole to hold his Luger to your head. They know it, too. They’re not all stupid. Only lots of them.”

That was also heresy or disloyalty or insubordination or whatever you wanted to call it. Or maybe it was just the attitude of a man who saw what he saw and knew what he knew and tried to get along as best he could.

“Like I say, sir,” he went on earnestly, “I don’t think it’ll come to that, honest to God. If you don’t want to start dropping bombs inside of Germany, nobody wants to.”

Was that faint praise? Or was it faint damn? Hans-Ulrich decided to take what he could get. “Thanks,” he said, and left it right there.