Last Orders

CHAPTER 7

Bend your knees. Roll when you hit. Don’t let the canopy blow you all over the place. The first time Pete McGill jumped out of a C-47, he had to think about all that stuff. No more.

This was his seventh jump now. He knew what it was like to step out of a plane and come to earth under a king-sized umbrella. Somebody’d told him that was just what the Germans called them, that their word for paratrooper literally meant umbrella rifleman.

He’d discovered he enjoyed floating down out of the sky. It was as close to flying as you could come without strapping on an airplane. And you were out in the air yourself with a parachute, not inside a machine that smelled of gasoline and lubricating oil.

He was only a couple of hundred feet off the ground and bracing himself for the landing when a little bird fluttered past him. Maybe he was imagining things, but he thought he saw surprise in its beady black eyes. What was a human doing up here in bird country?

“Oof!” he said when he landed. He bent his knees. He rolled. He wrestled the canopy into submission and detached himself from it. Then he lit a cigarette while he waited for a jeep to come by and pick him up.

The C-47 from which he’d parachuted was droning off toward the horizon. When he went in for real, the transport would fly in lower, so the men inside wouldn’t have so far to drop … and so the Japs on the ground wouldn’t have long to shoot at them while they hung in the air like ripe fruit dangling from a tree.

Here came the jeep, with a couple of leathernecks already in it. Pete stuck out his thumb, as if he were hitching a ride. When the jeep stopped so he could get in, the driver asked, “Where to, Mac?”

“Take me to the nearest saloon,” McGill answered. “If it’s next door to a cathouse, that’s better.”

Everybody laughed. One of the other guys who’d gone out of the C-47 said, “That sounds good to me, too. Let’s go do it.”

“Fuckin’ comedians, that’s what you are,” the driver said.

“I want to be a fuckin’ comedian. That’s how come I asked for a bar with a cathouse next to it,” Pete said.

“Funny. Funny like a truss,” the driver said, shaking his head. “Yeah, you’ll be on the radio next week, tellin’ dumb jokes for fuckin’ Palmolive soap.”

He took them back to Schofield Barracks, as Pete had known he would. No fleshpots there. The Marines climbed aboard a bus that hauled them back to Ewa, the base west of Pearl Harbor. Before they got there, though, a roadblock manned by MPs stopped them.

“The fuck is going on?” the bus driver, a Marine himself, bawled out of the window. “What are you guys doing here?”

“Ewa’s under quarantine,” one of the MPs answered. In case the driver didn’t know what that meant, he amplified it: “Nobody in, nobody out.”

“You nuts? What for?” the driver said.

“On account of a couple of guys down there are down sick with cholera, that’s what for,” the MP said. “I hear one of ’em’s dead, but I don’t know that for sure. They don’t want it getting loose all over the place.”

“Fuck me,” Pete said to the leatherneck sitting across the aisle from him. “Didn’t we get shots for that shit?”

“I think so,” the other Marine answered. “We got so many shots, both my arms swole up like poisoned pups and my ass was too sore to sit down on it for two days. I ain’t had an ass like that since my old man used to lick me before I joined the Corps. They say the training is rough, but, man, it was a walk in the park after my pa, I tell you.”

“I know what you mean,” Pete said. His father hadn’t walloped him that hard, but he hadn’t had an easy time growing up, either. He didn’t know many Marines who had. Most guys who joined the Corps were tough to begin with, and boot camp only made them tougher.

Meanwhile, the bus driver was saying, “Well, what am I supposed to do with these guys now?”

“Take ’em to Pearl,” the MP told him. “They’ll find somewhere to stash ’em till things at Ewa get straightened away.”

“Goddamn pain in the ass,” the driver grumbled.

“Don’t blame me, buddy,” the MP said. “Blame the stinkin’ slanties. They’re the ones keep dropping that poison shit on Hawaii.”

“It’s a crock of crap, is what it is,” the driver said. “How many bombers fly outa here two, three times a week to pound the crap outa Midway? But the Japs still keep sending planes back here.”

“Write your Congressman if you don’t like it-I can’t do nothin’ about it any which way.” The MP jerked his thumb eastward, toward Pearl. “Write your Congressman after you take these apes where they gotta go.”

Since they were coming from the direction of Ewa, the sentries on the road into the Pearl Harbor naval base didn’t want to let them in. The driver threw a tantrum a four-year-old would have been proud of. The sentries had a field telephone. They spent twenty minutes going back and forth with their superiors. Finally, shaking their heads as if they were dealing with a busload of plague-carrying rats, they let the leathernecks proceed.

Pete counted himself lucky that the mess hall hadn’t closed by the time he finally walked in. The fried chicken was rubbery and the mashed potatoes were tired, but he didn’t care. By the time he finished, he had enough bones on his plate to build himself another bird.

He also didn’t care where they put him for the night. It was Hawaii, for crying out loud. He would have curled up on some grass somewhere and slept like a log till the sun woke him up come morning. No, on second thought he wouldn’t. Some damn Shore Patrol clown would have rousted him in the middle of the night.

At last, the paratroopers were given a hall in a barracks that, by the musty smell, hadn’t been used for anything for a long time. Except for the risk of prowling SPs, Pete would rather have slept outside on the grass. He didn’t get to make such choices, though. People told him what to do, and he did it. That was what being a Marine was all about.

He didn’t get to the mess hall late the next morning. Eggs, bacon, fried potatoes, toast, coffee … He filled himself very full again. It wasn’t fancy food, but it was the kind of stuff even Navy cooks had trouble ruining.

Then he and the rest of the paratroopers had to get the brass to notice that things were screwed up for them. As far as the people at the airstrip where the C-47s took off and landed knew, they’d gone back to Ewa the way they were supposed to. As far as the brass at Ewa knew, they were AWOL. Yes, Ewa was under quarantine, but what did that have to do with anything?

They spent most of the day getting all that straightened out. By the time it was fixed, or Pete thought it was, he’d got good and disgusted. “We should’ve gone straight into Honolulu yesterday, had ourselves a spree on Hotel Street,” he said. “They still woulda figured us for AWOL today, and we coulda got smashed and laid.”

“What about the bus driver?” one of the other paratroopers asked.

“Hell, he coulda come, too,” Pete said magnanimously. “I mean, he was a Marine himself, so why shouldn’t he have a good time along with us?”

“You got all the answers,” the other leatherneck said, nothing but admiration in his voice.

“I wish,” Pete said. “If I’m so goddamn smart, how come I ain’t rich?” He stuck a hand in his pocket. A few coins clinked inside there, but only a few. Unless he got lucky rolling poker dice or something, he wouldn’t have had much of a spree in Honolulu’s red-light district.

In spite of the snafu, he and his buddies jumped from another C-47 the next day. This time, nobody tried to take them back to Ewa. As far as Pete was concerned, that was progress.

Peggy Druce lit her first cigarette of the morning as she poured herself her first cup of coffee. She put in cream and a teaspoon and a half of sugar. She would rather have put in two, but they were more serious about rationing sugar than they were about most things. She smiled as she drank. It might not be exactly the way she would have wanted it, but it was better than anything they were drinking in Europe. For starters, the coffee was real coffee. The tobacco was miles better than the harsh, adulterated stuff they had over there, too.

She popped two slices of bread in the toaster and fried a couple of eggs in lard. As she sat down to breakfast, she opened the Philadelphia Inquirer to see what had gone wrong in the world since she fell asleep the night before.

MORE JAPS GERM BOMBS HIT HAWAII! was the front-page headline. Peggy shook her head as she buttered her toast and slathered it with strawberry jam. “Filthy bastards,” she muttered to herself-who else was going to hear her?

She read the story below the headline. The War Department and the Navy Department admitted to a few small, isolated outbreaks of disease among military personnel on Oahu. Peggy smiled a tight, cynical smile as she worked her way through the story and her breakfast. If they admitted to a few small, isolated outbreaks, the real outbreaks were bound to be not so small and not so isolated. Dr. Goebbels didn’t oversee news here in the USA, but people who thought like him sure did.

A War Department spokesman was quoted as quoting the Bible on sowing the wind and reaping the whirlwind. That sounded good: no two ways about it. How the United States was going to make it come true … The Inquirer didn’t quote the War Department spokesman on that. Which, Peggy supposed, meant the illustrious spokesman had no idea, either.

She almost said as much out loud, just so Herb could make some pungent comment of his own in return. Little by little, though, she was getting used to the idea that Herb wasn’t sitting across the table from her, wasn’t and wouldn’t be. Herb was either reading the Inquirer after making his own breakfast in the little apartment near his law office or, more likely, sitting at the counter of some greasy spoon and reading the paper there.

Peggy had thought about selling the house. It was really too big for one person. She rattled around in it like a solitary pea in a pod. An apartment would be more sensible.

But she’d lived here most of her adult life. And moving was a colossal pain. Packing up all the books and dishes and knickknacks and clothes and furniture … Even thinking about it was enough to tire her out.

So she rattled around. When she didn’t feel like being by herself any more, she would go into town. Some of her former friends and acquaintances, though, raised their eyebrows when she came around. Being a divorcée was nowhere near so shocking as it would have been before the start of the last war. Then women who remained married didn’t raise eyebrows; they cut you dead. Divorce did still bring a breath of scandal, but only a breath.

Outside of Philadelphia, her marital status or lack thereof wasn’t whispered about behind her back. That meant she looked forward to her trips out of town to flog war bonds and to raise money for the Democratic Party more than she ever had while she was still married to Herb. They gave her something to do, and there was no room to rattle around in a hotel room in Easton or York or Shamokin or any of the other towns she’d seen on such trips.

She washed the breakfast dishes. Then she did some sweeping and dusting. If she took care of part of the house every day, she wouldn’t get too far behind with any of it. She sorted dirty clothes into two piles: the ones that had to go to the cleaners and the ones she could put through the washing machine and the wringer. She did those, and hung them up on the clotheslines behind the house to dry.

She hoped they would dry. It was hot, but it was muggy. Things always took longer in weather like this. Something in the sticky air, though-she couldn’t have said what, but she could feel it-said summer wouldn’t last much longer.

When she went back inside, she turned on a fan in the front room. It didn’t do enough to cool her down, so she went into the bathroom and splashed cold water on her face. That felt wonderful, but she had to repair her powder and her eye makeup. Lots of mascara claimed it was waterproof, but she’d never found any that lived up to the claims.

She had a half-gallon milk bottle in the refrigerator full of ice water. Drinking a glass from that also helped beat the heat. She looked at the clock over the stove. It was lunchtime. She didn’t know how that had happened, but it had. Housework kept you hopping, all right.

Two slices of bread. Ham and cheese and mustard and pickles. A little mayo-only a little, because she didn’t like gloopy sandwiches. A couple of softly purple plums. Another cup of coffee to wash everything down. Not a fancy lunch, but not a bad one, either.

Peggy was washing the knife she’d used to spread the mustard and mayonnaise when the telephone rang. She quickly dried her hands on a dish towel and hustled into the living room.

“Hey, good-lookin’!”

“I’m sorry. You must have the wrong number,” Peggy said, smiling.

On the other end of the line, Dave Hartman laughed. “I don’t think so,” he said. “How you doing?”

“I’m okay,” Peggy said. “How are you?”

“At my lunch break,” he answered. He’d found a factory that would let a machinist who knew what he was doing perch on a stool so he could do it. “Long as I’m not on my pins from morning till night, I’m happy as a cow in clover. Only they pay me better, and I don’t think I’ll end up roast beef.”

“You’re crazy,” she said.

“Yeah, but I have fun,” Dave said. “Want to watch the new Bogart movie tonight? It got a pretty good writeup in the paper this morning-did you see?”

“I just glanced at it, but that sounds fine. Shall we meet downtown?”

“Why don’t I pick you up? I’ve got gas-and I haven’t even eaten yet.” Dave laughed at his own joke.

“Har-de-har-har,” Peggy said, which only made him laugh some more. He knew he came out with some cornball stuff. He would have been much less fun to hang around with if he hadn’t.

He came by just past six. He drove an old Ford, but he kept it clean and shiny, and it ran quiet as a watch. He did almost all the work on it himself. He wasn’t an auto mechanic, but he understood machinery the way a pianist understood Beethoven. If it wasn’t working the way it was supposed to, he could fix it.

He pecked her on the cheek when she got into the car with him. He didn’t paw her as if he thought he might never get another chance. If he had pawed her like that, he wouldn’t have. Unlike some men, he had sense enough to understand as much.

The movie was … a movie. Bogie had done better. No doubt he’d also done worse. It was a way to kill a couple of hours without paying as much attention as you needed to reading a book. It was also a way to keep company with someone else for a couple of hours.

After the movie ended, they went to a cocktail lounge down the street and had a drink. Then he drove her home. Peggy kissed him good-bye at the door. They hadn’t gone any further than that. If they kept seeing each other, she expected they would, but they hadn’t yet.

“Thanks,” he said as he turned to go. “I had a good time. Always have a good time with you, seems like. I better head on back-got to be at the plant at eight o’clock sharp.”

“I had a good time, too, Dave.” Peggy let herself in and closed the door behind her. She smiled to herself. She really meant it. Who would have imagined that?

When Ivan Kuchkov peeked out of his foxhole, he saw something you didn’t see very often: a German waving a white flag. In this part of the front, the Nazis and the Red Army were pretty mixed up. They’d been going back and forth at each other for a couple of weeks now. The Germans had given up more ground than they’d taken, but some villages had gone back and forth two or three times. There wasn’t much left of those places.

The Hitlerite with the white flag shouted something in his own language. It was just noise to Kuchkov. “Hey, Sasha,” he called, “what the fuck is the dumb cunt going on about?”

Sasha Davidov knew Yiddish, not German, but they were closer to each other than Russian and the Ukrainian grunting they used down here. The Jew could follow what the Feldgrau bastard was saying, anyhow. “He wants a truce to pick up the wounded,” Davidov reported.

Firing on both sides eased off as men saw the white flag and waited to find out what would come of it. Ivan waited to discover whether any Soviet officers were in earshot. They’d speak German, odds were. And they could decide about the truce, too, so he wouldn’t have to take out his dick and lay it on the block.

Only there didn’t seem to be any around. He wondered what had happened to Lieutenant Obolensky. Maybe the company commander’d caught one in this latest firefight. Wounded men moaned. A couple of wounded men wailed. Russian and German agony sounded pretty much the same. Some of those sorry buggers might live if they got picked up. Of course, the NKVD pricks had their eye on him because of the mess with the politruk, and they were liable to say he was plotting with the enemy if he accepted the ceasefire.

Fuck them, too, in the neck, he thought. To Davidov, he said, “Tell him he can have an hour.”

When the point man yelled to the Fritz, it didn’t sound as if they were speaking quite the same language. The German shouted back. “He agrees,” the skinny little point man said. “He says thank you, too.”

“Tell him to screw himself,” Kuchkov said. When the Jew hesitated, Ivan snapped, “Tell him, dammit!”

Davidov yelled again. The German shouted back, in accented but understandable Russian: “Yob tvoyu mat’!”

Ivan laughed. He came out of his hole and stood up. Most Germans didn’t seem like human beings to him at all. But if you cussed one and he cussed you back, you couldn’t very well not see a man there.

Cautiously, Red Army men and Hitlerites emerged from cover. Nobody put down his rifle or machine pistol, but nobody fired, either. A couple of Germans swigged vodka from Russian canteens. A couple of Russians drank German schnapps. The Fritzes swapped some of their tubed meats for Russian tobacco. Ivan thought his side won that deal, but everybody knew Germans were dopes when they weren’t killing things.

Stretcher-bearers from both sides lugged away the wounded men they could find. Kuchkov noticed a Russian dragging a dead German off by his boots. They were good boots; he suspected the Red Army man would wear them if they fit and sell them if they didn’t. He also suspected the Germans would try to stop the Russian if they noticed him stealing their Kamerad’s corpse. But they didn’t, so he didn’t need to worry about that.

“Fünf Minuten!” shouted the Fritz who’d asked for the truce. He held up his hand with the fingers spread.

“Five minutes,” Sasha Davidov translated.

“Thanks a fuck of a lot, bitch,” Ivan said sarcastically. Sasha looked wounded. “Yeah, yeah,” Kuchkov soothed him. “Some of our guys are stupid pricks. I know.” He needed to keep Davidov happy, or as happy as Davidov could get. The Jew started at his own shadow, but he didn’t run from a fight. And when they were moving forward, he made the best point man Ivan had ever seen. Because he was so skinny and nervous, he never led the rest of the guys into a trap.

That German waved to Ivan, then turned and walked toward the hole from which he’d come. Ivan’s right index finger twitched-he wanted to fire a burst from his PPD into the Hitlerite’s back. The son of a bitch would never know what hit him. But Kuchkov couldn’t see enough advantage in it to make it worth his while.

A German ceremoniously fired a Mauser into the air to signal that the ceasefire was over. Kuchkov squeezed off a three-round burst with his machine pistol, also aiming at nothing and nobody. A minute later, one of Hitler’s saws opened up. Both sides got back to the serious business of trying to slaughter each other.

“Hey, Sasha!” Ivan called.

“What do you need, Comrade Sergeant?” the Jew asked. He was only a senior private, but he had more sense than anybody else in the section. Kuchkov thought his judgment worth having.

So he asked, “You think we can get around behind that little swell of ground off to the right? I saw the Nazi dickheads didn’t hardly post anybody over there.”

“Can the guys who don’t move lay down enough fire so they don’t know we’re sliding around till we take ’em from the flank?” Davidov asked in return.

Ivan considered. After a few seconds, he said, “Fuckin’ right, they can. Take half a dozen men and do it. We won’t let the Hitlerite cocksuckers have a clue they’re gonna get it up the ass.”

Davidov and the soldiers he’d chosen crawled away through the weeds and bushes, their bellies as flat against the ground as if they were so many slugs. The rest of the Red Army men sprayed bullets around so the Germans wouldn’t suspect the flanking move. About half of them carried PPDs or captured Schmeissers, so they had no trouble making a big racket.

As soon as the firing from the right started, Kuchkov yelled, “Come on, you sorry fuckers! Let’s get ’em!” He scrambled out of his hole and scurried toward the German positions. Other khaki-clad men came with him. If they’d sat there playing with their dicks, they could have got rid of him for good.

One of the Fritzes fired at him from no more than ten meters away. The rattled German missed. Ivan cut him down with a long PPD burst while the Nazi was still working the bolt on his rifle. He smashed in another Hitlerite’s face with his German-made entrenching tool when the man popped up in front of him like a rabbit coming up out of its burrow. The German screamed like a rabbit, too, and fell over on his back.

Then all the Nazis were running away. They liked flank attacks no better than Russians or anybody else.

Somewhere back there, the Germans had a couple of more MG-42s. Their pitiless snarl warned the Red Army men with Kuchkov not to get too bold in the pursuit. Instead, the Russians fell to plundering the corpses of the Fritzes they’d killed. Food, leather goods, grenades, trench knives, folding entrenching tools, water bottles-none of that stuff would go to waste.

Ivan kicked a dead German’s helmet as if it were a football. It spun through the bushes. He wished he could paint it khaki and stick it on his own head. It was of better steel and protected more of a man’s dome than its Soviet equivalent. But that wouldn’t work. The instantly recognizable shape would get him shot by his own side.

Here came Sasha Davidov with German black bread and tubes of meat paste or butter. “Good job, motherfucker!” Ivan said, and slapped him on the back hard enough to stagger him.

“Thanks, Comrade Sergeant.” The Jew squeezed something pale and yellow onto a chunk of bread and offered it to Kuchkov. “Here. I know which side it’s buttered on.” They both laughed and laughed. Why not? They’d both stayed alive to do it.

The men in Hans-Ulrich Rudel’s squadron sprawled on the grass by their airstrip. Rudel had his visored officer’s cap pulled down low on his forehead, and he wasn’t the only one. It had started drizzling a little while earlier. The sky was the color of pewter. Summer might not be over, but it wouldn’t last much longer.

Colonel Steinbrenner stood in front of the assembled flyers and groundcrew men. “Boys, I know you’ll be glad to listen to a talk from the National Socialist Loyalty Officer, Major Keller. So pay attention to what he’s got to say to you, right? Heil Hitler!”

“Heil Hitler!” the men echoed. Beside Hans-Ulrich, Sergeant Dieselhorst spoke up as loudly as anyone else. You couldn’t just be loyal these days. You had to be seen and heard to be loyal. Hans-Ulrich didn’t care for that, but he didn’t know what he could do about it, either.

As the squadron commander stepped back, Major Keller stepped forward. He wore the ribbon for an Iron Cross Second Class thrust through the third buttonhole on his tunic. The Iron Cross Second Class wasn’t quite like a vaccination scar; not everybody had one. But even Sergeant Dieselhorst sported an Iron Cross First Class. The rest of the loyalty officer’s decorations were Party awards, not ones earned in the field.

“We must be ruthless in our devotion to duty! Ruthless!” Keller declared. “The Jews and Bolsheviks who hate the Reich and plot to destroy the German Volk, we must root out and eradicate without mercy. They would give us none, and so they deserve none themselves. We must prosecute the war as if there were no tomorrow. If our enemies triumph, there will be none for us!”

Beside Hans-Ulrich, Dieselhorst reached into a tunic pocket. He pulled out a pack of Gauloises. Rudel wondered where he’d got them. From a Belgian farmer who’d got them from a Frenchman, seemed the best bet. The rear gunner and radioman stuck one in his mouth and lit it. He made a horrible face, but kept puffing away. Even Hans-Ulrich, who didn’t use tobacco, could smell how harsh the smoke was.

“We must fight. We must keep on fighting till Germany has the final victory and the Lebensraum our Volk require,” the loyalty officer went on. “We must back the Führer of the Grossdeutsches Reich, Adolf Hitler, and the National Socialist German Workers Party with all our heart, and with all our soul, and with all our might. Heil Hitler!”

“Heil Hitler!” the Luftwaffe men chorused again. Thou shalt love the Lord thy God with all thine heart, and with all thy soul, and with all thy might. How often had Hans-Ulrich heard that verse from his minister father? Did Major Keller even know he was quoting Scripture-and the Old Testament, at that? Or was he just pulling a phrase that sounded good out of thin air? Even Hans-Ulrich could see that asking him wasn’t the smartest thing he could do.

“The Führer is always right!” Keller thundered. “That is why we must back him with blind courage and blind obedience. He and he alone knows what is best for us and best for Germany. Sieg heil!”

“Sieg heil!” his audience responded. Albert Dieselhorst sent smoke signals up into the damp, drippy sky from his stinking French cigarette. No Red Indian stood on a hilltop to read what those smoke signals meant. Hans-Ulrich thought that might be just as well.

He joined in the polite applause as the National Socialist Loyalty Officer clicked his heels and took two steps back. Colonel Steinbrenner strode forward again. “Thank you, Major,” he said. “Thank you very much.”

Then Keller stepped up to stand beside him again. “One more thing, sir, if I may, which I unfortunately forgot to mention,” he said. The squadron commander waved for him to continue, so he did: “You must ignore-ignore absolutely-any reports of unrest coming from the homeland. Either they are lies spread by the enemy to weaken your spirit or the unrest was fomented by Jews and other traitors to the Reich.” He clicked his heels and withdrew once more.

“Thanks for making that plain,” Colonel Steinbrenner said. “Aber natürlich, reports of unrest at home can only be lies or treason.”

Keller nodded vigorously. Sergeant Dieselhorst coughed. It might have been the Gauloise’s fault-if that wasn’t poison gas he was breathing, what was it? Or the sergeant’s irony detector might have gone off. Hans-Ulrich’s had, and he was sure it was less sensitive than Dieselhorst’s.

By all appearances, the Party hadn’t issued Major Keller a working irony detector. After all, he still plainly believed everything he said himself. Well, Hans-Ulrich believed most of it, too, though he wasn’t so sure all the unrest in Germany was lies and provocations. Albert Dieselhorst, being more ironical, believed rather less.

“Now that you men have listened to Major Keller, listened to him carefully and with the great attention a National Socialist Loyalty Officer deserves, you may return to your regular duties,” Steinbrenner said. The loyalty officer looked pleased with himself. He was sure he deserved to be heard with great attention, all right.

Hans-Ulrich wasn’t so very sure Colonel Steinbrenner was so very sure of that. He didn’t think the squadron commander was a defeatist, or anything of the kind. Steinbrenner had replaced an officer who wasn’t loyal enough to satisfy the security forces. But the colonel didn’t care to have anyone tell him how to think.

Neither did Sergeant Dieselhorst. He stuck another Gauloise in his mouth. “Those things are filthy,” Hans-Ulrich said.

“So’s your granny … sir,” Dieselhorst replied. He scraped a match against the sole of his boot. After he lit the cigarette, he coughed some more. He took it out of his mouth and eyed it with mingled caution and respect. “Does kind of feel like I’m smoking sandpaper,” he allowed. That didn’t stop him from taking another drag-or from coughing afterwards.

Hans-Ulrich took a few steps to get upwind of him. The Gauloise was so harsh, he didn’t want anything to do with it. In a low voice, he asked, “And what did you think of Major Keller today?”

For a few seconds, he thought he’d been too quiet and Dieselhorst hadn’t heard him. Then, without seeming to, the sergeant looked around to make sure no one else stood close by. As quietly, he answered, “In the time I needed to listen to that, I could’ve taken a good shit. Quatsch mit Sosse, nothing else but.”

Rubbish with sauce. That was further than Rudel wanted to go-further than he might dare to go. “We do have to win the war, you know,” he said mildly.

“Aber natürlich.” Dieselhorst did a good job of echoing Colonel Steinbrenner’s dry tones. “But you know, sir, I could figure that out all by myself. I don’t need some would-be Party Bonz to shove it up my asshole.”

“He does try,” Hans-Ulrich said.

“He’s trying, all right,” Dieselhorst answered, which sounded like agreement but wasn’t. “If the Party wants to tend to politics, fine. It can tend to politics. I’m a Luftwaffe sergeant, for God’s sake. What do I know about that crap, or care? But if the Party wants to run the goddamn war, it should do a better job.” He breathed out more smoke, either from the Gauloise or from his own ire. Then he paused and added one more word: “Sir.”

“Oh, yes.” Hans-Ulrich nodded. “As long as you tack that on the end, it makes everything that came before it wunderbar.”

They both laughed. They’d been flying together since before the war started. Not many crews from those days were still alive, much less still flying together. They’d saved each other’s bacon too many times. They didn’t always agree, but neither one would ever report the other.

You followed your superiors’ orders. You hoped the people set over you were there for a good reason and knew what they were doing when they gave them. Most of the time, they put their lives on the line along with you. You couldn’t ask for more than that. In the end, you had to hope it would prove enough.