Two Fronts

Chapter 24

Arno Baatz had always wished the soldiers who served under him would like him better. But he’d always assumed it was their fault they didn’t. And, working from that assumption, he’d always wound up disappointed.

He’d always wished his superiors liked him better, too. Before the war started, he’d gone through the six-week training course that lifted him out of the teeming swarm of private soldiers and into the more glorious ranks of those with the authority to tell that teeming swarm what to do.

Even a corporal enjoyed such authority, and Arno enjoyed it as much as any Unteroffizier ever minted. He was official and officious. He knew the rules and regulations. He lived by them, and he made the men in his charge live by them as well.

He was a good soldier himself. He wore the ribbon for the Iron Cross Second Class on his tunic. He wore his wound badge, too-wore it with pride. He’d been an Unteroffizier a devil of a long time. Since before the shooting started, in fact. None of the men set over him had shown the slightest inclination to promote him to sergeant so he could use his talents on a bigger group.

So I can give orders to more people, he thought. Yes, he knew what he wanted to do, all right.

That he didn’t get the chance he was sure he deserved only left him even more sour than he would have been otherwise. Combine that with the Wehrmacht’s failure to knock the Red Army out of the war, and Arno Baatz was a less happy man than he might have been.

These days, the Russians were in the driving seat on the Eastern Front. Germany had to respond to one Soviet thrust after another. Smolensk wouldn’t fall this campaigning season, either. Moscow? Moscow wasn’t even a pipe dream any more. As long as the Reich could hold on to Byelorussia and a chunk of the Ukraine, things … weren’t too bad.

He had no idea what the name of the collective farm his section was defending might have been. He didn’t even know whether it had ever enjoyed a name. Maybe the damn Jews who ran the Bolshevik state just tagged it with a number so they could more efficiently keep tabs on it.

He set up the new section MG-34 where it could rake the fields to the east with fire. If the Russians wanted to charge across those fields in the drunken mass attacks they loved so much, they were welcome to try.

“As long as we have enough cartridge belts, we can kill off a couple of divisions’ worth of Ivans,” he declared proudly, once the men had brought the machine-gun position up to his exacting standards.

“If they don’t throw any panzers at us, anyway,” Adam Pfaff put in.

Baatz scowled at the unruly senior private. “When I want to know what you think-”

“You’ll kick it out of me,” Pfaff broke in. “I know.”

“Tend to your business,” Baatz snapped. “Keep the Russians off the gun crew and we’ll do fine.”

“Zu Befehl,” Pfaff said, which was a reply not even Baatz could fault. The Obergefreiter strolled over to his foxhole, slid in, and pointed his rifle in the direction from which the Russians were most likely to come. Baatz wanted to grind his teeth every time he set eyes on the Mauser’s gray-painted woodwork. You weren’t supposed to do that to a rifle. It was as far outside of regulations as it could get. But Major Schmitz, the battalion CO, let Pfaff get away with it. You couldn’t win.

Pretty soon, Baatz had other things to worry about (though the gray Mauser, like a broken tooth, seldom escaped his mind for long). A volley of Katyusha rockets screamed down on the collective farm. Luckily, the Russians aimed a little long. Most of the horrible things smashed down behind the section’s position. The buildings on the kolkhoz had been tumbledown wrecks before the rockets hit. Now they were burning wrecks. The wind blew the smoke away from the Landsers. Baatz wished it would have screened them. At least they would be able to see the Ivans from a long way off now.

“Any chance we can get reinforcements, Corporal?” Adam Pfaff asked. “Mighty lonely out here.”

“We are ordered to hold this collective farm. We are,” Baatz said importantly. “We’ll do it.”

“Harder if we all get killed,” Pfaff remarked.

“Is that defeatism?” Arno asked. Pfaff didn’t answer. Baatz hadn’t thought he would. Defeatism in the field was a capital crime. A drumhead court martial would pass sentence after a complaint.

Of course, getting overrun by the Russians was also a capital crime, and probably one with a punishment less merciful than a firing squad or an officer with a pistol would show. Stirrings off toward the eastern horizon warned that the Ivans were going to make their push soon.

Flares from little German strongpoints to the north and south said the men holding those stretches of the front were also awake to the building threat. Baatz fired a green flare of his own to show that he was, too. He remembered scaring off some Soviet panzers with red flares. That had been quick thinking from Dernen, no two ways about it, even if he was a troublemaker most of the time. Well, Dernen wouldn’t be doing any quick thinking now, not after he’d stopped one with his noggin.

“Urra! Urra!” That deep roar, right now just at the edge of hearing, made the short hair at Arno’s nape prickle up. The Russians were nerving themselves for the charge. They were all liquored up when they started yelling like that, sure as hell they were, almost past the point of feeling pain or caring whether they lived or died. And they had no choice but to go forward. NKVD men would shoot them down from behind if they faltered.

“Urra! Urra!” Here they came, still out of range but terrifying all the same. They’d linked arms as they dogtrotted forward in row after row. The skirts of their greatcoats flapped between them. “Urra! Urra!”

Most of them would have machine pistols, not rifles. They’d need to get in close before they could use them. “Urra! Urra!” They were ready to get in close, too. They seemed as determined, as unstoppable, as storm waves rolling up a beach and sweeping aside whatever lay in their path.

Then German mortar bombs started dropping among them. Dirt fountained up at every burst. Men close to the explosions fell or flew through the air. The Ivans who didn’t get hit closed ranks and kept coming.

When the lead wave of men in dun-colored uniforms got within about a thousand meters, Baatz yelled to the men at the MG-34: “Let ’em have it!” The man at the trigger tapped the machine gun’s rear end after every burst, spraying bullets back and forth in short bursts. Other German machine guns, MG-34s and MG-42s, were hammering the enemy along with this one. Russians toppled, one after another. The commissars spent lives the way a drunken sailor spent money on popsies.

Indifferent in the face of destruction, the Russian survivors kept closing up and coming on. “Urra! Urra!” The roar was loud now, and getting louder every second.

Baatz brought his own rifle up to his shoulder and started shooting. He wasn’t sure he hit anyone, not with so many other weapons knocking Ivans down, but hitting had to be easier than missing. He worked the bolt again and again, slapping in clip after clip.

A few bullets came back from the Russians, but only a few. If they didn’t break pretty soon, though, they’d open up with all those goddamn submachine guns, and then there’d be hell to pay. Baatz carried several potato-masher grenades on his belt. He hadn’t actually thrown one in a long time. You were in trouble if you needed them. He shifted in his hole so he could grab them in a hurry. He was liable to be in trouble now.

But then, quite suddenly, the waves of Ivans streamed back, not forward. Flesh and blood, even Russian flesh and blood, could take just so much, and the Germans here had enough firepower to dish it out. Dead and wounded men littered the battlefield. The machine guns went on firing, turning the wounded men into dead ones and making sure the ones who didn’t move wouldn’t. You could bet some of the bastards out there were trying to play possum.

“Fuck me,” Adam Pfaff said, as if from very far away-Baatz’s ears still rang. “We lived through it again, I think.” For once, Arno couldn’t argue with him at all.

The squadron had a new airstrip. They’d flown off runways in front of Smolensk. Then, as the Germans advanced, they’d flown from a base in back of the fortress city. Now they were at another strip in front of Smolensk. It wasn’t the one they’d used before, but Stas Mouradian didn’t think it was far away.

Naturally, he wasn’t the only one who noticed the change and what it meant. “We’re pushing the Hitlerites back,” Isa Mogamedov said as they settled in for their first supper at the new strip.

Stas nodded. He gnawed the meat off a boiled pork rib. Mogamedov was eating ribs, too. He might not drink much, but he didn’t strictly keep the Muslim dietary rules. At a base where the cooks were pork-loving Russians, he might have starved to death if he had.

After Stas swallowed, he said, “They are falling back, the bastards.” He didn’t want merely to be seen agreeing with his copilot and bomb-aimer. He wanted to be heard, too. Mogamedov might well have had similar motives in speaking up to begin with. You couldn’t just be loyal to the Soviet Union. You had to let everybody know how very loyal you were.

You especially had to do that if you weren’t a Russian. If you came from the Caucasus like Mouradian and Mogamedov, or from one of the Central Asian republics, you might be a member of the club by affiliation, but you weren’t-you couldn’t be-a member by birth. And so you had to work all the harder to show you deserved to belong.

One of the other flyers turned on the radio that sat on a crate in a corner of the mess tent. Inside the crate was the truck battery powering the set. When the radio had warmed up, the tail end of something new and martial from Shostakovich came out of it. Mouradian nodded again. That had to be better than the sugary pap they played so often.

The Shostakovich ended with a thunder of kettle drums. Not quite The 1812 Overture with a real cannon, but it did suggest pounding artillery. Then the announcer said, “Moscow speaking.” Everyone leaned toward the radio-it was time for the news.

“More of the Ukraine has been liberated by the ever-glorious Red Army of the workers and peasants of the Soviet Union,” the announcer declared in proud tones. “The Fascist sharks and the Romanian sucker fish that cling to them continue to retreat.”

“Sucker fish!” Stas exclaimed in genuine admiration. Some Party writer had probably won himself a bonus for that. The Romanians and Hungarians were usually jackals in Soviet news broadcasts, sometimes vultures, sometimes Hitler’s lackeys. But that was a new one. Stas wondered if it would stick or be forgotten tomorrow. He hoped it would last. He liked it.

Then he laughed out loud, because Isa Mogamedov bugged out his eyes and opened and closed his mouth several times. Stas hadn’t dreamt the Azeri could turn into such a convincing fish.

He’d missed a little of what the newsreader was saying. Well, no great loss. He knew things were going well here in Russia. That he was eating supper at this new air base and not at the old one told that story far better than the announcer could.

“In Egypt,” the man said, “the English government has confirmed that the transport carrying the theater commander, General Montgomery, was shot down by a Nazi fighter. General Auchinleck has been named to replace Montgomery.”

That the Germans could shoot down an English theater commander was not good news. The generals involved were no more than foreign names to Stas.

“On the Continent, English and French troops have made only the most minimal gains against the Hitlerites in Belgium,” the newsreader continued scornfully. “Fighting of a scale and seriousness to match that which the Rodina has suffered since the German invasion has yet to be seen there.”

“Right!” a flyer near Stas said. “Just right!” He pounded the table with his fist to show how right it was. Several other pilots and bomb-aimers nodded.

Stas wondered whether he was the only fellow in the whole squadron who’d been issued a working memory. Germany and the USSR didn’t border each other. Hitler never would have had the chance to invade the Soviet Union if Stalin hadn’t got greedy. Stalin had assumed that, with the Nazis bogged down in the West, they wouldn’t be able to do anything about it if he helped himself to a chunk of northeastern Poland.

Which only went to show that, unless you were doing geometry, you shouldn’t run around assuming things. Marshal Smigly-Ridz yelled for help from the Fuhrer, and he got it. And the Western democracies hadn’t minded a bit when the Nazis took on the Soviet Union. In fact, they’d even pitched in themselves for a while.

But saying something like that on Radio Moscow would be the same as saying that General Secretary Stalin, the wisest and most beloved of all men, the great leader of the people’s revolutionary vanguard, had screwed the pooch when he tried to steal Vilno or Wilno or Vilnius or however you wanted to spell the worthless place. Since General Secretary Stalin obviously hadn’t, obviously couldn’t have, screwed the pooch, the newsreader came out with this bilge instead.

And he expected his audience to believe him. Stas paused thoughtfully. No, that might not be quite true. The newsreader expected his audience to behave as if it believed him.

He would get what he expected, too. Stas imagined himself standing up here and announcing to his comrades what had really led up to the German invasion of the USSR. He also imagined what would happen right after that. If someone had a pistol handy, he might not even live long enough to get arrested. Whoever plugged him would win a commendation, and probably a promotion to go with it.

If nobody here happened to be armed, his comrades would grab him, wrestle him to the ground, and hold him till the NKVD could take charge of him. His troubles would be just starting then, not ending. All things considered, getting shot would be better. At least then everything would be over with at once.

People from Leningrad and from the Ukraine to Siberia (but not to Vladivostok, lost to Japan thanks to some more of the great General Secretary’s brilliance) would be listening to Radio Moscow right now. The ones who did still remember the way things had actually worked would be making the same automatic calculation Stas had just made.

They would come to the same answer he had. How could anyone who didn’t aspire to martyrdom possibly come to any other answer? You had to live, as much as the war and the Chekists would let you.

No one would ask any inconvenient questions, not out loud. That was the point of this exercise, of the terror that had ruled this broad land since the Revolution.

Stas wished for some vodka-not something he was used to doing. Even thinking this way was dangerous. The more you did it, the more likely you were to slip. And if you slipped, they would catch you. Hell, sometimes they would catch you even if you didn’t slip. They’d catch you on general principles, or because they needed to fill a quota and one of the guys they were really after had gone fishing that day before they could clap the handcuffs on him.

The newsreader went on to brag about the marvels of Soviet productivity. Stakhanovite aluminum smelters from a Magnitogorsk plant had set a new record-another new record! — in outproducing norms by 350 percent. A shock campaign in a coal mine near the Don River produced similar stunning results. Of course it did. All you had to do was believe what Radio Moscow told you.

Herb Druce kissed Peggy’s cheek on the platform at the Broad Street Station. “Off I go again,” he said. “Nevada this time-can you believe it?”

“Just barely,” Peggy answered, which wasn’t far from true. To someone from Philadelphia, Nevada was nothing but alkali desert, jack-rabbits, and Hoover Dam. She had trouble seeing how anything out there could be big enough or important enough to require the services of an ace troubleshooter like her husband.

She didn’t say so. They never talked much about what Herb was up to where other people could hear. Herb didn’t talk about a lot of it even with her.

“All aboard!” The shout rose from the conductors. The PA system announced the train’s imminent departure.

“See you,” Herb said, and climbed onto the train, attache case in hand.

“Love you!” Peggy blew him a kiss. He was already finding his seat; she didn’t think he saw her do it.

She let out a long sigh as she left the platform, left the station, and headed for the family Packard, which was parked not far away. You couldn’t do much driving on the crappy gasoline ration the government doled out, but today Herb didn’t feel like coming down here on the streetcar with his attache case and a couple of big old suitcases. This trip would be longer than usual, so she’d splurged and driven him.

Peggy sighed again when she slid behind the wheel to go home. She didn’t know all the details of what Herb would be doing out there in the Great American Desert. From what little he’d said, she didn’t think he knew all the details yet, either. He’d find out more about what was going on when he actually got there. But it looked as if he’d be gone for weeks, not days.

She put the car in gear and swung out into traffic. There wasn’t much. Everyone else had to worry about the crappy gas ration, too. She zipped along on the way home, as she and Herb had zipped along coming down to the station. That was the one good thing you could say about rationing. Traffic jams were a thing of the past.

You could get a little bit of gas. Peggy didn’t know what she’d do if one of the tires went, though. Hardly any rubber goods were available to civilians. An article in the paper had talked about a burning tool mechanics could use to cut new and deeper treads into tires that had gone bald. That didn’t sound safe to her. Then again, riding around on bald tires wasn’t exactly safe, either.

She pulled into the driveway. A wartime accessory she was thinking of getting was a gas cap with a lock and key. Since rationing clamped down, some people liberated gasoline with a siphon and a bucket. They either burned it themselves or sold it on the black market.

“Bastards,” she muttered, then quickly looked around. No, no neighbors out to be scandalized by her unladylike language. Well, good. If she was going to scandalize people, she wanted to do a first-class job.

She walked into the house. One more big sigh in the foyer. She’d spend more time rattling around here like a pea in an oversized pod. Things with Herb weren’t everything they had been or everything they might have been, but she still liked having him around.

A robin hopped on the front lawn, cocking its head to one side as it searched for bugs and worms. Every so often, it caught something. Peggy watched as one fat earthworm wrapped itself all the way around the robin’s yellow beak, struggling for all it was worth against getting eaten. The worm wasn’t worth enough. The robin bit it in half and swallowed the writhing pieces one after the other.

Unexpected tears stung Peggy’s eyes. Wasn’t that poor damned earthworm doing the same thing as all the sorry little people who got caught in the war’s iron jaws? Sure it was. It only wanted to live, the same as they did. But the robin didn’t let it, any more than the war spared those people.

The robin, at least, had the excuse of being hungry. If it didn’t eat bugs and worms, it would starve. What was Hitler’s excuse, though, or Tojo’s? They already headed great nations. What more could they possibly need? Would they be fatter and healthier and happier if they devoured other nations’ small stores of happiness?

They evidently thought so.

Before Peggy quite realized what she was doing, she walked into the kitchen and opened the cabinet where the liquor bottles lived. After a bourbon on the rocks-or, say, two bourbons on the rocks-she might be able to look at the world through a less jaundiced eyed.

Or two bourbons on the rocks might turn into a good many more than two, and she’d wake up tomorrow morning with a head like a drop-forging plant and a mouth like a latrine trench. Then she’d have one to take the edge off … and then everything would start all over again.

It wasn’t as if she didn’t know some quiet lushes, and a few more who weren’t so quiet. But she also knew what she thought of them. Nothing wrong with a drink every so often. Nothing wrong with a drink or three, even, every so often … as long as you were holding the bottle. When the bottle got hold of you, you turned into one of the people other people thought about that way.

So the bourbon on the rocks could damn well wait till after dinner. In the meantime, she lit a Chesterfield. Nothing wrong with cigarettes, by God! Not even if her granny would have got the vapors seeing her smoke one like a loose woman. Nothing wrong with coffee, either. She turned on the stove to heat up what was in the pot sitting there.

When Herb was out of town, time crawled by. A postcard from Reno-which, by the gaudy picture on the front, billed itself as the biggest little city in the West-was no substitute for the man himself. I won fifty bucks at a slot machine the night I got here, he wrote, and I’ve been putting it back a dime at a time ever since. He didn’t say anything about what he was doing way the hell out there, but she wouldn’t have expected him to.

She made one of her own patriotic forays into the Lehigh Valley, which kept her hopping for a few days. A speech at an Odd Fellows hall near the Civil War monument in what they called the Circle in Easton had the crowd eating out of her hand. The next morning, a Sunday, the Easton Democrats who’d sponsored her told her they’d never seen anybody else sell war bonds like that.

“All in the wrist,” she answered, not without pride.

A young man who looked like a black Irishman-the town seemed about a third Irish, a third German, and a third everything else-gave her a lift back to the train station. “I bought a bond myself,” he said. “Paying my own salary, like. I’m going into the Marines next week.”

“Good luck to you,” Peggy said from the bottom of her heart.

“Thanks,” he answered. “I’ll take whatever I can get.” That struck her as a sensible attitude. But if he was so sensible, why was he joining the Marines?

Because he was a man, so he could. Peggy made speeches and did volunteer work and used all the other substitutes for fighting a middle-aged woman could find. And if she sometimes had a drink or three to blunt the edge of loneliness, she did keep hold of the bottle, not the other way around.

She coped. It was with some astonishment that she realized Herb had been gone almost two months. Even by his standards and those of the government that ran him around, it was a long time to be away.

A couple of days after that thought crossed her mind, a fat manila envelope plastered with stamps was stuck in the mailbox. The postmarks on the stamps were from Reno. The return-address label was from a law firm there. “What the hell?” Peggy said, and carried the envelope and the rest of the mail inside.

The envelope held a sheaf of typed and printed legal papers. Paper-clipped to the front was a note in Herb’s familiar scrawl. I’m sorry, Peggy, it said, but honest to God I think this is for the best. I still like you more than anybody, but I just don’t love you any more. As you’ll see, the house is yours, free and clear. So is a big chunk of the bank account, and so is the car. I’ve got myself an apartment not far from the office. Not great, but it’ll do. Take care. When I get home, I’ll explain it all some more-or you can spit in my eye if you’d rather. Herb.

She numbly flipped through the papers. He’d established legal residence in Nevada. He’d petitioned for and been granted an interlocutory decree. Terms were … pretty much what he’d outlined in the note. They were fair: more than fair, in fact.

It all felt like a boot in the stomach just the same. “Jesus Christ in the foothills!” Peggy yipped. “I’ve been Reno-vated!” Then she started to cry.

RAF fighter-bombers streaked low above the Luftwaffe strip near Philippeville. Machine guns and cannon blazing, they shot up anything they saw. Then, their engines roaring flat out, they pulled tight turns and streaked off to the west no more than a hundred meters off the ground.

Hans-Ulrich Rudel and Albert Dieselhorst huddled in a zigzagging trench alongside the runway. A bullet thumped into the back wall of the trench, half a meter above Hans-Ulrich’s head. He dug his nose even deeper into the dirt than it already was.

When the enemy planes disappeared, Sergeant Dieselhorst said, “You know, I’d rather go to the dentist and get a tooth pulled.” His voice sounded muffled. He hadn’t pulled his face out of the dirt yet, either.

“Without novocaine,” Hans-Ulrich agreed. Cautiously, he did stick up his head. He felt like a turtle coming out of its shell to see if the hawks were gone.

They were, but they’d left something to remember them by. One of the squadron’s Stukas burned in its revetment. Earthen walls and camouflage netting hadn’t saved it. The netting was on fire now, too. A column of greasy black smoke mounted from the dead Ju-87 and blew off toward the Reich on the breeze.

Dieselhorst looked out, too. His forehead and chin had mud on them. So do mine, I bet, Hans-Ulrich thought. He rubbed his nose, which was also bound to be muddy. Dieselhorst gave forth with what good news he could: “It’s not our plane, anyway.”

“No, it isn’t,” Hans-Ulrich agreed. “And the Jabos weren’t carrying bombs-or else they’d already dropped them somewhere else. They didn’t crater the runways. We can fly off them.”

“You’re right. We can.” Dieselhorst sounded less than delighted at the prospect. “But are you sure you still want to? It’s a different world out there these days.”

He wasn’t wrong. Rudel wished he were. The Stuka was designed to fly where the Luftwaffe dominated the air, where Bf-109s kept enemy fighters away from it. The dive-bomber wasn’t quite a sitting duck in flight, but it sure was a waddling duck, especially when weighted down by panzer-busting cannon pods.

“What else can we do?” Hans-Ulrich said. “If they order us up, we’ll go. And we’ll do the best we can while we’re up, too.”

“Of course we will,” Sergeant Dieselhorst answered. They’d flown all those missions together. Even if they didn’t always like each other, that bound them together more tightly than some husbands and wives. Each of them would have been dead a dozen times if not for the other. Then the sergeant went on, “Have to hope we come down in one piece, though.”

“Hope? Yes,” Rudel said. “But sometimes you do what you have to do because other people depend on you to do it right.”

And you’ve got to do it no matter what happens to you. He didn’t come out with that. Sergeant Dieselhorst understood it perfectly well. The difference between them was that Dieselhorst hated it, while to Hans-Ulrich it was just a price that might have to be paid as part of the cost of doing the Fuhrer’s business. He wasn’t eager to pay the price, but he was ready.

They flew again, against batteries of English heavy guns that German artillery hadn’t been able to take out. The Stuka had been invented as an extension of artillery. It was the ideal kind of mission for the dive-bombers-as long as German fighters could keep enemy planes off them.

Somebody had to think the mission was important: both Bf-109s and FW-190s flew top cover for the Stukas. Some Focke-Wulf fighters were also being used as ground-attack planes, beginning to take on the role the Ju-87 had held for so long. FW-190s were much faster and more maneuverable than Stukas-no doubt about that. But they couldn’t put their bombs down right on the center of a fifty-pfennig coin. They couldn’t terrorize enemy soldiers with Jericho Trumpets, either. They were too modern. They had retractable landing gear, not the Stuka’s fixed installations.

Hans-Ulrich liked the kind of plane he flew. He’d been in the Stuka since the war started. He didn’t want anything new. The Ju-87 might look obsolete, but it was still up for jobs no other aircraft could match. The squadron wouldn’t have been attacking this English artillery unit if that weren’t so.

The front near the Belgian border seemed pretty quiet as the Stukas flew over it. Both the French and the English had made some spasmodic lunges against the Wehrmacht’s defenses. They’d got bloodied for their trouble, and hadn’t seemed so eager since.

A little flak came up at the Ju-87s, but only a little. Some machine guns winked petulantly upward, too, even if they had not the slightest chance of reaching high enough to hurt the planes.

Back behind the lines were gun pits by the dozen, by the score, by the hundred. Seeing so many down there gave Hans-Ulrich pause. The Western democracies might not be thrilled about the war, but they weren’t giving up on it, either. They were just fighting it on the cheap, with shells rather than with soldiers.

They had more flak guns protecting the artillery. Unlike the ones up by the trenches, these were in earnest. Puffs of fire and smoke shaped like armless men sprang into being not far from the Stukas. Hans-Ulrich’s plane bucked in the air after a near miss.

“I see the target,” Colonel Steinbrenner said into Rudel’s earphones. The squadron CO tipped his plane into a dive. “Follow me down.”

One after another, the Stukas did. As Hans-Ulrich started his dive, Sergeant Dieselhorst reported, “Our fighters are mixing it up with the Indians.”

“Let’s hope they can hold them off till we drop our bombs,” Rudel answered. He didn’t know what else he could say. They would certainly be faster and more maneuverable once they’d shed a tonne of explosives and sheet metal. Not fast. Not maneuverable. Not enough to escape enemy fighters. But more of each.

Down below, the heavy English guns swelled from little plasticine toys to scale models to the real things in seconds. The real things, damn them, had still more flak guns interspersed among them. The Stuka right in front of Rudel’s took a direct hit and fell out of the sky. The pilot and the man in the rear seat never had a prayer.

Rudel yanked on the bomb-release lever. The big bomb under the Ju-87’s midline fell free. He pulled the stick back, hard, fighting to bring up the nose. Everything went black for a split second as the blood drained from his head. Then Sergeant Dieselhorst’s exultant shout brought him back to himself: “You knocked that baby ass over teakettle!”

“Good,” Hans-Ulrich said. “Now we have to get out of here in one piece.” He gunned the Stuka for all it was worth-which, unfortunately, wasn’t much. If a Hurricane or a Spitfire broke through the fighter screen higher up and dove on him, he’d go down like the luckless fellows in the Ju-87 right below his.

What made one man die while another lived? It was and wasn’t an odd question to wonder about while racing along just above the treetops. His father wouldn’t have wondered. The stern minister would have said it was God’s will, and that would have settled that-for him, anyhow.

Well, of course it’s God’s will. Everything is God’s will, Hans-Ulrich thought. But that only shifted the question. Why was God so arbitrary?

Why did He decide one fellow’s time was up and let another, worse, chap live to a ripe old age and father eight children? Where was the justice in that?

Because He was God, and He could. It was an answer of sorts, but not one that brought Hans-Ulrich any comfort.

What brought him comfort was not seeing any RAF fighters boring in on his lumbering plane, not hearing Dieselhorst’s machine gun go off in what would probably be a futile gesture of defiance as an enemy swooped down on them. Yes, it was amazing how comforting negative information could be.