Two Fronts

Chapter 26

Nothing in Spain ever happened in a hurry. Vaclav Jezek had had to get used to that, no matter how crazy it drove him. Yes, he was a proud Czech. Yes, he hated Germany and everything Germany stood for these days. But German attitudes had rubbed off on his country, and on him. When a Czech said something would happen today, he meant it would damn well happen today, and not Tuesday a fortnight.

Spain, even Republican Spain (which tried to be efficient but had no idea how), didn’t work like that. The people in Madrid who ran things needed a while to hear that he’d smashed up the Spanish tankettes. They needed a while to decide how excited to get about that-they didn’t have a bounty on tankettes, the way they had on the late, unlamented (on this side of the barbed wire, anyhow) General Franco. And, once they had decided, what they’d decided needed a while to get to Vaclav.

He’d been issued a commendation for a brave and selfless service to the Republic. The gaudy commendation was on paper too thick and too crisp to do duty as either a cigarette wrapper or an asswipe. It was written in a language he couldn’t read; Benjamin Halevy had translated it for him. It was, in other words, almost extravagantly useless.

But it came with a medium-sized wad of pesetas-not nearly so many as he’d got for giving Franco what he deserved, but definitely better than no pesetas-and a week’s leave in Madrid. All things considered, Vaclav wished Sanjurjo’s men would throw tankettes at the Republican line more often.

Instead of staying in a barracks, he’d spent some of the pesetas for a room at a hotel that hadn’t been bombed in a couple of years. He’d spent some more at a different kind of house around the corner. And he’d bought himself a bottle of what claimed to be cognac and was bound to be strong if not smooth.

Now he walked into yet another different kind of building. In spite of a wonderful hot shower, in spite of getting his uniform cleaned, he still felt grubby going up the stairs. A woman typed at a desk in the lobby. He walked over to her.

She looked up and rattled rapid-fire Spanish at him. His own remained rudimentary. “Chaim Weinberg? What room, por favor?” he asked.

She flipped through a card file. He felt like cheering-she’d understood him! She found the card she needed and answered him. The only trouble was, he couldn’t understand her.

“?Que?” he said. She repeated herself. He still didn’t get it. Her nostrils flared in exasperation. Then she had a brainstorm. She wrote the number down: 374. He grinned and nodded. “?Gracias!” he exclaimed. When you had only a few words, you’d better make them count.

“De nada, Senor,” she replied. He actually got that. She pointed him toward the stairway. There was also an elevator, but it didn’t seem to be working. Whether that was war damage or Spanish fecklessness, he couldn’t have said. He had no trouble ascending. Getting wounded men up there might not be so easy, though.

He found room 374. Weinberg had it to himself, which definitely made him a special case. He wore a white hospital gown. His left hand was decked out in as many bandages as a mummy. When Vaclav walked in, Chaim’s engagingly ugly mug, which had looked bored, lit up like an electric sign.

“Hey! What are you doing here, man?” The American International’s Yiddish was hard for Jezek to follow, but he got the drift.

And Weinberg would be able to make sense of his German, too: “I heard you got hurt. I have some leave, and I wanted to see how you were.”

“Thanks, pal. That’s nice-that’s mighty nice,” Weinberg said. His smile faded. “I’m lucky to be here at all. One of my oldest buddies was just back from another wound, and the same mortar bomb that wrecked my hand went and did him in.”

“I’m sorry. That’s very hard-I know.” Vaclav pointed to the shrouded hand. “How bad is it?”

“I’m damn lucky to have it at all. They almost took it off at the aid station. But one of the docs here, all he does is fix up hands. He’s putting it together one step at a time, like. When he gets done, he thinks it’ll be pretty good. Not like it’s fresh out of the box, but pretty good.”

“Glad to hear it.” Now Vaclav understood why Weinberg rated a private room. If he was a fancy sawbones’ pet guinea pig, they’d treat him well-when they weren’t cutting him open, anyhow. “So you have a little something to celebrate, anyhow.”

“I would’ve celebrated a dud a hell of a lot more, but yeah,” Weinberg said. “How come?”

Vaclav held up the bottle of alleged cognac. “I brought something to celebrate with.”

“I’m single again. You want to marry me?” the American said.

Laughing, Vaclav shook his head. “I’m not that desperate, thanks.” He pulled the cork out of the bottle and sniffed. Rotgut, sure as hell. Well, he hadn’t expected anything else. He raised the bottle. “Here’s to you!” He drank. It was strong, all right, strong enough to put hair on a nun’s chest.

“Let me have some!” Weinberg said. His larynx worked as he swallowed. “Whoo!” He eyed the bottle with respect as he gave it back.

“I would have liked something better, but this is what I could get,” Vaclav said.

“Hey, I’m not kvetching, believe me,” Weinberg answered. Vaclav figured out the word he didn’t know from context. The American went on, “This is the first booze I’ve had since I got hurt. It’s not exactly on the hospital menu.”

“I believe that,” Jezek said. “How good will your hand be, and when does the doctor here get through with it?”

“Good enough to use some, I guess. Better than the mess it was when I got here, I’ll tell you that. If I were a lefty, I really would’ve been yentzed,” Weinberg said, and again the Czech worked out an unfamiliar word’s likely meaning. Weinberg continued, “Not as strong as it used to be, not as-as cunning, either. ‘If I forget thee, O Jerusalem, let my right hand forget her cunning.’ ”

“You come out with that?” Vaclav stared at him. “You’re a Red, right?”

“Sure I’m a Red.” Weinberg sounded proud of it, too-proud and faintly embarrassed at the same time. “I haven’t thought about any of that shit since I got bar mitzvahed to shut my old man up and he let me quit going to cheder.”

“To what?” Vaclav couldn’t unravel that one.

“Hebrew lessons. Religious lessons,” Weinberg said. “But some of it stuck after all. What are you gonna do? Everybody’s mind is like a rubbish heap, and sometimes the crap at the bottom floats to the top some kind of way.”

Is my mind a rubbish heap? Vaclav wondered. He didn’t want to think so. When he considered some of the weird, useless stuff he remembered, though, while things he should have recalled slipped right out of his head, he couldn’t very well claim the American International was wrong. He didn’t even try. He took another slug of flamethrower fuel instead.

“Me?” Chaim Weinberg said plaintively. Vaclav gave him the bottle. He drank from it, coughed, thumped his chest with his good hand, and gave it back. “Thanks, friend. You’re good in my book. Y’know, this here is far and away the longest I’ve been out of the line since I got to Spain in ’36.”

Not many people had been fighting longer than Vaclav. Some Chinese and Japanese, some Spaniards, and a handful of Internationals like Weinberg. “It seems like I’ve carried a rifle my whole life,” Vaclav said. “If the fighting ever stops, I won’t know what to do with myself.”

“Me, neither,” Weinberg agreed. “That’s why I want to get patched up-so I can go on doing what I’ve been doing.”

?Viva la muerte! Here’s to death! One of Marshal Sanjurjo’s generals was supposed to have used that for a toast. Most people who heard it thought it was disgusting and barbarous. Vaclav did, too … after a fashion. But he also understood it in ways most people didn’t, never would, and never could. Plainly, so would Weinberg. Like that goddamn Fascist, by now they were both creatures of the war, shaped in its image.

Between them, the two creatures of the war ended up killing the bottle.

The Gestapo man reminded Julius Lemp of a wall lizard, even though he wasn’t green. He blinked very slowly, and he kept licking his thin lips with a pointed tongue. He made more trouble than a wall lizard ever dreamt of doing, though.

Blink. “You have aboard your ship, the U-30, an electrician’s mate named”-blink, lick-“Eberhard Nehring.” Blink.

“That’s right. What about it?” Lemp tried to hide his contempt. The wall lizard with the high-crowned cap didn’t even know submarines were styled boats, not ships.

“I will tell you what about it,” the Gestapo man answered coldly. Lick. Blink. “You are to leave him ashore here at Wilhelmshaven when your ship puts to sea on its next cruise.”

“What? What the hell for?” Lemp yipped. “He’s the best I’ve ever seen for squeezing extra time and extra juice from the batteries. I need him, dammit.”

“You may not have him.” Lick. “He is”-blink-“politically unreliable.”

“Are you out of your mind?” Lemp said. “What’s he going to do? Scuttle the boat?” He did it right, not that the blackshirt would notice. “Knock my radioman over the head with a spanner and signal the Royal Navy where we’re at?”

The Gestapo man eyed him as if he were a fat, foolish grasshopper just about within snapping-up range. “I am not required to explain to you the details. The fact is sufficient.” Blink.

“Quatsch!” Lemp retorted. “If I leave Nehring ashore, I’ll have to put to sea with some half-assed Dummkopf on his first patrol. And that kind of numbskull is liable to get me sunk. So you can explain or you can go fuck yourself.”

When the Gestapo man blinked this time, it was in amazement, and not nearly so mannered as usual. “I could kill you for that, and I would not even have to fill out a report,” he said, in a voice even more frigid than usual.

He was trying to put Lemp in fear. He needed to try harder. Lemp laughed at him. “Listen to me, man. The ocean can kill me. My own lousy boat can kill me. The enemy can kill me. So why the devil should I worry about you? If you don’t level with me, I’m damned if I’ll pay any attention to you.”

“Notes on this conversation will go into your promotion jacket.” Lick.

Lemp laughed again, raucously. “Like I care!” He hadn’t expected to make lieutenant commander. He knew he’d never see commander. Blink. “You are being difficult.”

“You should talk! If you don’t give me some halfway decent reason for leaving Nehring ashore, I’m going to take him with me, and you can pound sand up your ass. He’s that good.”

Maybe the Gestapo man wasn’t used to running into somebody who didn’t turn to gelatin around him. He licked his lips once more, this time in what looked like real distress. “Oh, very well. He is engaged in correspondence of questionable loyalty with his family in Munster.” By the way the blackshirt said it, Munster was worse than Sodom and Gomorrah as a den of iniquity, and Nehring a nastier deviant than someone who snatched little girls off the sidewalk and did horrible things to them.

“What’s the big deal about Munster?” Lemp asked.

“In Munster, they have twice made insurrection against the Reich.” Blink. “Twice!”

“Was Nehring involved in any of this?”

“No, but”-lick-“his letters clearly show his awareness. He cannot be relied upon to serve the Fuhrer as he should.”

“I’ve relied on him to serve Germany for two or three years now,” Lemp said. “He’s done it, too, and done it damn well.”

“They are not the same thing.” Blink. The Gestapo man sounded sure.

“Of course they are!” So did Lemp.

“If you allow this man aboard your ship, I can-I will-have you fired upon as you leave the harbor. I serve the Fuhrer!” Blink.

“But not Germany?” Lemp suggested.

The wall lizard’s pale cheeks gained a little color. “I serve the National Socialist Grossdeutsches Reich, the one and only legitimate German government. I have its authority behind me when I tell you you may not use this politically unreliable individual.”

“But-” Lemp tried once more, but broke off before he was well begun. The Gestapo man was implacable. Lemp gave up: “Have it your way. You will anyhow, won’t you?”

“Reich security demands it,” the wall lizard said smugly. Lick.

“Wunderbar.” Lemp turned away in disgust. He did fire a Parthian shot: “If some jerk of an electrician’s mate comes aboard instead of Nehring and we get sunk on account of that, do you think it does Reich security one hell of a lot of good?”

Blink. “If the Kriegsmarine allows incompetents to fill these important roles, then it is the entity impairing Reich security. In due course, perhaps we shall examine that more closely.”

Defeated, despising himself for not having the balls to tell the wall lizard where to head in, Lemp stormed away. As the Gestapo man had warned, Nehring was not among the ratings who boarded the U-30. A newcomer was, an inoffensive little man whose name, Lemp saw when he examined the fellow’s papers, turned out to be Martin Priller.

As soon as Lemp got the chance, he summoned Priller to his tiny cabin. The new electrician’s mate saluted. “Reporting as ordered, Captain!”

“Oh, belay that spit-and-polish crap,” Lemp said wearily. “Save it for the surface navy-don’t waste my time with it. Did they tell you why you were supposed to report here?”

“They said your boat needed an electrician’s mate.” Priller visibly suppressed a sir. “I am one, so they sent me.”

“Did they tell you why we needed one?” Lemp asked.

“Nein.” Another obvious swallowed sir. “I figured your fellow didn’t come back from leave or came down sick or whatever the hell.”

“Whatever the hell is about the size of it.” Lemp grilled Martin Priller on what he knew about U-boat batteries. The new man wasn’t a Dummkopf. He also wasn’t afraid to admit he didn’t know something. He wouldn’t be so good as Nehring, not till he had a few patrols under his belt, but with a little luck he wouldn’t be hopeless, either, which was what Lemp had feared most. Grudgingly, the U-boat skipper said, “All right, go on back to the engine room. Do the best you can, and yell if you need help.”

“I’ll do that.” Bobbing his head in a little nod, Priller pulled aside the cabin’s curtain so he could escape into the corridor. He closed the curtain behind him as he hurried aft.

“Scheisse.” Lemp said it very softly. He still wished he had Eberhard Nehring there in his familiar slot. No matter what the wall lizard said, Nehring was about as political as a halibut, and if Munster was up in arms about the way things were going, whose fault was that? Nehring’s? Not likely! Wasn’t it the government’s, for screwing up the war and the economy to the point where even uncomplaining Germans started showing they could take only so much?

Lemp had never cared much for politics. He didn’t think they were fitting for a Kriegsmarine officer. But he wasn’t a blind man. If he wrote anyone a letter with those thoughts in it, would the Gestapo let him take the U-boat out on its next patrol?

No. They’d sit him in a black room, shine blinding lights in his face, and hurt him till he told them who all his treasonous friends were. If he had no treasonous friends, they’d keep hurting him till he named some names anyhow. Then they’d grab those people and start in on them.

Was that any way to run a war? Or a country? Even the apolitical Lemp couldn’t make himself believe it. But that was the war and the country and the government he had.

Peggy Druce waited nervously in the foyer. She stubbed out a cigarette and lit another one. She didn’t chain-smoke very often, but she did now. Behind her, a clock in the living room started to chime six.

Where the devil was Herb? She blew an angry stream of smoke toward the ceiling. You could always set your watch by him. Or you could have, until …

He knocked on the front door as the living-room clock bonged for the fifth time. Peggy had all kinds of reasons for being mad at him. Try as she would, she couldn’t fault him for being late.

She opened the door. There he stood, as solid and familiar as if things between them had never soured. “Hi,” he said, and then, “I’m sorry.”

“Yeah.” Her voice might have come from Greenland. They’d talked on the phone since he’d come back from Nevada, but this was the first time they’d set eyes on each other. She’d made a point of not being home when he came by to retrieve clothes and books and golf clubs and fishing gear and whatever else he’d taken.

He grimaced. “You don’t have to do this at all, you know.”

“I am trying to be civilized, just like you,” Peggy answered.

“Okay.” He didn’t sound as if things were okay. He sounded as if he’d been ordered to charge a German machine-gun nest in France in 1918. With the same kind of bleak courage he might have shown then, he nodded and said, “Well, come on, then.” As he led her out to his car by the curb, he chuckled in faint-or not so faint-embarrassment. “Fine set of wheels, huh?”

“Catch me!” she said. It was a long, angular Hupmobile from the first years of the Depression. The whole company had gone belly-up not long before the USA got into the war.

Herb shrugged. “I couldn’t find anything better in a hurry. Lord knows what I’ll do if it breaks down and needs parts. But I won’t be putting a whole bunch of miles on it, so maybe it’ll last a while.”

He held the passenger door open for her. She slid inside. He went around and got behind the wheel. The car rattled when he started it. It seemed all the noisier because she was used to the silky-smooth Packard. The Hupmobile wheezed and rattled when he drove off.

Donofrio’s was their favorite Italian place. Herb ordered spaghetti and meatballs. Peggy chose the lasagna. “You have chianti, George?” Herb asked the waiter.

“Only from California,” George answered regretfully-he was a Greek playing at being a dago. “Can’t hardly get no gen-u-ine Eye-talian stuff.”

“Well, bring us a bottle just the same,” Herb said. Peggy nodded. Vino might blunt the edge of what she was feeling. She wasn’t the kind of person who’d let out a war whoop and swing the bottle at her now ex-husband’s head if she got loaded. She didn’t think she was, anyhow.

The guy in the bow tie and the red apron set the bottle on the table. Herb poured for both of them. He raised his glass. “Good luck to you.”

Peggy couldn’t even not drink to that. The wine was … red. “Thursday vintage,” she guessed.

“Oh, it’s older than that. Tuesday, I bet,” Herb said. They bantered as if they’d been married for years. And so they had. And so they weren’t. Peggy drained the big glass in a hurry, but no faster than Herb. He filled them both up again.

They were halfway down their second glasses when the food came. Donofrio’s lasagna was as familiar as … as being married to Herb. “Why didn’t you tell me you were going to do that?” Peggy asked. “Jesus, why didn’t you even tell me you wanted to do that?”

Herb was using fork and tablespoon to twirl a bite of spaghetti. He paused and looked down at the plate for a moment. Then he met Peggy’s eyes again. Sighing, he answered, “On account of I didn’t feel like a screaming row, and that’s what we would’ve had. When I found out Uncle Samuel was sending me to Nevada anyhow, I figured I’d use the time I was stuck there two different ways.”

That did sound like him; he was nothing if not organized. And it cleared up something she’d wondered about: “So you didn’t make up the story about going to Nevada because the government sent you there?”

“No.” He shook his head. “I didn’t lie to you.”

“You just kept your mouth shut about what you were up to,” Peggy said. That sounded like Herb, too.

“It’s not the same thing,” he insisted, a touch of stiffness in his voice. That might have been the lawyer in him talking. Or maybe he really believed it. Who the hell knew? How much did it matter now either way?

Peggy sharpened her tongue on another question: “Seen anything of Gladys since you got back into town?”

She had the satisfaction of watching him turn almost as red as the tomato sauce on his plate. But he shook his head again. “Nah,” he answered. “I told you before-that didn’t mean anything.”

“Yeah. You told me. And I told you. And we were both telling the truth. And here we are.” Peggy looked at the little strip of fishbelly-white skin on the fourth finger of her left hand, where her ring had lived for so long. Was honesty really the best policy? If they’d both just kept quiet, would they still be married? Would they still be happy enough with each other? Again, who the hell knew? She had trouble believing things could have turned out worse, though.

Herb also finished his sort-of chianti. What was left in the bottle splashed into their glasses without going very far. He waved to the waiter for reinforcements. “Thanks, George,” he said when the fresh bottle came.

“Prego,” George replied. Hey, it was a job.

“We’re not far from the house, but will you be able to drive back to your new place if you get crocked?” Peggy asked.

“I’ll do fine. Not enough traffic to worry about,” Herb said. That was true enough.

When he finished his spaghetti, he shoved the plate aside and lit a cigarette. Peggy wasn’t quite done, but she looked forward to hers, too. The one after dinner was the best of the day-even better than the one after sex, usually.

But she hadn’t fired it up when she said, “When I got all those papers, your note said you didn’t love me any more. Have you found somebody else? Not Gladys, but somebody?”

“Nope.” One more shake of the head. “Maybe I’ll go looking. Or maybe I’ll just decide I’m an old goat who’s only fit for his own company. I haven’t worked that one out yet.”

“Okay.” Peggy had no idea whether it was or not. She also had no idea what she’d do along those lines herself. She wasn’t sure she wanted a man who wasn’t Herb in her life. Even if she did, she wasn’t sure she could find one. She was … not so young any more. Herb had a couple of years on her, but so what? It was different with guys. A woman in her thirties wouldn’t see anything wrong with a man in his fifties. The other way around? She snorted quietly to herself. Good luck!

“I wish things didn’t work out the way they did,” Herb said.

Then why did you go to Reno? But Peggy’s bitter question died unspoken. That wasn’t what he meant. He was talking about the things that led up to his going there. “We got stuck in the goddamn war,” she said. “It killed … us … the same way it killed all those soldiers.”

“It sure did,” Herb said. “We get to try and pick up the pieces, though. The poor guys they go and bury can’t even do that.”

Peggy wondered if they were the lucky ones. Everything was over for them, and they didn’t have to worry any more. But that was just self-pity talking. Any one of those poor damned kids would have traded places with her or Herb in a split second. She sighed and made herself nod. “Well,” she said, “you’re right.”

In his seat on the far side of the radio set from Theo Hossbach, Adi Stoss hit the Panzer IV’s starter button. The weather was warm. The panzer was new. The motor caught right away.

“I could get used to this!” Adi said. Before Theo could decide whether to chide him for that, he chided himself: “As soon as I do, the beast won’t start up like this any more.” Theo nodded; Adi had that straight.

“Let me know as soon as we’re warm enough to go, Adi, or even a little before that,” Hermann Witt said from the turret.

“Will do.” Adi watched the engine temperature and the oil pressure and the rest of the gauges on the instrument panel. All around them, the other panzers in the company were starting up and moving out, too. “We’re just about ready, Sergeant.”

“Then get rolling,” Witt said. “Sounds like we’re going to earn our pay the next little while.”

Adi put the Panzer IV in gear. Along with the others, it rolled north and east. The Russians had punched through the German line in front of Gorki, and an armored column was driving on the city. The panzer company was part of the southern jaw of the Wehrmacht’s counterattack. If the Germans could bite off the column, they could chew it up afterwards at their leisure.

If. From everything Theo heard in his earphones over the radio net, the Ivans had shoved a lot of men and machines through there. They were trying to take their own bites out of the German holdings in the East, and they kept learning more and more about how to do such things.

The company hadn’t been on the move more than ten minutes before flights of Katyushas rained down on the panzers and on the infantry coming forward with them. Theo thought the screaming rockets’ roar was one of the most horrible things he’d ever heard, even through thick steel armor. Hermann Witt ducked down into the panzer and slammed the cupola lid shut. Blast shook the heavy machine. Fragments clanged off it.

“Fuck!” Adi Stoss’ mouth silently shaped the word. Theo nodded again. He couldn’t have put it better himself. Adi went on, “God help the poor Frontschweine out there.”

“Ja.” He got a word out of Theo. Katyushas slaughtered foot soldiers, and often panicked the survivors. A direct hit on the turret from one could brew up a panzer, too. He wished that hadn’t crossed his mind.

He peered out through his vision slit. They were coming to Indian country-land the Ivans held. If the Katyushas had scattered German infantry, he needed to be extra alert to keep anybody in a khaki uniform from getting close to the panzer.

Sure enough, the Indians soon came out of the bushes-or rather, fired out of the cover they gave. That big flash had to come from an antipanzer rifle. The damned things were useless against modern armor: the loud clang as the round ricocheted from the Panzer IV’s front plate showed as much. The Russians kept issuing them anyway. They could punch holes in armored cars and halftracks, but anybody who thought he could knock out a real panzer with one was only fooling himself.

It was the last mistake this Red Army soldier was likely to make. Theo hosed down the bushes with several bursts from the bow machine gun. He thought he saw somebody thrashing in there. He might have shot a nice fellow, a guy who liked dogs and mushrooms and harmless hobbies like woodcarving. Give the nice guy an antipanzer rifle, though, and he turned into someone who was doing his best to make sure Theo didn’t get home to Breslau. Theo wasn’t about to let that happen. No second shot came as the panzer rattled on.

A much bigger shell burst fifty meters in front of the Panzer IV. Dirt and fragments banged off the German machine. “Panzer halt!” Hermann Witt yelled. Adi halted the beast. An AP round clanged into the breech. The big 75mm gun traversed a little to the right, then roared. The shell casing clattered down onto the steel floor of the fighting compartment.

Theo didn’t see a T-34 going up in smoke. That meant they’d missed. So did the way Witt shouted for another round. Theo’s balls tried to crawl up into his belly, as if that would do him any good. They were reloading and aiming again inside the Russian panzer, too. If they fired first, if they fired straight …

But they didn’t. A T-34’s commander also had to aim and fire the gun. The German crew, with a specialist gunner, was faster and more efficient. They got in the second shot, and they made it count. The distant T-34 began to burn. The enemy diesel didn’t explode into flames the way a German gasoline engine would have, but panzers had plenty of things besides fuel to catch fire.

“Forward!” Witt called.

Forward they went. The Wehrmacht wasn’t having everything its own way-it hardly ever did in Russia. The Panzer IV rumbled past the blazing carcass of an assault gun-a cannon mounted in a panzer chassis without a turret. The cannon had only a very limited traverse, so the assault gun had to swing itself toward a target. On the other hand, it boasted a low silhouette that made it hard to spot. And assault guns were cheaper and easier to manufacture than panzers.

Somebody had sure spotted this one. Theo hoped the guys in the gray coveralls were able to escape when their mount got hit, but he wouldn’t have bet on it. In case they had, he fired some machine-gun rounds more or less at random to make the Russians in the neighborhood keep their heads down.

A couple of rifle rounds pinging off the panzer near the vision slit told him he hadn’t made all the Ivans duck. Even a sniper wasn’t likely to hit a vision slit on a moving panzer, but anyone who’d been in the field awhile knew unlikely didn’t mean impossible.

“Panzer halt!” Witt ordered. Adi stamped on the brakes. The main armament thundered. Shouts from the turret told of another hit-and another kill. Yes, this machine could smash T-34s instead of just letting them know it was in the neighborhood.

But more and more Russian armor seemed to be in this neighborhood. The Ivans were guarding their flanks better than they often did. They must have realized what the Wehrmacht’s counterstroke against their thrust was likely to look like, and made their own plans to keep it from working.

The Panzer IV rolled past more burnt-out vehicles, some bearing the red star, others the white-edged black German cross. Some of the twisted bodies in the fields and meadows wore khaki; just about as many were in Feldgrau.

Clang! … Boom! That was a Panzer IV taking a hit and brewing up not far away. Adi’s mouth twisted. “We just lost some guys we know,” he said. Theo nodded once more.

“Panzer halt!” Hermann Witt shouted again. Again, Kurt Poske slammed an AP round into the 75. Theo braced himself for another boom from the gun.

But he got a different kind of boom. Something slammed into the panzer. He felt as if he’d been clubbed.

“Get us out of here, Adi!” Witt said.

Adi tried. “Can’t, Sergeant,” he reported. “That one knocked off the right track.”

“Scheisse!” Witt said. “All right-everybody out! The next one hits us dead center. Good luck, friends!”

Theo remembered the first time he’d bailed out of a crippled panzer. He’d gained a wound badge and lost most of a finger on his left hand. Well, no help for it. The panzer commander was right. He’d end up with the next Russian shell in his lap.

He paused only to grab his Schmeisser-yes, he knew where it was. Then he opened his hatch and scrambled out of the Panzer IV as fast as he could. Bullets spanged off the armor plate. They struck sparks, but they didn’t strike him. Adi got out in one piece, too. They both scurried to the rear of the panzer, to put its bulk between them and, well, everything. The guys from the turret escaped through a hatch in its back.

“Welcome to the infantry!” Adi said with a sour grin. Theo cared nothing for the infantry. He didn’t feel like a foot soldier. He felt more like a snail suddenly torn from its nice, hard shell and transformed into a miserable, squishable slug. He also cared nothing for this attack, which was plainly bogging down. All he wanted was to live to see tomorrow.