West and East

Chapter 7

Down roared the Stuka. The sirens in the landing-gear legs screamed. French troops scattered. Hans-Ulrich Rudel saw them through a red haze of acceleration, but see them he did. His thumb came down on the firing button. The forward machine gun hammered. A few of the running Frenchmen fell.

Some of the poilus had nerve. They stood there and fired at the Ju-87 as it roared by only a couple of hundred meters over their heads. You couldn't mistake muzzle flashes for anything else. Most of the time, they missed. The Stuka went mighty fast, and they wouldn't lead it enough. But all those bullets in the air were dangerous. Ground fire had brought down airplanes-not often, but it had.

Not today. Not this Stuka. It climbed again as Hans-Ulrich yanked back on the stick. "See any fighters?" he asked Albert Dieselhorst.

"None of ours," answered the noncom in the rear-facing seat. A moment later, he added, "None of theirs, either."

Theirs were the ones Hans-Ulrich worried about. Stukas were marvelous for shooting up and bombing enemy ground targets. When it came to air-to-air combat, they were too slow to run and too clumsy to dodge. A lot of good men had died before the Luftwaffe decided to admit that.

Although Hans-Ulrich had already been shot down once, he didn't intend to die like that. Unlike plenty of other cocky, cock-proud pilots, he didn't intend to be stabbed by a cuckolded husband, either. He aimed to have grandchildren and great-grandchildren gathered around his bed, so he could tell them something interesting and memorable as he went. He was a minister's son, all right.

He saw French panzers moving toward Clermont. He reported them by radio-that was all he could do. A Stuka had to score a direct hit with a bomb to harm a panzer, and a direct hit on a moving target was easier imagined than done.

On the way back to his airstrip, German flak opened up on him. He was tempted to strafe the idiots who'd started shooting. A Ju-87 was about the most recognizable plane in the world, for God's sake! Speaking of good men, how many were dead because their own friends murdered them? Too damned many-he knew that.

Even through the speaking tube, Sergeant Dieselhorst's voice sounded savage: "You ought to go back there and shoot those bastards up!"

"I thought about it," Rudel answered, "but at least they missed."

"That just makes them incompetent bastards," Dieselhorst said.

"Would you rather they'd shot us down?" Hans-Ulrich asked. Dieselhorst didn't answer, which was probably a good thing.

The landing wasn't smooth, but a Stuka was built to take it. Rudel went into Colonel Steinbrenner's tent to report. "We got your news about the panzers," Steinbrenner said. "Good job. The ground forces are doing what they can to stop the froggies."

"Danke, sir," Hans-Ulrich said. "Stuka pilots ought to be able to do more about panzers from the air. We're fine against soft-skinned vehicles, but armor…?" He spread his hands, palms up, as if to say it was hopeless.

"I don't know what to tell you," the wing commander replied. "Machine guns aren't heavy enough, and you have to be lucky with bombs. You'd need to mount a cannon or something to do yourself any good."

By the way he said it, the idea was impossible. The more Rudel thought, the more he figured it wasn't. "You know, sir, we could do that," he said, excitement kindling in his voice. "You could mount a 37mm gun under each wing instead of the bomb that usually goes there. You'd need a magazine for the ammo instead of loading it round by round, and you'd want to use electrical firing, not contact fuses from the ground artillery. Once you had those, a Stuka would turn into a panzerbuster like nothing anybody's ever seen."

"You're serious," Steinbrenner said slowly, staring across the table with folding legs that did duty as his desk.

"Damn right I am, uh, sir." When Hans-Ulrich swore, he was very serious indeed. "I'd like to talk to the engineers and the armorers, see what they think of the idea."

"What if they say no?" the wing commander asked.

Hans-Ulrich only shrugged. "How am I worse off?"

Colonel Steinbrenner blinked, then started to laugh. "Well, you've got me there. Go ahead-talk to them. See what happens. Maybe they'll come up with something. Or maybe they'll tell you you're out of your tree. Who knows?"

Head full of his grand new idea, Rudel hurried away. The first person he talked to was Sergeant Dieselhorst. The rear gunner and radioman rubbed his chin. "That'd be a nice trick if they can do it," he said. "Can they?"

"I don't know," Hans-Ulrich said. "I sure want to find out, though."

He interrupted the armorers' skat game. They heard him out, then looked at one another. "That just might work," one of them said when he finished. "Mount the breech in a sheet-metal pod so it's more aerodynamic…"

That hadn't even occurred to Hans-Ulrich. "Wonderful!" he exclaimed. "Could you fellows rig up a gun like that?"

They looked at one another again. The fellow who'd spoken before-his name was Lothar-said, "Well, sir, that's not gonna be so easy. We're Luftwaffe guys, you know? How do we get our hands on a couple of infantry cannon?"

"Oh." That hadn't occurred to Hans-Ulrich, either. He wondered why not. Probably because he was so hot for the idea, he ignored problems. Other people didn't, though. He supposed that was good. Well, most of him did. Every once in a while, you wanted things to be easy.

"Talk to the engineers, sir," Lothar said. "They've got more pull than we do. If anybody can get hold of that kind of shit-uh, stuff-they're the guys."

So Rudel talked to the engineers. They visited forward airstrips every so often: they wanted to find out how the Stukas were doing in combat so they could get ideas for improving the planes the factories would turn out next month or next year. (A few weeks earlier, Hans-Ulrich wouldn't have believed that the war could still be going on next year. Now, however much he regretted it, he realized anything was possible.)

They heard him out. When he started, they listened with glazed eyes and fixed smiles, the way an adult might listen to an eight-year-old talking about how he intended to fly to the moon on an eagle's back. But he watched them come to life as he talked. When he finished, one of them said, "I will be damned. We could probably do that. And it sounds like it'd work if we did."

"It does," another engineer said. He might have been announcing miracles.

"You don't need to sound so surprised," Hans-Ulrich said sharply.

"Lieutenant, we hear schemes like this wherever we go. Well, not like this, but schemes." The second engineer corrected himself. "Most of them are crap, nothing else but. Somebody has a harebrained notion, and he doesn't see it's harebrained 'cause he's harebrained himself. And so he tries to ram it down our throats."

"And he gets pissed off when we tell him all the reasons it won't work," the first engineer added. "I mean really pissed off. A rear gunner took a swing at me when I told him we couldn't give a Stuka an electronic rangefinder-they're too big and too heavy for an airplane to carry. One of these days, maybe, but not yet."

"An electronic rangefinder?" Hans-Ulrich asked, intrigued in spite of himself.

"You don't know about those?" the engineer said. Rudel shook his head. The man looked-relieved? "In that case, forget I said anything. The fewer people who do know, the better."

Hans-Ulrich started to complain, then decided not to. Plenty of projects were secret. If the Frenchmen shot up his plane the next time he went out, and they made him bail out and captured him, the less he could tell them, the better off the Reich would be. The engineer was dead right about that. Hans-Ulrich did say, "But you think my idea is practical?"

"Hell with me if I don't," the man answered. Hans-Ulrich frowned; he didn't like other people's casual profanity. The engineer didn't care what he thought. The fellow went on, "The ammunition may get a little interesting, but that's the only hitch I see."

"We could adapt the firing mechanism from the 109's 20mm cannon," his colleague said.

"Hmm. Maybe we could," the other man said. Their technical colloquy made as little sense to Hans-Ulrich as if they'd suddenly started spouting Hindustani. But he understood the key point. They thought the panzer-busting gun would work, and they thought it was worth working on. He wondered how long they would need to come up with a prototype.

And he wondered if they would let him try it out. "COME ON, damn you." Joaquin Delgadillo gestured with his rifle. "Get moving. If you were just a stinking Spanish traitor, by God, I'd shoot you right here."

The International sitting in the dirt glared at him. He wouldn't hold a rifle any time soon; a bullet had smashed his right hand. Blood soaked into the dirty bandage covering the wound. "What will you do to me instead?" he asked. Some kind of thick Central European accent clotted his Castilian. It wasn't German. Joaquin had heard German accents often enough to recognize them. But he couldn't have told a Czech from a Hungarian or a Pole.

"They'll want to question you," he answered.

"To torture me, you mean," the Red said.

Delgadillo shrugged. "Not my problem. If you don't start walking right now, I will shoot you. And I'll laugh at you while you die, too."

"Your leaders are fooling you. No matter what you think you're fighting for, you won't get it if that fat slob of a Sanjurjo wins," the International said. "All you'll get is-uh, are-tyranny and misery."

He came very close to dying then. Joaquin nearly shot him; the main thing that kept him from pulling the trigger was the thought that the Red's smashed hand made a good start on torture by itself. The interrogators could just knock it around a little, and the International would sing like a little yellow bird from the Canaries.

If the fellow hadn't got up when Delgadillo jerked the rifle again, he would have plugged him, and that would have been that. But the International did. He stumbled off toward the Nationalists' rear, Joaquin close enough behind him to fire if he tried anything cute. A wounded right hand? So what? He might be a lefty. You never could tell, especially with the Reds.

A bullet cracked past, a couple of meters over their heads. They both bent their knees to get farther away from it. "So you genuflect in that church, do you?" Joaquin said.

"Not many who don't," the International answered. "I want to live. Go ahead-call me a fool."

"If you wanted to live, you should have stayed away from Spain," Joaquin said. "This isn't your fight."

"Freedom is everybody's fight, or it ought to be," the Central European said. "If you don't have freedom, what are you? The jefe's donkey, that's what, with a load on your back and somebody walking beside you beating you with a stick."

That scream in the air was no ordinary bullet. "?Abajo!" Delgadillo yelled as he hit the dirt.

The International flattened out, too. He yowled like a wildcat when he banged the wounded hand, but he didn't pop up again, the way a lot of men would have. The shell-it had to be a 155-burst less than a hundred meters away. Fragments whined viciously overhead. The Nationalists weren't going to take Madrid away from the Republic, not like this they weren't. In fact, the Republicans and their foreign friends had pushed Marshal Sanjurjo's men out of the university at the northwestern edge of town. It was embarrassing, to say nothing of infuriating.

Which only made the International luckier still that Joaquin hadn't shot him out of hand. Sergeant Carrasquel would have told him he was wasteful if he had. That was another good reason to hold back. No one in his right mind wanted a sergeant giving him a hard time.

When no more shells fell in the neighborhood, Joaquin cautiously rose. "Get up!" he snapped.

"What else am I going to do?" The Red pushed himself upright, using his left hand and both feet. Joaquin made him open the good hand-he might have hidden a rock in there. He might have, but he hadn't. A more clever man might have felt foolish at seeing that dirty palm. Delgadillo didn't. Just one more chance he hadn't taken. You had to take too many any which way. Avoiding the ones you could made you more likely to live longer.

"Well, well! What have we here, sweetheart?" That was Major Uribe. That, in fact, couldn't very well have been anybody else. Uribe had been closer to where the 155 went off than Joaquin or his prisoner. Not a smudge, a stain, or a rumpled crease on his uniform suggested that he'd dove for cover. If he hadn't, wouldn't he be ropa vieja right now? (Even thinking of the stew of shredded beef-literally, old clothes-made Joaquin's stomach growl.) Maybe not. He had to be lucky as well as brave, or he would have died long since.

The International stared at him as if he couldn't believe his eyes. Chances were he couldn't. What were the odds of finding not just a faggot but an obvious-no, a flaming-faggot among the Nationalists' officers? Marshal Sanjurjo's whole campaign was about running such riffraff out of Spain, wasn't it? Of course it was-everybody on both sides knew that. But it was about running Reds out of Spain, too. Bernardo Uribe might want to stick it all kinds of places the priests didn't approve of (not that the priests didn't stick it into places like that, too), but he really and truly hated the Reds. Joaquin understood that, having seen him in action. The prisoner hadn't, and didn't.

"Yeah. What have we here, sweetheart?" With that miserable, ugly accent and a deep, rasping voice, the International couldn't coo the way Major Uribe did, but he gave it his best-or maybe his worst-shot.

Joaquin could have told him twitting the major wasn't the smartest thing to do. He could have, but he never got the chance. Uribe didn't even blink. He didn't waste a moment, either. "I'll show you what we have here, darling," he said, and drew his pistol. Raising it, he shot the captive in the face.

Red mist blew out of the back of the man's head. He fell over and scrabbled in the dirt. Uribe watched for a few seconds, then set the pistol by the International's ear and pulled the trigger again. The scrabbling stopped.

"That's what we have here, asshole," Uribe said, holstering the pistol once more.

"?Madre de Dios!" Joaquin crossed himself. "Begging your pardon, sir, but I was taking him back for questioning."

"?Ai!?Que lastima!" Major Uribe exclaimed. And it was a pity-for the International, whose blood still soaked into the thirsty ground. "The One Who questions him now already knows all the answers. And when He gets through with this fellow-it won't take long-the fucker will wish what I did to him was all he got. But he'll have worse, for all eternity."

"Er-yes." Delgadillo also believed in hell. The Bible talked about it, so it had to be true. And he believed Internationals were bound to go there. All the same, he hadn't intended to give Satan this one right then. "I, uh, thought we ought to find out what he knew, Senor."

Uribe flipped his hand, a gesture that magnificently mingled effeminacy and scorn. "I'll tell you what he didn't know, Joaquin: he didn't know how to keep a civil tongue in his head. And I'll tell you something else he didn't know, too: God forgives what you do in bed. He must, or He wouldn't have made it possible to do those things."

"Er," Joaquin said again. Something more seemed called for. "Yes, sir" seemed safe enough, so he tried that. How many priests would have apoplexy if they heard Major Uribe's doctrine? All of them, probably, clear on up to the Holy Father in Rome. If he told Uribe that… He tried not to shiver. He might end up lying in the dirt next to the dead International.

"Don't trouble your head about it, my dear," Uribe said. "Go back up and kill some more of these Communist monkeys. That's all you need to worry about."

"Yes, sir," Joaquin repeated, and he got out of there in a hurry. He'd often been more afraid of Sergeant Carrasquel than he was of the enemy. But Carrasquel would shoot him only if he tried to run away or something like that. The major might do it for the fun of watching him die. If that wasn't a bulge in Uribe's breeches, Joaquin had never seen one.

The Internationals might shoot him, too. He knew that. They'd come too close too often. But it was business for them, not sport. Killing for sport… He'd never been so glad to hurry to the front. Anything, as long as it got him away from Major Uribe. "YOU! Dernen! What the hell do you think you're doing?" Arno Baatz shouted.

"Just working on my foxhole, Corporal," Willi replied. Maybe a soft answer would turn away wrath. If Awful Arno was on the rag-and he sure sounded that way-the odds were against it, though.

Sure as hell, he thought one lousy pip on each shoulder strap made him a little tin god. "Well, cut that crap out and do something useful instead," he snarled. "Go chop up some firewood."

Willi didn't think fixing up his hole so he was less likely to get killed-and so he could sleep without getting all muddy-was crap. Saying as much would only piss Corporal Baatz off worse than ever, if such a thing was possible. They did need firewood; Willi happened to know that. He didn't know how he'd drawn the short straw for chopping it, but that was just Baatz moving in mysterious ways, his wonders to perform.

"Right, Corporal," Willi said resignedly, and scrambled out of the foxhole. He had some wood in there, shoring up what would be his sleeping compartment. He kept his mouth shut about it, for fear Awful Arno would tell him to rip it out.

The Frenchies had left a lot of lumber behind when most of them cleared out of this village. Willi didn't particularly blame them for bailing. If his own small home town had got shelled and bombed first by one side and then by the other, he would have wanted to get the hell out of there, too.

They'd also left behind a really lovely axe: light, well balanced, sharp. It almost made chopping wood seem more sport than work. Almost. Imagining that fine steel edge coming down on Baatz's neck instead of blond oak livened up the job, too.

Awful Arno came by after a while to check on how Willi was doing. He eyed the pile of firewood, grunted, and went away again. From him, that was the equivalent of awarding the Knight's Cross with Oak Leaves, Swords, and Diamonds. If Baatz couldn't find anything to piss and moan about, there was nothing to find.

Quitting now, though, would only bring him back and give him the excuse he wanted to come down on Willi. Willi knew as much. He kept chopping for another twenty minutes. By then, the squad had enough wood for the next six months. It did if you listened to him tell it afterwards, anyhow.

He marveled that his palms weren't blistered when he did set down the axe. Part of that was the smooth, fine helve. And part of it was the thick calluses he'd acquired. Sure as the devil, soldiering toughened you up.

It also turned you into an accomplished thief. As soon as he got done, he started going through the houses in the village. Yeah, they'd already been picked over, but you never could tell what you'd find if you poked around a little. Some canned salmon, a little flask of what smelled like applejack, 250 francs somebody'd forgotten when he got out of town… A good scrounger could come up with all kinds of things other people had missed.

He'd share the salmon and the firewater. You didn't want to get greedy with stuff like that. Your buddies wouldn't stay buddies if you did. The French money went into a tunic pocket. You never could tell when that might come in handy. He came out into the late-afternoon sunshine, more than a little pleased with himself.

He came out into that sunshine at the exact moment a black Mercedes about as long as a light cruiser rumbled into the village. Two enormous men in black uniforms jumped out. Willi had been thinking soldiering toughened you. He might be tough, but he wouldn't have wanted to mess with either one of these SS behemoths. Something in the planes and angles of their faces said they not only knew all the dirty tricks but got off on them.

"You!" one of them rumbled, raising a hand roughly the size of a ham and pointing at him. "Come here!"

"What do you want?" Willi didn't move.

"To ask you some questions," the SS man said. "If you're lucky, we won't ask about your name or your pay number. Now get over here!"

Goddamn asphalt soldiers, Willi thought. The SS looked marvelous on parade. In the field… That was the Wehrmacht's place. But the bastards with the runes on their collars were Hitler's fair-haired boys. Willi ambled over to this pair. If he didn't, they could make him disappear, and nobody would ever know where he'd gone. "Well, what is it?" he said. "You boys better watch yourselves around here, you know? French guns can reach this far, easy."

The big goons traded glances. But nobody was shooting at them right this minute. They could seem brave, even to themselves. One pulled out a notebook and flipped it open. "Do you know a certain, ah, Wolfgang Storch?" he asked, and rattled off Storch's pay number.

"Name sounds kind of familiar." Willi stopped right there. He'd see the SS men in hell before he ratted on a friend. Wolfgang and he had saved each other's bacon more times than he could count. They'd shared cigarettes and socks. They'd sworn at Awful Arno together. Would these clowns understand any of that? Not a chance in church. Willi eyed them. "How come you want to know?"

"We don't have to tell you that," said the goon with the notebook.

The other one tried to be subtle. He wasn't very good at it: "Have you ever heard this Storch make comments that reflect unfavorably on our beloved Fuhrer or the National Socialist German Workers' Party?"

"Nope," Willi said at once. Everybody in the field always swore at the idiot politicians who'd put them in danger of getting their heads blown off. Would the SS men get that? Again, not a chance. Nope was safer.

Or so Willi thought, till the blackshirt with the notebook said, "If we can show that you are lying, the two of you will be judged guilty of conspiring against the Reich."

No talk of trials or anything like that. Just You will be judged guilty. And what would happen afterwards? Nothing good. Willi didn't need a road map or a compass to figure that out.

"You said it yourselves-everybody loves the Fuhrer," Willi said. "Nobody has anything bad to say about him." Nobody did where somebody who might blab could hear, anyway. But if the SS men really believed all the Party bullshit, they might think Willi meant it.

By the way their faces hardened, he'd laid it on too thick. The one with the notebook said, "We have reliable reports that this Storch has delivered disloyal utterances on repeated occasions." He could talk that way without even realizing what a jackass he sounded like.

"Well, I never heard him do it," Willi said.

They didn't believe him. He could see it in their pale, merciless eyes. That meant his goose was cooked, too. Then he caught a break. French artillery really did open up on the village. Willi'd never dreamt he could be glad to get shelled, but he was now.

"Hit the dirt!" he yelled, and flattened out himself.

Because the SS men were greenhorns, they stayed on their feet longer than they should have. When shells started bursting and fragments screeched past, they got the message. "Hail, Mary, full of grace!" one of them gabbled as he got down. Whoever'd said there were no atheists in foxholes had a pretty good idea of what he was talking about.

Willi didn't like getting up in the middle of a barrage, but he didn't like getting hauled off to Dachau, either. He hurried toward the last place where he'd seen Wolfgang: a trench fifty meters or so south of where the houses petered out. Behind him, a 105 round turned the blackshirts' Mercedes into burning scrap metal. He laughed out loud.

"Where are you going?" one of the SS men called after him.

"To fight. You wouldn't know about that, would you?" he answered. And he even meant it. The froggies were liable to follow up the shelling with an attack. But he also had other things on his mind.

To his vast relief, he found Wolfgang right away and jumped into the trench beside him. "You trying to get yourself killed?" Storch asked.

"No. I'm trying not to get you killed. The SS wants your ass," Willi said. "I always told you you talked too goddamn much."

"Who squealed?" Wolfgang got right down to brass tacks.

"They didn't say, but my money's on Baatz. Doesn't matter now. Get the fuck out of here. Go across the line and surrender to the Frenchies. You can sit out the rest of the war in a POW camp."

"They're liable to shoot me if I do," Wolfgang said. Surrendering was always tricky. If the guys on the other side didn't like your looks or couldn't be bothered with you, you were dead meat.

"You've got a chance that way," Willi answered. "What kind of chance do you have with the blackshirts?"

Storch's unhappy expression told exactly what kind of chance he had. He pumped Willi's hand. "You're a good guy. Wish me luck." He scrambled out of the trench and crawled toward the enemy positions a few hundred meters away.

"Luck," Willi whispered. Most of the French shells were long. If Wolfgang really got lucky, they'd blow up the SS goons. Even as the thought crossed Willi's mind, he feared it was too much to hope for. VACLAV JEZEK CAUTIOUSLY LIFTED his head. There was less to see than he'd hoped: the dust and smoke the bombardment had already kicked up obscured his view of later shell hits on the Nazi-held village. He ducked down again. "They're knocking the shit out of that place," he remarked.

"And so?" Benjamin Halevy didn't sound impressed. "Not like the German mamzrim don't have it coming."

A Czech fighting for his government-in-exile after the Nazis jumped on his country with both feet. A Jew fighting the regime that had been giving his people hell ever since it came to power. Who hated harder? They could argue about it. They did. They both despised the enemy enough for all ordinary purposes and then some.

Which didn't mean they didn't respect the soldiers in Feldgrau. Fierce in attack, the Germans were also stubborn in defense. They would have been less frightening if they weren't so good at what they did.

Vaclav popped up again. This time, he laid his antitank rifle on the dirt thrown up in front of the entrenchment. He didn't see any panzers, but the monster rifle made mincemeat-sometimes literally-of foot soldiers, too. "What's up?" Halevy asked him.

"Goddamn German crawling this way," Jezek answered. "I'm gonna ventilate the asshole." He took another quick look, then swore. The enemy soldier had disappeared behind a burnt-out armored car. No, here he came again. Vaclav swung the heavy rifle a hair to the right.

"Is it a real attack, or only the one guy?" the Jewish sergeant inquired. He raised his head, too. "I only see the one."

"Where you see one, there's usually a dozen you don't," Vaclav said. But he didn't pull the trigger. "This fucker isn't doing his best to hide, is he?"

"Nope. Maybe he's had enough of the war," Halevy said.

"I know I have. But he's a damn German," Vaclav said. Easier to think of the Landsers as mechanical men. You could break them, yes, but imagining them with mere human weaknesses came much harder.

It did for Vaclav, anyhow. But Halevy said, "Oh, they're people. They wouldn't be so scary if they weren't." The Czech wasn't sure of that: not even close. No matter whether he was or not, the Jew stuck his head above the trench lip again and yelled in German (which Vaclav hadn't known he spoke), "Throw away your rifle and get your sorry ass over here! You're vultures' meat if you don't!"

When Vaclav looked out, too, he saw that the Landser had tossed aside his Mauser. The fellow got to his feet and trotted toward the French trenches, his hands high and a shamed, kicked-dog grin on his face. "Ja, komm! Mach schnell!" Vaclav shouted. Talking to an enemy soldier the way he would to a waiter in a beer garden-or to a child or an animal-felt good.

The German made it snappy, all right. "I'm coming, I'm coming!" he said, as if he feared a bullet in the back. Maybe he did-and maybe he needed to. He let out what might have been a stifled sob as he jumped down into the trench. To make sure he didn't do anything stupid, Vaclav pointed the antitank rifle at his midsection. "Jesus!" the Landser yipped. "You shoot me with that thing, you can bury me in a coffee can afterwards."

"That's the idea," Halevy said from behind him. The Jew relieved him of the bayonet and potato-masher grenades on his belt, then added, "If you've got a holdout knife, hand it over. We find it on you, you'll never known what Red Cross food packages taste like." Slowly and carefully, the guy in field-gray pulled a slim blade from his left boot. Halevy took it. "That's all?"

"Ja," the German said. "My name is Wolfgang Storch. I'm a private." He rattled off his pay number. "That's as much as I've got to say to you, right?"

"If you know anything that matters, pal, you'll spill it." Vaclav made the rifle twitch. It would have started twitching soon anyhow; the damn thing was heavy. "The French don't like you bastards much better than I do."

Storch seemed to notice the smooth lines of his domed helmet for the first time. "Oh. A Czech," he said. Then he took a longer look at Benjamin Halevy. He didn't need long to work out what Halevy was, either. "And-" He stopped, gulping.

"Yeah. And," Halevy agreed grimly. "Why don't you start by telling us what the hell you're doing here?"

"Damn blackshirts were going to grab me, that's what," the German answered. "A buddy of mine tipped me off. We figured maybe you guys wouldn't shoot me." He licked his lips. He still wasn't sure about that.

"Why would the SS want you?" Vaclav asked.

Storch shrugged. "I talk too much. Everybody says so. I must've said something dumb where some cocksucker heard me and squealed. There's this one corporal who's the biggest asshole in the world. Chances are it was him." His hands-dirty, scarred, broken-nailed, callused, just like Vaclav's-folded into fists.

"What d'you think?" Jezek asked Halevy in Czech.

"It could be," the Jew answered in the same tongue. Storch's eyes said he didn't follow it. Halevy went on, "Not our worry either way. We just have to deliver him and let the fellows behind the line put the pieces together."

"Fair enough." Vaclav went back to German: "All right, Storch-we'll take you back. First things first, though. Cough up your cash, and your watch if you've got one."

"I do. Here." The Landser was fumblingly eager to hand it over. Vaclav had seen that before. New prisoners figured they'd get killed if they didn't let themselves be robbed. They were usually right, too. Storch also emptied out his wallet. He thrust bills at the Czech. "This is all the money I've got."

Most of it was in Reichsmarks, which were too scratchy even to make good asswipes. But he also had some francs. Then Halevy patted him down and took another wad of bills from a tunic pocket. "Nice try," the Jew said dryly.

"I-I'm sorry," Storch stammered.

"Tell me another one," Halevy answered. If he'd plugged the German for holding out, Vaclav wouldn't have said boo. But he only gestured with his rifle. "Get it in gear. If your little friends don't shell us on the way back, you're a POW."

Vaclav slung the antitank rifle as they headed away from the front. That was easier than lugging it in his arms-not easy, but easier. The gun could do all kinds of things an ordinary rifle couldn't, but it weighed a tonne.

A couple of poilus eyed the procession as they zigzagged along a communications trench. One of them called a question in French. Halevy answered in the same language. The poilu snorted. Halevy switched to German: "He asked where we got you, Storch. I said we won you in a poker game."

"Wouldn't you rather have got fifty pfennigs?" the Landser asked. He took Vaclav completely by surprise. The Czech broke up. Damned if a human being didn't lurk under the beetling brow of the German Stahlhelm.

They eventually found a couple of military policemen who were happy enough to take charge of Wolfgang Storch. They'd be less happy when they found out Vaclav and Halevy had already picked the German clean, but that was their hard luck-and maybe Storch's as well.

"Now-we just have to do that another million times, and we've won the fucking war," the Jew said as he and Vaclav started up toward the front-line trenches again.

"Should be easy," Jezek answered. He was damned if he'd let anybody outtry him.