George Patton climbed out of his jeep, his throat tight with emotion. All around were the battered remnants of formations that had fought valiantly against an overwhelming storm of force. These men were German, not American, but they had fought as a part of Patton’s command, and his heart broke at the proof of their suffering.
Some of them were still coming down the road from Oranienburg, limping, supporting their comrades. Others were collapsed in various stages of exhaustion. The seriously wounded had been moved into hospitals, but those with minor hurts waited here listlessly for their next assignment.
Rommel was visible at the other side of the broad field, talking to a group of men, then moving on to another. Patton could see that the Desert Fox left his men standing a little taller, looking a little better, after just a few words.
Finally the field marshal came over to the American general. Patton guessed that the Desert Fox had not been to sleep; he had heard that Rommel had been driving around, gathering the shattered elements of his three divisions, pulling them back to the northern environs of the city.
“Zhukov has cut the highway, hasn’t he?” Rommel said; a young aide translated for him.
“Yep. Got word before dawn. British Airborne troops have a line south of the road, and it looks like they’re stopping short of that.”
The field marshal shook his head. His face was stained with soot and grime, and his injured eye was watering, seemed red and inflamed. Uncharacteristically, Rommel took off his hat and rubbed a hand over the sweaty strands of his thinning hair.
“We still have the autobahn, and Highway Twenty-Four,” Patton said, going for the positive news. “The Russians are forty miles away from them.”
“For now,” Rommel noted, and Patton felt the chill of that truth in his own gut.
Krigoff put his arm around Paulina’s shoulders, thrilled to the touch as she melded close to him. The spring night had descended, bringing a blanket of
moist and chilly air, but the young colonel felt only the heat of his personal, and political, passions.
“It was a great victory,” she said, gesturing to the shattered, burned-out hulks of German tanks that dotted the ground. “But only against the Germans? Do we not dare to attack all of the capitalist lackeys?”
Krigoff allowed himself a private chuckle. “Ah, do not judge prematurely,” he said. “I think you will see that, tomorrow, Comrade Marshal Zhukov has a little surprise planned for our former allies.”
She pulled away from him. He wondered at first if it was a playful gesture, then saw that she was walking toward one of the burned-out panzers, apparently deep in thought. He followed, biting back his impatience, and was surprised when she spun suddenly to face him.
“It is a parachute attack?” she asked bluntly.
He was taken aback. “I—I am not at liberty to say!” He found the beginnings of outrage. “We shouldn’t even be having this discussion—”
“Oh, it’s all right,” she said. “I know some officers in the Fifty-second Parachute Battalion. They are mindful of security, but I could see that something is up.”
Krigoff was torn between a stern sense of security, a desire to impress Paulina with his own knowledge, and a surprising, deep-seated storm of jealousy that had erupted when she mentioned the parachute officers. He tried to settle on a middle ground.
“Of course, we all have to be aware of security considerations. But I can see that I am giving you no new information if I but confirm that your observations, your instincts, may well be correct. I trust that these parachute officers have been quarantined, if they are about to embark on a mission?”
“Oh, quite,” she said, then surprised him again by leaning upward to kiss him, lightly, on the lips.
“Captain! You’d better have a look at this!”
Chuck Porter heard the alarm in the sergeant’s voice, and ambled over to the office door, trying to be unobtrusive as he listened. Fortunately, the men of the Eighty-second had accepted him as a regular feature around their HQ and other offices, so he had relatively free run of the great airport, which—now that the runways had been cleared—had been the landing point for a steady string of transport aircraft.
“Whattya got, Mac?” asked the duty officer, ambling over to have a look. There was a low whistle of amazement. “What the hell is going on? There must be a thousand bogies, to make the screen wash out like that!” The captain swiveled, shouted across the large office, which was located atop the terminal at the airport. “Jake—what’s the weather? Anything funky going on east of here? Rainstorms? Big fronts? Anything?”
“No, captain. Clear skies—can’t even see a cloud out there.”
“Shit. Mac, what do you make of it?”
The operator shook his head. “I don’t know, Captain. But if I had to guess, I’d say the Russians are putting a helluva lot of planes in the air. And they look to be coming this way.”
“All right.” The captain was moving across the room now, but Porter could still hear him in his agitation. “Get me Third Army HQ on the horn!” he was shouting. “We’ve got a big problem over here … .”
“They’re tracking the column. They have a count of more than a thousand multiengine aircraft, and at least that many fighters flying as escort. Right now, their course seems to be taking them south of Berlin, General,” Beetle Smith reported to the Supreme Commander.
“What the hell are they up to?” Eisenhower fumed.
American and British fighters had been scrambling in waves ever since the first reports had come in from Third Army. Naturally, they had first expected a bombing raid against the besieged cities, and there were some five hundred P-51s flying circles over the German capital right now, ready to start shooting
if this proved to be a Russian air raid. But that, at least, seemed not to be the case.
“Any visual confirmation yet?” Ike asked.
“Reports are that a few pilots have started to close it, but they’ve been jockeyed aside by Russki fighters who get right in their path. Our boys have dived away, rather than risk the collisions.”
“We need more information! In the meantime, get every fighter we have into the air. I want this formation shadowed every mile of their flight path. And try again to get through to Zhukov’s headquarters—and to our boys in London! See if they can learn anything out of the embassy in Moscow, anything at all about what’s happening.”
The door opened. Kay Summersby came in with a sheet of paper. “Sorry to interrupt, General, but this looks important.”
“Thanks, Irish,” Ike said, warming enough to offer a smile while he took the newest report.
“Damn, this is a new wrinkle!” he declared, passing the page to Beetle Smith. “A couple of our flyboys threw caution to the winds and went flying right through the Russian formation.”
“Transport planes? A thousand transports, in a sky train?” Smith looked puzzled. “And they’re not going to Berlin. Look at this position—they’re already west of the city.”
“This has got to be an airborne operation,” Eisenhower said. “But what’s the objective?”
Summersby was just leaving, but stepped aside to let another orderly come into the room, with yet another report.
“What is it?” demanded Ike.
“The Russian planes are turning north,” the sergeant reported, glancing over the text. “They’re west of Potsdam, but now changing course.”
“They’re after Highway Twenty-Four!” the Supreme Commander deduced immediately. His heart sank at the thought of the quandary facing him: Surely those planes were filled with thousands of Russians soldiers, and they were relatively defenseless now. If the P-51s tore into them, who knew how many would die? Certainly the landing would be disrupted, and …
And Zhukov would have the best excuse he could ask for to attack. He could claim that the Americans had fired the first shots—indeed, had massacred his airborne troops—and he could roll in, crush Third Army, and claim Berlin for his own.
If the American fighters didn’t attack? Ike looked at the map. Clearly he stood to lose another of the roads leading into Berlin, leaving only the autobahn as a supply link. But still, there might not be a shooting war, not yet.
“What are your orders, General?”
He realized that Beetle Smith was watching him, and once again the Supreme Commander felt the ultimate loneliness of his position. He sighed, threw the dispatch onto the floor in disgust.
“Keep an eye on the bastards, as close as possible without triggering accidents. But don’t start shooting yet. We’re going to see what Uncle Joe is up to.”
Mickey Davis was a master scrounger. He was an old corporal—he had been sergeant, twice, busted back to private both times—and he was content with his role in this man’s army. Now he was driving a two-ton truck, a very nice improvement over the jeep that had been his faithful steed for most of the drive across Germany. But he had learned that, with a truck, his capacity for cargo—and, hence, profit—was dramatically improved.
Corporal Davis had been fortunate enough to get a job that was well in line with his talents. He was actually an official scrounger for his supply company, and neither his platoon sergeant nor his company commander were inclined to ask him too many questions about how he got his work done. That was just the way Davis liked it, because it gave him the freedom to do what he was doing today.
The big truck rumbled along the highway, going toward Berlin. In the back he had several radios, a dozen crates of rations, and twenty jerry cans filled with gasoline, all castoff material that he had found along the highway, in vehicles that had broken down and been left behind by the convoys of the Red Ball Express—the great trucking caravans that hauled supplies from the great ports, especially Antwerp, to the far-flung spearheads of the Allied Expeditionary Forces. That cargo, he could claim truthfully, was just proof that he was doing his job, making sure that nothing too valuable got left behind.
His real treasure was stored in a couple of cases up near the cab, plain crates marked TOOLS. One of them was completely filled with cigarettes, which were already becoming the currency of choice in postwar Europe. With them, he could buy women, beer, or anything else from Germans, and they weren’t bad for bargaining with the Brits, either. The second crate was even more valuable, however: That one rattled slightly from the bottles of fine brandy stacked there. It had a false bottom, with something like ten thousand dollars’ worth of gold and silver concealed beneath that; the booty of a few of his most lucrative transactions during the last nine months.
Mickey Davis would not be coming home from this war a poor man.
He spotted another target up ahead, a truck much like his own that was parked on the shoulder of the road, with the hood up. Probably just overheated, Davis figured, but the boys in the express were in too much of a hurry to take time out for such details. No doubt the driver hopped into another
vehicle—Davis was unique, in that he usually traveled alone—and ridden on to Berlin, where he would report the breakdown. Sooner or later a maintenance crew would arrive to either fix the truck where it sat, or haul it to some motor pool for more involved work.
That suited Mickey just fine; he only needed five minutes with the broken-down truck in order to do his job. He slowed down, pulled over, and braked to a stop a dozen feet behind the other truck. The canvas flap on the back was loosely tied, but there was no sign of anyone left behind to guard it. That was not a surprise; what German civilian in his right mind was going to mess with the US Army?
He climbed right in the back and looked around, cursing as he saw that the bed of the truck had been picked pretty clean. Pushing back the flap, he was about to jump out and go around to check the cab when he heard the sound of an engine. He looked up and down the highway, couldn’t see anyone coming, but the sound continued to swell. Not just one engine, he realized, but lots of them.
When he looked up, he saw the airplanes, a great train of them growling through the clear blue sky. He had never been big on aircraft identification—that was too much like studying—but he guessed these were Allied bombers, returning from some raid or another. Maybe the war wasn’t quite as much over as he thought it was.
Then he saw the parachutes, scores, then hundreds of them popping into sight. They were clearly arrayed above the highway, and as they drifted earthward Davis figured that he was in the middle of some kind of huge drill. Several soldiers landed very nearby, crunching into the ground with force that seemed like it should have broken their legs. But they bounced to their feet, reaching for their rifles as if this was a real battlefield situation.
It was only then that Mickey started to notice some odd differences. Their uniforms were not quite olive drab, and those guns—he had never seen rifles like that before.
“Hey, guys,” he said, waving his hand and walking toward them. “What’s going—”
He never heard the gunshot, nor felt the bullet that killed him.
Franz Grubhof had been waiting for this moment for more years than he could remember … since before the start of the war, before even the ascendancy of Hitler to the rulership of Germany. Grubhof was a dedicated communist, and he had spent nearly a lifetime nourishing, cherishing that belief, and waiting for the day when he could strike a blow in the name of his cause.
That day had arrived.
His orders had been delivered by the man who was now in the rowboat with him, the stranger who had known the proper passwords—“Red sky tonight?”—and thus had been welcomed into Grubhof’s little apartment. From there they had gone to a boathouse on one of Potsdam’s many lakes, where they had encountered other members of the cell. They had paired up, two men—or women; Franz had noticed a couple of females among the two dozen provocateurs—per boat. Concealed in picnic baskets beneath the seats were strange packages, with timers. Grubhof knew that these were bombs.
Now, as they glided across the dark waters, he began to understand their target. There was a large span of concrete overhead, a causeway that ran for more than a mile through this shallow lake. Over that span passed the autobahn, the main highway connecting Berlin to the west.
Under that span, poking carefully among the sturdy concrete pilings, were twelve little rowboats, and twenty-four dedicated German communists.
“What the hell?” Frank Ballard charged out of the mess tent and looked to the south. Men were coming out of all the division’s buildings, looking in the same direction.
The sound of guns was loud, and all too close. “There must be a thousand pieces shooting down there,” murmurmed Major Diaz, with his artillerist’s ear. “They’re plastering the fields south of town.”
“We don’t have anyone down there, now, do we?” asked Ballard, knowing that any unfortunate persons caught in the blast zone were most likely already dead.
“Not that I know of. Smiggy’s men pulled back a few days ago—they’re still in the city.”
Ballard nodded. Smiggs was not his concern, not right now. “Get me some eyes out there,” he called, and a couple of privates took off in jeeps. “The rest of the combat command is going on full alert.”
An hour later he had his report: The barrage was intense, and it was slowly creeping northward, toward Luckenwalde—and the bivouac area of the Nineteenth Armored. Now the rounds were falling among the sheds and cottages at the fringe of the little town, and Ballard ordered his pickets to back up, out of harm’s way.
“Do you want me to start shooting back?” asked Diaz, getting ready to head back to his batteries, which were posted in several fields north of town.
Ballard, who had been unable to get through to Third Army HQ, shook his head. “You said they’re shooting a thousand guns at us? I don’t think they’d even notice your fifteen barrels shooting back. No, we’re going to have to skedaddle out of here.”
In fifteen minutes CCA was on the move, all the men riding in trucks, jeeps, and half-tracks, or on top of the tanks. They pulled out slowly, but within a few minutes after their departure the whole center of Luckenwalde was under fire. From a nearby hilltop Ballard watched the buildings that had been his HQ and mess hall for the last week get blasted into kindling.
“It’s like they’re herding us away, but not trying to kill us,” he told Wakefield, when they finally established a radio connection.
“Well, hell. Stay out in front of the barrage, but try to keep an eye on ’em,” the division CO replied. “We’ve lost two of our three roads into Berlin. The only one left is the autobahn, and you can bet your ass we’re going to fight for it if they get that far.”
The formation withdrew to the north throughout the night, and the barrage chased after them. No one was killed, but the forward progress of the Russian shelling was inexorable, and frustrating. By dawn, Ballard’s HQ company was coming up on one of the lakes of Potsdam. He could see the long bridge of the autobahn before him, stretching across the placid water, and he knew they would have to be prepared to fight.
He was just about to order his men into deployments when he heard a massive explosion behind him. Ballard whirled, worried that the Russian attack had gotten behind him. There was no sign of anything, except a cloud of smoke drifting across the water. Only when that smoke started to clear did he realize the stark truth:
The autobahn bridge was gone.