"Marie, report."
"Acknowledged. Activity in the mosque, runners going out.
Want me to knock it down?"
"Radio?"
"Nothing on the direction-finder since I hit the room with the antennae."
"Hold on the mosque, they'd just put their H.Q. somewhere else, and we're going to need the 120 ammo later. Bring two of the heavies forward, I'll take them over; leave the other four in the line, shift positions, direct fire support on tetrarchy-leader direction. Use the 120's if we spot major targets; keep the road north under observation. And send in the Ronsons and satchelmen—we're going to have to burn and blast some of them out." A different series of clicks. "Tom, close in. Tetrarchy commanders, report."
"Einar here. Lisa's hit, 3rd Tetrarchy's senior deeurion's taken over. Working our way in southwest to southeast, then behind the mosque."
Damn
! He hoped she wasn't dead; she'd been first in line if
he
"inherited the plantation."
"John here. Same, northwest and hook."
"John, pull in a little and go straight—Tom's going to hit the northeast anyway. We'll split them. I'll be on your left flank.
Everybody remember, this is three-dimensional. Work your way down from the roofs as well as up; I'll establish fire positions on commanding locations, move 'em forward as needed. Over."
Eric raised his head over the crest of the rubble. The peculiar smell of fresh destruction was in the air, old dust and dirt and soiled laundry. Ruins needed time to achieve majesty, or even pathos; right after they had been fought over there was nothing but… seediness, and mess. Ahead was a narrow alleyway: nothing moved in it but a starved-looking mongrel, and an overturned basket of clothes that had barely stopped rocking.
The locals were going to earth, the crust of posts in the orchard had been overrun, and the bulk of the Fritz were probably bivouacked around the town square: it was the only place in town with anything approaching a European standard of building. Therefore, they would be fanning out toward the noise of combat. Therefore…
"Follow me," he said. McWhirter flicked out the bipod of his Holbars, settled it on the ridge and prepared for covering fire.
Eric rose and leaped down the shifting slope, loose stone crunching and moving beneath his boots. They went forward, alleys and doors, every window a hole with the fear of death behind it, leapfrogging into support positions. Two waves of potential violence, expanding toward their meeting place like quantum electron shells, waiting for an observer to make them real.
They were panting, bellies tightening for the expected hammer of a Fritz machine pistol that did not come. Then they were across the lane, slamming themselves into the rough wall, plastered flat. That put them out of the line of fire from the windows, but not from something explosive, tossed out. One of the troopers whirled out, slammed his boot into the door, passed on; another tossed a short-fuse grenade through as the rough planks jarred inward.
Blast and fragments vomited out; Eric and Sofie plunged through, fingers ready on the trigger, but not firing: nobody courted a ricochet without need. But the room beyond was bare, except for a few sticks of shattered furniture, a rough pole-ladder to the upper story… and a wooden trapdoor in the floor.
That raised a fraction of an inch; out poked a wooden stick with a rag that might once have been white. A face followed it, wrinkled, greybearded, emaciated and looking as old as time.
Somewhere below a child whimpered, and a woman's voice hushed it, in a language he recognized.
"Nix Schiessen!" the ancient quavered in pidgin-german.
"Stalino kaputt—Hitler kaputt—
urra
Drakanski!"
Despite himself, Eric almost grinned; he could hear a snuffle of laughter from Sofie. The locals seemed to have learned something about street fighting; also, their place in the scheme of things. The smile faded quickly. There was a bleak squalor to the room; it swelled sourly of privation, ancient poverty, fear. For a moment his mind was daunted by the thought of a life lived in a place such as this—at best, endless struggle with a grudging earth wearing you down into an ox, with the fruits kept for others. Scuttling aside from the iron hooves of the armies as they went trampling and smashing through the shattered garden of their lives, incomprehensible giants, warriors from nowhere.
The
lesson being
, he thought grimly,
that this is defeat, so avoid it
.
"Lochos upstairs," he snapped. "Roof, then wait for me." He motioned the greybeard up with the muzzle of his assault rifle, switching to fluent Circassian.
"You, old man, come here. The rest get down and
stay
down."
The man came forward, shuffling and wavering, in fear and hunger both, to judge from the look of the hands and neck and the way his ragged khaftan hung on his bones. But he had been a tall man once, and the sound of his own tongue straightened his back a little.
"Spare our children, honored sir," he began. The honorific he used was
uork
,, it meant "Lord," and could be used as an endearment in other circumstances. "In the name of Allah the Merciful, the Compassionate—"
The Draka cut him off with a chopping hand, ignoring memories that twisted under his lungs. "If you want mercy, old one, you must earn it. This is the
Dar 'al Harb
, the House of War.
Where are the Germanski
?"
The instructions were valuable—clear, concise, flawed only by a peasant's assumption that every stone in his village was known from birth. Dismissed, he climbed back to his family, into the cellar of their hopes. McWhirter paused above the trapdoor, hefted a grenade and glanced a question. At the Centurion's headshake he turned to the ladder, disappointment obvious in the set of his shoulders.
"McWhiter doesn't like ragheads much, does he, Centurion?"
Sofie said as she ran antenna line out the window; the intelligence would have to be spread while it was fresh.
Inwardly, she made a moue of distaste. McWhirter was a veteran, and a man with those medal ribbons was due respect…
but there was something about him that made her queasy, as if-As if he were like that thing in the Yank magazine—
what was
it called
, Amazing Stories?
Something eaten out of him, so that
he wasn't really human anymore
. Not that she was going to say much—the old bastard was always going on about how women were too soft for front-line formations. A roar distracted her for an instant. She looked up, saw wings slash past only a hundred meters up.
Ours
, she thought: Rhino twin-engine ground attack ships, the "flying tanks." Heading north at low altitude, and three flights went over before she glanced down once more.
Going to be some surprised and unhappy Fritz down there in
the plains
, she thought.
With a grunt of relief, she turned and rested the weight of the radio on a lip of rock; the Centurion was facing her, that way they could cover each other's backs. She looked at his face, thoughtful and relaxed now, and remembered the hot metal flying past them with a curious warm feeling low in her stomach.
It would be… unbearable if that taut perfection were ruined into ugliness, and she had seen that happen to human bodies too often. And…
What if he was wounded? Not serious, just a leg uound, and
I was the one to carry him out
. Images (lashed though her mind—gratitude in the cool grey eves as she lifted his head to her canteen, and—
Oh, shut the fuck up
, she told her mind, then started slightly; had she spoken aloud? Good, no.
Almighty Thor, woman, are
you still sixteen or what? The last time you had daydreams like
that it was about pulling the captain of the field-hockey team
out of a burning building. What you really wanted was bed
.
That was cheering, since she
had
gotten to bed with
her
.
Eric stood, lost in thought. His mind was translating raw information into tactics and possibilities, while another layer answered the comtech's question about McWhirter: "Well, he
was
in Afghanistan," he said. 'Bad fighting. We had to kill three-quarters to get the rest to give up. McWhirter was there eight years, lost a lot of friends."
Sofie shrugged; she was six months past her nineteenth birthday, and that war had been over before her tenth. "How come you understand the local jabber, then?" And to the radio:
"Testing, acknowledge."
"Oh, my first concubine was a Circassian; Father gave her to me as a fourteenth birthday present. I was the envy of the county—she cost three hundred aurics." He thrust the memory from him. There was the work of the day to attend to.
"Next .
* * *
Standartenfuhrer
Felix Hoth awoke, mumbling, fighting a strangling enemy that he only gradually realized was a mass of sweat-soaked bedclothes. Panting, he swung his feet to the floor and hung his head in his hands, the palm-heels pressed against his eyes.
Lieber Herr Gott
, but he'd thought the dreams had stopped. Perhaps it was the vodka last night; he hadn't done that in a while, not since the first month after Moscow. He was back in the tunnels, in the dark, but alone; he could hear their breathing as they closed in on him
and he could not even scream
…
"Herr Standartenfuhrer?" The question was repeated twice before it penetrated. It was one of his Slav girls—Valenrina, or Tina, whatever; holding out a bottle of Stolichnaya and a glass.
The smell of the liquor seized him with a sudden fierce longing, then combined with the odors of sweat and stale semen to make his stomach twist.
"No!" he shouted. His hand sent it crashing to the floor; she stood, cringing, to receive the backhanded slap. "You stupid Russki bitch, how many times do I have to tell you, not in the morning! Fetch coffee and food. Schnell!"
The effort of rage exhausted him; he fought the temptation of a collapse back onto the four-poster bed. Instead, he forced his muscles into movement, walking to the dresser and splashing himself with water from the jug, pouring more from the spirit-heater and beginning to shave. Sometimes he thought she was more trouble than she was worth, that he should find a good orderly, and only send for her when he needed a woman. You expected an
unter-mensch
to be stupid, but it was what, five months now since he had grabbed her out of that burning schoolhouse in Tula, and she still couldn't speak more than a few words of German. His Russian was better. And she was supposed to have been a teacher!
It showed that Reichsfuhrer Himmler was right: intellectual training had nothing to do with real intelligence—that was in the blood. Or… sometimes he wondered if she was as dull as she seemed. Perhaps it would be better just to liquidate her. Two were enough, surely, or there were thousands more…
No. That was how Kube had gotten it, up around Minsk: one of them had smuggled an antipersonnel mine under the bed and blown them both to bits. Frightened but not completely desperate, that was the ticket.
Breakfast repaired his spirits; the ration situation was definitely picking up, not like last winter when they'd all been gnawing black bread in the freezing dark. Real coffee, now that the U-boats were keeping the English too busy for blockades; good bacon and eggs and butter and cream. He glanced around the room with satisfaction as he ate; it was furnished with baroque elegance. Pyatigorsk had been a health resort for Tsarist nobles with a taste for medicinal springs at the foot of the Caucasus, and the Commissars had not let it run down. Not bad for a Silesian peasant's son, brought up to touch the cap to the
Herr Rittermeister
, the Waffen-SS offered a career open to the talents, all right. No social distinctions at the Bad Tolz Junkerschul, the officer's training academy. No limits to how high a sound Aryan could rise; in the Wehrmacht he'd have been lucky to make Unteroffizier, with some traitorous monocled
"gentleman" telling him what to do.
Well, piss on the regular Army and their opinion of Felix Hoth. Felix Hoth now commanded a regiment of SS-Division
"Liebstandarte Adolf Hitler." The Leader's own Guards, the victors of Minsk, Smolensk, Moscow, Kharkov, Astrakhan. The elite of the New Order… and just finishing its conversion from a motorized infantry brigade to a Panzer division. He glanced at the mantel clock with its plump cupids. 0530. Good, another half hour and he'd roust the second Panzergrenadier battalion out—surprise inspection and a four-kilometer run. Good lads, but the new recruits needed stiffening. Not many left of the cadre—not many of the men who had jumped off from Poland a year ago. And as soon as they finished refitting they'd be back in the line—real fighting out on the Sverdlosk front instead of this chickenshit anti-partisan work.
The situation reports had come up with breakfast; they were a real pleasure. The trickle of equipment from the captured Russian factories was turning into a steady flow, not like the old days when the Wehrmacht had grudged the SS every bayonet, and they'd had to make do with Czech and French booty. The SS
could improvise; if the supply lines to the Fatherland were long, seize local potential! Ivan equipment: their armor and artillery were first-rate. He winced at the memory of trying to stop that first Russian T-34 with a 37mm antitank gun.
Burning pine forest
, the smell like a mockery of Christmas fires. Burning trucks and human flesh, the human wave of Russian troops in their mustard-yellow uniforms, arms linked.
Urra! Urra
! The machine guns scythed them down, artillery firing point-blank, blasting huge gaps in their line, bits and pieces of human flung through the forest and hanging from the trees… and the tank, low, massive, unstoppable, its broad tracks grinding through the swamp.
Aim, range 800, pull the lanyard… crack-
whang!
He'd frozen for a moment in sheer disbelief, the reload in his hand. A clean hit, and the thick-sloped plate had shed it into the trees like…
like a tennis ball. Left only a shallow gouge, crackling and red as it cooled. Coming on, shot after shot rebounding, grinding over the gun, cutting Friedrich in half.