Fox On The Rhine (14 page)

“That assumes once again that the USSR is an expansionistic power, but there’s no evidence whatsoever for that. They’ve minded their own business and kept the peace unless attacked. So why on earth would they even consider making peace with their historical enemies?”

“Because Himmler will make them an offer too good to refuse,” said Sanger.

Colonel Cook leaned across the table and took the pipe out of his mouth. “Sanger, I’m afraid I have to agree with Keegan on this one. That’s just too far-fetched.”

Sanger shrugged. “I’m not sure I’m right either. I just can’t think of another move for Himmler, and I know he’s got some kind of move planned.”

The colonel grinned. “Better be careful, son,” he said. “If you keep talking like a crackpot, you’ll never get that combat transfer you asked for.”

Luftwaffe Airbase, West of Lublin, Poland, 2130 hours GMT

Paul Krueger lifted the bottle, let the clear liquid trickle into his glass. It was potato vodka, really vile stuff, but he tossed off the contents in a single, burning gulp, allowing the caustic liquor to sear its way down his throat, to rage like fire in his belly.

The pilot was already drunk, but nowhere near drunk enough. He didn’t know if there was enough vodka in the world to deaden the impact of the event that had at first stunned, then horrified him, and ultimately left him grasping for any kind of meaning, of purpose, in his existence. His mind still reeled with the shocking news, the assassination that had pulled the rug out from under him.

At first he had refused to believe the radio reports, had turned furiously on those of his mates in the Jagdgruppe who had dared to ponder aloud the implications of Hitler’s death. They were too afraid of him to argue. Then, when his colonel had finally received confirmation from Berlin, Krueger had wandered the airfield for hours, until finally he had found himself here, at the humble farmhouse that had been commandeered as a drinking hall for the pilots and officers of the fighter group.

“Mein führer!” He whispered the phrase, fought against the tears that stung his eyes, knowing that he could not reveal his sentiments here, when there were a dozen other pilots sitting quietly at the other tables. Even now, a few of them cast surreptitious stares at Krueger. Not that it was unusual to see him drinking alone--Hauptmann Paul Krueger had no friends--but it was strange to see the usually domineering ace working so hard at impairing his awareness.

He could feel them looking at him, and he wanted to kill them for it. They couldn’t know that it wasn’t his mental acuity, his keen and nimble brain, that he tried to obscure. It was the anguish that threatened to shatter his heart.

Krueger sneered at a couple of majors sitting nearby, and the older officers quickly averted their looks, muttering quietly between themselves. They were fools, the pilot knew--they couldn’t understand the impact of Hitler’s death upon their future, upon the future of all der Vaterland. Then he had an even darker thought: perhaps they were not fools, but traitors!

It had come as no surprise to him that there were those among the Luftwaffe, no doubt throughout all Germany, who were relieved and gladdened when they heard the news of Colonel von Stauffenberg’s treachery. Some of his own countrymen thought the man a hero, instead of the vilest kind of coward, one who turned against the flag, the uniform, the nation of his birth. But Krueger knew the truth. He was certain that the count would burn in hell for his betrayal of the Aryan ideal, of everything that had formed the high purpose of the German nation during the last eleven years.

Krueger lurched to his feet, sending the chair slamming backward to the floor and drawing looks from all across the dingy room. He raised his empty glass, ready to hurl it at one of the majors, and saw the man’s eyes widen in fear. With a harsh bark of laughter, Krueger dropped the glass to the floor and staggered out the door.

He remembered, and relished, the terror that had flashed across the other man’s face. He knew that many people found him frightening, and he cherished that sense of power. They should fear him--and they did.

How many people had he killed during this war? More than he could count, far more than the 150 pilots he had blasted from the sky. His face twisted into a tight smile as he recalled the long lines of refugees on the Polish highways five years ago, the way they had scattered before his bullets as his invincible fighter had roared along, stitching the roadway, the vehicles, the bodies with a lethal thread of gunfire. And before them there had been numberless Spanish peasants, members of a subrace every bit as low as the Slavs, who had felt the lash of his weaponry as he learned the potential of his splendid fighter, had exercised his marksmanship against the antlike creatures who fled the violence of the war that ripped at their country.

And finally there had been the fat Soviet columns, and the cities and the encampments, that had suffered under the righteous fire of his attacks. Sometimes his Me-109 had carried bombs, and Krueger knew of no greater thrill than to drop a lethal explosive into a fuel dump, to watch the hellish fireball billow into the sky, flames tickling the tail of his fighter as he raced away. Other times fusillades of bullets had speckled his aircraft, but never once had they nicked his skin... always the killing violence remained beyond him, burning and shattering his enemies while sparing his own life.

But it had not been enough. No matter how many he killed, in the end the Russians had been too many, and the rest of the Germans too weak, to achieve the victory that morality required--no, demanded.

He found himself in front of the operations building, and stumbled through the front door to find the clerks busily cramming papers into a metal stove. Flames crackled, hot and orange through the open door, and the office workers and a young lieutenant came to attention at the sight of the pilot.

“What’re you doing?” demanded Krueger.

“The Russians,” Leutnant Schimmer explained hastily. “They’ll be here within a few days--the colonel told us to start burning the documents.”

“The colonel is a coward and a fool!” snapped Krueger, infuriated at the defeatist attitude. He was about to lunge forward and push the clerks away from the stove when he was startled by a calm voice from the shadows in the far side of the office.

“Now, now, Paul... it’s no doubt remarks like those that explain why you’re still a lowly hauptmann, after all these years, all those kills.” The speaker drew deeply on a big cigar, the end glowing like a cherry of fire, and the drunken pilot was stunned by an instant recognition.

“Galland... is that you?” he asked, gaping stupidly.

“General Galland, if you please,” replied the other pilot, moving forward so that Krueger could get a good look at him. “My face has been rearranged a bit since the days of the Condor Legion, courtesy of a Messerschmidt instrument panel,” added the commander of all the Luftwaffe’s fighter forces, now acting head of the entire Luftwaffe following Göring’s death. He offered the stunned and drunken Krueger a cigar. “Perhaps you’d take a walk with me?” He gestured to the still-open door, and together the two aces strolled into the night.

They paused for a moment while Krueger lit his cigar and drew a deep, satisfying draft. “It has been long since I’ve tasted anything like that...it is a pleasure,” he admitted, vaguely aware that his foul mood had been whisked away like the smoke of the burning tobacco.

They resumed their measured strides, smoking companionably as they walked along the flight line, now the province of only a half dozen battered 109s.

“I came looking for you,” Adolf Galland remarked, after a few minutes. “Though I’d hoped to find you in better condition.”

“Why?” demanded Krueger, his old bitterness once again rising. “My plane is grounded, the engine useless. And now we have nothing left to fly for!”

“There I think you are wrong. Tell me, I remember from Spain that you were once a fine engineer... do you think you have retained your edge?”

The hauptmann shrugged. The fiery ember from his cigar cast an orange glow on his face. “I have been killing the enemies of the Reich for eight years. But yes, I think I still know how to use a slide rule.”

“I have a job for you, if you are willing... and it is something that might actually make a difference, for Germany, for ‘the Reich,’ “ Galland stated, allowing a trace of irony to bracket the last words. “I will need your engineering talents, but it is also a chance for you to fly--and to pilot an airplane the likes which neither you nor the rest of the world has ever seen.”

“One of the führer’s secret weapons?” asked Krueger. He knew about the Vengeance Weapon, the V-1 flying bomb that had just gone into operation. What else was in the arsenal? He felt immediately sobered, and his nearly broken heart was quickening in his breast.

“I will be visiting other bases on the eastern front,” the general of fighters said evasively, “gathering the best men I can find. But I want you to come to Landsberg airbase by August first. There you will learn more, all you want to know.”

“I will be there, mein General,” replied Krueger. Impulsively he snapped out his arm.
“Heil Hitler!”

“Yes,” Galland replied, lifting his own cigar to the brim of his cap in a return salute. “Now finish smoking that, Paul... and try to get some sleep.”

Wehrmacht Hospital, Vesinet, France, 2150 hours GMT

He couldn’t sleep, not even with the drugs. He could feel everyone being quiet around him, but his mind kept circling in endless loops--the explosion, the roadside tree being blown apart, the car tumbling over and over. It was from the air, always from the air. And it was all his responsibility--his soldiers, his plans, his campaign failing, the forces of the Fatherland retreating, dying, defeated. He fought to concentrate, to focus his mind, and above all to keep himself from plunging down to utter despair.

The nurse in starched white, her voice barely a whisper, drew his attention to the door of the room.

“Herr Feldmarschall, Baron von Esebeck has been waiting outside for several hours... I told him that on doctor’s orders you were not well enough to have visitors, but he was most--” “Inform the doctor that I outrank him. And bring the baron in at once!”

Using his “general’s voice” strained his reserves of energy, but he was pleased that the nurse responded with obedience--and von Esebeck came through the door moments later. By that time the wounded man had pushed himself to a sitting position and shifted his legs off the side of his bed. He felt a wave of dizziness and planted both hands firmly on the mattress. Slowly his thoughts cleared, at least somewhat. He felt as if his head were stuffed with cotton, that everything was distant and moving just out of his mental grasp.

“My Field Marshal!” The war correspondent approached with a look of concern. “It’s splendid to see you so well--but surely you should lie down; I beg you not to exert yourself on my account!”

“I’m glad you came, my good man. Now, don’t make me regret the welcome by sounding like my surgeons!” Rommel smiled, though the twisting of his wounded face immediately distorted the expression into a grimace. “Truly, they’d have me seek permission before I so much as twitch an eyebrow.”

‘They tell me it’s a miracle--Professor Albrecht says he’ll have to revise all his lectures, that you shouldn’t be alive after such an attack.”

“Nonsense. The Allies will not remove me so easily. Now listen: nobody will give me any news around here. How do we stand in Normandy?” It was an effort to sound normal. He wondered what was behind the baron’s startled expression: am I sounding slow, stupid, an invalid?

Von Esebeck’s eyes widened. “You have heard nothing, these last days?”

“Of consequence? No. Just that drivel about me having no right to be alive.” Rommel remembered another question that had drifted through his mind these last days. “And Corporal Daniel, how is he doing?”

“I’m sorry, Field Marshal. Your driver was killed; regrettably, he died from his wounds the night after the attack.”

“Blast it all.” Another good man gone, and as always, no time for regret.

“Normandy... the line holds, as desperately as ever. We weathered a great attack from the British--they bombed a square mile of countryside into a waste, nothing but mounds of dirt...Von Esebeck was strangely hesitant. “That is, you have heard nothing about the führer?”

“What--no?” Rommel stiffened perceptibly, anticipating the news.

“Assassinated, by Colonel Claus von Stauffenberg. Three days ago.”

Now the general leaned back onto the bed, enveloped in a wave of fatigue that was perhaps only shock in thin disguise. But truly, he was not shocked--he had known about Stauffenberg and some of the others, noble and honorable army officers who had considered and planned for this dire step. Now they had acted. And I was in my bed, he thought frustratingly.

Rommel had never been close to the führer. He had at one time admired and respected him, though he had little use for Nazis in general. Hitler had a magnetic personality, a remarkable memory for any book he’d ever read, and surprising physical courage. Rommel had commanded the escort battalion when the Germans entered Prague in 1938. He remembered that Hitler had asked him, “What would you do if you were in my place?” and Rommel replied, “I should get into an open car and drive through the streets without an escort.” To everyone’s surprise--especially his guards--Hitler had taken Rommel’s advice.

It was after his return to Germany at the end of the North African campaign that his opinion of Hitler had turned increasingly negative. At first he’d believed Hitler to be a good man who inexplicably surrounded himself with sycophants, but his eyes slowly opened. He was one of the few who dared to argue with the führer directly, and when he saw that the führer himself was responsible for many of the decisions the Desert Fox thought were leading Germany to ruin and degradation, he was horrified.

Never a particularly political man, he had brooded over the matter for some months. He was aware that others shared his views, but he had made no effort to become involved with them. Instead, he’d turned himself back to his work, although with an increasing sense of futility and despair.

“Has the news been released--do the Allies know? Are talks under way toward an armistice?”

“Well... it has been announced to Germany and the world. Reichsführer Himmler made the declaration. The SS have backed him, of course, and the Wehrmacht... the Wehrmacht seems agreeable to the arrangement, for the time being.” Rommel shook his head, weary, fogged, but still able to see the overall picture from the correspondent’s carefully chosen words. “You are unusually circumspect, my good reporter. When we were together in Africa you had a better way with the truth, at least to my face. Surely you mean to say that Himmler controls the government, that he is our Hitler’s successor.”

Von Esebeck blanched, then shook his head with a wry chuckle. “The field marshal is refreshingly direct, as ever. But you should take it for a fact that things are very much as they were before.”

“Then the war is lost.” Rommel made the statement in a plain voice, though inside he felt another wave of the debilitating depression. “Our tanks are better than the Allies’, our soldiers more tenacious... but the war is lost because we lost the skies, and everything else lies under the skies. Well, what decisions have been taken? Perhaps with Hitler removed the ending may be brought about more swiftly.”

“Now I must insist you be discreet!” urged von Esebeck, his voice dropping. “Give no one a reason to accuse you of disloyalty. There have been no arrests yet, but everyone knows it’s only a matter of time. And when the Gestapo decides to act... well … “

“Ach, you’re right. I shouldn’t go looking for trouble when it will come and find me soon enough.”

“Now, please, I have disturbed you too much. I must beg that you seek some rest.”

“Surely, I will. But wait; I see you have your camera. Hand me my coat, there.”

Rommel struggled into the jacket, his field marshal’s tunic with medals and ribbons bright across the breast. He set his stiff-brimmed hat on his head and stood, trying desperately not to yield to a wave of nausea, waving away von Esebeck’s outstretched hand. Instead, the field marshal leaned against the window, looking across a lawn dotted by lofty oaks. One tree, a giant that had been splintered by the impact of a lightning bolt, loomed close before him, and he focused on the blackened wood until his weakness passed. Finally he stood tall, turned back to the correspondent.

“Now, take my picture... here, of my right profile, so you can’t see what happened to my face.”

The baron obliged, the pop of the flash lingering in the view of Rommel’s one good eye.

“Send that out as soon as you can,” he said with real satisfaction. “Get it to all the wires. I want the Allies to see that once again I have eluded them.” He sank wearily back into his bed.

Normandy, France, South of St-Lo-Periers Road, 26 July 1944, 1214 hours GMT

Carl-Heinz Clausen inspected the long track of rubber cleats and steel pins, once again making sure that the whole assembly was laid in a perfectly straight line across the tops of the road wheels and the left drive sprocket of his Panther tank. He inserted the last replacement pin, tossing the worn original onto the pile of its fellows. Carefully squeezing a daub of grease into the sockets, he rotated the pin a couple of times to make sure it was well lubricated.

“All set--we’re almost done!” he proclaimed, standing to admire the freshly repaired track.

“It’s about time,” grumbled Pfeiffer, groaning from the effort as he hoisted himself off of the grassy embankment that served to conceal the tank and its crew from the American troops poised barely a mile to the north. “Maybe then you’ll let me finish my nap.”

Carl-Heinz laughed. “You’ll thank me when our tracks stay on during the next battle, Ulrich. Now, get ready with the block and tackle--we’ll winch it tight. With any luck we’ll be ready to roll by the time the lieutenant gets back.”

As his crewmates pulled the track tight with the manual winch the stocky driver inserted the last shaft, then twisted the locking pin that turned the strip of track into a continuing loop around the Panther’s left-side wheels.

“Ah, my baby,” the driver said, giving the steel fender an affectionate pat. “How do you like your new shoes?”

Ulrich Pfeiffer snorted in amused disgust. “Did you treat your wife half as good as you treat your tank?”

“Always!” Carl-Heinz replied with a broad smile. “And she treated me well in return.”

“Why do you think he has five kids?” Fritzi noted helpfully. Leaning back against the hull, Carl-Heinz allowed his mind to drift back to Bavaria, to Yetta and the children he had seen only three times in the last five years. Ever since he had driven a Panzer Mark II into Poland during September of 1939, his life had been focused on these steel gray monsters of the Wehrmacht. He couldn’t entirely suppress a twinge of melancholy, but as always he reminded himself that treating his tank well gave him his best chance of eventually getting home.

The tank’s commander, Lieutenant Schroeder, came strolling back from the headquarters of the Panzer Lehr division, and Carl-Heinz joined his crewmates in greeting the young officer. Peltz, the loader, had been packing ordnance in the turret, and he scrambled out to gather with the others beside the tank.

“Did you see the general? Did you tell him about the noise that kept us up all night?” asked Fritzi.

“General Bayerlein has had reports of American armor all along the front, and he passed those reports along to Seventh Army HQ,” said Schroeder, meeting the eyes of each crewman as if to assess their reaction to the lofty company he had been keeping. “He told his officers that no less a personage than Field Marshal von Kluge himself has assured him that the attack will come from the Tommies, over in the Caen sector.”

“I’m glad we’re out of there!” Peltz exclaimed. The others nodded in casual agreement. In the weeks after the Normandy landings, Panzer Lehr had fought against an endless onslaught of British armor, Sherman and Cromwell tanks that had rolled from beyond the far horizon in a limitless stream. Lieutenant Schroeder’s tank had destroyed no less than fifteen of those, but the crew had all shared a feeling that their luck must inevitably run out. Thus, when the division had been transferred to the quieter American sector a few weeks earlier, they had all breathed a little easier.

“I still don’t like it,” Ulrich grumbled, after the lieutenant had gone to confer with the rest of the company’s officers and NCOs. “I’m sure those were tanks we heard last night. They’ll be coming this way any day now, mark my words.”