Marching Through Georgia (33 page)

"Wonder about Poles having this conversation in 1939, or Russians last year," Schmidt said, exhaustion bringing out the slurred Alsatian vowels. "They had to hold, everything depended on it. But they didn't hold."

"They were our racial inferiors! The Draka are Aryans like us; that is why they are a threatl The Leader himself has said so."

Schmidt looked at him with an odd smile. "The Draka aristocrats are Nordic, yes, Herr Standartentuhrer. But they are a thin layer; most of the Domination's people are Africans or Asians. Most even of their soldiers and bureaucrats, at the everyday level: blacks, mulattoes, Eastern Jews, Arab Semites, Turks, Chinese, a real
schwarm
. Would that not be an irony? We National Socialists set out to cleanse Europe of
fuden
and slavs and gypsies, and it ends with the home of the white race being ruled and mongrelized by chinks and kikes and Congo savages—'

He laughed, an unpleasant, reedy sound.

"
Silence
!" Hoth snapped. The other man drew himself up, his eyes losing their glaze. "Schmidt, you have been a comrade in arms, and are under great stress; I will therefore forget this…

defeatist obscenity. Once! Once more, and I will myself report you to the Security Service!"

Schmidt swallowed and rubbed his hands across his face, turning away. Hoth forced himself back to calm; he would need a clear head.

And after all the man's from Alsace
—
he's an intellectual, and
a Catholic
, he thought excusingly. A good fighting soldier, but the long spell of antipartisan work had shaken him, the unpleasant demands of translating Party theory into practice.

Combat would bring him back to himself.

He swung back into the radio truck and laced the panel to the outside, clicking on the light. This was going to be tricky; it was all a matter of time.

This is going to be tricky timing
, Eric thought as they reached the edge of the clearing. Even trickier than threading their way through the nighted bush; they had followed the Circassian blindly, had dodged aside barely in time and lain motionless in a thicket of witch hazel as a long file of Germans went past. One of them had slipped and staggered; Eric had felt more than seen the boot come down within centimeters of his outstretched hand. He heard a muttered
scheisse
as the SS-man paused to resettle his clanking load of mortar-tripod, then nothing but the rain and fading boots sucking free of wet leaf mold. He felt his face throb at the memory of it, like a warm wind; the rich sweet smell of the crushed brush was still with him. Extreme fear was like pain: it fixed memory forever, made the moment instantly accessible to total recall…

The native hunter crept up beside him and put his mouth to the Draka's ear; even then, Eric wrinkled his nose slightly at the stink of rotten teeth and bad digestion.

"Here, lord." His pointing arm brushed the side of Eric's helmet, and he spoke in a breathy whisper. Probably not needful, the rain covered and muffled sound, but no sense in taking chances. "The road is no more than five hundred meters that way. Shall I go first?"

"No," Eric said, unfastening the clasp of his rain cloak and sliding it to the ground. "You stay here, well need you to guide us back. In a hurry! Be ready."

And besides, it isn't your fight
. Except that the Draka would let his people live and eat, if they obeyed. He brought the Holbars forward and jacked the slide, easing it through the forward-and-back motion that chambered the first round rather than letting the spring drive it home with the usual loud
chunk
.

Safety or no safety, he was not going to walk through unfamiliar woods in the dark with one up the spout… Soft
clack-clicks
told of others doing likewise.

His mouth was dry.
How absurd
, he thought. His uniform was heavy with water, mud and leaves plastered on his chest and belly, and his
mouth
was dry.

A brief glimpse of yellow light from downslope to the north.

Sofie slapped his ankle; he reached back to touch acknowledgement, and their hands met, touched and clasped.

Her hand was small but firm. She gave his hand a brief squeeze that he found himself returning, smiling in the dark.

"Stay tight, Sofie," he whispered.

"You too, Eri—sir," she answered.

"Eric's fine, Sofie," he answered. "This isn't the British army."

Slightly louder, coming to his feet: Ready."

He crouched, eyes probing blindly at the darkness. Still too dark to
see
, but he could sense the absence of the forest canopy above; it was like walking out of a room. And the rain was individual drops, not the dense spattering that came through the leaf cover. Ripping and fumbling sounds, the satchelmen getting out their charges.
Why am I here
? he thought.
I'm a
commander, doing goddam pointman's work. I could be back in
the bunker, having a coffee and watching Sofie paint her
toenails
. His lips shaped a whistle, and the Draka started forward at a crouching walk. Their feet skimmed the earth, knees bent, ankles loose, using the soles of their feet to detect terrain irregularities.

Nobody's indispensable
, another part of his mind answered.

His belly tightened, and his testicles tried to draw themselves up in a futile gesture of protection against the hammering fire some layer of his mind expected.
Marie can handle a fixed-front
action as well as you can. And you've been expecting to die in
battle for a long time now
.

But he didn't want to, the White Christ be his witness.

Eric's step faltered; he recovered, with an expression of stunned amazement that the darkness thankfully covered. He grunted, as if a fist had driven into his belly.

I don't, I truly don't
, he thought with wonder. Then, with savage intensity:
There are hundreds within a kilometer who
don't want to either
. He was acutely conscious of Sofie following to his right. You
still can, and everyone with you. Carefull.

"…
never regretted my articles. I was not among those who
sentimentalized our arrangement with the
Orate, or
imagined
that it was a true alliance of mutual interest and shared values
like that with Britain or the new Indian government History is
something that tends to be re-edited in the light of current
needs, particularly when politicians and their journalistic
flacks are involved; to understand what was done, we must
make an effort of the mind to recapture what was
felt
at the
time. Otherwise, we lend ourselves to witch-burnings like the
late, unlamented Senator from Wisconsin's hunt for

'Drak-symps' in high places
.

What is most difficult to remember is that in the 30's. even
the early 40's
. nobody was afraid of the Draka. Our
bipolar
world, divided between the Alliance and the Domination, was a
nightmare that only a few radicals could imagine, just as the
balance of terror under the shadow of Oppenheimer's
sun-bomb and Clarke's suborbital missile was an idea a few
scientifiction writers played with. Perhaps our own racial
prejudices were at fault In the nineteenth century abolitionists
and humanitarians complained, but who was willing to spend
blood and treasure to save Africa from the Domination? It was
only negroes falling under the yoke, after all. In the Great War
it was only Asians, "wogs" (or only Bulgarians and Slavs, on
the fringes); if most of the public in North America or Western
Europe thought of it at all. they assumed the Domination was
no more than a harsher form of colonial imperialism. That the
Draka would bring the rule of plantation and compound,
impaling stake and sjambok to the European heartlands of
Western civilization, was unthinkable.

Perhaps there is something to the fashionable liberal idea
that the Domination is Afro-Asia's revenge on the West for five
centuries of pillage and exploitation. Certainly, the results of
the Eurasian War are a fitting punishment for our sins of
omission and commission: allowing the Domination to expand
in the Great War. the appeasement of Nazi. Soviet, and
Japanese aggression that followed, the isolationism and wishful
thinking that left us with no choice but that between bad and
worse. Yet given the choices left to us, what other course was
open? Japan attacked us directly, and as for the Third Reich
—

the Domination aspires to rule the world, not destroy it, and
they are patient The Nazi leadership was not "If we perish, we
shall take a world with us; a world in flames." Hitler's words,
and they were meant. The fall of Europe was apocalyptic
enough; had the National Socialist dream not ended in the
ruins of Munich, his scientists might have given him the means
to make his dreams literal truth. Liberty is not peace, but
constant struggle. Each generation must fight the enemy that
history deals it"

Empires of the Night: A '40's Journal

by William A. Dreiser

MacMillan. New York, 1956

VILLAGE ONE, OSSETIAN MILITARY HIGHWAY APRIL 15, 1942: 0350 HOURS

Trooper Patton wiped the sap from her bush knife .and sheathed it over her shoulder; carefully, with both hands. It was
far
too sharp to fling about in the dark. Then she knelt to run her fingers over the product of her ingenuity: a straight sapling, hastily trimmed to a murderous point at both ends.

One point was rammed into the packed earth of the trail; the middle of the stake was supported by the crutch of a Y-shaped branch cut to just the right length. The other end slanted up…

Patton stood against it, measuring the height. Just at her navel, coming up the trail from the north. The briefing paper
did
say that the Fritz SS had a minimum height requirement, so it should hit…

The Draka woman was grinning to herself as she slid back four meters to her firing position to the left of the trail, behind the trunk of a huge Mien beech; laughing, even, an almost soundless quiver. One that Trooper Huff beside her knew well.

Lips approached her ear, with crawling noises and a smell of wet uniform.

"What's so fuckin' amusin', swarthy one?" asked Monitor Huff, commander of C lochos, the squad.

Patton was dark for a Draka, short and muscular, olive-skinned and flat-faced; their people had a Franco-Mediterranean strain that cropped out occasionally among the more common north-European types. Huff could imagine the disturbing glint of malicious amusement in the black eyes as she heard the slightly reedy voice describe the trap.

"Belly or balls, Huffie, belly or balls. Noise'll give us a firm'

point, eh?"

"Yo're sick. Ah love it." Their lips brushed, and Huff rolled back to her firing position.
Gonna die, might as well die laughin

, she thought.

Down the trail, something clanked.

"
Clip the stickers
," Tetrarchy Commander Einar Labushange said as he crawled past the last of his fire teams. This was the largest trail; half the tetrarchy was with him to cover it, where a ridge crossed the path and forced it to turn left and west below the granite sill. Less cover, of course, but that had its advantages.

He touched the bleeding lip he had split running into a branch, tasting salt. "And be careful, if'n I'm goin' to die a hero's death, I don't want to do it with a Draka bayonet up my ass."

He slid his own free and fixed it, unfolding the bipod of his Holbars, worrying. The little slope gave protection, but it also gave room for the Fritz to spread out. And withdrawing would be a cast-iron bitch, down the reverse slope at his back and over the stream and up a near-vertical face two meters high. At least they could all rest for a moment, and there was was no danger of anybody dropping off, not with this miserable cold pizzle running down their—

The sound of a boot. A hobnailed boot, grating on stone. The heavy breathing of many men walking upslope under burdens.

Close, I can hear them over the rain. Very close
. He pulled a grenade out of his belt and laid it on the rock beside him, lifting his hips and reaching down to move a sharp-edged stone. He rose on one elbow to point the muzzle of the assault rifle downslope and drew a breath.

Eric could smell the trucks now, lubricants and rubber and burnt distillate, overpowering churned mud and wet vegetation.

They must be keeping the boilers fired; he could hear the peculiar hollow drumming of rain on tight-stretched canvas, echoing in the troop compartments it sheltered. Only a few lights, carefully dimmed against aircraft; that was needless in an overcast murk like tonight's, but habit ruled. To his dark-adapted eyes it was almost bright, and he turned his eyes away to keep the pupils dilated. There was an exercise to do that by force of will. Dangerous in a firefight, though; bright flashes could scorch the retina if you were overriding the natural reflex.

He counted the trucks by silhouette.

There must be at least some covering force. Adrenaline buzzed in his veins, flogging the sandy feel of weariness out of his brain; he would have to be careful, this was the state of jumping-alert wiredness that led to errors. Some of the trucks would mount automatic weapons, antiaircraft, but they could be trained on ground targets. Eight assault rifles, including his, and the demolitions experts from Marie's tetrarchy; they were going to be grossly outnumbered. Mud sucked at the soles of his boots and packed into the broad treads, making the footing greasy and silence impossible.

Thank god for the rain
. Darkness to cover movement, rain to drown out the sounds. That made it impossible for him to coordinate the attack, once launched; well, Draka were supposed to use initiative.