Milo had established the Charlie Company CP in a house that still had its roof, on the outskirts of the town of Delitzsch, just northeast of Leipzig. Since the drive from the Rhine had begun, the company had lost two officers and more than fifty enlisted men, but now replacements were catching up to them and the other battered, under-strength units of battalion, regiment and division, along with much-needed supplies.
After a morning spent at battalion headquarters in the middle of the nearby town, Milo returned to resume his paperwork. First Sergeant Cohen entered and said without preamble, “Captain, when are we due to cross the Mulde and head for Berlin? Do you know?”
Milo looked up and smiled. “Scuttlebutt up at battalion is that we aren’t. It seems that Ike means to let the Russkis take Berlin, and we’ll probably end up hunting out diehard SS and Nazis in Bavaria. At least that’s what the adjutant thinks, and he’s been right more times than wrong, Bernie.”
“Well, shit, captain,” the sergeant burst out heatedly, “we’re no farther from Berlin, right now, than the Russkis are, so why the hell just give it to them on a fuckin’ silver platter? Our armies fought just as fuckin’ hard as theirs did to get this close. We’re less than a hundred miles away, and all these Krauts are flat beat, no fight left in any of the damned fuckin’ Master Race anymore.”
“True enough, Bernie, but only around here. The adjutant says that the Russkis are having to fight like hell against troops every bit as stubborn as those we faced in the Ruhr. D’you want to go through another helping of that kind of shitstorm? I don’t! I’d much rather think of dead and wounded and missing Red Army troops than American GIs, if you don’t mind, Bernie. We’ll no doubt take casualites in those mountains down there”—he gestured at a map of Germany tacked to a hardwood-paneled, bullet-pocked wall—“but I guarantee we’d take more if we moved on toward Berlin.”
“Captain, by the way, it was a radio message came in while you was up to battalion. Your friend what use to be battalion CO, Gen’rul Stiles, is going to be passing through this afternoon and is going to stop by here to see you about something.”
True to his word, Jethro roared up in a big, long, powerful Mercedes touring car, its brand-new GI paint job streaked and splashed with mud, its tires and undercarriage thick with huge gobs of the gooey stuff.
“Where the hell did you get the car?” asked Milo. “And how the hell do you, a lowly BG, get away with driving around in it?”
Stiles smiled and shrugged languidly. “Spoils of war, Milo, I acquired it from the widow of a … shall we say, a former busineess associate in Marburg.” To Milo’s raised eyebrows, he added, “Yes, that particular one. It seems some of his SS buddies killed him and took away all of his hard funds and all of his other small, valuable items, as well. So I got the automobile at a very good price, dirt cheap, actually.
“What I detoured by here for was this.” Delving into the thick briefcase he had brought in, he withdrew two bulky sealed and taped manila envelopes and placed them on Milo’s desk. “Scoff if you wish, old buddy, but I feel that my demise is very, very near, and—”
“Your demise from what, pray tell?” said Milo. “Jethro, this war is as good as over for us. The Krauts around here are all beat down flat and begging for peace; this whole fucking town is aflutter with white sheets hung out the damned windows. My company and the rest of the battalion and the regiment might well run into some stickiness if we are sent hunting holdout Nazis and SS, but you can bet your arse that division HQ isn’t going to be anywhere near that fracas. So, unless Webber piles up that fancy new auto of yours, or you decide to take a stroll through an uncleared minefield, I can’t think of any possible danger you might be in.”
“Nonetheless, Milo,” Stiles went on mildly, “put these in a safe place for me, please. Open them if you hear of my death. Otherwise, I’ll pick them up within a few weeks or send for you to bring them to me.”
He threw down the last of the schnapps and stood up. “Now I must be going, Milo. Remember your promise, my dear old friend. God bless you.”
Out at the big automobile, Sergeant Webber opened the rear door and stood beside it at attention. After tossing the now lighter and less bulky briefcase in, General Stiles turned back and took Milo’s hand in both of his own and opened his mouth to speak, and that was precisely when the first shot was fired.
XII
Stiles gasped, grimaced, then his legs flexed, and he would have fallen save for Milo’s grip on his hand. The second shot was fired, and Milo felt something tear through the left shoulder of his Ike jacket. Almost at the same time, there was a third shot that struck the muddy boot-cover of the automobile and caromed off, whining.
Webber had stood for a bare moment in shock, then he had sunk to his knees beside the door. As he slid forward on his face, Milo saw the red-welling hole drilled into the back of his neck, just at the base of the skull.
Forcibly pulling his hand free from the powerful grasp of his friend, Milo reached for his pistol, slapped his hip and cursed; his pistol belt still hung on a hook beside his desk.
“Berniel” he roared, “Get me a fucking weapon of some kind out here, and some grenades, too. Snipers. Snipers in the big front upstairs window of that house two doors up on the other side of the street. At least two of the Kraut fuckers. And get Nicely to see to the general —he’s been hit.”
Stiles lay quietly, his face whiter than pale and his breathing ragged. Milo could see no wound on the front, so he gently eased the man partially over. Then he could see it, and it looked far from good—a rapidly growing blotch of blood at just about the center of the left shoulder blade. With a retching, tearing sound, Stiles coughed up a thick spray of red blood, then, with the blood still dribbling from his mouth and nose and down his chin, he spoke, hoarsely.
“Milo … for the love of God, prop me up … can’t breathe!”
Milo saw the long barrel of a Mauser K98 poke out of the window opening once again, and he ducked down, shielding Jethro as much as he could with his own body. But the shot was obviously aimed elsewhere, at another target. Milo heard it hit something more solid than flesh and bone, though it did elicit a vile curse from someone who sounded like Master Sergeant Chamberlin.
Sure enough, as he looked up at a nearby scuffling sound, it was to see the hulking Chamberlin belly-crawling toward him, a Thompson cradled in his thick arms.
When the noncom had come close enough, Milo grabbed the submachine gun from him. “Give me the magazine pouch, too. I’ll keep the fuckers down. You hightail it back and get some more men, good ones, too, not any of these fucking johnny-come-latelies. See if you can run down an M7 launcher or at least some hand grenades.”
The rifle barrel had withdrawn into the darkened room behind the window, but still Milo took no chances. Using the boot of the Mercedes for both cover and a shooting rest, he sprayed half a magazine of big .45 caliber slugs across the window, parallel to the sill. From the first-floor window came a flash and the booming sound of a pistol and the simultaneous smack of the bullet into the far side of the tire beside which Milo crouched. With a drawn-out hissing the tire began to flatten. But he didn’t flinch, he just lowered the muzzle of the smoking Thompson and put the other half of the magazine across the width of the lower window; his reward was a high-pitched scream.