Muller gasped again, this time with exhilaration. He was flying.
Around him, other parachutes swayed in the wind as they fell. It had taken only ten seconds for the entire stick to jump. In the distance, he thought he saw the colored canopies of the weapons containers, which would land on their crash pads.
No time to enjoy any of it. At the height he jumped, it would take only about thirty seconds to hit the ground. He was coming down fast, though in the dark it was hard to tell exactly when he’d hit.
Here it comes—
His feet hit the snow. He fell forward onto his padded knees and went into a roll that left him gasping on his padded elbows and knees.
Nothing broken or sprained. He’d done it.
Behind him, the parachute rustled, billowed with a strong wind, and began to pull. He snapped out of his daze and worked at the clips. He removed one before the parachute yanked him backward and began to drag him through the snow.
Muller turned himself around and dug in with his heels. He grabbed the shroud lines and pulled the deflating ’chute toward himself.
Another paratrooper approached. Good. The ideal dispersion was twenty to twenty-five meters, which would allow them to concentrate fast along the 400-hundred-meter stretch of ground where they’d landed.
“Help me here,” Muller said.
“Ja, ja.”
“Hurry, I’m tangled up.”
The soldier lurched closer, the moonlight revealing a ghastly pale face under a steel helmet. Champing jaws. Eyes missing over its lipless death grin. A gray greatcoat belted at the waist. Hands stretched into claws.
“Ja, ja,” it said like a skipping record, its mouth barely moving as it spoke.
“Scheisse!” The thing was every nightmare he’d ever had rolled into one.
The draugr continued to trudge toward him. Muller let go the shroud lines to reach for his Luger. The parachute redeployed with a crack, dragging him along the snow again.
After a few meters, he yanked on the cords and removed another clip attached to his belt. The undead soldier turned slowly with its horrible eyeless grin and began to shamble after him.
As the draugr closed, he let go again on a prayer, which was answered by the ’chute dragging him another few meters.
This time, his gloved hand closed around the hilt of the gravity knife jutting from the pocket on his right thigh. He pressed the button to release it.
He cut the cords and rolled away from the thing’s outreached claws as the parachute blew away into the dark. Back on his feet, he unholstered his Luger and aimed it with two shaking hands.
A pistol banged. The draugr shrugged, its head remaining tilted at an obscene angle to thud against its shoulder while it walked.
Muller looked around for the source of help. He hadn’t fired. Then he did.
The bullet pinged off the creature’s helmet. The head flopped back before returning, seeming to dance on the thing’s shoulders as it lurched toward him. The grin stretched on its dead face until it become impossibly wide.
Another flash and bang in the dark. The draugr toppled into the snow and lay still.
Muller fell to his knees panting.
Leutnant Reiser holstered his smoking pistol. “Los, los, you idiot. We are wasting time here.”
Muller pulled himself to his feet and followed the lieutenant into the darkness.
He’d dropped into hell.
CHAPTER TWELVE
DISORIENTED
Gefreiter Steiner struck the ground and rolled to a dazed stop. His parachute floated away across the snow like a startled ghost. Somehow, he’d undone all four clips on his harness and shrugged it off along with his Mae West.
He sat up and surveyed his surroundings. Deep snow barely illuminated by starlight and the waning moon. A line of trees, probably a hedgerow. The black silhouette of a distant farmhouse, which he intended to avoid as if it were Dracula’s castle. Several kilometers away, the wreck of a downed C-53 blazed energetically, having taken God knew how many German souls with it.
On an ideal drop, the planes would fly as close together as possible at low altitude over a visible target. That was the best way to drop paratroopers in a very tight dispersion. It also wasn’t what happened. The German interceptors had wreaked havoc on the American transports, scattering the sticks.
The skies were quiet now. And he was lost.
You aren’t lost, he thought. You’re closer to home than you’ve been in eighteen months.
He was quite a ways from Meissen, his hometown on the Elba River, near Dresden. Still, this drop felt like a homecoming, even if he returned as an invader.
Liberator, he told himself. It was all a matter of perspective.
God, he missed the old war. His side had been losing, but at least things were simple.
Weapons banged around him with yellow light bursts, mostly Lugers. Two men shouted at each other before the wind swept their voices away and delivered a blood-curdling scream from somewhere else.
Steiner jumped to his feet fumbling for his own Luger and found the .45 pistol he’d received in trade. An excellent trade, actually; it was a solid handgun. Their tanks couldn’t stand up to the Tigers and Panthers, but otherwise the damned Amis had the best of everything and a seemingly inexhaustible supply of it.
Gone was his fleeting death wish born of shame from serving a regime that created the monstrous super soldiers. He’d challenged the Americans to punish him, but he hadn’t thought they’d actually kill him. He’d figured they’d rough him up a bit and scratch his shame’s itch. Now he had zero wish to die, especially by being chomped on by carnivorous corpses.
Another pair of Lugers popped in the dark. The flashes oriented him. The strong wind hadn’t taken him as far afield as he’d thought. If he was right, First Squad and some of his own squad was just on the other side of the hedgerow, along with a weapon container for the platoon.
Right now, for him, happiness was a machine-gun. He felt naked without it. The MG42 was one of the most brutal infantry weapons of the war, and he had one of his very own. Weighing only twelve kilos, the bipod-mounted medium gun blasted anything in front of it with up to 1,500 rounds per minute.
Though it was rugged and able to function in dust and mud, so many were lost that they were hard to get these days. Many squads made do with the lighter MG34, which had a tendency to jam. Steiner jealously guarded his MG42 and took care of it as if his life depended on it, which it did. He longed to get his hands on it again and hoped Weber and Braun, his assistant gunners, had survived the drop.
Time to move before this scheisse sandwich got any worse. Damn this jumping at night. It was hard enough to organize after a jump in daylight.
Steiner crept to the hedgerow with his .45 held out in front of him, ready to punch a hole in anything that moved. The hedge was thicker than it had looked in the dying moonlight. He flailed through the branches, growling at real and imagined terrors, and spotted a group of figures moving around a weapons container downed in the middle of a field. They froze and looked his way, some appearing to have weapons raised.
Steiner let out a bird call.
One of the figures said, “Halt, wer da?” Stop, who goes there?
“Are you real?” Steiner called out.
“Get your ass over here, Otto,” Animal said.
He hurried across the field, grunting at the effort of trudging across a thick blanket of snow. “Give me my goddamn MG.”
He spotted Oberfeldwebel Wolff, Schneider, Weber, Beck, Braun, Engel, and two shooters from First Squad.