Hennecke could only stare at the body for a long moment, torn between relief and a peculiar kind of excitement as his enemy breathed his last. He’d had unarmed combat skills hammered into his head during training, his instructors drilling the recruits mercilessly until even the least of them was deadly with or without a weapon, but it was the first time Hennecke had ever killed a man with his bare hands. It had simply never been necessary, not for all of his career. And now he’d done it, he found himself unsure what to feel.
He sucked in his breath as he heard the sound of running footsteps, then hastily picked up his rifle. Losing it would be a good way to get in trouble. He checked the body as a Strumscharfuehrer entered the room, rifle at the ready. Hennecke didn’t recognise him, but that hardly mattered. Far too many units had been chewed to pieces as the fighting raged on, the enemy refusing to fall back to their next line of defence until they had taken out as many stormtroopers as they could. But it hardly mattered. The assignment – clear the suburb – had to be completed, whatever else happened.
Shaking his head, he checked the body for anything useful, but found nothing that might interest his superiors. Jokes aside, the enemy weren’t stupid enough to put copies of their battle plans on the corpses of ordinary soldiers. And if he had found something that claimed to be a battle plan, he would have been reluctant to pass it on to his superiors. It would almost certainly be a fake. He removed a half-empty packet of cigarettes and a lighter, then led the way back out of the house. The sound of shelling grew louder as he stepped into the open and peered towards Berlin. Great clouds of smoke were rising in the distance, obscuring the city.
But the aircraft will still be able to find their targets, he thought, nastily. And as long as they’re not dropping bombs on us, who cares?
He took a moment to study the squad as it slowly reformed. He’d lost too many men from his original company, but his superiors had supplied replacements – the survivors of other units that had lost too many men to remain viable. They’d have to be rebuilt from the ground up, if the war ever came to an end. Hennecke had been fighting for seven days, barely finding the time to get a few hours of sleep in between attacking, counterattacking and counter-counterattacking. He felt perpetually hungry and increasingly deaf.
And his men looked ragged. They were all experienced – even the least of them had spent months marching over Russia, chasing insurgents – but none of them had experienced a hellish nightmare like Berlin. Hennecke knew, as little as he wanted to admit it, that they needed to be pulled out of the line and given a few days to rest. But it wasn’t going to happen, not when their superiors were demanding results. The best they could hope for was good food and warm drinks and it didn’t look as though they were going to get either of them.
He sighed, feeling torn. There was a part of him that loved the fighting, that loved testing himself, that loved showing the westerners that treason had consequences. The dumb bastards had never really believed in the Reich, let alone committed themselves to doing whatever was necessary to ensure that the Reich’s dominance. They deserved, every so often, a reminder that the universe was cold and harsh, red in tooth and claw. And yet, he hated to think just how many stormtroopers had died. The battle to break into the suburbs had cost him over twenty men, suggesting that over five hundred men had been killed in a single bitter skirmish.
And that meant…
He shook his head. They were committed, now. The SS would either fight or die; the war would be won or lost. But there was no way to back off, to live together. West and east could not coexist. Only one could be supreme.
Bracing himself, he hefted his rifle. There were more buildings to clear before night fell.
Andrew kept his face impassive as he strolled through Berlin, even though he knew it was quite possible that he would be mistaken for an easterner, rather than an American. Quite a few pilots had been brutally torn apart by angry mobs, he’d been told. He was rather tempted to believe that, if anything, the stories were underrated. Berlin hadn’t been bombed since 1944, when the British had launched a handful of air raids before the end of the war. And the Berliners were angry.
“The SS are pushing hard,” his escort said. “But we are holding them.”
“You’re doing well,” Andrew said. “But how much of a city will you have left when time finally runs out?”
His escort – a young military officer – didn’t bother to answer. Andrew shrugged and turned his attention to the buildings as they walked past. Berlin was a huge city, but more and more buildings were badly damaged, even knocked down, by the fires of war. Broken windows were everywhere, despite advice from the provisional government warning homeowners to board up their windows or cover them with plastic. Makeshift tents were scattered everywhere, offering very limited comfort to the refugees and Berliners who had been driven out of their homes. Andrew had even heard that thousands of Berliners were even flocking into the city’s underground stations, just as the British had done during the Blitz. It provided more protection than they were likely to get elsewhere.
His lips thinned as they passed a soup kitchen. A dozen German women, all wearing trousers rather than the party-approved long skirts and blouses, were handing out soup, bread and something that smelt faintly unappealing. Andrew’s nose wrinkled as he took in the desperate refugees and, behind them, Berliners who were starting to look pale and wan as hunger took its toll. It was a sight he’d never seen in America or Britain; it was a sight that wouldn’t be out of place in the refugee camps in South Africa, the townships where black civilians were clustered as the military fought to exterminate the insurgents.
This is the beginning of the end, he thought. And the start of hell itself.
He looked past the refugees to the poster on the wall, feeling a flicker of concern that no one had bothered to take it down. A signal, perhaps, to anyone who might be watching that they weren’t totally opposed to the SS? Or a simple sign of apathy? There was no way to know, but it concerned him that none of the passing policemen or soldiers had cared enough to rip it from the walls. Perhaps, just perhaps, there were more rats within the provisional government’s walls than it wanted to admit.
“We could stop for soup,” he said, just to see what his escort would say. “I could pay, you know.”
“We’re expected at the front,” the escort said. He wasn’t quite experienced enough to hide the anger – and the shame. “They will be upset if we’re late.”
Andrew nodded, wondering just how he would have felt if Washington, D.C. had become a battlefield. There had been countless attempts by the Reich to resurrect the Confederate States, attempts so pitiful that the FBI had wondered if they’d been a joke, an attempt to distract the Americans while the Germans got on with the real plan. But Andrew, who had spent more time than he’d wanted to in the Reich, suspected that the Reich had genuinely believed that the Confederate States of America was just waiting to be reborn, just as they believed that a non-Nazi government would surrender Germany to chaos and madness. It seemed hard to grasp, but they had very little understanding of the outside world. They judged all others as treacherous because they were treacherous themselves.