“He said you had such a good time at the opera and afterwards,” Mrs. Jenkins went on, oblivious-Peggy sure hoped she was oblivious, anyhow. After the opera in Berlin… What Herb didn’t know wouldn’t hurt him-she hoped. Matilda Jenkins kept burbling: “Such a pleasure to get the chance to meet you. I never dreamt I would.”
“How about that?” Peggy said one more time, wondering how soon she could get the hell out of Erie.
Colonel Steinbrenner looked at the Stuka pilots in his squadron. Hans-Ulrich Rudel looked around at them, too. Not many faces were left from the ones he’d seen when the balloon went up in Czechoslovakia. He’d been shot down once himself, and thanked heaven he’d been able to bail out. Too many of his former comrades hadn’t been so lucky.
“Things are heating up again,” Steinbrenner said. “Our infantry and armor can move forward now that the roads are drying. They need air support.” He grinned wryly. “We have a chance to give it to them, too, because the runways are drying.”
Rudel chuckled, though it wasn’t as if the squadron CO were kidding. Planes flying off forward airstrips had to deal with mud just like panzers and trucks and foot soldiers. There were times when nobody could deal with it. At times like those, the Ju-87s stayed on the ground.
At times like those, he always wished he could hop on a train and go back to Sofia in Bialystok. If he couldn’t do the Reich any good at the moment, why shouldn’t he enjoy himself instead? Unfortunately, Luftwaffe higher-ups disapproved of such little jaunts. As far as they were concerned, it would always turn thirty Celsius tomorrow-day after at the latest-and the deep Russian mud would magically dry up so the flyers could get back to walloping the snot out of the Reds.
Well, it had finally happened, or enough of it had. It wasn’t thirty Celsius-it probably wasn’t even twenty-and the mud hadn’t cleared up by magic. But it wasn’t twenty below any more, and neither was it pouring rain. The Stukas could get back to walloping the Ivans.
After lighting a papiros — German quartermasters weren’t too proud to dole out captured stocks of smokes-Steinbrenner went on, “The Russians tried to knock us back from our bridgehead in the direction of Smolensk during the winter, but they couldn’t bring it off. So we-and our allies-are going to keep pushing that way. Once Smolensk falls, I suspect it will be time to start thinking about Moscow.”
Moscow! Driving Stalin out of his lair, taking the lair away from him? No wonder an excited hum rose from the flyers. Napoleon had taken Moscow away from Tsar Alexander, but he hadn’t had much joy afterwards. He couldn’t fight a winter campaign, not in weather like what they got here he couldn’t. The Wehrmacht had already proved it could.
“Questions?” Steinbrenner asked. He pointed toward a pilot who raised his hand. “What’s on your mind, Helmut?”
Helmut Bauer was big and blond and broad-shouldered; he seemed almost too wide to fit inside a Stuka cockpit. But fit he did, and he flew with nearly as much reckless enthusiasm as Hans-Ulrich himself. Now he asked, “Colonel, with Romania in the war, what happens when things down south get screwed up?”
“You’re assuming they will,” the squadron commander said, his voice dry.
“Damn straight I am… sir,” Bauer agreed. “I know what the Romanians’ve got. It isn’t much, and they aren’t what you’d call eager to use it, either.”
Heads bobbed up and down, Rudel’s among them. He didn’t care for having Polish allies. You couldn’t say the Poles lacked guts, but most of their equipment was junk. The Romanians mostly used junk, too, and precious few Germans had ever figured them for heroes. Hans-Ulrich sure didn’t.
Even more dryly than before, Steinbrenner answered, “There may just be a few German soldiers along with the Romanians, to help remind them how to play the game and why they’re playing it.”
The flyers chuckled. Hans-Ulrich knew why the Romanians were playing the game: the Fuhrer had promised them the Black Sea port of Odessa and the adjoining lands on the far bank of the Dniester. If nothing else could get somebody moving, good old greed would often turn the trick.
“I do understand that, sir,” Bauer said. “But still… The Ukraine’s a hell of a big place, if you know what I mean. I hope we’ll have enough men and equipment in place to bite off the chunks we need-and to keep the Ivans from bunching up down there and biting our flank.”
“Helmut, if they decide to move the squadron down to the Ukraine to support our men and the Romanians, you can’t do anything about it, and neither can I,” Colonel Steinbrenner said. “I’m sure you’ll be able to find yourself another lady friend, though.”
More chuckles from the pilots, and a snicker or two to go with them. “Oh, so am I,” Bauer said, unmistakable complacency filling his voice. Hans-Ulrich wasn’t nearly so sure he could find another girl he liked as much as Sofia.
You’ll be safer if you find one who isn’t half a Jew, he told himself. The SD didn’t like such liaisons. Neither did the National Socialist Leadership Officer standing at Steinbrenner’s elbow. Building a case against someone who wore the Knight’s Cross and who wasn’t shy about saying he backed the Fuhrer wouldn’t be easy, but it wouldn’t necessarily be impossible, either. Nothing was impossible if somebody important enough decided to build a case.
“Can we get on with the war we are fighting, not the one we may be fighting some day?” Steinbrenner asked. Nobody told him no, so he did: “The Ivans have a concentration in front of Studenets, southwest of Smolensk. Our forces are in the neighborhood, and so are the French. If we bomb the enemy’s infantry and shoot up his panzers, word will get back to Paris that the froggies would be smart not to think about changing horses again. So we’ll do that, gentlemen, if it’s all right with you.” Again, nobody told him no. He nodded briskly. “We take off in forty-five minutes.”
And they did, the first Ju-87 kicking up dust from the unpaved strip and climbing into the air right on time. Hans-Ulrich pushed back his leather flying glove and the sleeve to his fur-lined flight suit to check his watch and make sure. “Ready, Albert?” he called through the speaking tube.
“Not me,” Sergeant Dieselhorst answered. “I’m still soaking in the bathtub, and after I get out I’ll go pick flowers so I keep on smelling nice and sweet.”
Hans-Ulrich snorted. Dieselhorst did deadpan even better than Colonel Steinbrenner. When his Stuka’s turn came, he goosed the throttle. The Ju-87 rattled down the runway, then sedately got airborne. The weight and drag from the underwing gun pods made the ungainly plane even more so.
“Studenets,” Rudel repeated to the rear gunner, as if they hadn’t gone over it before takeoff.
“Gesundheit,” Dieselhorst said, so it was going to be one of those missions.
Messerschmitt Bf-109s clustered around the Stukas. The 109s had plenty of other things to do; dive bombers got escorts only when the Luftwaffe feared the Red Air Force had fighters of its own in the neighborhood. And the Reds did: blunt-nosed, stumpy Polikarpov Po-16 monoplanes. They were a long step slower than the Messerschmitts, but they could have made mincemeat out of the lumbering Ju-87s had the bombers had no friends. As things were, one of them tumbled to the ground, trailing smoke. Two more made halfhearted runs at the Stukas and then peeled off. The rest decided to go somewhere else, to some place where misfortunes like 109s never happened.
After that, the Stukas worked over the Ivans’ positions in front of Studenets with only ground fire to worry about. That wasn’t negligible, however much Hans-Ulrich wished it were. One Ju-87 took a direct hit from a flak shell and never pulled out of its dive, exploding in a fireball when it hit the ground. You had to ignore such things and do your job.
Rudel did. He shot up four panzers. A couple of rounds of small-arms fire clanged into the plane, but none of the instruments showed any damage. The panzers were all ordinary Soviet models. He didn’t see any of the KV-1 mastodons that made German panzer men break out in a cold sweat. What you didn’t find, you couldn’t kill.