Afterwards, Varner was told many things, including the details of the death train and the fact that his wife and daughter were working on the Rhine Defenses.
He didn’t know which disturbed him more. The fact that the two women-Margarete clearly was no longer a girl-had seen such horrors as that train, or that they were in danger from Allied bombings while working. He made a note to try again to have them totally excused from their current assignments.
Later, after he and Magda had made love, they lay together in their bed. “I hope we didn’t wake anybody,” Ernst said and Magda giggled.
“Don’t worry. Eric and Bertha are at the other end of the house and they sleep like rocks. Margarete is no longer a little girl and I am reasonably confident she knows what goes on behind closed doors.”
Ernst laughed softly. “Did you see the way my pilot looked at her? My God, is this what the next few years are going to be like?”
“I just hope we have a few years in front of us,” Magda said wistfully.
He sighed. “I think I liked things they way they used to be. I still can’t believe that the idiot Detloff boy is nearby. I think I shall hurt his other knee for insulting my daughter.”
“ Our daughter,” she corrected. “And she’s quite capable of taking care of herself. She can drive cars and small trucks, and Eric has taught her how to shoot his guns. The Ami’s come and we’ll be ready,” she said only half-jokingly.
Varner visualized a line of women and old men defending the Reich against vast numbers of American tanks and planes. It would have been funny if it hadn’t been so close to reality.
“So how is the war coming?” she asked with forced casualness. He had tried to hint at the truth in his letters, using code words and phrases, but he couldn’t be too specific. Even though he was an OKW staff officer, the post office had the right to open his mail and turn anything suspicious over to the Gestapo, and candor could be defined as defeatist and suspicious.
“There may actually be a glimmer of light. With Herr Hitler no longer around to guide us with his catastrophic sense of brilliance, Himmler is letting the generals fight the war properly; thus, the Russian and American advances have been slowed dramatically. Winter will soon be upon us, which means that the Soviets will stop and the American will at best be slowed even more. All forecasts by the group of shaman who profess to understand the weather say that the winter will be colder and snowier than normal, and that will help us considerably since it will keep American planes on the ground and turn the roads into muck for their tanks.”
Magda sighed. “Which only means that the war will go on and on. What if it never ends? What if this is only the beginning of a new Hundred Years War?”
“I can’t argue with anything you said. However, I keep hearing rumors of a political and diplomatic solution. Perhaps a negotiated peace is not out of the question if the two sides become exhausted. First, however, we must resolve the Jewish question, although not necessarily in the way Hitler originally planned.”
He laughed harshly. “Perhaps we will ship them all to Palestine and let the British and the Arabs fight over them. At any rate, we have to get them out of the Reich for their own good and for the future of Germany. Hitler originally wanted to ship them to Madagascar. It’s a shame it didn’t occur.”
“Peace,” she sighed, “what a wonderful thought. And what is really happening about the Jews? Please tell me there aren’t trainloads of corpses rotting all over Germany.”
“I’m certain that utter bureaucratic stupidity caused that and other, similar situations. Unfortunately, nobody knew quite what to do with Jews already in transit when word came down to stop shipping them. They couldn’t be returned to their homes or the camps they’d come from, and no trains were supposed to deliver them to their destination camps. Somehow it’s been straightened out by the SS, although I’m certain I don’t want to know the details.”
She decided to change the subject. “When are you leaving?”
“Tomorrow morning.”
Too soon, she thought. But she knew better than to argue with him. She reached down below his belly, found her target, and stroked him. He reacted and hardened immediately. “Then we’d better make sure we don’t waste any more time,” she said, “and no, I don’t give a stinking damn if Margarete hears us or not.”
Andrey Vlasov had once been considered a rising young general in the Red Army. Then, a series of unfortunate events had resulted in his own forces being left stranded and overwhelmed by the Germans. Requests for support, and then rescue, had gone unheeded. Vlasov’s force had been destroyed and he’d been captured.
Furious, and realizing the callousness and ineptitude of the Soviet high command, he’d turned traitor and had gone over to the Germans. Now the former Soviet lieutenant general led an anti-Soviet force, called the Russian Liberation Army.
Vlasov understood Berlin’s reluctance to use his forces, now at nearly sixty-thousand men, in key areas. Simply put, if they’d changed sides once, what would stop them from doing it again? Time would vindicate them, he told his second in command, Sergei Bunyachenko, as they traded shots of vodka.
However, the actions of the Nazis against Russian civilians had upset him deeply. The Germans could have been welcomed as liberators, not conquerors, and their savagery had horrified him. It was one thing to be brutal to combatants, and he didn’t much give a damn what happened to the Jews, but the manner in which the SS in particular was treating Russian civilians was appalling and he was beginning to wonder if he had indeed made the right decision. Rape and massacre seemed to be the code of the SS, especially the Totenkopf divisions who fought with incredible savagery on the Russian front. He wondered why almost all the Reich’s SS divisions were now confronting the Soviets. Why had those divisions in France and elsewhere been moved to the Eastern Front? He felt that the answer was that the SS would fight with incredible savagery against Slavic peoples they didn’t think were human.
He looked across the table. Bunyachenko was nearly asleep. Vlasov was puzzled. Sergei hadn’t had all that much vodka and the man had the capacity of a bear. Perhaps it was because they had just eaten a good heavy meal, were tired, and that the room was warm? Yes, that must be it. They were in Berlin awaiting a meeting with von Rundstedt. The field marshal had said he wanted Vlasov’s army sent to Yugoslavia and Vlasov thought that might be a good idea. They would earn the OKW’s respect by putting down the civil war going on in that godforsaken country by squashing Tito’s partisan armies. He would succeed where the regular German Army had failed, thereby earning the German high command’s respect and gratitude.
Vlasov yawned. Damn, he was getting sleepy too. Bunyachenko’s head came down and rested gently on the table. Vlasov couldn’t keep awake. Dimly, he knew that something had gone terribly wrong, but what he couldn’t say. Nor could he think. Nor could he fight the sleepiness.
His last coherent thought before he lapsed into unconsciousness was the horrible realization that he’d been drugged and that he was looking at the face of Satan.
Now it was Jack’s turn to go looking for a missing friend. After his narrow scrape with the Panthers, Carter had simply walked away and hadn’t been seen in a couple of hours. His crew, all of whom had almost miraculously survived, saw him walking off with a bottle in his hand.
“And I don’t think it was Coca-Cola, sir,” said Carter’s driver. All but one of the crew would return to duty immediately, or as soon as they got another tank. One man had a broken arm and would be replaced, but the rest only suffered from bumps, bruises, and minor burns. The driver’s eyebrows were singed black, which made him look like he’d been made up to look like a tramp.