"Gisors," Major Bleyle said a few minutes later. "They're pushing supplies through there to the front near Beauvais." He whacked a map with a pointer. "Gisors is about seventy kilometers northwest of Paris. You'll recognize it by the castle and the cathedral. Here are some photos." He passed around the reconnaissance shots. "Railroad and highway. Pick your targets when we get there. We'll try to knock out both routes. Questions?" He waited. Nobody raised a hand. "All right, then. Good luck, everybody."
Rudel and Dieselhorst stuck to business as the pilot taxied the Stuka out of the revetment and got it into the air. Hans-Ulrich felt bruised by their earlier encounter. He wondered if Dieselhorst did, too. One more thing he couldn't ask…
Messerschmitt 109s accompanied the Ju-87s as they flew west. Hans-Ulrich hadn't seen a 110 for quite a while. The two-engined fighters hadn't lived up to expectations over the North Sea and England. Maybe they'd gone back to the shop for retooling. Or maybe the idea wasn't as good as the high foreheads in the design bureau thought it would be.
Antiaircraft fire came up as soon as they crossed the front. It was heavy and alarmingly accurate. The Allies had more and more guns shooting at the Luftwaffe. They knew what was at stake here as well as the Germans did. French and British fighters attacked, too. The 109s darted away to take them on. Then more fighters jumped the dive-bombers.
They were French machines, not too fast and not too heavily armed. The 109s outclassed them. Stukas, unfortunately, didn't. Hans-Ulrich threw his all over the sky, trying to dodge the enemy fighters. It was like trying to make a rhinoceros dance. Even when you did it, the result was none too graceful. Sergeant Dieselhorst's machine gun chattered again and again.
"How you doing back there?" Rudel asked him.
"They haven't shot me yet. That's something, anyway," the rear gunner answered. "How are we doing?"
It was a fair question-several bullets had hit the Stuka. "Everything shows green," Hans-Ulrich said. A Ju-87 could take a lot of punishment. The war had shown that the dive-bomber needed to. Rudel's head might have been on a swivel. "Now which way is Gisors?" He'd done so much frantic jinking, he didn't know north from sauerkraut.
He spotted what he thought was the cathedral steeple a moment before Major Bleyle's voice dinned in his earphones: "Abort! Break off! We're losing too many planes!"
"Devil take me if I will," Hans-Ulrich muttered to himself. To Sergeant Dieselhorst, he added, "I have the target. I'm going into my dive."
"What about Bleyle's orders?"
"What about 'em?" Rudel shoved the control column forward. The Stuka's nose went down. Acceleration slammed him back against the armored seat. Damned if that wasn't a truck column on the road. Even if this wasn't Gisors after all-plenty of little French towns had cathedrals-he'd do some damage. He yanked at the bomb-release lever, then pulled up for all he was worth.
In the rear seat, Sergeant Dieselhorst whooped. "What a fireworks show! They must have been hauling ammo!"
"Gut. Sehr gut," Hans-Ulrich said. "Officially, of course, I never heard the major's order to withdraw."
"What order was that, sir?" Dieselhorst said innocently. Rudel laughed, then grimaced. Ignoring orders, disobeying orders…Once such things started, where did they stop? With trying to overthrow the Fuhrer?
But I helped the Reich more than I would have by obeying, he thought. Maybe the conspirators had felt the same way. He shrugged. He was loyal. He knew it. His superiors did, too.
Pretty soon, they'd refill the Stuka's gas tank and bomb her up again, and he and Dieselhorst would go off and try this again. And, if they came back from that run, they'd do it one more time, and one more after that, till the war was won and they didn't have to worry about it any more. As long as you looked at things the right way, they were pretty simple. SOMEBODY KICKED WILLI DERNEN IN the ribs. He grunted and folded up on himself and tried to go back to sleep. After a few seconds, the German marching boot thudded into him again. He grunted once more, louder this time. Reluctantly, his eyes opened.
"There you go," Corporal Baatz said. "Time to get moving again."
"Your mother, Arno," Dernen said. With great determination, he screwed his eyes shut again.
Arno Baatz kicked him yet again, this time with real malice. He knew just where to put a boot to make it hurt most. Willi wondered how he knew. Had he learned in noncom school along with other bastardry, or maybe from an SS interrogator? Or was it just natural talent? It worked the same any which way. Willi sat up, clutching at the injured part. As with Macbeth, Baatz had murdered sleep. "Get it in gear," he snapped. "Nobody put you on leave."
Willi staggered to the bushes to take a leak. He was still yawning when he came back. No one who hadn't been through a campaign had the faintest notion of how exhausting war was. Some men could get kicked almost to death without waking up, let alone marching. The mechanism simply wore down. Willi wasn't there yet, but he wasn't far from that dreadful place.
Maybe breakfast would help. Then again, maybe it wouldn't. He took out his mess tin and advanced on the field kitchen. The cooks spooned the tin full of slop. They called it porridge, but that gave it too much credit. They took everything remotely edible they could find and boiled it all together in a giant kettle. It ended up tasting the way library paste smelled.
The coffee, by contrast was pretty good. That was because it wasn't Wehrmacht issue. Like the cigarettes the Landsers smoked, it was the good stuff, foraged from French farms and villages-and, no doubt, corpses. Wolfgang Storch already had a tin cup's worth. "You know you're beat to shit when even this stuff won't make your heart turn over," he said sadly.
"Tell me about it," Willi agreed. He gulped the coffee anyway. He certainly didn't move slower with it inside him. If he moved any slower, he'd be dead. The stink that fouled what should have been a fine spring morning reminded him how easy dying was these days. The Wehrmacht was still pushing forward, so what he smelled were mostly dead Frenchmen. Dead Germans were no sweeter to the nose, though.
Lieutenant Krantz took advantage of having most of his men gathered together. "We have to get through," the platoon commander said earnestly. "We aren't as far along as we ought to be. The more we fall behind schedule, the better the chance we give the enemy. If he stops us here, he can reinforce his positions north of Paris. That wouldn't be good-not a bit."
A few of the soldiers eating breakfast and smoking managed weary nods. Willi didn't have the energy. He knew too damned well why they hadn't come farther or gone faster. Anybody with a gram of sense did. The terrain in the Ardennes sucked, and they didn't have enough panzers along to punch through the Frenchmen and their friends blocking the way west. Most of the goodies-and most of the air support-went to the right wing, the one punching ahead somewhere to the northwest. The plan had almost worked in the last war. The High Command had decided it just needed to make the fist a little bigger this time around.
And maybe the High Command knew what it was doing, and maybe it had its head up it ass. One reason you fought wars was to find out things like that.
Willi washed out his mess tin and stowed it on his belt. He put on his helmet and picked up his Mauser. The rifle was just over four kilos; it only seemed to weigh a tonne. He couldn't even sling it. He had to carry it instead-the French were too damned close.
As if to remind him of that, a Hotchkiss machine gun stuttered awake. The malign rattle made his asshole pucker. Somewhere up ahead lay Laon, which the Germans had been bombing and shelling for days. How many French soldiers still crouched in the ruins with rifles and machine guns and grenades-waiting?