“Nothing, I suppose,” the Oberscharfuhrer answered. He didn’t sound happy.
“Nothing at all,” Heydrich said firmly. “It is still a war, dammit. We hurt the enemy as best we can. Sometimes he hurts us. That’s a part of war, too, as much as we wish it weren’t. Eh?” He wouldn’t have wasted time cajoling many other people-maybe no one else still alive-but he and Hans went back a long way.
“Ja. I suppose so,” Klein said. “But…”
“But what?” Heydrich snapped. Even with his old driver, he ran out of patience quickly. He was too used to automatic obedience to be comfortable with anything less.
“But we can’t afford to get hurt much any more,” Klein said. “If we do, the resistance movement will fall to pieces.”
Heydrich sucked in a deep breath, ready to scorch the obstreperous noncom with hot words. He exhaled with Klein still unscorched. How could you come down on somebody who was obviously right? Only long habits of discipline, obedience, and patriotism would make a man go out and blow himself up to hurt the occupiers. If the troops in the field had no one of suitable authority to obey…Germany would be ruined forever.
“They haven’t found us. They won’t find us. Even if they discover this place, we’ve got others to go to.” Heydrich realized he was bucking up his own spirits as well as Klein’s. And why not? His morale mattered, too. “We are going to win this fight, Hans. However long it takes, we’ll do it. And the Vaterland will be free again.”
“Ja, Herr Reichsprotektor.” Klein didn’t sound a hundred percent convinced, but he didn’t call Heydrich a liar with his tone, either. That was something, anyhow. In this uncertain twilight struggle, Heydrich took whatever he could get.
George Patton had the bad habit of sitting up very straight in his jeep. Sometimes he’d even stand up behind the pintle-mounted.50-caliber machine gun the jeep carried. Not for the first time-not for the twentieth, either-his driver said, “General, I wish to Christ you wouldn’t do that so much, especially when the road runs through woods like this.”
Not for the first time-not for the twentieth, either-the commander of the U.S. Third Army laughed as if he’d just heard the juiciest joke ever. “Take an even strain, Smitty,” he said. “The Huns are whipped.”
“My ass…sir.” Smitty hunched low behind the jeep’s wheel. He had a wife and two kids in Dearborn, and he wanted to get home to see them again-he had just about enough points to do it, too. “They string that piano wire between trees just above windshield level, and no way in hell you can see it till it catches you in the neck. I hear they’ve taken two guys’ heads clean off.”
“Sounds like bullshit to me,” Patton said. “Stories always get bigger in the telling. Do you know either of these unlucky souls? Can you put names to them?”
“Well…no,” Smitty admitted.
“There you are!” Patton said triumphantly. “The Huns are whipped, I tell you. Maybe a few of them don’t know it yet, but we’ll keep licking them till they do. I promise you that.”
“Yes, sir.” Sometimes you couldn’t win. Smitty’d done all the fighting he cared to do before the Germans surrendered. He didn’t want to keep on doing it three and a half months later. But if he said so, Patton would go up like a Bouncing Betty. Smitty did say, “I sure wish you’d leave that chromed helmet back in the barracks, though. It’s like you’re wearing a SHOOT ME sign, y’know?”
“Nonsense!” Patton said. “The Germans fear me, and I don’t fear them-not one bit, d’you hear me? Let them see trouble’s heading their way.”
He stood up again. He swung the big, heavy machine gun back and forth. Sure as hell, he had plenty of firepower at his disposal. But God didn’t issue anybody eyes in the back of his head.
Not to Patton, and not to Smitty, either, however much the driver longed for them. The jeep’s rearview mirror made a piss-poor substitute. Smitty didn’t see the man in ragged Feldgrau get up on one knee in the roadside bushes and launch his Panzerschreck.
He did see the burst of flame from the antitank rocket. The Panzerschreck was a German copy of the U.S. bazooka round. The Germans didn’t just copy it, either; they improved it. A Panzerschreck had more range and penetrated thicker armor than its American prototype.
This one didn’t need the extra range. Smitty had time to go “Aw, shit!” He was starting to yank the wheel hard left when the rocket hit the jeep’s right rear and flipped it over. Patton’s startled squawk cut off abruptly when a ton and a half of metal and burning gasoline came down on top of him.
Smitty was luckier-he got thrown clear of the jeep. He put his teeth through his lower lip and broke several of them when he met the road facefirst, but he could crawl dazedly away from the inferno that engulfed the general.
He’d had a grease gun beside him on the seat. He couldn’t find it now. If the kraut with the Panzerschreck came after him, he was history. But the German seemed content with blasting the jeep-he bailed out. And why not? He’d just scragged a four-star general.
IV
Erlangen was shut down tight-“tighter’n a fifty-buck whore’s snatch,” one GI put it-for General Patton’s funeral procession. Sandbagged machine-gun nests outside of town made sure nobody unauthorized got in. Mustangs and Thunderbolts buzzed overhead, ready to strafe infiltrators or shoot down any enemy airplanes that tried to interrupt the proceedings.
Lou Weissberg wondered how much good all that would do. If the fanatics-a name for the diehard Nazis the papers were using more and more often-already had people in town, they wouldn’t need to sneak in more now. He wondered why nobody with a grade higher than his seemed to have thought of that. No one to whom he mentioned it seemed to want to listen.
He also wondered why the occupation authorities were making such a show out of Patton’s rites. As far as he was concerned, Old Blood and Guts was a blowhard, a good fighter with few other virtues. During the war, his men worshipped and despised him in about equal numbers. Since…If he could have stirred up a war with the Red Army, he would cheerfully have rearmed the Jerries and sent them into battle alongside the U.S. Army. He cared not a pfennig for Eisenhower’s denazification orders.
Rumor said Eisenhower was about to remove him from command of Third Army when the krauts removed him permanently. Lou didn’t know whether the rumor was true. He wouldn’t have been surprised, though. Eisenhower and Patton had been banging heads since the invasion of Sicily, two years ago now.
But here came Ike, driven down Erlangen’s Hauptstrasse-main drag-in a jeep, a look of pious mourning on his face. Another jeep followed, this one with Patton’s coffin on a standard Army quarter-ton trailer hooked up behind. An American flag covered the coffin.
The Hauptstrasse led to the Altstadter Kirche-the Old City Church-north of the market square. American soldiers lining the parade route fell in behind the jeep to crowd into the square. Germans who tried to do the same were discouraged, more firmly than politely. Again, Lou hoped it would matter.
A couple of GIs with scope-sighted rifles peered out from the church’s steeple. Snipers, Lou thought. Terrific. But maybe having them there was better than not having them. Maybe.
Newsreel cameras recorded the goings-on. One of them peered up at the riflemen. And how would they look to folks back home, here months after peace was supposed to have come? What were they thinking on the far side of the Atlantic? How much did they like this festering aftermath of war?