“Where the fuck you think they are?” Corvo yelled as fragments whined not nearly far enough overhead.
“The mortar guys, you mean?” Bernie said. Corvo nodded without raising his head. Bernie’s shrug actually hunched him down lower. “Could be anywhere. With a full charge, one of those cocksuckers’ll shoot a mile and a half.”
He tried to imagine securing everything within a circle three miles across centered on the market square. His imagination promptly rebelled. Somewhere-in a fenced-in yard or a back alley or up on a roof-a couple of mortarmen were having a high old time. And they could just leave the tube and bipod behind when they finished. How many mortars-German and American and British and Russian-littered the local landscape? Thousands, maybe even millions.
“C’mon, get up! Get moving!” Corvo shouted. “We gotta make sure Adenauer’s okay. Fanatics are bound to be after him.”
Bernie hadn’t even thought about that. He hadn’t thought about getting up under fire, either. He’d done it more often than he cared to remember during the war, but the war was over…wasn’t it? But seeing the sergeant stand up brought Bernie to his feet, too.
Several other U.S. soldiers were also up. Most of them headed for the platform from which Adenauer spoke. Another mortar bomb scythed one of them down. Bernie looked away. You didn’t want to remember what explosives and jagged metal fragments could do to flesh.
The mortar rounds stopped falling then. Either somebody’d caught the guys serving the nasty little piece or they’d figured they’d done their duty and bugged out. Bernie knew what he hoped. He also knew what he thought. They weren’t the same.
There lay the auburn-haired gal he’d wished he were searching. Nobody’d want to feel her up now. A bad chest wound, a worse head wound…She was still moving and moaning, but Bernie didn’t think she’d last long. Too bad, too bad.
He jumped up onto the platform, pointing his M-1 this way and that. It was dumb-he knew as much even while he did it. The bastards who’d done this weren’t close enough for the rifle to do him a nickel’s worth of good. Everybody here in the square with him probably hated the mortarmen as much as he did. But you wanted to hit back somehow, even when you couldn’t.
“Oh…motherfuck.” Sergeant Corvo used his rifle, too, pointing with the muzzle.
One of the mortar bombs had blasted Konrad Adenauer off the platform. He lay on his back, staring up at the sky. His thinning gray hair was mussed. A single drop of blood splashed the end of his long, pointed nose. Other than that, his face was untouched. He looked mildly surprised.
Below his face…Bernie looked away. The mortar rounds had done worse to Adenauer than they had to the pretty woman with the dark red hair. “Motherfuck,” Carlo Corvo said again.
“You got that right,” Bernie agreed. “He ain’t gonna be making more speeches any time soon. I mean, not unless it’s to St. Peter or the Devil, one.”
A groan from a little farther away drew their attention to Lieutenant Colonel Rosenthal. He leaned against a wall, clutching one arm with his other hand. Blood leaked out between his fingers.
“Can I bandage that for you, sir?” Bernie called.
“I don’t think you’d better.” Rosenthal sounded eerily calm, as wounded men often did. “I’m holding it closed better than a bandage could. If you want to yell for a medic, that’d be good.” He paused as if remembering something. And he was, for he asked, “How’s Adenauer?”
Bernie wished he could lie, but didn’t see how it would help. “Sir, he bought a plot.” He raised his voice: “Corpsman! We need a corpsman over here!”
“Shit!” Rosenthal sounded furious. Then he said “Shit” again, this time in the way Bernie’d heard much too often before: the wound was starting to get its claws into him. Baring his teeth, the American officer went on, “Adenauer was the best hope we had for a Germany that isn’t either Nazi or Red.”
“‘Was’ is right, sir. He’s a gone goose.” Bernie pointed toward the politician’s crumpled body. People always looked smaller when they were dead. He didn’t know why that was true, but it was.
“Shit,” Keith Rosenthal said yet again. “Score a big one for Heydrich and his assholes, then. Who’s gonna have the nerve to try and stand up to ’em after this?”
From in back of Bernie, Carlo Corvo said, “Here comes a medic.”
“That was quick.” For a moment, Bernie was admiring. Then he wondered how come the aid man had got here so fast. Had the American authorities feared trouble and put the medics on alert, maybe even posted them close by? What did that say about Konrad Adenauer, who’d trusted U.S. security arrangements? It said he’d been a jerk-that was what.
And what did it say about how things were going in Germany generally? Nothing good. Bernie Cobb was goddamn sure of that.
Vladimir Bokov had been through the influenza before. You spent a week flat on your back. Then you spent another week feeling as if you’d been beaten with knouts. After that, you were pretty much all right.
Running on benzedrine while you were at your sickest meant that afterwards you felt as if you’d been beaten with knouts and chains. And you felt that way for three weeks, not one.
All of which got him scant sympathy from his superiors-not even from Moisei Shteinberg, who was as miserable as he was. “Did influenza keep anyone from holding the Nazis out of Moscow and Leningrad?” Shteinberg demanded. “Did it keep anyone from throwing them out of Stalingrad?” He paused for a coughing fit.
Influenza probably kept some Red Army men flat on their backs during those fights. Bokov knew better than to say so. Instead, he said, “The Western imperialists have lost one of their reactionary politicians. I suppose we need to protect the leaders of the Social Unity Party of Germany.”
“I suppose so. Ulbricht is…useful, no doubt about it.” Shteinberg spoke with the same not so faint distaste Bokov had used.
They had their reasons. Walter Ulbricht was useful. He headed the Social Unity Party of Germany, the front through which the USSR intended to rule its chunk of the dead Reich. Like Lenin, he was bald and wore a chin beard. There the resemblance ended. Lenin, by all accounts, had been loyal to no one and nothing but himself-and the revolution.
Ulbricht, by contrast, was Stalin’s lap dog. He’d spent the war in exile in the USSR, returning to Germany in the Red Army’s wake. He would do exactly what the Soviet Union told him to do, no more and no less. If Heydrich’s hooligans blew him off the face of the earth, Moscow might have to turn to someone less reliable-to say nothing of the propaganda victory his death would hand the bandits.
With a sigh, Shteinberg went on, “I’m not really enthusiastic about keeping any Germans alive these days, if you want to know the truth.”
“Well, Comrade Colonel, plenty who were alive on New Year’s Eve are dead now, and plenty more will be,” Bokov said.
“They had it coming,” Shteinberg said coldly. Mass executions in Berlin and all through the rest of the Soviet zone warned the Germans that having anything to do with the Fascist bandits was a bad idea. Far bigger mass deportations drove home the same lesson. How the camps in the Arctic and Siberia would absorb so many…wasn’t Bokov’s worry. You could always plop prisoners down in the middle of nowhere and have them build their own new camp. If some of them froze before the barracks went up, if others starved-it was just one of those things.
Bokov had been through the Germans’ murder camps. They sickened him-the Soviet Union had nothing like them. They also struck him as wasteful. They didn’t squeeze enough labor out of condemned people before letting them give up the ghost. Zeks were to use, not just to kill. So it seemed to him, anyhow.