Both machine gun and tripod clanked as Joinville and Villehardouin followed suit. That fearsome ratatat-tat grew louder yet as the German biplanes neared. They're doing it with their engines, Luc realized. It was the same kind of trick as the sirens in a Stuka's landing gear. It was designed to make people afraid. And, as with most things German, it did what it was designed for. Did it ever!
The biplanes carried real machine guns: Luc saw them spitting fire. And bombs fell from under their wings: not the monsters Stukas could haul, the ones that pierced reinforced concrete and wrecked fortresses, but even so… Luc rolled himself into a ball like a hedgehog. He only wished he had real spines.
Bullets sparked off brickwork and cobblestones. Bombs bounced him as if he were a basketball. A round clanged off metal somewhere much too close. And then the biplanes were gone-he hoped.
He needed a moment to take stock of himself. Both arms work? Check. Both legs? Check again. No holes? No blood? No pain? No and no and no. "Fuck me," he said. "I'm all right."
Then he looked around to see how his buddies were doing. Villehardouin seemed to be going through a checklist like the one he'd just used himself. The big Breton nodded and gave a thumbs-up. Joinville had taken off the Hotchkiss gun and was looking it over. "Look!" he said, pointing to a dent and a lead splash on one of the iron cooling fins at the base of the barrel. "It hit here and ricocheted. If it hadn't ricocheted, it would have gone into my back."
"Sometimes you'd rather be lucky than good." Luc took his water bottle off his belt. "Here. Have some of this."
"Pinard?" Joinville asked, taking the flask.
"Better-applejack," Luc said.
"Ah. Merci, mon ami." The Gascon's throat worked. After a couple of swallows, he handed Villehardouin the bottle. The big man also took a knock. Then he gave the water bottle back to Luc. Luc drank, too, before he stowed it on his belt. He needed a little distilled courage, or at least an anesthetic.
Luc looked around again, this time for the soldiers who'd been hauling the Hotchkiss gun's ammunition. None of the bullets from the biplanes had hit the aluminum strips of cartridges, which was also lucky. They might have started going off like ammo inside a burning tank, which wouldn't have been healthy for anyone within a few hundred meters.
But one of the troopers was methodically bandaging his calf. Red soaked through the white cotton gauze. "How bad is it, Emile?" Luc asked.
"Hurts like a motherfucker, but I don't think it'll kill me," Emile answered. "Hell, if you get me a stick I bet I can walk on it."
"Chances are they'll send you home, then," Luc said.
"Not fucking likely-I grew up in Verdun," Emile said. The eastern town had held in the last war, but fallen in this one.
"Oh." Luc had forgotten that, if he ever knew it. "Well, they'll take you out of the line for a while, anyway."
"It'll do," Emile said. "I only wish to Christ they'd done it sooner."
Loud shouts came from around the corner. That was Sergeant Demange's voice. Of course he'd live through a strafing and a dive bombing. Luc didn't think anything could kill him. He'd probably never been born, but manufactured in some armaments plant during the last war. Maybe he had a serial number tattooed on his ass-or stamped into it.
Now he was trying to pull order out of chaos. He bawled for medics, for stretcher-bearers, for Peronne's firemen, for water, for anything else blasted houses and wounded people were likely to need. He might have restored something resembling calm, too, if the church of St. Jean hadn't chosen that moment to fall in on itself with a crash.
Shrieks from inside announced that people had sheltered there against the German biplanes. Sergeant Demange effortlessly shifted gears. "Come on!" he yelled to whoever might be listening. "Let get the sorry sons of bitches out!"
"Let's go," Luc told his men-or all of them except Joinville, who'd somehow disappeared after his slug of apple brandy. "We'll do what we can."
They followed him. He was proud of that. Till he'd got a corporal's stripes, no one had ever wanted to follow him. Maybe the rank helped make the man. He didn't feel like complaining any which way.
The church wasn't burning: a small thing on the scale of miracles, but Luc would take it. He flung aside stones and chunks of brickwork and tugged at beams. His hands were hard, but he tore them up anyhow. And the first woman he uncovered didn't need help: falling masonry had made sure she never would. He turned her over so he wouldn't have to look at what was left of her face.
He and the other soldiers-and some townsfolk-did pull several people out alive. That made him feel a little better. Joinville showed up about twenty minutes after he started heaving wreckage. "Where the hell were you?" Luc growled.
"I found that broad," the Gascon said with a lazy smile. "Never did it with nobody with no hair up top before. Didn't matter-she had plenty down below." He set to work as if he'd been there all along.
"Merde! I ought to kick your sorry ass!" Luc didn't know whether to laugh or to pound the soldiers's thick head with a brick.
He ended up laughing. Life is too short for anything else. Joinville's presence probably wouldn't have meant life for anyone who'd died. That being so, why resent him for tearing off a piece when he saw the chance? Because I didn't get to, goddammit. Yes, that one answered itself, didn't it? Luc bent to the task once more.
HANS-ULRICH RUDEL WATCHED the Hs-123s land one after another. The biplanes were as near obsolete as made no difference. But they could still carry the fight to the enemy, even if Stukas could do more and do it better.
Those Henschels could take it, too. One of them had a hole in the aluminum skin of the fuselage big enough to throw a cat through. It flew, and landed, as if it had just come off the assembly line. Rudel didn't like to think what that kind of hit would have done to his Ju-87. Nothing good-he was sure of that.
Groundcrew men pushed the biplanes toward revetments after they shut down their engines. Before long, the Henschels would fill all of them. Hans-Ulrich's squadron, and the Stukas the pilots flew, were heading east to teach the Red Russians a thing or two.
Sergeant Dieselhorst ambled up. "I was talking to one of the guys in the radio shack," he said. "Sounds like they gave that Peronne place a good pounding."
"All right by me," Rudel said. "But they can't carry cannon under their wings, you know-not a chance in the world."
"Ja, ja." Dieselhorst nodded. "But the scuttlebutt is, the Ivans have more panzers than England and France put together."
"Well, if they do, we'll just have to make sure it doesn't last." Hans-Ulrich spoke with the confidence-with the arrogance-of youth. Dieselhorst, an older man, smiled and nodded and said not another word.
The Stukas flew off to the east two days later. The sun was rising in Hans-Ulrich's face when he rose from the airstrip in France and setting behind him when he put down on the smooth, grassy runway at Tempel-hof, just outside of Berlin. He and Dieselhorst both eagerly hopped out of their Stuka; long flights were tough on the bladder.
Rudel was happier once he'd eased himself, but only for a little while. Then he noticed the armored cars crewed by Waffen-SS men near the edge of the airport. Their turrets were aimed at the just-arrived bombers. "What's that all about?" he asked.
"What do you think?" Sergeant Dieselhorst answered. "They don't want us to bomb up and go after the Chancellery."
"That's crazy!" Hans-Ulrich exclaimed. "We wouldn't do anything like that."
"They're kind of jumpy right now," Dieselhorst said dryly.
"You can't blame them, after… whatever happened here," Hans-Ulrich said. He didn't know the details of the plot against Hitler: only that it had failed. He was glad it had. Treason had brought down the Reich at the end of the last war, and now it was raising its ugly head again? If it was, it needed to be slapped down, and slapped down hard.