heard the clang as an armor piercing round hit the side of one of the vehicles, heard the explosion as the ammunition in the half-track exploded, felt the heat from the ball of flame as the 37mm gun and its crew died. The viciously cold air was burning his lungs as he ran. He saw some snow banks and hurled himself into them as the Grizzlies swept overhead. The rockets screamed from under their wings and he heard the explosions. The mass of secondary explosions meant he didn’t need to look to know that the tracks brought all the way from England had just blown up.
He did sneak a look anyway. Pyres of black smoke were rising from where both the 37mm guns and one of the quadruple 20mms had gone. The AECs weren’t just burning, they were an inferno of exploding ammunition and fuel. The infantry, the convoy’s guard against partisan attack had spread out into defensive positions, away from the guns but near enough to protect them from any partisans closing in on the scene. Joint attacks between Ami jabos and partisans weren’t unknown but they weren’t common either. More often the partisans stayed in the background and called in the air attacks.
Up above, the four Grizzlies were turning away. One was streaming thick black smoke from its starboard wing. Heim watched it turn away still further and head north slowly losing height. One of the other jabos was leaving with it. Another difference between the Amis and Ivans. A crippled Russian aircraft was on its own, left to get back to base as best it could. The Americans detached aircraft to escort the cripple. If it crash-landed, they’d land to pick up the crew. They’d risk men to save men. In their eyes, expending treasure, machines, resources to rescue their men just didn’t enter into the equation. If their men were down, they’d do what it took to get them back. May the good Lord help anybody who got in the way.
The Grizzlies vanished behind the trees again. Heim guessed what was coming next. It wasn’t an accident that the 20mm quad at the front of the convoy had been knocked out in the first pass. He and his men took the opportunity to get still further from the tracks on the road. They had little time and it ran out as the two remaining Grizzlies broke over the treeline. Their 75mm guns belched out the familiar orange ball of flame. They were joined by the flat hammering of the .50 machine guns. Heim saw the lead ten tonner explode. A 75mm round had plowed through the front and it shattered the vehicle into blazing fragments. There were only a handful of shots, the range was short and the Grizzlies had better things on their mind. Better for them that was.
Heim watched the two stubby tanks detach from the bomb racks on the jabos. They wobbled down, turning end over end as they fell. An inaccurate weapon but it didn’t matter. It was the dreaded jelly gas, the foul thing the Amis had created by mixing gasoline with stuff that made it burn hot and slow. Stuff that made it stick to whatever it touched. Stuff that nothing could put it out.
The first pair hit the ground just short of the wrecked 20mm half-track. They bounded high and erupted into a roaring mass of orange and black flame. It boiled skywards as the bouncing tanks spewed the hellish jellygas back along the lines of stalled vehicles. The second pair hit just behind the middle point of the convoy and repeated the inferno that was consumed what was left of the convoy. Roaring and screaming, the black smoke and orange flames blotted out the sky above the convoy. The black cloud of smoke turning the sun blood red. Heim’s face blistered as the heat from the nightmarish holocaust rolled across the snow. He felt the hard-packed whiteness soften and saw it turned black with soot from the fires.
The two Grizzlies swept over the inferno below them. The orange glare of the fires reflected off their glossy white-and gray camouflage paint. Then they were gone, heading north.
Only one vehicle had survived, the little kubelwagen right in the middle. It must have been just far enough back to miss the first pair of jellygas tanks and too far forward to catch the second. Around it, the wreckage on the convoy burned. Scattered around it were the blackened, carbonized husks that had once been soldiers.
The perfect perfumed prince stood immaculate, in the middle of the destruction, neither burned nor asphyxiated. Mentally, Heim raised his eyes in despair. He had long since ceased to believe in God; this was just another example of the injustice that made up his world. The survival of the perfect perfumed prince responsible for this nightmare confirmed his disbelief in any form of divine providence. “Sir, I shall assemble the survivors. We should head back to the depot.”
The depot was a safe cantonment heavily guarded against attack. They had to get back there by dusk; the Partisans were closing in. They’d have seen the smoke and heard the explosions. They knew what was happening. Most of the Partisan bands had radios now. It was a fair bet that they’d been told of the strike, to find any survivors the Grizzlies had left and kill them.
“Our orders are to reach the 71st Division base area as soon as possible. We will go on.”
“With respect, sir, reaching the base area is no longer possible. We are barely a third of the way there. Even if we are left undisturbed, we will not make it by nightfall. We will be hard put to get back to the depot by then. It is cold now; when dusk comes it will be much, much worse. We can’t make it. Even if we could, the wounded couldn’t. We must go back.”
The perfect perfumed prince stared at the shabby, grizzled sergeant. Slowly Captain Wilhelm Lang realized the truth that lay behind the words he had heard. The stink of the burning vehicles and incinerated men drifted across him and with great annoyance he realized his spotless white scarf was in danger of being stained black by the soot from the fires.
“Very well Sergeant, we will head back for the depot area. With the guns gone, there is no point in carrying on anyway. For the sake of the wounded, we must return to the depot.”
“I’ve got the latest production figures from Germany, Loki. Third quarter, 1945. And the transportation requirements for military and civil resource allocations.”
Loki was leaning back in his high leather chair, looking out over Geneva, the wet roofs glistening in the morning sun. “Thank you, Branwen. Anything interesting?”
“I’ve only had a brief look but it looks like much the same as before. Steel, coal, nitrates; all have increased a bit but not much. Armored vehicle and aircraft production are holding steady. It looks like Speer’s reforms have finally finished working through the system. Production totals have been steady for two quarters now. I expect they’ll drop a bit in the fourth quarter as coal production gets diverted from industrial production to heating. If one goes up, the other goes down, there’s no slack left in the German economy any more. Everything they do these days is a zero-sum game, as one thing goes up, another goes down.”
Loki took the two-inch thick file and started to skip through the pages. “You know, this would all make a lot more sense if we had the American and Russian figures by way of comparison. We’ve no idea how much of the American economy is mobilized.”
Branwen snorted. “I had Manannan take a look of the American economy; more or less from what we can see they’ve produced and guesswork at the rest. He reckons the Americans have mobilized about half their productive capacity. To put that into perspective, they’re producing around two thirds of the world’s aircraft engines.”
“About half? I wonder why they haven’t mobilized the rest. German’s running, what eighty, ninety plus percent mobilized? And the Russians?”
“Germans at least that. Russia? No means of knowing. Most of their industrial infrastructure was in the area now occupied by the Germans. The Russians evacuated a lot and destroyed the rest but how much and what did they have to begin with? We don’t know. How much of what they evacuated has been returned to use? We don’t know. We do know the Americans have been building factories and resource recovery facilities in Siberia but their output? We just don’t know. Loki. It’s maddening. We know far, far more about the Germans than about the people we’re supposed to be working with.”
“With Stuyvesant over there at the heart of things, does this surprise you? I’m astonished he’s even told us there’s a war on. Ask Manannan mac Lir to drop up and see me this afternoon will you? I need to talk with him about the Americans and Russians.”
Branwen made a note on her pad. Manannan had some odd theories about the American war effort. He believed that something about it didn’t quite make sense. As if anything in the madness that was tearing the world apart made any kind of sense.
