on the seat beside him, where he could grab it in a hurry. Lou carried a.30-caliber M2 carbine, which gave him about as much firepower as a submachine gun. But he also manned the jeep’s pintle-mounted.50-caliber Browning. That baby could reach out over a mile, and kill anything it reached. A damn nice weapon to have.
All the same, he and Rocky both kind of hunkered down whenever they passed a wrecked German or American vehicle by the side of the road. They did that at least every few hundred yards-sometimes a lot more often, where fighter-bombers had rocketed or just shot up a column on the move.
You never knew whether some bastard lurked in or behind a burnt-out hulk. If he popped up and let fly with an antitank rocket, your fancy.50-caliber machine gun might not do you one goddamn bit of good. You’d have a
“Almost 1947,” Rocky said after they rolled past a seventy-ton King Tiger tank that some colossal explosion had flipped over onto its side. Lou tried to imagine what it took to do that to one of the fearsomely lethal-and fearsomely immense-panzers. He had trouble coming up with anything plausible.
Answering Rocky seemed easier. “I won’t be sorry to see the end of 1946-I’ll tell you that,” he said.
But then the driver said, “Back when those Nazi cocksuckers signed the surrender, did you figure you’d still be here now?”
“Maybe to get rid of war criminals,” Lou said uncomfortably. “I didn’t think the fighting’d still be going. Who could have?”
“Yeah. Who?” Rocky gunned the jeep to hustle past a dead Panzer IV. Those babies weren’t nearly so dangerous as King Tigers-they made a pretty fair match for, say, a Sherman. The krauts had had a lot more of them than King Tigers, but nowhere near enough. A rocket had blown the turret clean off of this one. When the IV proved really and truly dead, Rocky went on, “Me, I won’t be sorry if Congress ships us all home. Only way we’ll ever get there, looks like to me.”
“You want to fight another war in fifteen, twenty years?” Lou demanded.
“Shit, Captain, I’ll worry about that then-or I’ll let my nephew worry about it. He’s like six or seven now,” Rocky answered. “What I know for sure is, I don’t want to fight
Lou stared at him, as he might have stared at a blue giraffe in a zoo. Were people really shortsighted enough to think like that? Of course they were. Why else was the incoming Eightieth Congress full of folks who wanted to pretend that the United States could walk away from Europe without anything bad happening afterwards? But they weren’t pretending. They really believed it. That was even scarier.
They drove through some trees. Lou didn’t know whether to swing the heavy machine gun to the left or the right. He feared it wouldn’t do much good either way, because he couldn’t see very far in either direction. Well, with luck any lurking German fanatics also couldn’t see very far.
Only trouble with that was, he couldn’t know ahead of time where the fanatics lurked. They already had a pretty good notion where the road was. They could have their rocket launchers or machine guns all sighted in….
He never got
That was how it seemed to Lou, anyhow. One second, he was grinning along with Rocky. This $1.29 wire- cutting wonder damn well
Except it wasn’t. The next second, Lou flew through the air with the greatest of ease. He fetched up against a tree trunk on the far side of the road with an
And, at that, he’d been lucky. Getting blown clear of the jeep was the best thing that could have happened to him. Well, actually, not getting into the jeep at all would have been luckier, but it was way too late to worry about that now. Way too late to worry about the blasted jeep, too. It had slewed sideways and caught fire. Whatever blasted it to hell and gone must have killed Rocky. He wouldn’t have been pretty even without the flames. He seemed to be in several chunks….
Muzzily, Lou tried to figure out what the devil had happened. They’d taken care of that damn wire, and then…. “Shit,” Lou said again, on a different note this time. Cutting the wire must have touched off whatever explosive charge the fanatics had hooked up to it.
Explosive charge and fragments: it wouldn’t have done that to Rocky-and to the jeep-without plenty of fragments. A buried 155mm shell, maybe? The blast seemed about right for something like that. If Lou had been Catholic, he would have made the sign of the cross. He realized how lucky he was not to be ground round himself. Lucky, yeah-and Rocky caught some of the fragments that would have torn him up instead.
The only good thing you could say about Rocky was that he never knew what hit him. One second, he was being happy about the wire cutters. The next?
Lou hauled himself to his feet. That made the rib or ribs stab him again. It also informed him that one of his ankles could have been working better.
He scowled at the wire cutters, which he now saw through a curtain of flames and smoke-and through a deeper curtain of apprehension. If you took them off jeeps, the fanatics’ wires would start causing casualties again. But if you left them on, how many wires would turn out to be hooked up to big old artillery shells? You’d find out pretty damn quick. Boy, would you ever, the hard way.
Something warm dripped from Lou’s nose. Blood, he discovered when he wiped it on his sleeve. No surprise there. Blast could have broken both eardrums as easily as not. It could have torn up his lungs, too, if he’d been inhaling instead of exhaling. If could have done all kinds of things it hadn’t-quite-done.
All it did was earn him a Purple Heart.
After a moment, he realized the improvised bomb had done something else. It had turned Rocky, who wanted to get the hell out of Germany, into a statistic that argued for doing just that. He would be the whatever and sixth GI killed in Germany since what the papers were calling the so-called surrender. And Lou had just made the statistics himself. He would be the whatever and twenty-ninth American soldier wounded since V-E Day.
“Hot damn,” he muttered, and then “Shit” one more time.
Vladimir Bokov remembered last year’s new year’s eve much too well. Influenza and benzedrine made a lousy combination. They went even worse with wood-alcohol poisoning. Damn the Heydrichites anyway! They’d taken out far too many first-rate Soviet officers with that stunt. Some of the men who replaced those casualties couldn’t tie their own boots without reading the manual first. Others didn’t have the brains to read the manual.
“Things could be worse,” Colonel Shteinberg said when Bokov complained out loud.
“How’s that, sir?” Bokov asked.
“Well, the Heydrichites could be holding their own victory banquet right now,” the senior NKVD officer replied.
“You’re right,” Bokov admitted. “It isn’t that bad. But it isn’t good, either. For instance, Comrade Colonel-how many times have you been in a jeep that cut a garroting wire stretched across the road?”
“A few. More than a few, in fact. That was a clever gadget our technicians came up with,” Shteinberg said. “Why?”
Vladimir Bokov happened to know an American noncom had invented the wire cutters that sat on the hoods of most jeeps in Germany these days. He also knew Shteinberg wouldn’t listen if he said anything like that out loud. It was beside the point, anyway. “Be careful if you cut another wire, that’s all,” was what he did say.
“Oh? How come?” Moisei Shteinberg asked.
“Because Heydrich’s bandits have started hooking those wires to 105mm and 155mm shells buried by the
