weren’t many trees left standing. Holmes used the walkie-talkie and got through to the next platoon, which had already sent the information to the company commander.
In front of them, a Russian tank struck a mine. The explosion lifted the vehicle and sent pieces of tread flying into the air. In a perverse way, Tolliver felt sorry for the men in the tank. They would have to stay where they were until the battle passed them by before they could attempt repairs. All the while they would be vulnerable to American fire. The disabled tank’s main gun barked and the shell hit a few dozen yards to his left. So much for sympathy, he thought bitterly. That tank could still kill.
Tolliver’s men opened fire on the advancing Russians, cutting down about a dozen before the others dropped and hugged the ground.
“Keep it up,” he yelled. “We got ’em stopped.”
Holmes put down the walkie-talkie. “Second platoon is pulling out, sir. Word from the CO is the Reds punched a hole down a ways in G Company and we’re being flanked.”
Tolliver was shocked. They had stopped the Russian advance. An enemy tank was dead and so were a bunch of Reds. “They want us to retreat? You’re bullshitting me, aren’t you, you damned Yankee?”
“No sir, no bullshit. The word is retreat. Now.”
Tolliver swore. A fat lot of good all the defenses the engineers had built had done them. They’d withstood the bombs and the artillery, but after only a couple of minutes against the exposed Red infantry, they were going to have to pull back. At least there were more defenses built and prepared behind them.
“Let’s go,” he ordered, and the handful of men he commanded emerged from their trenches and burrows into the smoke-filled sky. They hunched their shoulders as they trotted back, as if that would protect them from shells or bullets.
There was a short, angry stutter of automatic weapons fire, and Tolliver saw a man in a baggy uniform standing directly in front of them. A Russian, his mind screamed. It was one of the paratroops, and he was fumbling with reloading a deadly looking submachine gun, a look of panic on his face. Tolliver fired his carbine from the hip and a number of his men did the same thing at the apparition, who lurched backward from the sudden storm of bullets and lay still.
“Shit!” Tolliver said. He had never been that close to an enemy soldier before. The Russian had been only a few feet away. “Anybody hit?”
There was a few seconds’ silence while his shocked platoon checked themselves. “One,” said a voice. “Holmes.”
Tolliver whirled and looked at his fallen radio man. The bullets from the Russian’s submachine gun had stitched a hideous pattern across his chest, exposing bone and organs. Holmes’s eyes were open but blank.
“Should we take him with us, sir?” It was Barrie, his senior surviving NCO.
Tolliver thought for only an instant. They were still out in the open with a long way to go. “No,” he said sadly. “We leave him here.”
Tolliver reached down and pulled off one of Holmes’s dog tags. Then he looked down at the Russian. Angrily, he fired several shots into the dead man’s chest. “That’s for Holmes, you motherfucker.”
As they turned to continue their withdrawal, Tolliver noticed some activity around the damaged Russian tank. Were they trying to fix it?
“C’mon, Lieutenant. Let’s get the hell out of here.”
“Barrie, what are the Russians doing to that goddamn tank?”
Barrie looked for a moment, spat on the ground, and grinned. “Yeah, Lieutenant, I see what you mean. They’re siphoning gas or whatever the fuckers run on.”
Tolliver laughed. The Russians were so short of fuel they were cannibalizing their own disabled vehicles on a red-hot battlefield. Not only that, they were ignoring the fuel drums strapped to the back of the tank, behind the turret. Why? Because they were empty, that’s why.
“Who’s got the walkie-talkie?” One of his men waved a hand as they commenced trotting away. “See who you can raise, and tell them to report back what we just saw. Tell them the Russians are running out of fuel.”
Poor Holmes, he thought, glancing back at the limp body on the ground. You bugged the shit out of me sometimes, but I will miss you. God damn the Russians.
General Adolf Galland searched the empty skies for a target and found nothing. He was not surprised. The Russian planes had paid a terrible price since the assault on the Weser had begun. It had been only three days since the first bomber wave had fallen prey to his jets, and now the Allied fighters almost totally ruled supreme. He alone had accounted for fifteen Russian planes confirmed killed, and several others damaged, and his was not the best total. Some of his younger pilots had double his amount.
The former German jet fighters had more than decimated the ranks of Ilyushin bombers along with Yak and MiG fighters who’d tried to escort them, and even killed a few armored Stormovik tank destroyers. After the first day, the slow, blundering bombers had not been seen again. He was not aware of any ME-262 having been shot down by a Russian. A few had been lost, but he thought that might have been due to equipment failure, and there was one report of a jet colliding with a Yak that was too slow to get out of the jet’s way. If true, that was a shame, but it was also war.
On the dark side, about a third of his planes were grounded because of mechanical problems. The jet was a fairly fragile kind of weapon that needed to be maintained much more carefully than the ground crews were used to. The American P-47s and P-51s, on the other hand, were unfeeling brutes by comparison, needing comparatively little maintenance and repair. The jet, he concluded, was the rapier, while the P-47s, P-51s, and others were the broadswords and battle-axes.
Galland understood that the victory in the skies had not been his alone, and that the Americans would have won it sooner or later. But he did know that the Luftwaffe’s jets had made it possible for that victory to occur with astonishing swiftness. Statistically, the relatively small number of jets had killed an average of twenty Soviet planes each, while the Americans had a four-to-one kill ratio.
The Russians, however, were not totally done. Galland thought they would lick their wounds and hoard their remaining planes and save them for the proper time and place-like last night, he thought wryly. Who would have suspected a Russian attack at night? All their other attacks had come during the day. Thus, the order to scramble from their supposedly secret American-run base had been a surprise, and many of his men had taken far too long to get their planes in the air.
Vectored into the Russian airplane stream by radar, they had chewed on the formations and then watched incredulously as transport planes disgorged hundreds, perhaps thousands of paratroopers onto the American defenses.
Galland had reviewed German airborne operations, such as the disaster on Crete, where an entire German paratroop division had virtually been destroyed, and knew that the attacks by his and American planes, however belated, meant that Russian paratroops would be landing nowhere near their intended drop zone. But was that important to them? Wherever they landed they could spread chaos. Had they misjudged the Russians once more?
Others in his squadron continued to report a lack of targets. In a little while, they would have to return to base. Despite its superiority as a weapon, the ME-262 did have one major drawback. Its maximum range was only 650 miles, and that didn’t leave much time to search for an enemy.
Galland looked at the ground below. They were almost directly above the river and he could see small, dirty clouds where explosions had already taken place as well as the flashes of new ones. Poor bastards, he thought. Who the hell would ever want to fight down there? Give me a plane and the blue sky anytime. If I have to die, let it be as a bird in flight, not a rodent in a burrow.
Bazarian smiled at his guest and offered the disgusting creature another drink of liberated schnapps. It was readily accepted. The Russian was well on his way to getting totally stinking drunk.
“This is piss” was General Vladmir Rudnev’s response. He had been making the same comment for each of the six very large drinks he had consumed. Rudnev might not particularly care for the German liquor, but he accepted it as an adequate substitute for his normal quart of vodka per day. Either that or, Bazarian thought, the pig actually liked to drink piss.
“Of course it is, dear comrade General.” Bazarian oozed warmth. Even though he slightly outranked Rudnev, he needed him, or at least what Rudnev could bring with him in the coming battle for Potsdam.
Rudnev belched and Bazarian recoiled from the stench of the man’s breath. Rudnev was a short, stocky man
