diminished. In part, he thought, because the Rhine bridges were down, which meant no more refugees were coming from the Rhineland, which was now occupied by the Americans. That didn’t mean that the human vultures weren’t out there. He’d read the reports and understood that while many of the attacks were by Germans, a number had been by foreigners. German criminals were bad enough, but the Reich had brought countless numbers of foreign workers, slaves, to work in factories and farms, and many of these had been uprooted by the bombings and were hiding wherever they could. Escaped POWs were another possibility. In particular, freed Russian prisoners wanted to wreak a terrible vengeance on their captors.
He stepped into the barn. The three foreign workers had finished their Christmas dinner and Bertha had given them a couple of bottles of the bad wine she made. Varner had mixed thoughts about giving them alcohol, but concluded that there wasn’t enough to get them drunk and dangerous.
The three men shuffled to their feet, but did not look him in the face. Were they among the ones who’d attacked refugees? The two Latvians looked harmless enough-large, but harmless. However, the Czech or Frenchman or whatever he was, Mastny, looked positively feral. Varner wondered what he’d find if he searched the many recesses of the barn? Money? Jewelry? Nothing?
He stared at them, again making sure they saw his weapons. His look told them he could and would cut them down in an instant. The Latvians looked frightened, but Mastny didn’t. He understood the game Varner was playing.
Varner wished them a good Christmas and a peaceful future and left them. He would tell Magda to keep a watch on Mastny and to push Bertha to send him back to the prison if he gave even a hint of trouble. He would give Margarete the same message.
He saw shadows on the porch. He almost stopped but smiled and kept on walking as if he had not seen his daughter and his pilot standing so close together.
It was after midnight when Margarete padded softly down the stairs. The wooden floor was cold on her bare feet, but she didn’t mind. She thought she looked like an old lady. Her flannel nightgown was full and came down to her ankles. She thought she also resembled a very lovely ghost in the dim light. She found the door to the spare bedroom that had once housed a servant. Heart pounding, she opened it and slipped in.
Hans was awake in an instant. “I was beginning to think you wouldn’t come.”
“I had to wait until it was safe.” He started to get up from the bed, but she pushed him back. She could see that he was wearing his underwear and thought it made him look cute. She pulled back the blanket and slid in beside him. His arms went around her and their bodies strained against each other as they kissed with an intensity that surprised them both.
Margarete felt his erection against her, gasped, and pushed her belly against it. “Do you know what you’re doing?” Hans asked.
She giggled and licked his ear. “I am a silly little virgin, but not a stupid one. And be still, we only have a minute before my mother realizes I didn’t go to the kitchen for a cookie.”
He laughed and they kissed again, their tongues eagerly exploring. “We will not go all the way, Hansi, but I won’t fall to pieces if you touch me.”
Hans began to stroke her, feeling her body under the cloth. “This way,” she said and shifted so her nightgown was above her bottom. His hands on her bare flesh excited her. He pushed the nightgown up to her shoulders. She sucked in her breath as he gently caressed her breasts and her nipples. He shifted so his lips were on her nipples and his hand was down her panties and between her thighs, which were suddenly moist and seemingly moving of their own volition. Margarete had never known such sensations and wanted them to continue forever. It was nothing like that idiot Detloff’s pawing of her. This was the way it should be.
However, a rational corner of her mind said it had to stop and, with great regrets, she pushed him away.
Hans lay back gasping. “You are so beautiful.”
“So are you, Hansi.”
“Nobody’s ever called me Hansi. I don’t know if I like it. But if you say it, it must be all right.”
She gazed at his erection stretching the fabric of his shorts and felt bolder than she’d ever been in her life. “This is to make sure you do come back,” she said as she slid his shorts down. He sighed as she took his manhood in her hands and stroked it. She’d never done it before, but she’d talked with friends who had. Shortly, he gasped and climaxed.
Margarete stood and smiled down at the stunned young pilot. “Good night, Hansi dearest, and if I don’t have a chance to talk to you in the morning, I very much want you to come back safely.”
Hans smiled and said he would. When she was gone he thought how nice it was for her to want him to come back safely. What the devil was safe to a pilot in a war where the enemy ruled the skies? Even a man who flew something as innocuous as a Storch was at risk and, besides, he was sick of not pulling his weight in the war. He decided it was not the time to tell her he’d applied for a transfer to train as a jet fighter pilot.
Magda was waiting for her daughter at the top of the stairs. “Well? I gave you ten minutes with him and you took twelve,” she said with a knowing smile.
“I lost track of time, but don’t worry, my precious virtue is safe.”
Magda gave her daughter a hug. “I never doubted for a minute. Now go to bed, and this time I mean yours.”
Margarete walked towards her bedroom, turned and grinned wickedly. “I’m still a virgin, Mama, just a much more knowledgeable one.”
Himmler paced his office. Never the most secure of persons, his doubts were getting the best of him and the presence of the stern field marshal commanding his armies was not comforting.
“I never should have agreed to let you pull our armies behind the Rhine.”
Rundstedt almost yawned. They had basically the same discussion every time they met. “You didn’t have a choice, Herr Himmler. If you had ordered the army to fight on the west bank it would have been defeated and destroyed, and the Rhine Wall would now be empty of troops. Then, regardless of the weather, the Allies would have poured across, and all of us would be in hiding or running for our lives.”
Himmler waved him off. “I know, I know. But I am being criticized for the loss of the lands and the cities. Think of it, Aachen, Cologne, Koblenz, and so many other places that have been German forever are gone.”
“Once more, Reichsfuhrer, the lands were lost for nearly two decades after the Treaty of Versailles and were subsequently recovered. If we stick to our plan, they will be German again in a much shorter period of time. As to the plan, it is going well. Our armies are intact and safely on the east of the Rhine where they are continually building their strength.”
This latter statement was a sop to the paranoid Himmler. There were serious problems in the military. Thanks to the moves he’d made, the army had large numbers of men, but many of them were either very young or very old, and so many were poorly trained. Also, the loss of the Rhineland had devastated the morale of the troops, many of whom had homes now occupied by the Yanks. Worse, many of the soldiers defending the Reich weren’t even German, but conscripts from other conquered nations, and whose reliability was doubted.
In most cases, the German army had superior weapons compared with the Americans, but not enough of them. The infusion of two thousand Soviet tanks would help, but German armor would still be horribly outnumbered. Worse, the Americans had found one tank park and largely obliterated it. How many more tanks would be destroyed before they even got to the front?
It was much the same with the Luftwaffe. The ME262 jet was a marvelous machine, but would they have more than a few hundred of them when the decisive battles came? There were enough experienced and elite pilots to man the jets, but what about the rest of the Luftwaffe? Galland was distraught at the fact that so many pilots were getting little training because there just wasn’t enough fuel, or air space in which to train as the Reich contracted. American pilots jumped on the trainees like vultures whenever they took off. As a result, the dispirited army suffered from almost daily bombings the Luftwaffe was powerless to prevent.
