Watch on the Rhine lota-7 Page 6

  Mueller, emerging from the test shelter, itself a metal bunker, looked at the body and shook his head wearily. “I did want a railgun. Continuous acceleration. Greater — much greater — ammunition storage…”

  The Israeli, Benjamin, interrupting, asked of Prael, “At what point did the metal give way?”

  Instead of answering directly, the German handed the Jew a printout.

  “I see,” said Benjamin. “Hmmm. Could we reduce the charge… no, I guess not, not and achieve the kind of velocity we must have…” The Israeli had, in an earlier day, riding his Merkava against his national enemy, punched out more than one Arab-manned, Russian- or Ukrainian-built, tank.

  “Nor can we reduce the weight of the projectile and still achieve the penetration we must have,” finished Mueller.

  “GalTech,” offered Nielsen.

  “The chancellor, acting on the advice of the BND, has decreed not,” answered Henschel. “For what it’s worth, I think he is most likely right in that. The Galactics have their own agenda. That agenda might or might not include the presence of humanity after the war.”

  Scratching an ear absentmindedly, Benjamin observed, “When David went out to fight Goliath, King Saul offered the boy the use of Saul’s own armor and weapons. The boy refused, claiming that he would do better with his own weapon than with others the use and feel of which were unfamiliar to him. David was right. Your chancellor is right. Our prime minister agrees. This must be a human weapon, something the Galactics cannot interfere with.”

  “Isn’t there some way we can strengthen the recoil cylinders by making them simply bigger?” asked Mueller, pushing his pet railgun to the side for the nonce.

  “No,” said Prael, rubbing his face briskly with a frustrated hand. “We’ve looked into that. We can reduce the cylinders to eight and make them somewhat larger and stronger. And then the breech of the gun hits the back of the turret. Scheisse! We tried to cut it too fine.”

  Though they had not been present for the test, the resounding crash from the destruction of the recoil cylinder had sent a shock wave through the entire plant, drawing Schlüssel and Breitenbach at a run. They entered the test chamber, took one look at the cylinder, another at the corpse, and crossed themselves like the good Catholics they were. Schlüssel, perhaps not so good a Catholic as Breitenbach, said, “Fuck!” immediately after.

  What had happened was so obvious that neither Prael nor the others felt the need to explain to the two newcomers.

  “Oh, well,” said Schlüssel. “There’s some good news. Breitenbach, here, has gotten something very interesting from the Americans. Tell them, Stephan.”

  In his left hand Breitenbach carried a small black box, attached to and trailing a harness. “Better I should show them, nicht wahr, Reinhard?”

  Schlüssel sighed, resignedly. Impetuous boy! “Oh, yes. By all means show them, since you must.”

  Without another word, Breitenbach turned on his heel and left the area. When he reappeared some minutes later, standing on a steel walkway seventy feet above the factory floor, the harness was around his body. Schlüssel directed the others’ attention upward with a nonchalant finger.

  With a boyish cry, and to the wide-eyed amazement of all of the others but Schlüssel, Breitenbach hurled himself over the railing guarding the walkway. He fell, faster and faster, shrieking with a boy’s mindless joy. So fast fell he that the eyes had difficulty following. Henschel’s eyes didn’t follow at all as he had closed them against the seemingly inevitable impact.

  The impact never came. Eighteen to twenty feet above the plant floor, Breitenbach’s body began to slow. The rate of slowing continued to increase. By the time Breitenbach had reached the floor, he was able to settle onto his feet as gently as a falling feather.

  “What the hell caused that?” demanded Mueller.

  Schlüssel shrugged. “The mathematics are beyond me, frankly. Had she not written them down, the American girl who discovered the principle would likely have found them beyond herself as well. Long story there, so I am told.

  “But look at it this way: that black plastic device on Stephan’s harness takes the energy of falling, saves it, and then twists it sideways to turn it into an energy of slowing. We believe we can use this in the suspension system for the tank — without a major redesign being required, by the way — and reduce the robustness of the shock absorbers to save perhaps fifteen or twenty tons of weight. To say nothing of reducing the maintenance required.”

  Mueller’s eyes, which had never narrowed to normal after Breitenbach’s plunge, grew wider still. Prael’s eyes began to dance in his head, unable to focus on anyone or anything. Henschel and Benjamin exchanged thoughtful glances.

  Heads swiveled slowly as all eyes turned to the ruin of the recoil cylinder. A new light gleamed in those eyes.

  * * *

  Paris, France, 15 February 2005

  Isabelle’s husband entered her kitchen wordlessly, a paper clutched in one hand.

  She did not see the paper, initially. She saw instead a much-loved face gone ashen.

  “What is wrong?” she asked.

  He didn’t answer, but just thrust the paper at her.

  With a trembling hand she took the proffered form letter and read it through quickly. Uncomprehending, she shook her head in negation. “They can’t do this to you, to us. You did your time in the army as a boy. They have no right.”

  The husband quoted from the scrap of paper he had already read fifty times, “In accordance with our time-honored heritage and traditions, all Frenchmen are permanently requisitioned for the defense of the Republic.”

  “But you are a doctor, not a killer,” Isabelle objected.

  “Killers get hurt,” answered the husband. “Then they need doctors. I report the day after tomorrow.”

  She stood there for a long moment, stunned, unable to speak further.

  Bad Tolz, Germany, 17 February 2005

  Quietly, a long and snaking column of armed men marched up the forest trail in the dead of night. In the darkness, only the eyes gleamed, and occasionally the teeth. The faces were darkened by burnt cork and grease paint… and a fair amount of simple dirt. Frozen dirt and gravel below crunched softly under the soldiers’ boots.

  The boys, as Brasche thought of them, had done well so far with their basic training. Marksmanship was of an acceptable order, though Brasche had serious reservations that any amount of normal training would be adequate to teach anyone to shoot well when there was an enemy shooting back. He had served on the Russian Front, after all.

  But “well” is a relative term, he thought, too. And we have a few tricks, ourselves, that just may help. Brasche smiled with wicked anticipation at what awaited the boys ahead.

  The boys’ ostensible mission was to counterattack to retake a section of field entrenchments lost to a notional Posleen attack. In fact, as Brasche and a few others running the exercise knew, the techniques of the counterattack through the trenches were purely secondary. The objective of the exercise was to frighten the boys half out of their wits so that once they recovered those wits would be harder to frighten.

  Brasche heard static breaking over the radio at his side. He answered with his name.

  “Oberst Kiel here, Brasche. My men are in position.”

  “Excellent, Herr Oberst.” Brasche glanced quickly at the rear entrance to the trench system just as the first of the new troops began his descent into it. “The party should be beginning right about… now.”

  As if they were timed to a clock, as indeed they were, the first mortar shells crashed down onto the objective area. Through the actinic glow of the splashing shells Brasche saw, faintly, the outlines of half a dozen or so of Kiel’s men. Themselves immune to any weapon the new boys had to bring to bear — as well as from the mortar shells, the armored mobile infantry were there to add spice, frightfulness really, to the exercise. Their holographic projectors were ideal for portraying a Posleen enemy, even a mass of them. But best of all
…

  “Liebe Gott im Himmel!” Brasche heard a boy — young Dieter Schultz, so he thought — exclaim over the radio. “They are fucking shooting at us. For real!”

  “Indeed they are, Kinder.” Brasche recognized Krueger’s voice in the radio. “With weapons much like the ones the invaders will have. Now what have you been taught about what to do when someone is shooting at you?” asked Krueger, with a tone of scorn.

  The radio went silent immediately. Still, so Brasche was pleased to note, rifle fire began to flash out from the trenches, to strike the holographic projections or even, occasionally the armored combat suits. Where a bullet was sensed to have passed or hit, or a shell or grenade to have exploded, an Artificial Intelligence Device — or AID, eliminated one or more of the Posleen targets. Meanwhile, from above the ground and the trenches, the Armored Combat Suits themselves flashed fire generally in the young boys’ direction. The ACS were aiming to frighten, however, rather than to kill or wound, carefully keeping their point of aim away from the boys’ heads and bodies.

  Young Schultz’s voice again crackled over the radio to be answered by a regular Bundeswehr tank commander on loan to the training brigade for the exercise.

  Over the sound of rifle fire, high explosives, and the sound barrier cracking of the ACS’s grav-guns, Brasche detected the throaty diesel roar of a Leopard II tank in full charge.

  Good boy, young Schultz, thought Brasche. Not everyone would have remembered that they were not in the fight alone.

  The tank was suddenly lit in Brasche’s view by its own flame as its main gun spewed forth a storm of flechettes onto the objective area…

  * * *

  Brasche and his wingman advanced alone into the storm of steel. Ahead, artillery pounded at such of the Russian positions as could be positively identified or confidently guessed at. There was never enough of it though.

  They had been warned that the defenses were incredible. But nothing had prepared Brasche or the men who had begun the battle under his command for the reality of Kursk. Nothing short of a tour through hell could have even approached the reality.

  Of the men under his command to begin, a single platoon of Panzer IVs and a platoon of infantry in support, all that remained were a brace of tanks. The infantry was but a memory.

  And Ivan’s PAKs, his antitank guns, were everywhere. Brasche shuddered at the memory of a fight between his medium panzers and no less than a dozen Russian guns, dug in, camouflaged and firing under a unified command. That fight alone had cost him two panzers. The screams of one crew, burning alive, still rang in the tank commander’s ears.

  In Brasche’s headphones he heard the commander of his wing tank exclaim, “Achtung! Achtung! Panzer Abwehr Kanonen zum—”[22] and the panicky voice cut off.

  But the direction was not needed. Standing in the tank commander’s hatch, Brasche himself could see smoke and fire belching from the ground to his right. Eyes straining to make out the precise location of his enemy, he could not see, but he could feel, the half dozen solid shot that tore through the air at himself and his wing man.

  Both tanks frantically tried to pivot themselves to place their more strongly armored glacis in the direction of the fire, as their turrets swung round even faster to engage the enemy.

  A race against time it seemed. And then Brasche realized there must have been a reason for those guns to have opened fire when they did. He turned around just in time to see more fire coming from behind.

  Then the world went black for Hans Brasche, Fifth SS Panzer Division (Wiking).

  * * *

  The Leopard fired again, clearing Hans’ reminiscences from his mind. Never mind, though. Back at Kursk, more than six decades prior, the second battery of guns had opened up, gutting both his tank and his wingman’s. Hans had lost consciousness. He never knew how it had come to pass that he escaped the tank. In his memory he imagined a mindless crawling thing, fleeing the fire like an animal fleeing a combusting forest. Of his trip back to Germany, to his convalescence, his memory had been reduced to a sense of little beyond pain, sometimes dim, sometimes agonizing.

  The memory of the pain made him shudder, still.

  Brasche pushed the memories aside, finally and completely. The open ramp into the trench system awaited. Hans walked forward and descended.

  * * *

  Down in the trenches Dieter Schultz, age eighteen, shuddered with pain from a tank-fired flechette that had grazed one arm, ripping an inch-long jagged tear across his skin. Blood poured out, staining his kampfanzug, his battledress. The blood showed a dullish red in the tracers’ gleam.

  Beside Schultz another of the boys, Harz, looked down in uncomprehending fright. “Dieter, you’re bleeding.”

  “Never mind that,” insisted Schultz, clamping a hand to his wound to stop the trickling blood. “Run down the trench to Third Squad. Get them to move to the right and engage… to take some of the fire off of us here.”

  “Zu Befehl, Dieter,”[23] answered Harz, half mockingly and yet half serious.

  Krueger, meanwhile, crouched silently nearby, watching Schultz’s actions with an eagle eye. He caught a bare glimpse of Brasche, easing himself down the trench, and stood to a head-bent attention.

  “Herr Major?” asked Krueger.

  “Nothing, Sergeant,” answered Brasche. “Just observing.”

  Dieter, obsessed with his wound but more so with his mission, did not notice Brasche standing nearby. Still, Hans noted the quiet boy, growing into his potential, there in the cold and muddy trench.

  The boy shouted to the others around him. “Stand by.” Then he spoke a few short words into the radio, “Five rounds, antipersonnel.” Brasche and Krueger ducked low once again. And only just in time, too, as the distant tank began firing rapidly, deluging the surface above with flechettes. All told there were precisely five major blasts and five minor as the flechette rounds burst to spill their deadly cargo.

  Without more than half a second’s hesitation after that fifth minor explosion, Schultz shouted another command and the boys, following his example, stuck their heads and their rifles above the trench lip, adding their precision fire to the holograms and ACS remaining.

  Very good, thought Brasche.

  Paris, France, 17 February 2005

  The house was plunged in an early morning sadness. The mother and one little son cried openly. The elder boy, nearing thirteen now, struggled to keep his face clear. Last night his father had made him promise to be the man of the house, a promise asked for solemnly… and as solemnly made.

  “I will write every day, ma cherie… ma belle femme,” promised the husband, stroking the sobbing Isabelle’s hair softly. “And I should be able to take leave at sometime.”

  Isabelle pressed her wet face into his shoulder. Her encircling arms held him tightly. There were no words she could bring herself to say.

  Last night had been bad. They had fought as they rarely fought. She had struggled to get her husband to desert, to flee to some place past the army’s reach. He had steadfastly refused, claiming — truthfully insofar as he knew — that no place on Earth would be safe from the army, not now with the entire planet rearming to the teeth.

  In the end, seeing that he would not, it had been she who had relented. In fear for her future and in remembrance of more youthful, happier times, she had dragged her husband to their large wooden bad and made love to him with a dazzling skill and enthusiasm that left him breathless.

  “That is to remind you,” Isabelle had said, “to remind you of what you have here and to make you want to come back.”

  Still half out of breath, he had answered, “After that awesome performance, my love… and at my age… I should be better to stay away in order to safeguard my life.”

  Kraus-Maffei-Wegmann Plant, Munich, Germany, 21 June 2005

  Mühlenkampf was… well, there was no other word: he was awed.

  Gleaming above him, for the beast had not yet had its coat of paint, stood the Tiger III. Below, at g
round level — though the ground was meters-thick concrete — the tracks were caked with the mud, so Mühlenkampf noted with interest.

  “She works,” he announced with a quiver in his voice, drawing the correct conclusion from the caked mud.

  Proudly, Mueller, Schlüssel, Prael and the others stood a bit taller. “She works, Herr General. This is prototype number one. There are a few bugs yet. But she moves. She shoots. She can take a punch on her great armored nose and punch right back.”

  “And,” added Prael who had designed and nearly hand built her electronic suite, “Tiger III is the best human designed and built training vehicle in history, with virtual-reality simulators to allow a full gamut of gunner and driver training without ever leaving the Kaserne.”

  “We will have to take her out anyway,” answered the general. “Otherwise you will never know what might still be wrong. When can I have one? Or, better still, many of them?”

  “This one is yours now,” answered Mueller. “We are, indeed, hoping your field tests will help work out any remaining problems.”

  But Mueller spoke to Mühlenkampf’s back. Already the veteran was fumbling with his new, inconvenient, and sometimes damnable cellular phone.

  “Brasche? Get to Munich. Now!”

  Sennelager, Germany, 28 June 2005

  Basic training was long over now. The thin, emaciated skeleton of a Korps was beginning to grow and fill out here at this training base on the north German plain where the boys had been relocated for unit training.

  Though Basic was over, the days were still as long and the nights sometimes longer. And yet the boys reveled in the name “soldier.” On the route marches that took them through the nearby towns the boys marched with pride and a spring in their steps.