Operation Fury
by
Leo Kessler

Recent Titles by Leo Kessler from Severn House The S. S. Wotan Series

ASSAULT ON BAGHDAD

BREAKOUT PROM STALINGRAD

FLIGHT FROM BERLIN

FLIGHT FROM MOSCOW

FIRE OVER SERBIA

MARCH OF DEATH

OPERATION LONG JUMP

S.S. ATTACKS WOTAN MISSIONS

THE HITLER WEREWOLF MURDERS

Writing as Duncan Hording

ATTACK NEW YORK!  COME HELL OR HIGH WATER

TF1E TOBRUK RESCUE OPERATION JUDGEMENT OPERATION STORM WIND

Writing as Charles Whiting The Common Smith VC Series

THE BALTIC RUN

DEATH TRAP

HELL'S ANGELS

IN TURKISH WATERS

PASSAGE TO PETRO GRAD

THE JAPANESE PRINCESS

PATHS OF DEATH AND GLORY (non-fiction) Writing as John Kerrigan The
O'Sullivans of the SAS Series

KILL ROMMEL SURPRISE ATTACK

OPERATION FURY

Leo Kessler

This first world edition published in Great Britain 1997 by S-F.VF.RN
HOUSE PUBLISHERS LTD of 9-15 High Street.  Sutton.  Surrey SM1 1DI;.
This first edition published in the U.S.A. 1997 by SHVERN MOUSE
PUBLISHERS INC of 595 Madison Avenue.  New York.  NY 10022.

Copyright (c) 1997 by Leo Kessler All rights reserved.  The moral
rights of the author to be identified as author of this work have been
asserted.

British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data Kessler.  Leo.  'l926
Operation Fury.  (S.S. Wotan series) l.Lnnlish fiction 2()th century
I.Title

823.9'14 [F]

ISBN 0-7278-4958-1

Typeset by Hewer Text Composition Services.  Edinburgh.  Printed and
bound in Great Britain by Hartnolls Ltd.  Bodmin.  Cornwall.

Publisher's Note Well, well, what can one say!

A writer of fiction featuring himself in one of his own novels?  It's
highly unusual, yet that is what Mr.  Leo Kessler, the acclaimed author
of several score novels on World War II published over the last quarter
of a century, has done.  The question, so far unanswered, is why the
70-year-old author has done it.  Vanity, nostalgia, megalomania all
spring to mind.  In due course Mr.  Kessler may explain why he featured
himself as a main character in events which took place well over half a
century ago.

To me, however, as his publisher, Kessler's reasons are quite simple.
This young combat soldier on the Western Front over 50 years ago was
also a budding writer, he needed the real-life experiences which would
be the basic elements of his future work.  Novice scribbler that he was
then, he had to store some of those terrible if tremendous experiences
of that time in his brain for future use.  Probably many fiction
authors do, remembering the dramatic or unusual events of their youth
for the rest of their writing careers.

Indeed what more dramatic events can a young man undergo than those of
a 'hot' war when one's life hangs by a thread and men die in their
scores, their hundreds, in bloody battle, young existences snuffed out
before they have really commenced to live?

For a matter of several days in that grey, grim week at the beginning
of December 1944, before it all began, young Kessler hazarded his life
behind the German lines, taking absolutely impossible risks.  No one
had ordered him to do so, he had volunteered.  If he had been caught he
would have been shot out of hand as a spy without a moment's hesitation
on the part of the enemy.  Kessler would have died young, remembered,
if at all, as a minor footnote in the history of espionage in World War
II.  Those Kessler novels which have so appalled and entertained us
since the late 1960s would not have been written.

But Kessler did volunteer and he did survive.  Now, 50-odd years on, he
has finally revealed his own personal secret.  Not only that, he has
revealed a much greater and historically significant one: a secret that
almost beggars belief.  How America's most senior general of the 20th
century was prepared to and did sacrifice many hundreds of his young
soldiers' lives in order to achieve a great victory over the German
enemy.

It is an almost unbelievable tale of treachery and counter-treachery,
lechery and gross perversion and, above all, betrayal, tremendous
betrayal of a kind never to be expected from a senior officer of the
world's greatest democracy, a land that prides itself on being 'the
home of the free'.

OPERATION FURY, and the role Kessler played in it, deserves to be told
at last, despite all the controversy that it will undoubtedly raise in
due course.  It is not a pretty tale, but in those grim, war-torn days
there were no pretty tales .. .

E.B. Surrey, England, 1996

VI

Man's Character is his Fate."  Heraclitus.

Book One

T' FOR TRAITOR

What of the faith and fire within us Men who march away Ere the
barn-cocks say Night is growing gray?

Thomas Hardy Men Who March Away

Chapter One

"Leo KesslerT Obersturmbannfuhrer von Dodenburg, commander of the elite
SS Assault Regiment "Wotan', looked up from the kitchen table of the
country inn which served him as his headquarters and stared up at the
newcomer.  The man looked tough despite the ragged combat fatigues,
russet-brown and patched where he had been wounded and captured three
weeks previously.

Outside, the guns were silent, for it was already pitch-black at the
front.  The only sound was the steady pace of the sentries outside,
muffled up to the eyeballs in greatcoats and scarves; and the muted
rumble of yet more transports bringing up reinforcements along the
straw-covered roads of the Eifel, eager to take cover in the vast fir
woods of the area before dawn came.

"Are you of German origin?"  von Dodenburg asked curiously, putting
down his simple wooden pen.  He eyed the volunteer from the US
prisoner-of-war camp and told himself the American lieutenant of
infantry hardly looked the type to turn traitor and help Wotan, which
it had been suggested by German Intelligence he was prepared to do.

The American shook his head.

"But you speak fluent German," von Dodenburg commented, staring up at
the American in the flickering, wavering yellow light of the candle
which threw their shadows in grotesque magnification on the grey walls
of the dirty kitchen.

"I lived in a German neighbourhood in Nebraska," Leo Kessler explained.
He shrugged carelessly, as if it was not very important.

"Everyone up there had to speak Dutch, even pure, white-blooded
Americans."  He laughed shortly at the expression.

"Otherwise you simply didn't exist for the local Dutch."

Von Dodenburg looked at the prisoner hard.

"Kessler," he announced after a few moments, "is not a German name.

You're not Jewish are you?"

The big American with the craggy face and the careful, calculating grey
eyes, laughed.

"It's hardly likely, is it, Obersturmbannfuhrer" he said.

"I can't see a kike volunteering to help the Waffen SS, can you?"

Von Dodenburg agreed.

"I suppose you're right, Kessler."

He puffed out his skinny black chest, his uniform heavy with
decorations for bravery in action, including the Knight's Cross
dangling from the ribbon at his throat.

"So why have you volunteered to aid us and be classified as a traitor
who is likely to be shot if you ever fall into American hands, eh?"

Suddenly Kessler's face grew hard and serious.  The bantering tone
vanished.

"Because," he said slowly and determinedly, "I hate commies."  He
paused as if he expected a reaction from the 29-year-old SS colonel.

Von Dodenburg gave none.  In six years of tough combat across three
continents he had observed many men cowards, heroes, ordinary 'stubble
hoppers', malingerers.

He had learned never to concentrate on their faces, but always on their
eyes.  He noted that Leo Kessler's face was fixedly grim and supposedly
angry, his grey eyes remained as cool and as calculating as ever.

"You see, Obersturmbannfuhrer " Kessler said urgently, "you Germans
have almost lost this war.  You are fighting the Anglo-American Armies
in the West and the overwhelming power of the Red Army in the East.
Soon if they aren't stopped the commies will take over Europe, once you
Germans can no longer stop them.  Then they'll attempt to take over
America and the rest of the world, just as they attempted to do after
the First World War.  I aim to do my little bit to stop them while
there's still time, even if it means helping you Krauts .. . er,
Germans."

Von Dodenburg pushed a tin of looted English "Capstan' cigarettes
towards the American as he paused for breath, his big chest heaving.

"Have a cancer stick," he invited Kessler, "Don't be afraid."  He
allowed himself a cynical little smile at the American's expense.

"They aren't German ersatz rubbish, but real one hundred percent US
Virginia tobacco!"

Kessler didn't need a second invitation.  He took a 'cancer stick' and
lit the cigarette expertly with his treasured Zippo lighter.

"Thank you," he said gratefully, puffing out a thin stream of blue
smoke from his flared nostrils.

"Haven't had a smoke for a good while."

Von Dodenburg ignored the information.

"You are remarkably frank for a prisoner of the SS," he admitted, "You
are risking your life now.  However I am prepared to accept your offer,
so join us now, Lieutenant Kessler."

The American brightened immediately.  It was as if he had suddenly
achieved something of great importance, at least to him.

Outside, a fighter plane came zooming in at zero feet, skimming the
supply road outside, making the windows shake violently with its prop
wash.

Leo Kessler looked up in sudden alarm as the plane roared across the
remote hamlet, which housed SS Assault Regiment "Wotan'.

Von Dodenburg looked unperturbed.

"Don't worry," he reassured the American, "Just routine, it's one of
ours.

They're bringing up replacement Tigers and Panthers from the railhead
at Biburg.  We need them urgently.  Reveille at dawn," he went on.

"Watch it however.  My green beaks shoot first and ask questions
afterwards, especially at night."

Kessler nodded, saluted and went out to leave von Dodenburg to stare
thoughtfully at the dirty, flaking wall.

He knew that something big was going to happen soon.

He had never seen so many new men and such splendid new equipment since
the Fuhrer had invaded Russia back in '41 in what now seemed another
age.  He didn't know what it was, but he could guess.  Now Reichsfuhrer
SS Himmler had sent this Ami guide to him personally.  Why?  What did
he need the American for?

For what seemed an age he brooded over his problems, as outside there
was the rusty squeak and clatter of the arriving tanks, with NCOs
shouting hoarse orders and the men detailed to do so already chopping
down branches to be draped over their camouflage nets so that when, at
dawn, the little hedge-hopping Ami spotter planes came zooming over the
huge frontier forest, they would see nothing but kilo metre after kilo
metre of supposedly empty forest.  This was the 'ghost front', as it
was called by both sides ever since the fighting had died down there in
September 1944.

Finally he made a provisional decision.  He placed both fingers in his
mouth the way he had seen Berlin street urchins do as a boy, and
whistled shrilly three times.

The two old 'hares' came in immediately without knocking, as if they
had been waiting for his summons behind the battered, bullet-pocked
door all the time.

In the lead came senior sergeant Schulze, his brawny chest covered with
as much 'tin', as they called decorations for bravery, as that of his
CO.  He was wolfing down something from a steaming mess tin.  Behind
came him came his running mate, wizened little Corporal Matz, the
straps that held his wooden leg creaking audibly as he limped into the
office.  He, too, was busily engaged with a steaming canteen and, for
some reason known only to himself, he was wearing a woman's frilly
scarlet garter, trimmed with lace, peeping out from beneath his
coal-scuttle helmet.

Von Dodenburg looked up at them in mock amazement.

He shook his head in wonder, as if he couldn't quite believe that he
saw.

"Can't you observe basic military courtesies just for once, you two
rogues?"  he asked in the voice of a longsuffering man sorely tried.

The big sergeant, with the brick-red, weather-beaten face that looked
as if it had carved from granite, wiped away the grease that was
dripping down from his unshaven chin.

"Just trying to get some fodder inside us, sir," he explained.

"We managed toer obtain his," he winked knowingly, "before those greedy
bastards of kitchen bulls" (he meant the regimental cooks) "scoffed it
themselves.  You know what they're like, sir.  We poor hairy-arsed
stubble-hoppers are supposed to live off love and air, while those
shitehawks live like the king of France on our stolen rations.  Matzi
here's got him sen a nice mug o' nigger sweat, real coffee beans, not
that ersatz stuff made of friggin' acorns.  And I nicked half a litre
of good thick fart soup" (he meant pea soup) "with a chunk of old man
inside it."  He was referring to tinned meat, reputedly made from the
bodies of old men who had died in Berlin's workhouses.

Von Dodenburg held up his hand for silence.

"Keep your gourmet pleasures to yourself, you big oaf, and listen to
me, attentively," he ordered.

Schulze clicked to attention like a raw recruit and barked at the top
of his voice, "At your service, Obersturmbannfuhrer!"

Von Dodenburg shot him a menacing look and said, "An Ami has just
joined us.  You don't need to know why."

"I shit Amis for breakfast," Matz said apropos of nothing and reached
for the half-smoked cigarette perched behind his right ear.

"Now," von Dodenburg continued, "the Ami seems genuine enough.  He's
volunteered to work for Wotan but you never know.  I want you to keep
your eyes skinned, watch his every move."

"Like the proverbial tinned tomato," Schulze promised him.

"The glassy orbs will be on his visage twenty-four hours a day."

"And?"  Schulze queried urgently.

By way of an answer, von Dodenburg raised his right hand and clicked
his forefinger back and forth, as if he were pulling the trigger of a
pistol.

Schulze nodded his understanding and Matz said threateningly, "Leave it
to us, sir.  One wrong move and the Ami's dog-meat toot sweet".

Outside, lying on the hard, damp earth, Leo Kessler turned stiffly
under the rough woollen blanket.  The pre-dawn mist was creeping
through the dripping firs, curling itself about them silently like a
grey noiseless cat.  He told himself he thought he had pulled it off.
The hard-faced SS colonel seemed to have believed him.  Then he
snuggled down deeper into the brown woollen blanket.  A moment later he
was fast asleep, snoring softly like a man who hadn't a care in the
world.

Chapter Two

"Meine Hen en" the giant black-clad adjutant bellowed at the top of his
voice, as if he were back on the barrack square, "unser Fuhrer Adolf
Hitler!"

As one the three army commanders, their chiefs-of-staff and top aides
rose, pushed back the hard-backed wooden chairs and clicked to
attention.  The great hall of the medieval Ziegenburg Castle echoed and
re-echoed to the hard crunch of their polished jackboots.  They fixed
their eyes expectantly on the high-arched Gothic portal, flanked by two
suspicious black-uniformed SS officers, loaded machine-pistols slung
across their chests.  For they were curious.  Most of them hadn't seen
the Fuhrer since the attempt on his life by the renegade Wehrmacht
generals back in the previous July.

Hitler took his time.  Finally the great doors swung opened.  Dietrich,
once the Fuhrer's bodyguard in the early says of the Movement, now
commander of the Sixth SS Panzer Army, gasped.  Hitler was a changed
man.  Slowly and shakily he came into the great, flag-draped hall,
supported by his chief-of-staff, cunning-faced Colonel-General Jodl,
and Field Marshal Keitel, wooden and stupid, but loyal.

Dutifully Sepp Dietrich raised his right hand and in his thick
Bavarian, schnapps-sodden voice, cried, "Heil Hitler!"

The other two army commanders and their staff joined in it wasn't wise
to be suspect these days; one could end up hanging from a length of
chicken wire if one did so that the ancient black beams high above them
in the grey gloom seemed to tremble with the cries.

Weakly the head of the vaunted "Thousand Year Reich' flipped his right
arm in acknowledgement of the greeting and said in a low, shaky
voice.

"Thank you, gentlemen.

Please be seated once more.  I have something of vital importance to
say to you."

With a shuffle of their booted feet, Germany's top brass settled in
their hard chairs once more, while the giant aides crooked their
fingers around the triggers of their machine pistols and gazed at them,
alert to any danger to the Fuhrer's precious life.

Adolf Hitler held his left arm which trembled uncontrollably and stared
at the commanders of the three assault armies of 200,000 elite
soldiers.  To diminutive Colonel-General Hasso von Manteuffel,
commander of the 5th Panzer Army, Hitler looked like a crippled man,
old before his time, who wouldn't live much longer.  Was this the man
to whom Germany's fate should be entrusted at this moment of ultimate
crisis?  He thought not.

But as soon as Adolf Hitler began his address, von Manteuffel knew that
he hadn't lost his old power to shock and dramatise.

"Meine Herren" he announced, his voice hoarse and hushed, "On Saturday,
December 16th, 1944, Germany's armies in the west will once more go
over to the offensive!"

There was a sudden buzz of excitement among the high ranking generals.
It didn't seem possible after the terrible defeats of the summer in
France and Poland.

Hitler held up his good hand for silence.

"Confidently he added, "At 0500 hours on that morning, the Seventh
Infantry Army, under you, von Brandenburger," he indicated the somewhat
elderly infantry general, "the Fifth Panzer under your command, von
Manteuffel, and your own SS Panzer, Dietrich will attack the Western
Allies between Monschau to the north and Echternach in the south.  That
is on a front of 70 kilometres, held by four weak US infantry divisions
of the US VIII Corps, under the command of a certain General Middleton,
of whom I have never heard."

He let his fateful words sink in before continuing: "You, my dear
Dietrich, will commence the operation with the most powerful army of
the attack force, the 6th SS.  I know I can rely on my loyal and brave
SS to carry the day."

Dietrich's coarse drinker's face broke into a self-satisfied smirk,
while von Manteuffel, the professional who had risen from colonel to
army commander is five short years, looked angry.

"With your four SS panzer divisions," Hitler said, "you will attack
through the Losheim Gap below Monschau to the north, Dietrich, smash
through the enemy line which is eggshell-thin there, according to
Intelligence, and head for the River Meuse in Belgium."  He paused and
then his voice rose dramatically as he pointed a trembling finger at
the big, dark-faced Bavarian SS general with the pugnacious, dimpled
chin, "Once across the river, head for the main Allied supply port at
Antwerp.  Once Antwerp is lost the Western Allies will have to come to
terms with us, for they will have no other means of continuing the war
without their supplies."

Von Manteuffel felt his heart sink into his polished boots.  Antwerpl
The capture of the great Belgian port was an impossible mission for the
German Army at this stage of the war.

Now Jodl took over while the Fuhrer rested, slumped in a chair, the
flickering light of the candles which lit the great hall wavering and
trembling.  Jodl cleared his throat in that business-like, no-nonsense
manner of his and started reeling off the statistics: "There will be
77,000 replacements led into your armies in the first forty-eight hours
of the attack to make up for casualties .. . You will be supplied with
3.1 million lit res of fuel, enabling each tank to travel twenty
kilometres the first day of the attack .. . Three hundred and fifty
fighters will support you, including eighty of our new jets against
which the Western Allies are powerless .. ."

He reeled off figure after figure, while his listeners' minds rocked.
Where was Germany obtaining so many men and so much materiel after six
years of total war?

It was Hitler himself who answered that overwhelming question, when
Jodl was finished.  Helped to his feet with difficulty by two of his
black-clad giants, he said, "Meine Hen-en, this tremendous effort has
only been made possible by the almost superhuman efforts of our folk
comrades in factory and workshop.  They will never be able to make the
same effort again.  Bear that in mind.  The battle to come is to decide
whether Greater Germany lives or dies.  I want you to understand that
my brave soldiers must fight hard and without pity.  We shall instigate
a reign of brutality.  All resistance must be broken in a wave of
terror.  In this, the Fatherland's gravest hour, I expect all of my
soldiers, from the lowest rank to the most senior general, to be
courageous and courageous again!"

His voice rose to that mad, hysterical screech that they all remembered
from the pre-war Party rallies at Nuremburg.

"The enemy must be beaten, now or never!  We shall never have another
chance.  Otherwise our beloved Germany must die .. . Our enemies will
show no mercy."  He sat down heavily, skinny chest heaving frantically.
He was obviously exhausted.

Again Jodl took over and looked at the three army commanders.  Dietrich
and Brandenburger remained silent.

They knew it was wiser to do so in the Fuhrer's presence.

Not so von Manteuffel, who when he had doubts had more often than not
spoken frankly to Hitler.

"Let me use the old German phrase, Jodl," he said quietly.

"Free from the liver."

Jodl nodded, wondering what was to come.

Von Manteuffel soon enlightened him.

"The plan is brilliant," he said.

"But it if fails, we are lost.  Now," he was obviously thinking out his
words carefully, "so far we have been able to beat off every enemy
attack from our positions in the Siegfried Line.  From north to south,
despite overwhelming superiority in men and materiel, the Anglo
Americans have been unable to penetrate our concrete fortifications,
even when the line has been held by boys and old cripples with one eye
and a leg."  He laughed hollowly and cynically, but no one joined him. 
Their gaze was fixed hypnotically on the Fuhrer's face, wondering how
he was going to take the small, ex-gentleman jockey's words.

"Since September we have managed to fend them off.  They have hardly
captured a metre of German soil.  Despite all their efforts."  He
paused and waited for the outburst from Hitler.

But none came.  Instead, the Fuhrer listened intently, as if he were
quite interested.

"So while I agree with the whole concept of offensive action,"
Manteuffel went on, "I think under present circumstance we should stay
behind the fortifications of the Westwall and let the Amis continue to
batter their heads against it.  Soon the winter snows will start and
that will be the end of offensive ops for them anyway.  Besides," he
said darkly, "we might need out armoured formations in the East to ward
off the Ivans," he meant the Russians.

"Apart from the natural barrier of the River Oder there is no Siegfried
Line there to stop them.  The way is wide open for the Red Army to
attack Eastern Germany once they have crossed the Oder.  They could be
in Berlin in a matter of days."  He looked directly at Hitler, "and we
all know what that would mean the end of the Reichl" He paused
momentarily, his thin chest hcaviim with the effort of all the
talking.

"I, therefore, am in favour of staying where we are in our
fortifications on the Reich frontier."

The other two army commanders stared at him aghast, as if he had
committed a great heresy and Brandenburger, a mild-mannered man,
ventured, "He who tries to hold everything holds nothing, as the great
Napoleon once stated."

Von Manteuffel ignored the remark contemptuously.

His gaze was fixed on Hitler, waiting for his reaction.

The Fuhrer took his time.  Finally he said, "I take your point von
Manteuffel.  It is a very valid one.  But we can't afford to wait for
the spring in the West.  Time is running out for our beloved
Fatherland.  In the spring the Western Allies will be too powerful for
us to stop them even at the Westwall.  Besides, there has never been a
time since the Invasion in June which is so politically favourable to
our cause.  Revolution is imminent in France and Belgium.

The communists are planning to take over there and the whole Allied
transport and supply situation will be thrown into disarray once the
Belgian and French dockers and railway workers go on strike at Moscow's
orders.  The Anglo-Americans are squabbling among themselves about
their war aims.  Roosevelt is determined to break up the British Empire
and he will go to any length to do so.  And Churchill, the drunken sot,
is running out of manpower.

He is scraping the barrel for men.  He has just called up men aged
forty-five and older.  He, too, is afflicted by strikes and badly
needed men are being sent to Greece to try to put down the communist
insurrection there.  No, von Manteuffel, we are dealing not only with a
military situation, but with a political one as well.  Believe me."

He paused and said with an air of finality.

"No, the great surprise attack must go ahead mr!"

Von Manteuffel gave in.  With a slight shrug of his shoulders, he said
with a resigned voice, "As you say,

me in Fuhrer.  Rest assured, you will have my fullest support."

"Thank you, General."  Wearily Hitler rose to his feet.

Immediately his soldiers did the same, clicking to attention as he
departed supported by his SS men.  They watched and told themselves
Hitler would surely be dead within the year.

But for the time being he lived and held the power of life and death
over them.

They waited till the great doors closed behind him before following to
where the guards handed them back their briefcases and pistols.  These
days the SS were taking no chances of another attempt on the Fuhrer's
life.

Chatting excitedly among themselves, or moving out in silence,
considering what they had just been told, they passed out into the
night.  Already the fog was beginning to roll in once more, muffling
the sound of the patrolling sentries' boots and the sound of the big
grey staff cars starting up to take them back to their command posts
tucked away in the remote forests of the Eifel, far away from the
prying eyes of the Americans.

Von Manteuffel walked in front of his chief-of-staff and officers, as
if he wanted to be by himself at this moment;

as if he might well have been shocked by what he had just learned of
Hitler's intentions, which was true.  Suddenly he was overcome by a
terrible sense of helplessness knowing that he had no power to change
things, despite his high rank.  Things would go the way Hitler wanted.
He could do nothing.  Wordlessly he got into the grey Horch.  In front
the driver slipped into first gear and the car drew away into the
night.  Within seconds it had disappeared into the gloom.

Chapter Three

Dietrich waited till the attentive chauffeur had covered his legs with
the thick plaid rug and placed the hamper, containing its thermos of
steaming hot coffee, laced with strong rum, between him and General
Kraemer, his cynical and sophisticated chief of staff, before he
indicated the big staff car should set off.  Behind them the gothic
facade of Ziegenberg Castle was silent and shrouded in fog.  As the
cars started to move away, with Dietrich's bodyguard, armed with a
sub-machine gun, sitting warily next to him, the turreted castle
disappeared like one of those magic castles of the medieval German
legends.

Dietrich leaned forward and, pressing the electric button, closed the
bullet-proof glass window between them and the two men in the front.
Now he felt free to speak.

"Well?"  General Kraemer, his chief of staff, asked in the bored,
apparently languid manner of his, "What did you think of the old man's
performance?"

Dietrich was shocked at his chief of staffs use of the term.

He had never heard of Hitler being referred to as the 'old man' before.
But he knew he must not comment on it.  He needed the highly trained
staff officer, who had just been posted to him, to help in what was to
come.  (Privately, Kraemer confided to his cronies about Dietrich, "An
army commander and the damned fellah can't even read a map correctly!")
Dietrich shrugged a little awkwardly.

"The plan is very bold admittedly.  But an armoured assault in the
depths of winter in some of the most difficult mountainous terrain in
Western Europe-" He left the rest unfinished, as if it was impossible
to think the matter to an end.

Carefully, Kraemer, eyes as cynical as always, took out one of his
hand-rolled perfumed Turkish cigarettes from a silver cigarette case
and placed it in his long ivory holder.

Gratefully he puffed out the pungent smoke, which made Dietrich cough,
and said, "Jodl's behind it of course.  He's done the planning, the
cunning fox.  But he's honest, well, as honest as anyone is these
days."

Dietrich kept silent.  He had learned since the summer it was not wise
to comment on such matters.

"He's picked an ideal spot for a breakthrough, the Losheim Gap, the
classic invasion route into the Low Countries, and the joint between
two US corps, always a very vulnerable place.  But once we leave the
plain behind and cross the River Salm, we enter those damned Ardennes
mountains which more than likely are going to be covered with snow and
ice at this time of the year.  Terrible terrain for the follow-up
armour."

Doggedly, Dietrich said, "My boys will tackle it all right.

They've done so before in Russia."

Gently, Kraemer said, "Those er boys are long dead, General.  Now
you're dealing with green beaks raw recruits straight from the depots.
Some of them hadn't even seen a tank up to a few weeks ago!"

"All they need is the right commander to lead them, someone who'll put
the fear of God into their hearts and black pepper in their arses."

Kraemer chuckled softly at the expression.

"Von Dodenburg of Wotan perhaps?"  he ventured carefully.

"Exactly!"

"He won't like it.  You know just how loyal he is to his regiment.
Wotan is his home, family, fatherland these days.

He'll do almost everything to protect it from losses."

"Von Dodenburg, the arrogant swine, will do as I order," Dietrich
growled a little angrily.

"He must learn that I am the army commander, not him!"

Kraemer said nothing.  Now they were rolling along the second-class
road to Cologne and Dietrich's forward command post which lay to the
south-east of the great Rhenish city.  There were heavily armed patrols
everywhere and road blocks, manned by officers, every kilo metre of
so.

Routinely they stopped the big grey staff car but when they saw who was
sitting in the back they waved the car on with a salute and without
asking for their passes.

"Rank hath its privileges," Kraemer commented cynically.

"For all they know the two of us could be Ami spies!"

" Wasein Quatschl" Dietrich said angrily "what rubbish!

No one could penetrate out lines in the Eifel.  Our security is far too
tight."

Kraemer said nothing, but inside his head a small, harsh voice rasped,
"famous last words!"

Then the two of them lapsed into silence, as the big car rolled towards
its destination and Dietrich reached for the rum-laced coffee and
preceeded to get 'bed-heavy', as he called it and which Kraemer
interpreted as getting seriously drunk.

Thirty kilometres away, Leo Kessler stole out of his little tent into
the fog-shrouded camp.  All was silent now save for the mournful
drip-drip of the raindrops from the dank firs and the heavy snoring of
the SS troopers, ensconsed in another and better world than this at the
front.

On tiptoe he crept cautiously to the latrines, keeping his eyes peeled
for the first sign of a patrolling sentry but he made the
rough-and-ready structure at the edge of the sleeping camp without
difficulty.  It was the usual

thunder box as the troopers called such places, a 12-seater crapper,
though there were no seats in the latrine, which stank of human faeces
and lime.  Instead, fastened to each end by means of a heavy ration
box, a pole was stretched over the noxious hole, filled almost to the
brim with slimy ordure.  To keep out the cold Eifel winds, the
engineers had surrounded it with a shoulder-high hessian screen to
which were attached empty rations cans, which contained strips of
cut-up newspaper instead of the usual grass with which the front-line
troops wiped their bottoms in the field.

On impulse, Leo Kessler picked up a piece of the coarse, recycled
newspaper and peered at it in the cold light of the sickle moon, past
which clouds scudded overhead, momentarily penetrating the grey damp.
He grinned a little as he just made out of the paper's title.  It was
from the Volkischer Beobachter, Hitler's own paper.

"Well, now we know what the average SS stubble-hopper thinks of his
Fuhrer," he muttered to himself.

Suddenly his tough, craggy face hardened.  He had heard a soft footfall
outside the 12-seat crapper.  Was it his contact, whom he ventured out
here to meet this foggy night?  He hesitated a moment, then called
softly in German, "MickeyT Back came the wary, barely audible answer
"Mouse".  It was him all right.  Hastily he did up his flies, rose from
the greasy, stinking pole and waited.

Next moment a little man, who stank of coarse black German tobacco,
stale male sweat and fear came sidling into the latrine.

"Lahousen, Emil," he whispered somewhat fearfully in strangely accented
German.

"Out of Luxembourg from Diekirch."

Leo Kessler knew the little Luxembourg township.  It was the place the
division had gone to to haul the good local, beer for their Saturday
evening binges when they had been out of the line.

Lahousen said, "I'm working for the Germans with other Luxembourgers
and some Russians half a dozen kilometres up the road towards Losheim.
They think we are loyal and like them.  They are mistaken."  He spat on
the dirt floor of the latrine.

"We hate them, those damned Prussians" 

He used the old Luxembourg word
for all Germans.

Leo Kessler wasn't interested.  He didn't want to waste more time than
necessary with the little Luxembourg front runner as the agents who
crossed the border while working for both sides were called.  Too many
awkward questions would be asked, especially as he was an American.

"Listen," he said urgently.

"I want you to move out this very night."

Lahousen nodded his understanding.

"There's not a moment to be lost.  The Krauts are definitely up to
something and our people know nothing about the build-up here, just
opposite Middleton's VIII Corps."  He paused to let his words sink in
before going on with, "Cross the River Our, but don't report to our
front line on the other side.  They'll be a rough-and-ready lot of
ragged-arsed infantry and they'll have no intelligence that far up
front.  They might keep you there for days and time is running out."

"So what do you suggest I do?"

"Make your way straight to your hometown, Diekirch.

It's your safest bet.  You'll be familiar with the best route to sneak
through the American lines."

"I am."

"A divisional HQ is located at the Hotel Cavallis on the hill just
outside the place.  Report there and ask to see the senior intelligence
officer.  Tell him what I'm going to tell you in a moment about the
German build up here."

"But what will I have to prove that the information is coming from a
reliable source, sir?"  the little Luxembourger asked.

"Can't I use your name?"

"Naturally not", Leo Kessler answered immediately.

"Use my code name.  They know it well."

"It is'?"

"Simply TV

"T'?"

"Yes, it stands for 'traitor,"" he answered with a soft chuckle.

"Ah, like the French word for Verrater trait cur."" "Exactly."  Leo
Kessler stopped short suddenly, his heart abruptly beating furiously.
Someone was approaching the crapper.  There was no mistaking the
determined, urgent footsteps.  Someone was in a hurry to use the
latrine.

"Christ on a crutch!"  he cursed in English, "Troubled Lahousen looked
terrified.  He crossed himself urgently and murmured, "If they find
me-" "Shut up!"  Leo Kessler cut him short, his mind racing.  He knew
only well enough the danger they were now in and there was no other way
out of the latrine save the front exit.

Next moment a big, burly SS trooper bustled in, his braces already
dangling from his hips, ripping at his flies as came through the
entrance, as if it were an emergency.  All the same he stopped short
with a gasp as he saw the man in American uniform squatting on the pole
over the midden and the little shabby civilian facing him.  For a
moment he was obviously too flabbergasted to react.  Finally he choked,
his voice outraged.

"In three devils' names what's going on here at this time of night? Are
you warm brothers or something, pulling each other's salamis?"  He
meant homosexuals.  But next moment he realised they weren't.

They were too terrified to be engaged in anything like that.

"Hey!"  he snapped obviously suspicious now, " Was geht hier vor?
what's going on, eh?"  He started to reach into his right-hand trouser
pocket.  It was obvious that he was looking for a weapon.

Leo Kessler didn't give him a chance to find it.  He dived forward from
the sitting position.  The move caught the Wotan trooper completely off
guard.  He went tumbling down to the dirt floor, a bundle of flailing
arms and legs, Kessler sitting on top of him.

Blindly the American lashed out.  The German started to yell for help.
Kessler knew he had to silence him at once, otherwise he'd alarm the
whole camp and then they would be sunk.  It would the firing squad in
short order for both of them.  He doubled up his fist and brought it
down cruelly on the man's Adam's apple.  His cry of alarm died in
muffled groans of sudden unbearable pain.

Kessler, sweating like a pig, showed no mercy.  He smashed home his
fist in the defenceless man's face and his nasal bone splintered.  His
lips puffed up immediately as he splattered out broken teeth. Blood-red
gore started to arc from his nose and shattered mouth. Kessler hit him
again with all his remaining strength, his chest heaving.  Next moment
the man's head lolled limply to one side.  He was out to the world.

For what seemed an age, Kessler squatted on the unconscious man's chest
while Lahousen stared at them, his eyes wild with fear.

Kessler pulled himself together.  Time was of the essence.

"Quick, give me a hand!"  he panted.

"What are you going to do?"

"Shut up!"  Kessler cut him short.

"We've got to lift him."

Grunting, the two of them raised the dead weight to its feet.  With a
kick Kessler smashed the squatting pole.  Next instant, before the
Luxemburger could stop him, he had heaved the German into the terrible,
stinking yellow ordure below.

The shock brought the man back to life.  He started to struggle wildly,
fighting to keep his head above that awful brew.  Kessler didn't give
him a chance.  He seized the broom, used for cleaning the latrine out,
and smashed it cruelly over the German's head.  Still the German
persisted, struggling wildly, frantically to escape.  But it wasn't to
be.  With all his remaining strength, while the little man watched in
horrified awe, he pushed and heaved, thrusting the German ever deeper
into the yellow mire.  Finally the latter gave up.

His face disappeared.  Bubbles started to escape and explode on the
surface.  A claw of a hand, dripping faeces, raised upwards, as if
making one last gesture.  Then it, too, was gone and Kessler was
gasping to the shocked Luxembourger, "Get the hell out of here at oncer
Moments later the two of them were staggering off on their separate
ways, leaving behind a still thunder box its dreadful secret buried
beneath that unspeakable yellow mire.

Chapter Four

"I think I'm going impotent," Schulze said, as he picked the dirt from
beneath his yellow toenails with the point of his bayonet.  His feet
were black; they hadn't been washed since September.  But as Schulze
always maintained to the green beaks awed by his massive presence,
"Just keep yer bowels open and yer toenails clean and you'll be all
right."

Matz sniffed, but made no direct comment.  Instead he buttered thick
wads of white bread stolen from the cook house while the cooks tucked
into their own hearty breakfast in secret before the men came for
theirs, and placed nice juicy fried eggs between the wads.

Opposite, the young recruits squatted in the damp grass, watching the
fog disappear in silent clouds and hewed solidly at their wafer-thin
slices of stone-hard Army black bread, spread with a hardly visible
layer of ersatz syrup, all washed down with weak 'nigger sweat."

"Look at them cardboard soldiers, will yer," Matz said scornfully,
taking a first happy bite into the juicy sandwich, from which the
yellow of the egg dripped.

"Bin in the Army nearly three months now and still don't know how to
nick the cooks' rations, instead of that piss-poor fodder, fit only for
pigeons."

Schulze wasn't listening.  He was still concerned with his supposed
impotency.

"Yer," he moaned, "the last time I went to the senior NCOs' knocking
shop in Cologne, I could only manage it five times!  Imagine that!  Me
who used to be able to part the old beaver for forty-eight hours
non-stop!"  He sighed.

"Suppose I'll have to go to the bone-menders in the end and cadge some
pills so that I can get a real diamond cutter agen."  He grabbed the
crotch of his dirty, stained pants, as if to reassure himself that his
precious organ was still there.

"Here," Matz said unfeelingly and handed him a dripping, fried-egg
sandwich, "Get yer friggin' biters around that.  Might take yer
friggin' mind off it."

"Nothing'll take my mind off that!"  Schulze said mournfully.  All the
same, he took the sandwich, the egg yolk dripping all over his hairy
hand, "and took a sizeable bite at the white bread, intended for the
Regiment's sick but reserved exclusively for the greedy kitchen
bulls."

Matz looked over to where the big, tough-looking Ami squatted on a
moss-covered log, munching away at the hard German Army bread.

"What dyer make of him -the Amis old house?"  he asked curiously,
noting that the American renegade didn't seem one bit interested in the
surroundings, but was sunk into a cocoon of his own thoughts, whatever
they might be.

"Search me," Schulze replied, swallowing the last of his sandwich,
obviously still worried by his supposed impending impotence.

"He certainly keeps to his sen

"I thought 1 heard him leave his bedroll late last night," Matz said
with a bored yawn.

"Probably had to go to the crapper to take a piss," Schulze said
without interest.

"Even A mis can't piss through the ribs, yer know."

"Suppose not," Matz agreed and then, lowering his voice, he whispered,
"I've got a bit o'news for you Schulzi, good news."

"What's that, arse with ears?"

"There's gash in the camp, real female gash.  Well, not exactly in the
camp, but up at the Army Commander's

HQ."

" What did you just sayT' Schulze enquired, sudden animation and
excitement in his voice.

Matz repeated his statement.

Schulze looked at his old running mate and sighed, "Well, I live and
breathe.  By the Great Whore of Buxtehude, where the dogs piss through
their tails womenl" "Yes," Matz answered, "staff officer's field
mattresses.

It's Rosi-Rosi and Mobile Field Brothel, Number Sixty Nine

"A good number," Schulze said, eyes suddenly glittering with lust.

"Officers and gents only," Matz warned.

"Staff officers, who wear silk knickers and have their periods every
month."

Schulze ignored the warning, his mind full of Rosi-Rosi whom he had
encountered several times before at various fronts, plying her
delightful trade.  Schulze licked his cracked, egg-stained lips in
anticipation as he remembered the high-class brothel-keeper's ample
charms.  Mostly she was clad in a black silk dress that was cut so low
that her delightful plump breasts were in full view, especially when
she bent down to reveal splendid nipples, painted a bright carmine.  It
was those painted nipples which gave her her name through the German
army "Rosi-Rosi'.

Matz sniffed, "Don't start pulling yer pudding in anticipation yet," he
warned his old comrade.

"That's officers' territory, yer know.  Them staff officers wouldn't
take kindly to a lot of hairy-assed stubble-hoppers slipping a fly
piece of salami to one of Rosi-Rosi's girls."

Schulze stuck up a middle finger like hairy pork sausage.

"They know what they can shittin' well do," he exclaimed.

His eyes narrowed cunningly.

"Matzi, sudden-like I've got so much ink in my fountain pen that I
don't know who to write to first."  He grabbed his flies wildly, as if
in the throes of an uncontrollable sexual passion.

"Matz, I've got to have some of that parted beaver tonight or I'll bust
a gut."

"And I thought you said you couldn't get yer friggin' salami up."  He
relented as he saw the tortured look on Schulze's face.

"Don't worry, old house, we'll do it somehow or other.  Listen and pin
back yer spoons .. ."

Watching them through the shell-cracked window of the kitchen which
served him as a regimental office, von Dodenburg wondered just what the
two rogues were up to.

Something illegal, he concluded as he disrhissed the two old sweats and
returned to his kitchen-table desk to consider the new problem.

Schulze ignored Matz's snide comment.  He was too busy working out his
grand plan to get up Rosi-Rosi's ample knickers.

"So," he said, "after their fodder, the staff ll settle down to their
coffee and cognac."

"Don't forget their friggin' after-dinner mints," Matz sneered.

"That means we might have an hour, perhaps, at the most to get our ends
in."

"Not much time for yours truly," Matz said modestly, grabbing the flies
of his dirty, ragged trousers again, as if to reassure himself that his
vital organs were still there.

"I

mean, I've got a lot to offer, Schulzi.  That's why I've got these
round shoulders.  It's the weight of what I've got in my britches
pulling them down."

By way of answer, Schulze stuck up his middle finger.

Matz was in no way offended, "Can't old friend, got a double-decker bus
up there already."

"All right, Matz," Schulze concluded, "We go into action at 2030 hours.
By that time the filthy, perverted monocle Fritzes will have had their
way with les girls, including my betrothed, Rosi-Rosi."

"Betrothe," Matz asked in the tone of a man who was being sorely
tried.

"Now there's a little question of pinki-pinki."  He made the
Continental gesture of someone counting notes with his thumb and
forefinger.

Matz hesitated, then he said reluctantly, "I've got three cans of Ami
spam, a pound can of real bean coffee and about a hundred looted cancer
sticks."

Schulze looked at him, suddenly open-mouthed.

"Why, you1 re a cunning, mean bugger," he exclaimed.

"You never told me nothing about them goodies!"

"I was keeping them for a rainy day," Matz answered, somewhat
shamefacedly

"Well, now it's pissing down.  The monsoons have friggin' well started.
Hand over the goodies and let's get cracking.

It's almost zero hour."

Matz needed no urging.  Happily, although he was going to lose his
precious supplies, he set off after an impatient Schulze, his peg-leg
creaking audibly.

" Wasn't I good?"  Schulze exclaimed proudly, as they puffed contently
on a last cigarette before the little raiding party set off into the
night.

"Didn't I just make Rosi-Rosi's eyes pop when I stuck it to her."

"Yer got yer share," Matz said a little sourly as he remembered how,
after all the fun and excitement of Mobile Brothel 69, that he was
minus his precious store of goodies.

"Anyhow," Schulze said with mock modesty," she's promised to marry me
after the war.  I'm going to get a half share in her house of
ill-fame."

"House of ill-fame!"  Matz mocked.

Schulze ignored him.

"I'll act as the chief pimp and chucker-out while she lies on her back,
does her bit for the Fatherland while the money comes rolling in."

Dictz, who would be in charge of the trucks- he wasn't going to risk
his precious neck in the actual raid was urgently barking out orders.

Matz sighed and stubbed out his last 'lung torpedo'.

"Duty calls.  Suppose we'd better get back."  He rose wearily.

Schulze did the same, clutching a gold-rimmed chamber pot, which he had
stolen as a souvenir of his 'betrothed'.

Suddenly, he realised that the ornate thunder-mug wouldn't be much use
to him where he was going.  He un die his flies and urinated into the
chamber pot, adorned with a drawing of the Englishman Churchill,
smoking a big cigar.  He finished with a sigh then he tossed the pot
into the nearest bushes.

Von Dodenburg awoke from his brief nap, with the fog already curling
about the forest camp like a soft-footed cat.

He lay there on his ground sheet listening to the harsh orders of the
NCOs kicking the raiding party awake.

"All right you bunch of Asparagus Tarzans," they growled in the
traditional fashion, "hands off yer cocks and on with yer socks."

He didn't smile; he had heard it all too often before.

"God," he sighed to himself, "How many times over the last terrible
years!"  There was the crunched step of winter-stiff boots making their
way through the frozen, white grass.

Someone was coming to wake him.

Hastily he shook off his sombre mood, as grey as the fog.  There was a
job to be done.  Wotan needed him.  By the time the sentry had
appeared, bearing a mug of steaming coffee, announcing "Nigger sweat,
sir, laced with rum and plenty of sugar," he was awake and ready for
what was to come.

Chapter Five

Attentively the Ami listened to what von Dodenburg thought wise to tell
him before saying, "Can I tell you what I know of the American
dispositions on the other side of the line?"  he said.

"Please."

Briskly, Leo Kessler strode to the wall map and spread his hand over an
area between the French and Dutch borders.

"Our line er, the American line," he corrected himself somewhat
shamefaced as if he had suddenly become aware of the fact that he was a
traitor, betraying his former comrades.

"As you know the whole front ninety kilometres of it is being held by
Middleton's VIII Corps?"

Von Dodenburg nodded; he already knew.

"But perhaps what you don't know is just how weak that corps is and how
eggshell thin the line is they are holding."  He let his words sink in
before going on with, "From north to south, just opposite Wotan, as it
happens, is the US 99th Infantry Division.  Totally green, never been
in action before.  Why, when they came into the line they were still
wearing neckties and leggings as if they were still in training back in
the States."  He let his listeners absorb the information before
continuing.

"Next to the 99th moving south is the US 106th Infantry Division.

They're even greener.  In fact, they are still moving into the line
straight from the transports that brought them across the Channel from
England."

Von Dodenburg nodded encouragingly.  The renegade certainly knew his
stuff.  Definitely he knew more than Sixth SS Army Intelligence.

"Next to the 106th, straddling the Belgian-Luxembourg border, is my old
division, the 28th.  They call us the "Bloody Bucket'.  He pointed to
the fading divisional patch on his shoulder, which certainly did look
like a blood-red bucket.

He sighed and said a little wearily, "We've always lived up to that
reputation ever since we landed in France last summer.

We've had a complete turnover of infantry personnel due to battle
casualties in that time.  Three weeks ago we came out of the Hurtgen
Forest fighting after suffering five thousand casualties in fourteen
days, one third of the whole division.

When I - er left, the Division was busy absorbing five thousand green
replacements straight from stateside with three months' infantry
training" He let his words sink in and von Dodenburg could see just how
war-weary the big renegade was.  For a moment or two he felt sorry for
the Ami; he knew the feeling.

"To the 28this left is the 4th US Infantry Division which landed on
D-Day.  It covers the Luxembourg-French frontier.

The 4th has suffered even worse casualties than the "Bloody Bucket."
It, too, has just come back from the Hurtgen, bled white, exhausted,
absorbing green rookies not ready to fight yet."

"So," von Dodenburg said after a few moments as he absorbed the Ami's
information, "I can now tell you that I would like you to guide us."

"Where?"

Von Dodenburg ignored the question.  The Ami didn't need to know too
much.  Instead, he said, "Where do you suggest we go through the US
line in a matter of, say, three days?  An easy spot where we won't have
any trouble and through which we can return under the same
circumstances?"

Kessler looked as if he wanted to ask more questions, but he changed
his mind.  He pointed to the map and announced, "Through the 4this
lines here, just above the Luxembourg border township of Echternach."

The SS craned their necks to find the place on the big map, while von
Dodenburg asked, "Why there in particular?"

"Because the 4th doesn't expect any trouble there.  At the moment, the
place has no tactical value, the infantry are rather thin on the ground
and, because the front there has been quiet for nearly three months and
it's getting very cold at night, the bulk of the defenders move back to
sheltered accommodation at night, leaving only the outposts overlooking
the River Sauer manned till daylight."

Von Dodenburg considered for a moment.  He realised that even if they
did hit trouble and lost men who might blab, the Amis wouldn't connect
the Eahternach with their real breakthrough 50-odd kilometres to the
north.

"Sounds pretty good to me," he said, thinking aloud, while the others
listened attentively.

Leo Kessler said, like a man used to giving orders, and having them
obeyed, "We'll need American vehicles."

"Why?"  von Dodenburg asked.

"We can camouflage our own armour to look like your stuff."

Kessler shook his head firmly.

"No, you can't.  Even the greenest GI can spot the difference between
yours and ours.

Your Mark IV tanks are far lower than our standard Shermans, even if
you did build up the turret and somehow shorten the cannon.  The same
applies to your half-tracks.

They're twice the size of our standard White half-tracks and the
silhouette is quite different.  The game would be up as soon as they
spotted your armour.  In short, we need American armour for this type
of deal."

Von Dodenburs considered for a moment or two and then nodded his head
in agreement.

"I suppose you're right."

"I know I am," the American answered somewhat dogmatically.

"So what are you going to do, Colonel'. 

"This," von Dodenburg said,
making up his mind instantly the way he usually did when urgent action
was required.

"Just across the frontier from here at Bullingen in Belgium there is a
US supply and repair depot.  We know that from our agents among the
villagers.  They're all German-speaking and most of them have menfolk
in the Wehrmacht.  Now, to my way of thinking, it shouldn't be too
difficult to nip across the frontier, then drive away what we wanted
before the Amis know what has hit them."

"Sounds all right to me," Kessler said easily, while von Dodenburg's
listeners nodded their agreement.

"When?"

"Just before dawn tomorrow morning, when the front is at its quietest
and your people are tucked away in their warm bunks."

Kessler laughed hollowly, "That'll be the day," he said.

His face hardened suddenly and grew very serious.

"Just one more thing, Colonel."

"What?"

"We need American uniforms as well."

Dietz looked at him aghast, as if the big American had suddenly lost
his reason.

"Ami uniforms," he quavered, his fat jowls trembling with sudden
fear.

"But if we're caught in American uniforms they'll shoot us out of
hand!"

Kessler laughed again.

"What do you think they're going to do to us if they catch us behind
their lines in German gear?

They're not going to invite us to high tea with chocolate cookies.
They'll shoot us one way or another, they're not too particular those
guys at the front.  They can't afford to be when their own lives are on
the line."

"I take your point," von Dodenburg agreed.

"All right, we'll try to obtain American uniforms."

Dietz opened his slack lips as if to protest again, but then thought
better of it and kept silent.  He looked at the mirror he used to shave
with, his mind blank for a few minutes.

To anyone who had known Kuno von Dodenburg since 1939, when the great
conflict had first broken out, it would have been obvious that the war
had taken its toll.  Then, he had been a happy-go-lucky, fresh-faced
young lieutenant straight from the Bad Toelz officer cadet school, full
of a sense of adventure and a fervent believer in the Fuhrer and the
National Socialist creed.  He had been fully convinced that the New
Order would bring hope to a decadent, cynical Western Europe, sweeping
away the weary old men who thought there was no future for the
Continent.  In that great year of victories when it seemed nothing
could stop Germany's armies and one country after another had fallen to
the 1,000-Year Reich with hardly a fight, he had still believed in the
Fuhrer and German's holy mission Things had begun to change for him
once Germany had invaded Russia in June 1941.  For the first time the
Wehrtnacht had begun to suffer defeats, serious defeats, at the hands
at what they had thought were sub-humans, third-class citizens, who
couldn't read or write for the most part.

Four years later, and he had lost the bloom and enthusiasm of youth
long ago.  Now he was hollow-cheeked, almost wolfish and rapacious in
appearance, his eyes glittering as if he could be suffering from a
fever.  He had long forgotten the loyalty he had once possessed to the
"Holy Cause' of Greater Germany.  His own family, what there was left
of it, meant nothing either.  His one and exclusive loyalty was to the
Regiment.  Wotan was his home, his family, his world.

He knew that soon he would be expected to risk the precious lives of
his young grenadiers.  It was expected of him.  Besides if he didn't
comply with orders from above he would be quietly spirited away and
dealt with in some secret place.  He had no illusions about such
matters.  In his place there would be put some fanatical Nazi eager for
a desperate glory that would bring him decorations and advancement.
There were still plenty of that type about.  He frowned at his unshaven
face in the cracked mirror.  He couldn't allow that to happen, so he
concentrated on the task at hand, sweeping his gaze along the long
front line which stretched from the Swiss border to Holland.  If he
could only get through at some weak spot in the Ami line and do a
reconnaissance of the route picked by the Fuhrer before the battle
commenced, he might be able to avoid serious casualties.  At least he'd
know what to expect from the terrain, about which he knew little at
this moment.

Although he knew he was chancing a court martial he guessed that Sepp
Dietrich wouldn't risk putting him before a board at this crucial stage
of the game, when he urgently needed the old hares of Wotan, he made up
mind.  He'd do a secret recce of the route westwards.  He leaned back
and concentrated on whom he would take with him and even as he did so
he knew two troopers he would have to include in the recce those two
hairy-arsed rogues sitting on a log not more than 20 metres away always
busy licking their dirty paws for the last remnants the stolen fried
eggs.

"Gentlemen," he announced an hour later, as outside a sentry paced up
and down to protect the room from unwelcome intruders, l'I have an
announcement to make.  I have hand-picked you for a very dangerous and
illegal mission behind Amis lines."

There was the excited buzz of chatter which he had expected and he let
them have a few moments while he surveyed their faces, the tough,
brutalised faces of the 'old hares," who knew that their lives were
short and would end in sudden, violent death.  They took their savage,
unfeeling pleasures accordingly, living for the day.  Then there were
the two young officers, both in their teens, green beaks straight from
the cadet school, but eager, enthusiastic and willing.  He knew he
could rely on them one hundred percent.

Purposefully he had kept the Ami, Kessler, waiting outside.  He would
need the American for what was to come, but he didn't want him to know
too much at this stage of the game.

He opened his mouth to continue when he was rudely interrupted by the
sentry's cry of protest, followed an instant later by an oily,
unpleasant voice threatening, "Don't talk to me like that, soldier, or
it will be the worse for you!"

Then Dietz, the new National Socialist Leadership Officer, came
bustling into the room, full of his own importance.  Von Dodenburg had
disliked the political officer ever since, a few weeks before he had
been appointed to Wotan on Himmler's express orders.  He stared about
him through his thick glasses, the thick jowls of an unhealthy, pale
face trembling like a jelly as he did so.

"Friggin', creeping Jesus!"  Schulze muttered out of the side of his
mouth to Matz.

"That's the last shitehawk we want in here now."

Dietz, so full of himself, though he was a mere lieutenant who had
spent most of the war in a training establishment for the sons of Party
leaders, gazed about him.  Von Dodenburg felt the anger well up inside
him at the sight of the pompous politics, who, for him, epitomised the
typical "Gold Pheasant',* but he kept his peace.  These National *
Contemptuous name given to Nazi Party officials because of their liking
for fancy uniforms, heavy with cold braid.

Socialist Leadership officers, modelled on Stalin's Russian commissars
and introduced by Reichsfuhrer SS Himmler after the bomb attack on
Hitler's life in July, were more powerful than even an army commander.
They reported immediately to the second most important man in the Reich
and had the power of life or death even over senior generals:

silly asses like Dietz, who had never heard a shot fired in anger in
all the long years of the war.

"Now, I know you're up to something illegal," Dietz commenced, looking
straight at an angry-faced von Dodenburg.

"No matter."  He jerked a thumb at his fat chest.

"Here, I decide what is legal and what is not.  What is your intention,
Colonel?"

Spitting out the words through angry, tightly clenched lips, von
Dodenburg told him, while Dietz nodded sagely, as if it might well have
been a plan that he had worked out personally.  Finally, when von
Dodenburg was finished, he said: "I find, with certain reservations,
that it is a good scheme."

In the back, Schulze raised his massive haunch, grunted and let rip one
his celebrated, not unmusical farts, well known throughout the SS Corps
as a sign of contempt.

"Ride on that, plush ears!"  he growled at Matz.

Matz grinned.

Dietz's pudgy, pale face flushed angrily.

"Damned dumb insolence!"  he said, but he let the matter go without any
further comment.

"When, Colonel?"  he snapped, as if he carried out such dangerous
operations as this daring reconnaissance behind enemy lines every other
day.

"Within the next forty-eight hours.  It's about all the time we've got
left before the real thing."  He turned to face the others.

"You know the rough details now," he went on.

There was a murmur of agreement.

"In a moment I shall wheel our tame Ami in again.  I intend to use him
as a guide.  But I'd like to warn you not to give anything away that
you've heard in here.  The less he knows the better."

"VersUmden" they said as one.

Von Dodenburg nodded to where the American stood hunched outside in the
damp morning cold, smoking his last "Camel'.  "All right, Schulze,
wheel him in .. .!"

Chapter Six

""Crap," said the king."  Schulze murmured to himself in some disgust,
"and a thousand arse holes bore down and took the strain.  For in those
days, the word of the king was law.  Will ya get a look at that sloppy
Ami mob down there!"

They crouched on the heights overlooking the Luxembourg border township
of Echternach, divided from Germany by the River Sauer.  Below them the
plain was spread out like a map.  There were brown shell holes
everywhere and dead animals, their legs pointing stiffly into the air.
GIs moved around freely, some of them carrying steaming mess canteens.
At the gun guarding the bridge, the gunners stretched over the barrel
and snored.  To Schulze the GIs looked like a peacetime garrison with
not a care in the world.

Leo Kessler seemed able to read his mind, for he said, "There's not
been any trouble here since September.  That's why they're so
relaxed."

Schulze snorted, "Bout time then that they got a swift kick up the
arse."  His mood softened.

"They say that the local beaver is willing and has plenty of wood
before the door."  He indicated what he meant by a generous sweep of
his horny paws in front of his chest.

"Holy straw sack I'd just love to get my head between a pair o' tits
like that.

Keep my ears warm at least."

At his side, Matz grumbled.

"Shit on the shingle!  Don't think there'll be much playing around with
foreign milk factories down there soon."

"All right," von Dodenburg cut in in a very business-like manner.

"First we cut the telephone cables.  Isolate them to the rear.  Then
we'll mine the roads to the back of the village, which we're not going
to use.  That way we'll isolate the Ami position.  There'll be no way
for them to do a bunk, once the balloon goes up."

"Agreed," Leo Kessler said somewhat morosely, as if he realised for the
first time that he was betraying his former comrades.

"When?"

"As soon as they have finished taking on board their fodder," von
Dodenburg answered, as if he had it all worked out.

"Then, according to Intelligence, they retire to their billets for the
night to play poker, write letters home and finally sleep.  They'll
post sentries of course, but that's about all.  They're pretty careless
otherwise.  We'll hit them as soon as it's dark."  He turned to
Schulze.

"You and Matz can pick half a dozen old hares and get into position to
the rear of the village.  Once the trouble starts, open up with the
heavy machine-gun and discourage the Amis from trying to move to the
rear.  Klar!"  "Clear as mud, sir," Schulze agreed.  Minutes later he
was on his way, leading a file of veterans, their boots muffled in old
socks, each man silent and wrapped in a cocoon of his own thoughts and
apprehension.

They stuck to the deeper shadows of the shell-pitted road.

There was no sound, not even the stamp of a sentry's boot as he
attempted to keep his feet warm.  Nothing stirred.  The spectral moon
appeared to scud from behind the clouds.  It bathed the ground below in
its eerie cold-silver light.

Hastily and a little apprehensively, Schulze slipped on his "Hamburg
equalizer', his brass knuckles just in case.

"Keep your eyes peeled," he hissed urgently to the old hare behind
him.

"Pass it on."

"Like the proverbial tinned tomatoes," the answer came back
cheerfully.

Schulze didn't feel that cheerful.  He knew that one wrong move and the
whole op.  Would be jeopardised.  They pushed on.  Suddenly Schulze
came to an abrupt halt and crouched, heart beating furiously.

In the shadows ahead he had suddenly spotted a dull red glow.  He knew
immediately what it was.  Someone was puffing away at a cigarette up
there, and it could only be an Ami.  He held a finger like a hairy pork
sausage to his lips in warning.  Then as the others crouched there
tensely, he advanced on his own, making hardly a sound for such a large
man.

Now he was only metres away from the unsuspecting Ami sentry.  Suddenly
things went wrong.  He stumbled into a hidden pothole, catching himself
just in time.  But he had made a noise and the sentry reacted.
Frantically he attempted to unsling his rifle but Schulze didn't give
him time.  He dived forward and the two of them went down in a confused
heap.  But Schulze recovered the quicker.  He crashed his great fist
into the American's face, who yelped with pain as his nose smashed and
bright red blood spurted from the shattered organ.

Schulze showed no mercy.  He hit the man again and a strange, strangled
note emerged from the American's throat.

Suddenly, his head lolled to one side and he was out, dead or
unconscious, Schulze didn't know or care.  The main thing was the
American was out.  He whistled softly.  The patrol, breathing hard now,
advanced once more.

"Hurry," Schulze urged, "To the rear of the village now.  At the
double!"

Ten minutes later they were in position.  They had laid a chain of
anti-tank and anti-personnel mines to the rear of the village and
covered the area with their heavy machine-gun.  It fired at a rate of a
1,000 rounds a minutes and the Amis would not have much of a chance of
attacking such a position, Schulze told himself, well satisfied with
what he had done in so short a time.  Now he settled back to wait for
the signal which would indicate the balloon was about to go up.

It came ten minutes later.  The green flare sailed into the night sky,
exploded with a slight plop and bathed the countryside below in its
eerie, glowing light.  Moments later things started to happen fast. The
two German half-tracks came rattling down from the heights at speed. 
The rusty rattle of their tracks echoed and re-echoed around the valley
and the racket would have awakened the dead.

Immediately the surprised Americans sounded the alarm.

The blackout was ignored.  Yellow light poured from the medieval
village houses as yelling wildly the Amis rushed into the open, NCOs
bellowing orders, trying to restore calm.  To no avail, the Americans
were panicking.

A spotlight flashed on, piercing the gloom.  A grenade exploded in an
angry ball of ugly red flame.  Tracer started to bounce off the sides
of the German half-tracks like glowing golfballs.  But there was no
stopping the German advance.

The American fire began to peter away.  There were cries of alarm and
panic, mixed with the angry shouts and whistles of the US officers.

"We're bugging out!"  someone yelled in alarm.

"Frig this for a friggin' game of soldiers.

Let's go .. .!"

"Knock it off!"  the voice of authority snapped angrily.

"STAND FAST EVERYWHERE!"

But there was no holding the panicked soldiers now.

"We're bugging out!"  they yelled.

"Everybody's bugging out!"  Red and white tracer zipped lethally over
their heads as they attempted to make a break for it while there was
still a chance.  To no avail, for the officer was hit.  He went down in
a sudden blood-red huddle.

"For God's sake somebody help me!"  he yelled frantically.

"They've shot off my legs!"

Another quavered.

"I'm blinded, guys.  I can't see nothing .. Oh mother of God, help
me!"

But the GIs were swept away by their overwhelming, unreasoning panic.
They were starting to throw away their weapons.  Here and there they
were already holding up their hands in surrender crying, "Kamenul .. .
night schlessen .. !"

They rushed towards the minefield, finding out what they had let
themselves in for when it was too late.  Machine-gun fire hissed above
their heads as they were tossed back and forth by the exploding mines
like bundles of rags.  Even Schulze felt sorry for them as they broke
and the survivors, in complete disorder, started streaming back to the
village.

Another flare exploded over their heads.  They cowered there like
animals waiting tamely to accept their fate.  Von Dodenburg had seen
enough.  He stood bolt upright in the leading half-track, hands cupped
round his lips, shouting, "Cease firing .. .!  They've had enough ..
.!

CEASE

FIRING?"

One after another the guns stopped firing, leaving behind a loud,
echoing silence which seemed to go on for ever.  It was punctuated by
the eerie moans of the wounded and dying, some crying for their
mothers, others fervently cursing their fate.

"Now you can do your looting," von Dodenburg yelled, knowing that the
Americans were no danger; they had no fight left in them.  Besides, he
knew, the men felt it was their right to do the looting of the
prisoners.  It was one of the perks of combat which kept them going.

Schulze needed no urging.

"No souvenirs," he urged.

"None of that shit.  Cancer sticks and firewater, that's what we're
after."

"You can friggin' well say that agen," Matz agreed with a snarl, as the
men swarmed forward eagerly, knowing that their time was limited.  The
CO would give them only minutes before he ordered them to march on.

Standing next to von Dodenburg, Leo Kessler looked grim as he observed
the German colonel click off the safety on his pistol in the ruddy,
unnatural flames cast by the burning cottages.  Instinctively he knew
what was to come and he didn't like it.  Neither did the
rapacious-faced colonel, he could see that as well, but von Dodenburg
wouldn't hesitate.  There would be, he realised with shocked
suddenness, no witnesses of what had just happened here.

Purposefully, pistol held down at the side of his leg von Dodenburg
strode towards the American prisoners.  For a moment or two Leo Kessler
judged he would be forgotten while the Krauts shot their prisoners, for
that was what they were going to do.  He knew that instinctively.  He
looked around; he was safe.  No one was watching him.  He waited no
longer; he had to give the signal.

He pushed on up the road.  A dead GI lay sprawled out next to a shell
hole  On his shoulder he bore the red-blood bucket of the 28th
Infantry, his old divisional sign.  The poor guy didn't look a day over
18, with a lock of lank blond hair swept over his high forehead.
Kessler dismissed the dead soldier's appearance.  He had only minutes
to do what he had to do, and he wanted to do it correctly.  It was
vital.

He passed on, examining the dead bodies, knowing that the blacks of the
Graves Registration would be the first outfit sent up to bury the dead.
Who would they deal with first?  He didn't need a crystal ball to work
that one out the dead officers.  At company strength the shattered
Americans who had held the border village would have several
second-looeys, a first lieutenant or so, all commanded by a captain or
even a major.  He'd have to find that officer as soon as possible. This
man would be the first to be checked and processed by the Blacks.

Minutes later he discovered him sprawled in a ditch with the back of
his head blown off.  But his insignia, the golden leaf of a major, was
still intact on his shoulder.  Leo Kessler flashed a look to left and
right.  Nobody was observing him.

The men were too busy looting their prisoners and the German officers
were preparing for the slaughter to come.

Hastily he went to work.

Ten minutes later the little German convoy set off once more, heading
for the depot in Belgium, where they hoped to find their American
'wheels'.

Behind them they left the bodies of the dead stiffening in the cold,
their sightless eyes staring at the cold unfeeling sky.

It was war at its worse, Von Dodenburg told himself as they headed
south for Belgium and what was to come.  There was no turning back now.
The die was cast.

"March or croak, sir" Schulze standing next to him in the half-track
broke the heavy brooding silence, as if he could read the CO's sombre
thoughts.

Von Dodenburg nodded grimly.

"Yes, march or croak, that's it, Schulze!"  Then the two of them fell
silent, each man occupied with his own thoughts.  They weren't
particularly pleasant.

Chapter Seven

At midnight the little German convoy crossed the Luxembourg-Belgium
frontier.  Standing there in the half track as they moved northwards in
the bitter cold, along the deserted country backroads, Leo Kessler
suddenly remembered that final briefing at the Supreme Headquarters
before it had all started.

First he had seen the personal surgeon of Eisenhower, the Supreme
Commander.  The middle-aged colonel had looked worried.

"Are you sure you don't want a shot, son?"

he had enquired, searching the other man's face as he had sat there
strapped to the chair, waiting for the operation to commence.

"It'll hurt like tarnation without a shot."

Kessler had shaken his head and said, "No thank you.

They might notice the mark of the hypodermic and start asking awkward
questions.  Better without, sir."

The surgeon had shaken his head, he couldn't believe the evidence of
his own ears.  Most wounded GIs just wanted the pain to stop.  He had
never heard of a soldier refusing a painkiller before.

"OK, let it be on your own head.  But it's sure gonna hurt.  Here we
go."

Leo Kessler had tensed, telling himself it was an experience he'd use
later as a writer somewhere or other.  All this was grist to the mill.
It was the kind of stuff the average writer would give his left ball to
obtain.

Using the blade of the surgical scissors, the surgeon, sweating
already, started to brutally hack away at the recently healed wound,
tearing at the newly closed flesh.

Leo Kessler nearly fainted at the pain.  Still he hung on gamely.
Fifteen minutes later it had been all over, the wound ragged and raw
once more, bright-red blood pouring from it.

Swiftly the surgeon had dabbed up the best he could, muttering in a
shame-faced fashion, "Sorry, son, but you asked for it this way."

Leo Kessler had nodded slowly.  He couldn't trust himself to speak.

Five minutes later he was in the presence of the top brass in the great
smoke-filled ops room, while the colonels and the generals had stared
at him as if he were a creature from another world, which he was in a
way, he supposed.

Still racked with pain, feeling sick and nauseated as the blood
continued to trickle from the re-opened wound, he had listened to their
advice and warnings while the most senior officer in the Allied camp,
General Dwight D. Eisenhower, had slumped in the corner saying nothing,
chain-smoking all the time as he had listened to his staff officers.

"Kessler," they had urged, "you've got carte blanche from now onwards.
You can do what you like, even if it is not strictly generally
legal."

"You can rob, betray, inform, kill if you must all with impunity," they
had maintained.

"From now on, you are beyond above the law, military or otherwise.  You
understand?"

He nodded that he did, still not trusting himself to speak, his pain
was so great.  Opposite him, the Great Man, his face deathly pale,
chain-smoking yet another of the 60 "Camels' he consumed a day, nodded
his agreement.  Then he turned and went out silently, without another
word, as if he didn't want to hear any more and be incriminated.

Finally the Intelligence brigadier, a Scot by the sound of it, said,
"Remember, Kessler.  This mission must remain a secret for all time.
Fifty years from now, when all of us old farts are long dead, it still
must not be disclosed in any shape or form."  He looked somewhat sadly
at the pain racked young American, as if seeing him for the first
time.

"Now you have taken on this mission you are beyond the law.  It is
vital to the nation.  But the nation will never be able to reward you
for your efforts never.  That's all.

You're dismissed to your briefing."  With that he had been ushered out
and that had been the last he had seen of the top brass.  Now, with
every man's hand against him, both friend and foe, he realised for the
first time just what that meant.

There was little hope for him whatever happened.  He would just have to
live off his wits and pray hard, a cynical little voice at the back of
his mind said harshly.

After a while he looked at the green glowing dial of his wristwatch. It
was one in the morning.  He did a quick calculation.  In two hours, if
everything went well, they would reach their next objective, the depot
where they would pick up their "American wheels'.  Suddenly he prayed
there would be no more massacres as there had been at Echternach.  He
had done enough killing of his own people.

But that, as he would soon see, was not to be ... Like predatory grey
timber wolves, the Wotan troopers stole silently through the shadows
down the dead-straight border road that led to the Belgian village of
Bullingen.

Behind them round the bend, they left a terrified Dietz who was
'guarding' the half-tracks, already turned around to beat a hasty
retreat if anything went wrong.  Squatting in the back of the freezing
half-track (though naturally he didn't notice the cold), he prayed
fervently like he hadn't done for years since he had renounced his
Catholic faith in order to join the Hitler Youth back in 1933.

Up in front of the raiding party, Colonel von Dodenburg constantly
flicked his anxious gaze from left to right, as they entered the
sleeping village.  They passed the run-down post office to the left.
From here one of their agents had signalled them on what was going on
behind the Ami positions in the border village.  Now he was asleep like
everyone else in the shabby wooden houses, shrouded in silence. Nothing
stirred.  Not even a dog barked as they stole by.  There were no signs
of Ami sentries.  Here at Bullingen, it was obvious the front had gone
to sleep for the night.

Von Dodenburg in the lead, covered by Matz and Schulze, both carrying
sub-machine guns, knew exactly where they were going.  Up ahead in the
foggy pre-dawn gloom lay the place's tumbled own Apotheke.  To its
right the main road forked off and went on its way down the valley to
the larger township of Malmedy.  To the left, just beyond the chemist's
shop lay what had been before the war the local farm square, complete
with the pens into which the farmers herded their beasts to be
auctioned off every Thursday, the market day.  That had been before the
days of the black market when now everything was done 'under the hand',
as the locals called it.

Since the Amis had arrived the previous September the square had been
used as a light airstrip for their planes and a workshop for damaged
armoured vehicles from the nearby front.  This depot was the raiders"
objective.

Next to von Dodenburg, Leo Kessler, who was going to respond in English
in case they were challenged, whispered:

"Stand-to is usually at five-thirty.  Not that these depot men take
such matters seriously.  They think they're nice and safe here.  All
the same we don't want to take any unnecessary risks."

Von Dodenburg said "Agreed," his narrowed eyes trying to penetrate the
grey gloom ahead for the first sight of the fork in the road.  Then he
had it.

"There's the chemist," he hissed.

"The depot's to the left."

"Know it," Kessler said.

"I was here once to pick up a Staghound armoured car to you, Colonel
which the depot guys had repaired for us."

"I can see only one problem," von Dodenburg whispered as they edged
their way forward closer to the depot, their nerves tingling.

"What's that?"

"That there's nothing we can drive away without trouble."

Kessler nodded his understanding.

"We'll try the vehicles with worksheets tagged to their windscreens.
That should tell us if they're mobile or not."

"Good thinking," Von Dodenburg said.

"With a bit of luck we'll be out of here and on the road before they
stand to."

Gingerly they crossed to the depot.  A temporary hut had been erected
to their right, just behind the chemist's, and von Dodenburg guessed it
would house the depot's mechanics.  He turned to an anxious Schulze
just behind him.

"You and Matz cover that.  If the balloon does go up unexpectedly, give
'em all hell."

"Sir," The two NCOs sped away, in Schulze's case moving noiselessly for
such a big man.

Von Dodenburg indicated they should move forward to the silent steel
monsters, dripping with dew.  Next to him Kessler peered at the labels
attached to the armour.

"Here's one," he announced after a few moments.

"Sherman, ready to roll."

"Good.  Can you drive it?"  He indicated the 30-ton US tank.

Kessler said easily, "Yes, Colonel."

He peered at the name painted on the tank's steel side.

""Gruesome Twosome'.  Some moniker!"

"Good."  They passed on, hardly daring to breath, to where three
American half-tracks were lined up.  Kessler peered at the three
vehicles' worksheets and announced after a moment, "All in running
order, Colonel."I Von Dodenburg nodded his understanding.

"All right, let's get the lead out and start them up."

Momentarily, Kessler pulled a face.  The shit would really hit the fan
once the mechanics heard their vehicles starting up at this ungodly
hour.  But he knew there was no other way.  The sooner they made tracks
the better.  They didn't want to give the mechanics time to recover and
raise the alarm.

He bustled with the armour, as if he was giving it a last check.  In
reality he was looking for a way to pass on what he knew once the
military came to investigate.  Then he spotted one that would suit his
purpose: a badly damaged Staghound, all four tyres flat, with its
engine a mass of tangled, shot-up metal.  Hastily he took out his pad
and scribbled a message, the best he could in the gloom, pinning it
next to the worksheet, where he hoped the depot man would find it on
the morrow.

Then he was swinging himself into the driving compartment of the lead
Sherman while the others did the same with the other vehicles they had
selected.

Five minutes later, von Dodenburg kicked Schulze's brawny shoulder in
the driving compartment below.  It was the signal to start up.

"Are you ready, you big horned ox?"

"As ready as I ever will be, sir."  Hastily von Dodenburg popped his
head above the turret and peered through the foggy gloom.  Everyone was
in place.  He ducked down again and spoke into the throat mike.

"Roll 'em, Schulze!"

The big NCO needed no urging.  He knew the need to get out of this
place before the shit hit the fan.  He pressed the button.  The 30-ton
tank sprang into life at once.  Suddenly the air was filled with the
cloying stink of petrol.  That tremendous noise echoed and re-echoed
frighteningly through the circle of enclosed hills.  They were ready to
move off.

Chapter Eight

Leo Kessler waited impatiently for the vehicles to move off.

His nerves twitched.  As usual of late, when he became nervous his
tongue wandered to the centre of his upper teeth and sought that dull
object that Eisenhower's surgeon had implanted there.

"It's the L-Pill" he had explained after he had finished putting it
in.

"L-Pill?"  he had queried, puzzled.

The middle-aged doctor with the steel-rimmed glasses had pulled a face
as if he didn't want to say what he had to say.

"Yes."  he muttered reluctantly.

"L for lethal."

"You mean a suicide pill?"

The man had nodded.

"Useful for our authorities and you, too, naturally.  You won't suffer
any torture if you don't want to if they catch you.  General Eisenhower
has ordered that you take it immediately if you fall into their
hands.

He er doesn't want you to spill the beans."

Leo Kessler had laughed hollowly.

"I'm between the devil and the deep blue sea in a way."

"In a way," the surgeon had agreed uneasily and had hurriedly changed
the subject.

Now, as he waited, Kessler's tongue swept the ugly pill, telling
himself he was lucky in a way.  It was not given to many people in
combat to make their own decisions about the way they should die.

Next to him, von Dodenburg cursed angrily.

"Come on, Matz!"  he snapped.

"Heaven, arse and bleeding cloudburst, start that damned engine!"

Behind the waiting vehicles, their engines already roaring, a desperate
Matz, brow lathered in sweat despite the morning cold, attempted to
start the engine of the reluctant Sherman.  There was a long, keening
sound, mournful and frustrating.  Still nothing.  The engine failed to
start.

In the hut opposite, the lights started to go on.  The tense troopers,
waiting for Matz to join them, could see the lights through the chinks
in the place's blackout.  Someone mumbled a sleepy question.  It was
followed an instant later by a voice calling urgently, "What the Sam
Hill's going on outside, Short Arse?"

Whatever "Short Arse' answered, it started the mechanics springing from
their bunks and grabbing frantically for the weapons they kept in the
racks next to their beds.

Up front, von Dodenburg considered what he should do.

"What a mess!"  he cursed to himself.  Should he order Matz to abandon
the reluctant vehicle?  Or should he try one more time to start the
engine?

Now the first of the Amis was emerging from the hut, clearly outlined
in the harsh light of a hissing Coleman lantern as he peered into the
gloom.

Leo Kessler was going to have to act whether he liked it or not.  He
couldn't abort this vital mission for the sake of one black mechanic.
He reluctantly raised his carbine.  The man presented the perfect
target as he stood there in the doorway.  These mechanics were not
combat troops.  One dead man and they'd be stopped for the time being
at least.

Von Dodenburg saw the movement.  He looked at the American in a little
wonder.  Was he really going to fire on his fellow Ami'1 It was too
much to expect even from a renegade.

It was the same thought that occurred to a miserable Kessler at that
moment.  They were his own people, members of the same army,
comrades.

Leo Kessler squinted through the sight, praying that something would
happen before he had to fire.  Nothing did.

He'd have to solve the problem himself.

He took first pressure, controlling his breathing, taking his time like
the expert marksman that he was.  He squeezed the trigger.  The butt of
the carbine jerked suddenly against his right shoulder.  The mechanic
screamed shrilly and threw up his hands, clutching the air.  Next
moment his weapon tumbled from his suddenly nerveless fingers.  His
legs started to fold beneath him like those of a newly born foal.
Hastily his comrades went to ground in the same instant that Matz's
reluctant engine roared into life.

Moments later the "American wheels' were on their way, heading
north-west.  Behind them they left the dying man to stiffen in the
pre-dawn cold in a star of his own blood .. .

Morosely the Supreme Commander, General Eisenhower, stared out of the
window of his office, looking at the slick wet French pavement below.  It
was drizzling again: a cold, grey winter rain it always seemed to rain
in France.  Like icy tears the raindrops trickled down the big windows.
It was midday.  At his Rheims HQ nothing was happening save for the
usual Red Ball convoy transporting supplies from the far-off Normandy
beaches to the front.

He shivered despite the thick underwear he wore under the Ike jacket.
The office had once been that of a provincial schoolmaster.  Obviously,
in their usual frugal manner, the French authorities had not installed
a proper heating system in this technical school, though it was
supposed to be the most modern in the 'champagne capital of France'.

Rheims.

He turned and walked back to his big desk, flanked on one side by the
myriad flags of the Allied nations and on the other by his own personal
command one.  The only other adornment was a photograph of his wife
Mamie, who was far away in Washington, from which she nagged him all
the time by letter.  Obviously she suspected he had another and younger
woman and she was right.  All the brass had.

Moodily he lit yet another cigarette from the butt of the one he was
smoking and almost angrily stubbed the former out in the overflowing
ashtray.

There was a soft tap at the door of his office.

"Come," he commanded sourly.  He was in no mood for visitors, his mind
was too full of the risks he was taking.  Still he knew he had to keep
up appearances.  No one must suspect, save the handful of top brass in
the know, what he was up to.  He dare not take the slightest chance of
anyone knowing his plan, in case anything went wrong.

"Come," he said again.

It was Brigadier Kenneth Strong, his Scottish chief of British
intelligence, the best intelligence officer in the Allied camp,
something with which Eisenhower concurred.

"Hello, Ken," he said with apparent casualness, "Where's the fire?"
Then he remembered his manners and using another English expression, a
mannerism at which his American staff laughed behind his back, added
"Take a pew."

Strong's dark, chinless face smiled briefly at the phrase and he sat
down facing the chain-smoking Supreme Commander.  Outside, a column of
ragged French recruits was marching by, singing something about la
Pulrie in a lacklustre manner.  In a working-class France, dominated by
the Communist unions, there wasn't much enthusiasm for the rag-tailed
French Army created by General dc Gaulle.

"Ike, you know the situation at the front, especially in Middleton's
VIII Corps area."  His dark face grew serious, "Naturally the Germans
there have enough spies and informers on the Belgian side of the border
to know what's happening.  After all, most of the locals in the
Ostkantonen," he meant the German-speaking people of the area "have
German relatives, even menfolk in the German Army."

Eisenhower nodded his understanding.  He knew that Strong was the best
intelligence man in the business.  He had been in intelligence back in
the 1920s during the 'troubles' with the Irish rebels.  He knew
anything worth knowing about the 'great game', as the Limeys called
it.

"So," Strong continued, "why, with the knowledge they possess, are the
Germans running patrols again in the Middleton area?"

Eisenhower said nothing.  Instead, he waited for Strong's explanation.
It was soon forthcoming.

"Because, Ike, they want to know our latest dispositions.  Middleton's
front is eggshell thin and he has no reserves at the back of his
line.

My guess is that the Germans want to know just how deep Middleton's
front is.  Why?"  He answered his own question.

"Because the Germans are going to attack."

"Bullshit!"  Eisenhower snorted crudely.

"The Krauts haven't got the strength to attack.  They're exhausted
strapped for men and materiel.  It's as simple as that."

For some reason known only to himself Eisenhower looked away, avoiding
the Britisher's gaze as if he were abruptly embarrassed.  Strong
wondered why.

"To the best of my knowledge the Kraut line is as thin as ours," said
Ike.

"Their armour and the best of their infantry formations are still in
North Germany being refitted after the summer debacle."

"That's the conventional wisdom," Strong said, obviously unconvinced by
Elsenhower's explanation.  He sighed and gathered up his papers.

"I'll keep you informed of the latest info, Ike," he said as he went
out.

"Do that," Eisenhower said without enthusiasm.

With a sigh like a man sorely tried, he looked out at the black-slick
of the wet pave outside.  God, what would he give for some sunshine.

There was another knock at his office door.  He forgot the sun and put
on his official Supreme Commander's face, that of a general who
commanded the destinies of 5,000,000 Allied soldiers.

"Come," he said once again.

It was "Beetle', General W. Bedell Smith, his bad tempered chief of
staff; by the angry look on "Beetle's' face he could see that something
was wrong.

"Well?"

"Kessler's reported.  Something's in the wind," he answered without any
further ado.

"What?"

"The Krauts raided one of our depots last night and stole some of our
armoured vehicles."

Eisenhower whistled softly.

"Hot goddam dog!"  he exclaimed.

"The hell they did!"

"Yeah."

"Wonder what the deal is?"

Bedell Smith was direct and to the point.

"Our friend was with the raiding party."

Eisenhower leaned forward eagerly.

"Shoot!"  he commanded.

"Well?"

"The Krauts are in business.  They're going on ahead with this nasty
business.  They're sounding us out and you don't need a frigging
crystal ball to know why, Ike."

Eisenhower frowned at the tough talk.

Bedell Smith looked at his boss hard.

"Ike, we're taking one hell of a risk, you know.  If we screw up and
the shit hits the fan-" he stopped short, he didn't want to think the
unpleasant thought through to its logical conclusion.

"It's got be done, "Beetle'.  There is no other way now.

You know that.  We've discussed it often enough."

"Maybe."  Bedell Smith paused and bit his bottom lip.

"But the cost in American lives, Ike, could be horrendous.  In essence
we might end up sacrificing the whole of Middleton's VIIHh Corps.  It's
a risk I wouldn't like to take, whatever the gains we might make."

"It's the only way, "Beetle'.  We've got to get the Krauts into the
open and finish them off at last.  We've been battering at their goddam
Siegfried Line fortifications for too damned frigging long."

Bedell Smith pulled a long face.

"Ike, you know that if anything goes wrong and this business comes out
you'll have to take the can.  Washington will fire you and then
some."

"I'll do it, "Beetle'.  It's my job."  He waved a hand in dismissal.

"Beetle' opened his mouth as if to object.  Then he thought better of
it.  He went out without another word, leaving the Supreme Commander
alone with his thoughts.  They weren't pleasant .. .

Book Two

TWO LESBIANS

"Ye have scarce the soul of a louse," he said, 'but the roots of sin
are there."

Rudyard Kipling.

Chapter One

The crowd of shabby civilians in Luxembourg's Place de la Gare gawped
as the big pre-war Rolls Royce with the family crest on the highly
polished chassis drew up outside General Bradley's HQ opposite.  What
kind of civilians were these who could afford to run a car of that size
on a petrol ration that was limited to a few lit res a month, for even
those handful of Luxembourgers employed in essential duties?

"Steel and coal nobs from the border," they muttered enviously among
themselves, as they waited to enter the station.

"The Amis fall over backwards to pander to those rich bastards.  But
their day is coming," they growled.

"Once the workers take over the big industries, they'll be out on their
upper-class friggin' necks."

Wanda von Wettersheim heard the threatening murmurs, but the beautiful,
perverted aristocrat was totally unmoved.

All her young life she had bought people.  In due course, she and
"Daddy' would buy the workers' leaders, too.  They might talk
revolution, but in reality all they wanted was money.

As a deliberate provocation, she leaned out of the window of the Rolls,
drew the plain female American lieutenant to her and gave her a long,
lingering kiss on the lips.  The crowd gasped.  What a pervert she was!
Like the rest of the steel barons, she took what she fancied without
shame.

At the entrance to Bradley's HQ, the two immaculate MPs, in their
lacquered white helmets, looked at each other as the Rolls drew away
almost noiselessly and one said, "Did ya get a load of that, Butch?
Kissing an American first looey on the lips in public!  I don't
understand the world no more, old buddy."

Poor plain It.  Fran Bender, with her ugly skin and large spectacles,
didn't either for that matter.  There were tears of joy in her eyes as
she watched her lover's car vanish.  For 30 years of her life, no one
had taken a blind bit of notice of her.  She had lived in shabby
apartments out of a suitcase, working for bosses who regarded her as a
machine.  Fran had never dated, eating lonely meals in 'greasy spoons',
where it look all her efforts to get the surly staff to bring her a cup
of ten-cent coffee.  More than once, back in New York, she had told
herself miserably she was the invisible woman passing like a ghost
through what went for a life.

Wanda, the Baroness, had changed all that dramatically.

Just after she had been posted to Bradley's HQ as a
secretary-stenographer, Wanda had taken Fran up at a great, grand
reception given by the border industrialists for General Bradley, the
12th Army Group Commander.  It had always been their policy to fish for
such important military leaders.  They had done it with the German
generals.  Now it was the turn of the Americans, who were just as
flattered by the attention as their German predecessors had been.

There had been great quantities of vintage champagne available. Somehow
or other, Fran had ended in a dark corner of the Hotel Alpha, Bradley's
HQ, with Wanda holding her big rough hand and kissing her secretly, but
very sweetly, at regular intervals.

Two nights later Fran Bender had visited the beautiful Wanda at the
family chateau just inside the border.  As before there had been a lot
of champagne, and when the Baron, Wanda's ancient father, had creaked
off to bed supported by a couple of servants, long used to getting the
old sot, with his weak bladder, back to his bedroom,

Wanda had suggested she should spend the night at the chateau.  After
all, the next day was Sunday and she didn't work Sundays; she could
sleep in as long as she wished.

Giggling and very drunk (Wanda had offered her the potent champagne all
night), she let herself be led to the big bedroom which would be hers
for the night.  Wanda had kissed her passionately and placed her hand
on Fran's right breast, pressing hard so that the nipple had sprung up.
She had moved the splendid silken night-gown that she had loaned the
American woman, kissed her with feeling and then had departed, leaving
Fran in a state of emotional confusion.

She had tried to sleep, but sleep had refused to come.

Instead she lay there in the great bed, listening to the wind howl
about the eaves outside, tossing and turning and feeling giddy, yet she
didn't know why at the same time strangely disturbed.

Time had passed leadenly.  Down below in the dark, polished hall, the
grandfather clock had ticked away the minutes of her life with grave
metallic inexorability.

Fran had been about to doze off when she had heard the soft footfall
outside.  Instinctively, she had known who it was.  Her heart had begun
to race; she couldn't understand why.

Naturally, it had been Wanda.  Her hair had been drawn back in a
savagely tight bun.  She was without make-up.  In her hands she bore
two glasses and yet another bottle of champagne.  Fran had shivered,
she had known that something decisive was going to happen to her this
night.  It did.

Slowly Wanda had poured out two glasses of the sparkling, bubbling
wine, taking her time, her dark eyes boring into Fran's as she did so,
as if she were looking for something important there of value only to
herself.

Finally she was ready with the wine.

"We shall drink a toast.  Continental fashion," she ordered in a voice
that became strangely husky and slightly out of control, or so it had
seemed to a puzzled Fran.

"How do you mean?"

"Like this.  Slip your arm through mine and I'll do the same to you."

Groggily she had done as she was told.  They drank together and then
before Fran had chance to ward her off Wanda had begun to kiss the
American woman passionately, moaning with joy, pressing her wet tongue
into Fran's open mouth.

After a while, Wanda had momentarily paused in her attack.  She had
laughed softly in a forced manner and said, "Golly, it's just like when
we used to have dorm feasts before the war at Cheltenham Ladies'
College.  You know."

Fran didn't know or care.  Suddenly her heart was beating furiously and
she felt an unusual wetness between her legs as if she had passed
water.  But this was something else; this was something new, forbidden
and exciting.  She realised then that she was on the fringe of starting
a strange, desirable, life.

At her side in the bed, not taking the slightest precaution to conceal
her full breasts with their firm dun-coloured nipples, Wanda babbled on
about some college in England.

Finally she stopped and looked at the plain American secretary as if
seeing her for the very first time.

"In England I made some true friends, though the English are not
generally a loyal people."  She lowered her voice and looked up at Fran
in a coy manner, for her.

"I hope you, too, will be my loyal friend here?"

"Of course I will, Wanda!"  She had touched and pressed the other
woman's hand in a manner that she had never before touched another
human being, male or female.

Suddenly she realised she was in love with this aristocratic foreign
woman.

More champagne had followed.  She had felt decidedly dizzy, but it
didn't matter.  She was happy.  She was in love.

Time had passed.  Later she had never been able to work out how long.
It had not seemed important anyway.  What was important was to be with
the beautiful Wanda.  Then, abruptly, she had found herself lying
spreadeagled on her back, legs wide apart, panting feverishly like a
bitch on heat, with Wanda kneeling between them, doing something to her
she had not believed possible at least for a refined, well-educated
woman.

At first she had been repulsed, but not for long.  Suddenly she had
become tremendously excited, trembling and quivering violently, so
violently that Wanda had been forced to hold her down in order to
continue with that delightful, decadent pleasure-giving.  She had never
experienced anything like it in all her life, even when she had played
with herself as a Saturday night treat behind the locked door of her
room at the New York "Y'.

It was somewhere before dawn when she was exhausted and almost
delirious after the many orgasms she had experienced at the actions of
Wanda's cunning tongue, when the latter had said thickly, her face
flushed an ugly red almost as if she was angry, "Now I shall take your
virginity and then you shall be mine for ever, Fran."

"What!"  the American woman had gasped.

But already Wanda had swept through the door, totally naked.  When she
had returned, for some reason she was wearing a thick woollen male
dressing gown.

"Look," she had commanded and she had seized Fran cruelly by the hair
and forced her head up.

"Look at this!"

Fran had gasped with both pain and surprise.  A great rod of hard
rubber bobbed up and down at the opening of the gown like a cop's
rubber blackjack.  She had

A 7

looked at it in puzzled awe and asked in a weak voice, "What is it?"

By way of an answer, Wanda said thickly, "You will soon see, my little
cabbage.  Prepare yourself for the shock."

The pain had been frightful.  Wanda had shown no mercy.

She had pressed the strange appliance deep into Fran's soft body, still
wet from before.  Not that the wetness helped, the thing had been too
large.  She had writhed and wriggled frantically, trying to free
herself.  But Wanda had been stronger and without mercy.  Not once did
she release Fran from her vice-like grip.

Later, after it was all over and she lay there in Wanda's arms, with
the blood trickling down warmly down the side of her leg, she had tried
to ask her lover what it all meant.

Wanda had refused to answer, save with, "Now you are mine.  That is all
that matters.  You will obey me at all times.

That's what love is about."

Outside, the chateau's clock had struck six.  Wanda had been out of the
rumpled, sweat-lathered sheets in a flash.

But before she had fled, she had added in a cold, dispassionate voice,
as if she had not just made love to the American ugly duckling half the
night, "Remember what I said.  Now you are mine, body and soul.  You
will do everything that I order you to do.  It will be the worse for
you if you don't."  There was iron in her voice now, which the refined
English accent could not hide.

"I demand instant obedience without question."

Then she was gone out of the room, without a backward glance.  It was
as if she had not been there at all.

Chapter Two

Now, two weeks later, as she passed through the main entrance, ignoring
the looks and the snide comments of the MPs. 

"Jesus H!  Here she comes, Miss Butch herself!"  she was supremely confident of herself, but as withdrawn as ever.

As usual, nobody wolf-whistled her, something which had once disturbed
her greatly.  Now she had Wanda it didn't matter.  Nor did the fact
that the officers already inside the lift didn't wait for her, as they
would have done for any other female auxiliary, but had swept upwards,
leaving her to kick her heels until another lift came.  Again it didn't
matter.  They could do whatever they liked, she told herself
confidently.  She had her Wanda.

She waited.  Staff officers with clipboards under their arms, in
immaculate uniforms, came and went, looking very self-important.
Typewriters and teleprinters clattered.

Phones jangled urgently.  It was typical of a higher headquarters
working flat out.  After all, Bradley controlled three armies
stretching from France to Holland.  It was something that Wanda asked
her about constantly.  Why, she didn't quite know.  Wanda didn't look
as if she would be interested in military matters.

She went into the tight little cubbyhole of an office she shared with
General Bradley's other secretaries.  They worked in daily shifts,
filling their pads and then moving out to make room for the next
secretary.  Then they would type up the communications, have them
encoded and return to Bradley's office for the next round of
dictation.

She collected her pads and pencils and entered the ancient, creaking
lift.  For the first time since she had entered the HQ someone showed
some interest in her: one of the white-helmeted MP officers who guarded
the General's office.

"ID?"  he snapped and after she had shown it he watched her attentively
as she made her way down the rest of the gloomy corridor with its
squeaky wooden floor to Bradley's office.

She knocked and slipped in quietly.  The General was on the phone,
speaking urgently in his plaintive mid-western accent.  With his
steel-rimmed glasses and lantern jaw he looked more like a high school
teacher than an army commander, she told herself as she watched him
from the corner of the big, echoing office, but then she reflected that
was what he had been for most of his military career before the war a
teacher of maths at West Point.  Like his boss, Eisenhower, Bradley had
never commanded troops in action or heard a shot fired at him in
anger.

Fran Bender had very acute hearing, something she had never told
anybody about.  It had always been a useful secret in her life as a
secretary.  Now she could hear every word that Bradley said although he
was telephoning some way off and there was plenty of noise coming from
the busy Place de la Gare outside.

"Ike," Bradley was saying urgently.

"It's them all right.

Just as we anticipated.  The night before, it appears, they crossed
from Germany into Lux at Echternach.  They massacred the garrison there
down to the last man, though our fall guy reported in indirectly.  You
know?"

Obviously Eisenhower did, for Bradley said, "Sure, he's still in
business."

Fran Bender frowned and pricked up her ears.

"Fall guy?"

what did the Army Commander mean?

"They must have spent the next day," Bradley went on, "working their
way around Lux City here.  They hit one of our POL depots on the way
and filled up with gas.  We estimate they've got enough now to get them
way into Belgium and we know they went that way because of the attack
on the workshops at Bullingen, which you already know about.  Now the
question is, where are they going next?  Since our fall guy reported
from Bullingen we've lost track of the bastards, if you'll excuse my
French, Ike."

In the shadows, Fran Bender's frown of bewilderment deepened.  There it
was again, the 'fall guy'.  What did Bradley mean?

There was a sudden, heavy, brooding silence as both generals obviously
considered their problem, while she sat in the shadows hardly daring to
breathe.

Finally Bradley said, "Sure, Ike, as I said, our man's still in
business.  In both cases he reported the general direction of their
advance.  Mind you, Ike, he's taking one hell of a risk.

If those Nazi SS bastards discover who he is, I wouldn't give a red
cent for his life."

Eisenhower must have agreed, for Bradley said, after listening
attentively for a few moments, "I know, I know, Ike.  He's only one of
our guys and they're all risking their lives.  I know, too, that
there's so much at stake.  Perhaps the outcome of the whole war in the
West, if your plan works as you envisage it.  Still, you must admit
that he's a very brave guy for a writer fellah, risking his life like
that to spy on them."

The two high-ranking generals exchanged a few pleasantries and then,
his ugly face thoughtful, Bradley put down the phone slowly, as if
preoccupied by his own thoughts.

She cleared her throat.  He looked up somewhat startled and saw her for
the first time sitting on the hard chair, pad on her right knee,
apparently ready for business.

"Good morning Miss .. . er," he commenced and then looked embarrassed.
He couldn't even remember her name.  She shrugged inwardly.  She was
used to it.

"Good morning, General," she said cheerfully.

"Hope you slept well, sir?"

"Yes.  thank you er-" he compromised with "Lieutenant".

She picked up her pad and walked towards his desk as he leafed
hurriedly through the mountain of papers in his "In' tray, obviously
wondering where to start his dictation.

For her part, she wondered who this 'fall guy' was, who was obviously
with a German raiding party behind Allied lines.  At all events it
would be something for her lover Wanda tonight.  She felt a sudden
delicious wetness between her legs again and wondered what the
sour-faced general would say if she mentioned it to him.  Of all the
married top brass in Europe, he was the only one who didn't keep a
mistress; Bradley was very straight-laced.  She hoped that Wanda would
'spoil her' for the information about this so-called 'fall guy' of the
generals.  Not for once did it strike her that she was betraying her
country by passing on what she had just heard; she was too besotted by
love and sex.

"All right," the General commanded, "let's go."  He started to dictate,
and efficient secretary that she was, Fran Bender forgot everything
else but the task at hand.

Eisenhower had just time to put down the phone after talking to Bradley
when an urgent knock came at his office door.

"God dammit!"  he cursed angrily, "is there never any peace for the
wicked?"  All the same, he said politely, "Come!"

The door opened immediately and Strong, Chief of Intelligence, burst
in, his dark Scots face revealing unusual excitement for him.
Eisenhower looked across the desk at him, half amused, half irritated:
"Where's the fire, Ken?"

he asked.

"Here," the Intelligence man answered and slapped the photograph he was
carrying.

"Perhaps this will convince you about what I've been saying this last
month or so."

"What is it?"

"It's illegal, I know, for the chaps to carry cameras into action.  But
this was taken by a sergeant in the 28th Infantry yesterday while out
on a patrol from Weiswampach over the border into the Reich."

"Go on," Ike urged, wondering what Strong was getting at.

"Well, he and the rest of the patrol succeeded in ambushing a German
armoured car.  Just before they destroyed it so that the Jerries
couldn't haul it away and repair it later their standard operating
procedure he took a photograph of himself and the other chaps on the
patrol standing in front of their er trophy.  Rather like big game
hunters in Africa-" "Get on with, Ken!"  Eisenhower urged.

"I'm expecting the French Chief-of-Staff in ten minutes.  Usual French
bullshit no doubt, but we've all got to humour the Frogs.  Orders from
Washington."

"Yes, I understand.  Sorry, Ike," Ken said eagerly.

"Well, I'd like you to have a quick look at this photo and tell me if
you spot anything unusual about it.  Plecisel" Grumpily Eisenhower put
on his reading glasses.  Strong handed him the grainy photograph,
obviously taken in hurried circumstances, for the camera had moved and
it was slightly blurred, Eisenhower stared at it: a bunch of young GIs,
armed to the teeth, grouped in front of a German armoured car, the dead
crew spread out beside it, both the front tyres burst, with what looked
like a trail of grey smoke coming from its ruptured engine.

He grunted and said after a moment's perusal, "Okay, a group of GIs
with a damaged Kraut scout car.  So?"

"Look at the insignia, sir," Strong said.

"Use that magnifying glass on your desk, if you would."  The use of
'sir' convinced Eisenhower that the Scot thought the photo important.
He did as he was ordered.  After a few moments he grunted.

"Still looks like a Kraut scout car to me, Ken."

"Naturally it is, Ike.  But take a dekko at the insignia to the rear."
Then as if not to waste any more of the Supreme Commander's valuable
time, he added, "The original insignia has been painted over."

"So?"

"It's that of the elite German 116th Panzer Division, the greyhound
division as they call themselves."

Ike's bored expression didn't change.

"Still leaves me cold, Ken."

"Well, what about this, Ike?"  the dark-faced Scot said, a little
angrily.

"The 116th is a basic element of von Manteuffel's 5th SS Panzer Army
and we've been looking for the 5th for weeks now."  He shrugged.

"We need to look no further.  We've located it, Ike.  It's on
Middleton's Eighth Corps front, the weakest Allied corps along the
whole of the Western Front.  What do you say to that, Ike?"

Inwardly, Eisenhower cursed Strong and all Intelligence officers.  The
former was getting too close to the truth for his own good.  He pulled
himself together with difficulty and said, trying to keep his voice
calm and avoid looking directly at the triumphant, beaming Scot.

"All well and good, Ken, but there could be a hundred reasons why that
armoured car once bore the markings of the 5th Panzer Army."

He pressed home his advantage, as the Scot flushed.

"You know what your own people call you Intelligence fellahs nervous
nellies, seeing ghosts everywhere where there are none."

Strong flushed even more deeply.  He opened his mouth as if to protest,
but then closed it as if he thought better.

Eisenhower pressed home his advantage, putting into words the thoughts
he had suppressed for so long.

"I know that Middleton's VIII Corps is wide open for a German attack,
it's so weak.  But there is no evidence, you've said so yourself, that
the Kraut has the strength to do so."

"But this von Manreuffel-" Eisenhower cut him short.

"I'd need to see more than one solitary Kraut armoured car to believe
that von Manteuffel's 5th Panzer Army is secreted away on their side of
the front just waiting to jump Middleton.  No, Ken," he said with an
air of finality, "if you're going to convince me, you've got to do
better than that."  He looked at his wristwatch pointedly.

Strong knew he had had all the time he was going to get.  He nodded
wordlessly and went out.

The Supreme Commander waited till he had closed the door behind him.
Then he gave a sigh of relief.  That had been another close call, he
told himself, as he grabbed greedily for yet another "Camel' and lit it
with a hand that was decidedly shaky.

For a while he sat there absolutely still, trying to calm his nerves,
knowing that so much depended upon him; that his great, bold plan might
bring the war to an end by Christmas 1944, as he had always promised he
would.  Yet, at the same time, he knew things were closing in on him.
Sooner or later he would be discovered.  He had to act fast now before
the winter weather set in.  All the same, as he sat there he cursed the
man who had started it all the previous summer.

"Damnyou, Baron Oshinui!"  he said aloud, but whispering the name
almost as if he couldn't trust even himself to utter that strange
foreign name aloud.

"Damn your goddam slanting Jap frigging eyes .. .!"

Chapter Three

In late September 1944, craggy-faced General George Catlett Marshall,
the US Chief of Staff, Eisenhower's patron and mentor, had been faced
with an agonising decision.

Governor Tom Dewey, the Republican candidate for the office of
presidency this year the ailing President Roosevelt was going to
attempt a third go at that supreme office was threatening to malign
Roosevelt by revealing all he knew about the top secret "MAGIC'.

"MAGIC' was the code name given to the decoding operation, run mainly
from nearby Arlington Hall, Virginia.

Here, for the past four years, the American de-coding experts had been
reading most of the Japanese secret Sigint codes: naval, military and
diplomatic.  Now Governor Dewey was about to state publicly that
Roosevelt, thanks to MAGIC, had known in advance that the Japs were
about to attack the US Fleet at Pearl Harbor, but had done nothing
about it.

Why?  Because he had wanted to drag the US into the war on the Allied
side, cost what it may.

But Marshall, who wouldn't even let the President call him by his given
name, knew something else that the Republican governor of New York
State didn't.  The same code that "MAGIC' was breaking and reading was
still being used by the Japanese.  If Dewey revealed what he knew the
Japs would stop using it and destroy a war-winning intelligence
operation.  What was he to do?

That September he made a decision without telling

President Roosevelt.  He sent one of his staff personally to the
handsome former 'crime-buster' to tell him of the continued use by the
Japs of the Sigint code "MAGIC' was decoding.  Dewey had not believed
the staff officer.  He had told him scornfully that it was all a
whitewash job to protect the President and ensure he would win the
third term.

Desperately Marshall, the most important figure in the whole of the
Allied camp, sent Dewey a long, personal letter.  In it he explained
his position, writing: "Now the point of the present dilemma is that we
have gone ahead with this business of deciphering the Japanese codes
until we possess other codes, German as well as Japanese.  But our main
basis of information regarding Hitler's intentions in Europe is
obtained from Baron Oshima's messages from Berlin reporting his
interviews with Hitler to the Japanese Government.  These are still
sent in the codes involved in the Pearl Harbor events."

Marshall went on: "The conduct of General Eisenhower's campaign and all
the operations in the Pacific are closely related to the conception and
timing of the information we secretly obtain through these intercepted
codes.  They contribute greatly to the war effort and tremendously to
the saving of American lives."

Dewey was still not convinced.  He had exclaimed when he had read the
hand-delivered letter.

"Well, did you read that?

I'll be damned if the Japs are still using those codes."

Marshall's staff officer tried to convince the politician otherwise,
but Dewey had not been impressed.  He had grunted: "There is little in
Marshall's letter I don't know already.  There's one point, however.
What in hell's name have the Jap codes got to do with Eisenhower?"

Marshall's staff officer hesitated, then he told Dewey something that
was known only to a handful of people in the whole of the Allied
camp.

"Sir, General Eisenhower is one of the few recipients of General
Marshall's Black Ultra."  Ultra was the code name given to the decoding
operation run by the Allies from Bletchley Park, UK.

Dewey snorted, "I've heard of Ultra through the grapevine of course.
But what the Sam Hill is Black UltraT Again the staff officer
hesitated.  Finally he explained.

"Black Ultra, Governor, is a kind of "Ultra within Ultra," distributed
personally by General Marshall to only a handful of Americans, such as
General MacArthur in the Pacific and General Eisenhower in Europe, and
naturally the President himself."

Dewey was impressed at last.  He realised he was getting himself in
very deep waters.  He went to the next room and had a brief discussion
with his personal adviser, then returned to say, "Colonel, I want to
say I do not believe that there are any questions I want to ask you nor
do I care to have any discussions about the contents of General
Marshall's letter."  Thereupon the two men had shaken hands and Dewey
had dismissed the staff officer with, "Well, I hope we meet again under
more auspicious circumstances."

The crisis had been over.

In that last week of September Marshall knew that the respite was only
temporary.  As he signalled to Eisenhower at Rheims at the end of the
Dewey's business, For Your Eyes Only.  Make full use of the Oshima
Black Ultra.  Use as available.  Now!"  He had underlined the 'now' in
the green ink restricted to the use of the US Chief of Staff.

"My guess is that the Oshima Code will be compromised sooner or later.
Then Tokyo will react.  In your court now, Eisenhower.  Signed G.C.
Marshall."

The message from the General, of whom he stood in awe, as did the rest
of the US military, had perplexed Eisenhower more than it had worried
him.  He had many sources of information at the highest level, apart
from the Oshima decodes.

Naturally they were of the greatest value, or they had been prior to
the invasion of France in June 1944.  From 1943 to 1944 when Oshima,
who was not only the Japanese ambassador, but also the former Japanese
military attache to Berlin, had toured the German Atlantic Wall
installations, and he had provided invaluable information on the German
preparations for the invasion.  With the trained eye of a former
soldier, he had seen things and reported them in detail which had been
of tremendous use to the Allied DDay planners.

For instance he had sent Tokyo in-depth reports on the German de fences
at Boulogne, Le Havre, Dieppe and so on, down to the siting of
individual German artillary sites.

He even reported that Hitler didn't believe that the Allies would land
in Normandy, where they would.  Hitler thought they would take the
shortest seaborne route across the Channel to land in the Pas de Calais
area.  Fact after fact, each more valuable than the other, was acquired
by the Allies.

Then suddenly the link between Berlin and Tokyo had gone dead and Baron
Oshima had passed out of the picture.

Black Ultra had been replaced by the more conventional Ultra coming
from Bletchley Park.  Eisenhower had begun to forget about the squat,
bullet-headed Jap who had once been so useful to him.

That all changed in October 1944.  By then Eisenhower had taken over
command of all Allied ground forces from the British General
Montgomery; after all, America fielded three men for every British
soldier in Europe.  An American general, Marshall thought, should now
have the kudos of defeating the Third Reich.  To his dismay, Eisenhower
found that that defeat was a very long way away.  For weeks now the
Allies had been battering the frontiers of the Reich.

Casualties had begun to mount alarmingly, without results.

At the cost of over 100,000 dead, wounded and captured, the Americans
had penetrated a matter of mere yards into Germany.  The fortifications
of the Siegfried Line, on which the British had been prepared to hang
their 'dirty washing, mother dear' so long before, was stopping the
great attack dead.  Eisenhower knew he'd have to do something urgently
or he'd suffer the same fate as Montgomery: he'd be kicked upstairs or
dismissed altogether.  But what?  That was the question.

It had been about then that the almost forgotten Baron Oshima had
reappeared abruptly on the scene.  In a message forwarded by Black
Ultra and marked "Extremely Urgent', the Japanese ambassador in Berlin
had signalled his government in Tokyo that he had seen the German
Foreign Minister von Ribbentrop at Hitler's HQ in East Prussia.

The vain former champagne salesman had told the Jap that Germany was
preparing to stabilise the Western Front now that all the divisions
decimated in France had managed to return to the Reich.  The German 5th
Panzer Army under Colonel-General von Manteuffel was preparing to
attack in France.  To the Americans' surprise, a supposedly defeated
Germany had done exactly that and for 24 hours it had been nip and tuck
in Eastern France before the hard-pressed Americans of Patton's Third
Army had managed to stop von Manteuffel.

But there had been even more surprising news to come from Baron Oshima.
A week later the Jap had signalled the Japanese capital that he had had
a long private interview with Hitler.  The latter had told him, as he
radioed Tokyo, that Tt was his (Hitler's) intention, as soon as the new
army of more than a million men now being organised was ready, to
combine them with units to be withdrawn from the front in every area
and,

waiting upon the replenishment of the air forces which is now in
progress, to take the offensive in the West on a large scale."

Hitler expected that this build-up would take place under the cover of
the rainy weather to be expected in late September and October when the
Allies would not be able to make use of their superior air power. Thus,
the large scale attack in the West, according to the Oshima signal to
Tokyo, would take place 'after the beginning of November'.

That was the last the Allied cryptanalysts heard of the Jap, but a flow
of other messages to Tokio from Berlin were picked up at Bletchley Park
and Arlington indicating that Oshima had been right.  It became clear
that Hitler intended to drive for the key Allied supply port of
Antwerp, starting the great 'surprise' offensive once the autumn bad
weather, normal on the Continent at that time of the year, commenced.

Back in Britain the Allied planners started to pinpoint the European
areas where this change in the weather would be most acute.  They were
Eastern France, the German Eifel and the nearby Belgian Ardennes.  But
Eisenhower, now concerned on a daily basis with this grave new threat,
couldn't defend all three areas, though he was happy that at last the
Germans were coming out of those damned Siegfried Line positions that
had held up his advance into the Reich, which would bring about
Germany's defeat.

Slowly, however, a bold plan had begun to form in Eisenhower's brain.
The plan was calculated to make the Krauts attack an Allied front of
his choice, where he could force the Germans into a trap.

At first he took only Bradley into his confidence.  Bradley had been
appalled at Eisenhower's suggestion.

"But you can't do that, Ike," he had protested.

"Don't you realise that you're going to waste hundreds, perhaps
thousands of young American boys' lives to bait your trap?  No," his
face had whitened with shock, "you simply can't do it!

It's un-American," he had stuttered, "downright .. ."  he stuttered
again as he searched for the right word to express his indignation
"sinful."

Eisenhower had looked down at his desk as if in shame.

But there had been no shame in his eyes, shaded from an outraged
Bradley's view at that moment.  He knew from his readings of military
history that a commander could get away with sheer bloody murder as
long as he delivered the goods.

A little hesitantly he had said after Bradley had calmed down, "Brad,
as the Frogs say, you can't make an omelette without breaking eggs .. "
He paused and then added, "It's got to be Middleton's VIII Corps in the
Ardennes."

Bradley shook his head.

"Middleton won't buy it.  I know Troy.  He's been under my command
since Sicily in '43.

He's intensely loyal to his men."

But Bradley turned out to be badly wrong.  Middleton had been in
college administration for many years before the war and didn't
particularly look like a one-time professional soldier.  He was
overjoyed when Eisenhower asked, apparently casually, what his attitude
would be to an attack by the enemy on his VIII Corps.

"Hell, Ike," he exclaimed, "I'd welcome it!  We've been sitting here on
our butts doing nothing for too long, Let's start earning our pay and
killing Krauts."

It was the reaction that Eisenhower had prayed for.  Now he began to
let the portly, bespectacled Corps Commander into his plan.

"We'll thin out your front, Troy" he said.

"For starters I'll remove your two experienced, full-strength
divisions, the 2nd and 83rd.  They'll be replaced by the totally green
99th and 106th.  I'll give you two experienced divisions, the 4th and
28th, to make things still look right to the Krauts.  But they're both
on their last legs after they've been hit so hard in the fighting
farther north.  Both the divisions will have to absorb some five
thousand green replacements each.  In essence, they are veteran
fighting formations I'll name.  In reality they're as green and as
untried in battle as the 99th and 106th."

The fat Corps Commander nodded his agreement, accepting without
question or objection everything the Supreme Commander was telling
him.

Listening to the two of them, Bradley despaired quietly.

Why didn't Middleton ask what it was going to cost his corps in
casualties when it was hit by three German armies?

But perhaps, he told himself, Middleton didn't want to know.  Perhaps
he thought by simply accepting orders without question, as a good
soldier should, he would be keeping his nose clean.  If afterwards
there were any awkward questions asked by Washington, he could reply in
all honesty that he had simply been carrying out the orders of the
Supreme Commander.

Now Eisenhower was detailing what should happen once the Krauts had
struck.

"You'll stand fast the best you can, Troy," he was saying.

"Try to hold the Krauts for as long as possible.  I've already planned
to have armoured and infantry divisions on tap to the north and south
of your corps positions.  Once the Krauts have penetrated your corps
and are really involved in the fighting, these divisions and all the
air and artillery I can muster will hit the other guy one hell of a
blow."  Eisenhower smacked the flat of his left hand with his right
fist.

"This time we'll finish the Krauts off for fucking good.  We've
pussy-footed around them far too long."

"Hot diggity," Middleton exclaimed joyfully like some high school
kid.

"We'll see the Krauts off for good!"

Standing next to the door in Middleton's tiny office.

Bradley pulled a long face.  Eisenhower was prepared to risk
sacrificing a whole US corps in order to lure the Krauts into the open.
He only hoped he'd pull it off.  If he didn't, Eisenhower would ruin
the lot of them.

Chapter Four

"HALT!"  von Dodenburg commanded and raising his right hand, spoke into
his chest mike.  In the driving compartment below, Schulze brought the
"Gruesome Twosome', as the big Sherman had been named by some previous
American crew, to a rumbling stop.

Half an hour ago, they had crossed the Belgian border a second time
between Arlon and Bastogne on the main road to Brussels.  A few minutes
afterwards they had left the main road and had commenced their way
north along the secondary roads winding their way through pine forests
that marched up the steep slopes on both sides like rigid ranks of
spiked-helmeted Prussian grenadiers.

Von Dodenburg dropped stiffly from the turret.  He stamped his feet on
the yellow-stained cobbles, indicating that local farmers with their
manure carts often passed this way, to restore his circulation. Moments
later he was joined by his young officers.  Together they focussed
their glasses on the heights above: somehow dark, sinister and
threatening, though a weary von Dodenburg could not reason exactly
why.

Finally the CO broke the heavy, brooding silence, punctuated by the
steady throb of the Sherman's engine like the beating of a metal
heart.

"Mehie Herren, I know you can't see it but up there is the route we
shall take in the actual attack when the time comes, and that is not
far away, believe me."

He let them absorb this information before adding, "First, our infantry
will force a passage through the enemy infantry.

Then we're off, going hell for leather for our objective and, remember,
time will be of the essence.  Once the enemy Jabos," fighter-bombers
"get on to us, we're in trouble, serious trouble.  For that reason
we've got to move fast before they can locate us."

They nodded their agreement.  All of them feared the jabos, especially
those of them who had gone through France where the enemy
fighter-bombers had mercilessly slaughtered the packed, retreating
German columns.

"Naturally we can't see the actual road from down here," he
continued.

"But you don't meed a crystal ball to realise just how steep its slopes
are.

And where the ascents up there are difficult you can take it for
granted that the Belgian engineers cut costs before the war by
narrowing each difficult stretch of road.  So in essence we shall be
asked to move sixty-ton Tiger tanks up gradients of one in three where
there is room only for one tank and that tank will be unable to turn if
it gets into difficulties.  In addition, those gradients can be
defended by a man and a boy armed with some sort of anti-tank weapon.
Even our Tigers will be sitting ducks up there."  He hesitated and
looked at the grey, leaden sky.

"Naturally there will be the distinct possibility of snow at this time
of the year, especially on those heights."  He let his words sink in.

One of the young officers protested.

"But you said, sir, that the Fuhrer picked that route personally and
everyone knows that our Fuhrer never makes mistakes."

Von Dodenburg looked pityingly at the officer, as if he were a
half-wit, but he made no comment.  Even in Wotan, especially with these
young fanatical National Socialist green beaks straight from the
indoctrination of the Reich, it wasn't wise to criticise the 'greatest
captain of all time," as Hitler styled himself.  One never knew how the
green beaks would react.

Standing a dozen yards away, Leo Kessler, his face unshaven and weary
after a long night on the move, watched and wondered.  He would dearly
have loved to know what von Dodenburg was explaining.  He could see
from the animation on the faces of von Dodenburg's youthful listeners
that it was something of importance.

He turned to Matz and Schulze, who were guzzling the last of their
looted bourbon, and took a chance.

"We're not going up there?"  he ventured, indicating the height.

Schulze drained the last of the spirits and threw the empty bottle
away.

"Officers and gents don't usually take hairy-assed stubble-hoppers into
their confidences," he growled.

"But I guess we are."

"Then how far do you think we're going into Belgium?"

Leo Kessler persisted.

"Once you've crossed the River Meuse it's only two hours to the coast,
roughly."

Matz laughed coarsely.

"Perhaps we're gonna invade the friggin buck-teethed Tommies," he
ventured.

"The Fuhrer has been saying we're going to do that ever since 1940."

"Tough titty" Schulze added, "And that in the friggin' depth of winter.
Anyway, who'd want to invade England with all that friggin' tea and
warm beer that the Tommies drink?"  He shrugged.

"But with the greatest friggin' Captain of all Time, you never friggin'
know."  Schulze belched and with that the conversation died, leaving
Leo Kessler standing there, barely concealing his frustration.

Von Dodenburg was saying, "Meine Herren, I'm relying upon you to note
every difficult ascent, hairpin bend and narrow cutting.  It's vital.
Once we get back to base" if a harsh little voice rasped at the back of
his brain "we shall note all this information on our route maps so that
we know what to expect in advance."

His young officers, their faces glowing with the kind of energetic
enthusiasm he vaguely remembered from the great years of victory which
seemed now so long ago, stared at their CO attentively, till one of
them ventured the question which they all longed to ask.

"Oberstunnbannfuhrer, can I ask what our final objective is?"

There was a murmur of agreement from the others and for a moment von
Dodenburg was quietly amused at the way the young officer had posed his
question in such a strange, indirect manner.  He rubbed his unshaven
chin, knowing that soon he would be asking these young officers to risk
their lives to achieve that objective.  At the same time he daren't
reveal it now.  One of them might well get captured and then, as
Schulze would have phrased it, the tick-tock would be well and truly in
the pisspot.  The Amis would exert the most extreme pressure to find
out what an SS officer, dressed as an American, was doing so far behind
their lines.  There was no doubt of that.

"Gentlemen, what we are about is this.  We are helping to give the
Fatherland one last chance to win the war in the West.  That's about
all I can tell you at this moment.  But believe me, our mission is
vital."

He wasted no more time.  Soon the light would go.  He wanted to see as
much of the high route before it became dark and they were forced to
bivouac for the rest of the long autumn night.

"To your vehicles, we've a lot to do yet."

They moved out with a will, happy and smiling, discussing the exciting
news among themselves.

"For Folk, Fatherland and Fuhrer," Leo Kessler heard one of them say as
he returned to the White half-track.  His brain raced, it was obvious
he was on to something.  But still he didn't know exactly what von
Dodenburg and his Wotan were up to.

Then, suddenly, he forgot their mission, whatever it was.  He had a
strange, uncanny feeling that he was being watched.  A cold finger of
fear traced its way down the small of his back.

Leo Kessler turned abruptly and realised immediately that he was right.
Dietz was watching him through those damned rimless steel spectacles of
his, that he wore in imitation of his boss Reichsfuhrer SS Heinrich
Himmler, and he knew instinctively he was under surveillance.  The
Nationalist Socialist Political Officer, 'creeping Jesus', as Schulze
called him contemptuously, suspected something.  It was clear that he
was being watched and he didn't like it.

Sepp Dietrich raged.  He had once been a sergeant major, now he wore
the stars of a general, but he cursed and drank as he had once done as
a lowly Bavarian NCO.  Amused and at the same time slightly bored,
Kraemer listened to his boss as he fulminated against "Those damned
arrogant monocle Fritzes like von Dodenburg."  He knew that it was
typical working-class envy.  All the same, it was strange to hear a
colonel-general, who now commanded Germany's most powerful armoured
formation, talk in this fashion.

Most of his fellow regular staff officers would be shocked at such
behaviour on the part of an army commander.

"The aristocratic bastards," Dietrich thundered.

"They think they're above the law.  Heaven arse and twine, if von
Dodenburg were not such a capable officer with so much tin on his
skinny chest for bravery, I'd have him courtmartial led on the spot.
What in the three devils names did he think he was about, taking off
this way?"

Kraemer, smoking through his ivory holder, dark eyes as cynical as
ever, said nothing.  He let his chief get it out of his system.  He
knew that Dietrich, who had once been Hitler's bodyguard, would be lost
without a trained general staff officer at his side.  He could afford
to be tolerant.  Dietrich needed him and the former knew it.

In the end Dietrich's breath gave out and he lapsed into silence.
Kraemer took the opportunity offered by on that silence: "Von
Dodenburg," he said, "is doing a personal reconnaissance of the route
he will take and you will understand that he is running a great risk if
he is captured.

The Amis will shoot him out of a hand as a spy."

Dietrich grunted, but didn't comment.

"But I think you can rely upon him as an old hare that he won't be
captured."  For a while Kraemer changed the subject and regaled his
chief with the latest statistics and the current supply position of the
Sixth SS Panzer Army.

Dietrich obviously wasn't interested, but he listened dutifully all the
same.

Finally Kraemer stopped speaking.  Uneasily he wondered whether he
should report to his chief the latest rumours coming from their female
agent in Luxembourg.

He decided finally to go ahead and tell Dietrich.

"I have some unsettling information."

"What?"

"From our woman in Luxembourg.  Naturally she can't provide anything
hard and fast, but I'm sure she's on to something.  She's a very shrewd
person, sir."

"What, is it, Kraemer?"  Dietrich asked badly.

"Gruppenfuhrer, she is sure that the Amis have an agent in our camp."

"Impossible.  Our security is absolutely watertight."

Kraemer didn't react and Dietrich snorted, "The Amis are fools,
everyone knows that.  Besides, the Intelligence people are always
seeing ghosts where there aren't any.  If I listened to Intelligence
I'd never make a move."  He pushed back the hard chair in the room of
the inn which served as his HQ.

"I'm going to turn in," he snapped.

Kraemer knew otherwise.  Dietrich was going to get his usual skinful.
Without it he couldn't sleep.  He rose to his feet, too, and snapped to
attention.

Dietrich ignored the military courtesy.

"See you in the

Q1

morning," he snapped.

"And enough of that spy business, Kraemer.  It's bad enough von
Dodenburg taking off like this without permission.  What do you think
the Fuhrer might say and do if he heard we suspected a spy in our camp.
 Heads would roll."

"Jcnrohl, Gruppenfuhrer" Kraemer answered dutifully.

He waited till his chief had gone out, then he slumped back in his
chair, his agile mind working.  He knew he could rely a hundred percent on Wanda von Wettersheim.  After all, she was doing this in
self-interest.  The border coal and steel barons wanted Germany to
succeed because it served their own business interests.  So what was he
to do about her information on the spy in the German camp?

For what seemed a long time he pondered the problem.

Outside, the HQ fell silent, the only sound the steady tread of the
sentries on patrol.  In the end he gave up.  He'd do nothing.  It was
what his chief would expect of him.

Chapter Five

Schulze spotted the smoke first.  The little convoy of armoured
vehicles was crawling up the very steep ascent along the mountain road
which led to the Belgian town of Werbomont, directly on the route to
the River Meuse, when he saw it.  Standing next to von Dodenburg on
Gruesome Twosome, as Matz was doing the driving now, he snapped,
"Smoke, a lot of smoke at eleven o'clock, sir!"

Hastily von Dodenburg turned in the direction indicated.

He peered through the green gloom of the tightly packed firs and saw
the smoke, too.  A dozen or so streams of thin grey smoke, which
indicated wood fires, ascending into the still, dawn air.

"A camp?"  he queried.

"Looks like it, sir."  Schulze sniffed the air with his big red nose
twitching like that of a predatory animal.

"Cooking some kind of fodder.  Smells good."  His stomach, empty of
food for 20 hours, churned noisely.

Von Dodenburg ignored the remark and the noise.  He turned to Leo
Kessler standing with them in the Sherman's turret.

"I thought you said that once we were through the main line there was
nothing between that and the Ami supply dumps on the Meuse?"  There was
a note of accusation in the German's voice.

Leo Kessler looked slightly puzzled.

"Before I was wounded and captured, sir," he said hesitantly, "that was
true.  There was nothing up here.  Why should there be'?

What's the use of a camp at the top of a mountain?"

"So who in three devils' names is up here?"

"The only way to find out, Obersturmbannfuhrer, is to have a
look-see."

"I suppose you're right," von Dodenburg agreed.

Once again they started to groan their way upwards, with a puzzled Leo
Kessler telling himself that if it hadn't been for the smoke, they
would have missed the forest camp, whatever it was, altogether.

Another 100 metres and von Dodenburg snapped, "All right, Schulze, get
a half-dozen of your old hares and follow me.  We'll do a recce first
before we show ourselves."

"We couldn't do it without you, sir," Schulze said.

"Oh, stop looking after me like a broody mother hen," von Dodenburg
rasped.  He knew just how much the big tough non-com worried about him.
But the knowledge made him angry.

"Come on, digit out of the orifice.  At the double!"

"Yes sir," Schulze agreed reluctantly.

Von Dodenburg took his pistol out of its holster, snapped off the
safety and stuck it loose inside his belt.  It would be easier if he
needed it fast.

They advanced cautiously through the trees, their bodies bent as if in
anticipation, their nostrils assailed by the delightful smell of frying
bacon and real bean coffee.

Schulze's stomach growled again and von Dodenburg shot him a hard look.
The big non-com shrugged his shoulders, he couldn't help his stomach
responding.

"Lucky shite hawks!"  he whispered enviously to the nearest old hare,
"Real bean coffee, not that friggin' ersatz nigger sweat that we've got
to drink."

They went on.

To their front, von Dodenburg crouched suddenly and carefully parted
the bushes in front of him.  A sight of almost rustic tranquility met
his eyes.

Everywhere men were squatted on their haunches in front of a haphazard
camp of tents, cooking their breakfast over rough-and-ready fires,
grills suspended over circles of stones, using branches as their fuel.
The picture looked rustic save for the villainous faces of the men as
they bent over their pots of coffee or worked frying pans full of
spluttering American bacon and eggs.

For the most part they were dressed in dirty American uniforms or in
long black slickers to keep out the morning cold.  Their faces were
unshaven and unwashed so that it was obvious they were no longer
disciplined soldiers.  As Schulze whispered urgently to von Dodenburg,
"A real shower of shit, sir.  Cardboard soldiers the lot of them!"

Von Dodenburg nodded his agreement as he watched them cook, mostly in a
kind of sullen silence, puffing morosely at cigarettes like men who
weren't properly awake and who would return to their nice warm bedrolls
at the first opportunity.

Behind them their tents were covered with camouflage netting and pine
branches, with a few trucks similarly camouflaged beyond.  Von
Dodenburg knew enough about US transport by now to realise that the
trucks all came from different outfits, each bore a different insignia
on the white painted bumper.

They were soldiers enough to have posted sentries at the edges of the
camp, especially where it was close to the winding mountain road and
there were arms ready for use stacked in the centre of the tents.  He
guessed that this was no second-line outfit manned by untrained
soldiers.  These were fighting men, but for what cause they might well
be fighting he couldn't guess.

He turned to Schulze just behind him and hissed, "Fetch up our tame
Ami, Kessler.  He might well be able to enlighten us about those men.
At the double, you big horned ox!"

Schulze needed no urging.  He eyed that sizzling bacon and pots of
steaming hot bean coffee and wondered when he would be able to get his
hands on them.  Moments later he returned with the panting Ami.

"Well," von Dodenburg asked, after allowing Kessler to watch the men
cooking around the campfires for a few moments.

"What do you make of them?"

"Deserters," Kessler answered promptly.

"They're all from infantry outfits from the front to judge from their
divisional patches-the US 101st, 5th Infantry, 2nd Infantry and the
like."

"So what are they doing up here?"

"Well, Obersturmhcinnfuhrer," Kessler answered.

"They say there are hundreds, perhaps thousands of US deserters in the
big cities living off the local whores and the black market.  But the
cities are getting too hot to hold them.  They say the MPs are having a
real crackdown on deserters.  Ike Eisenhower, the Supreme Commander is
furious with the sheer number of them.  So my guess is that these are
guys who have left the cities and come out into the sticks.

Yes, they'll still live off the black market, by hijacking lone trucks
using this road and selling the goodies they contain, plus the tyres
and gas.  The Belgies will take everything they can offer without
question and they'll be pretty safe up here.  There'll be only the odd
MP patrol in a remote place like this.  The military police can't be
everywhere, so they live a life of Reilly, plenty of food, no real
danger and as many of the local broads as they can afford on their
black market loot."

Schulze perked up at the mention of the women.

"I

think I'll desert to the Amis,"" he exclaimed to no one in
particular.

"Shut up!"  Von Dodenburg said as he considered the problem presented
by the hundred or so deserters so close to the mountain road that they
would have to take on their way to the Meuse.

"Duck!"  Kessler snapped sharply, breaking into von Dodenburg's
reverie.

"What is it?"  the latter asked urgently, as the men bent double.

"A truck's coming up the incline from the opposite direction to us."

They listened.  A moment later they could all hear its laboured engine
ascending the steep incline in first gear.

"Watch the deserters!"  Kessler hissed.

They didn't have long to wait for their reaction.  A tall sergeant in a
dirty uniform grabbed a white-painted MP helmet, placed it on his head
and hurried towards the nearby road.  Another NCO, equally scruffy,
followed him, fiddling with a tommy-gun, a wolfish grin on his unshaven
face.

Von Dodenburg knew instinctively what they were going to do as the
other men rose from their camp fires.  They were going to ambush the
lone truck.  For so many armed men it would be as easy as falling off a
log.

Tensely they watched through the gloom, the Sergeant stepping into the
road as the truck breasted the rise, steam pouring from its overworked
radiator.  He raised his hand in an official manner.  The driver of the
truck started to slow down even more.  In the trees to the sergeant's
left, the corporal raised his tommy-gun, as other deserters filtered
through the trees to join him, weapons raised.  The corporal aimed his
sub-machine gun, a look of pleasure on his rat-like face.  He was going
to enjoy the next few minutes.

Without seeming to take aim he pressed the trigger.  The dawn calm was
shattered by the urgent hammering of the gun.  Tracer hissed lethally
towards the lone truck.  Leo Kessler caught one last glimpse of a
terrified black face behind the steering wheel, then the windscreen was
a spider's web of shattered glass.  Desperately the driver fought for
control but to no avail.  The truck veered to the left, and came to a
stop in the drainage ditch, resting at a stupid angle, wheels spinning
purposelessly, white smoke pouring from its shattered engine.

Next moment the deserters broke from the trees, streaming forward,
cheering and screaming, greedy for the looting to come.

While the rest watched, Leo Kessler did a bit of quick thinking. Sooner
or later the US military police from the nearest town would drive up to
this place looking for the missing truck.  They would report to the
nearest HQ.  That report would go to the Supreme Commander personally. 
It had already been ordered that anything that might have something to
do with the spy in the enemy camp would go to him.  It was one way to
get a message through about Wotan's intentions. He couldn't see any
other way of doing so from this remote mountain area.

Von Dodenburg and his grenadiers were occupied, obviously wondering
what they were going to about the deserters.  They had to eradicate
them somehow.  Kessler knew he must deliver that message.  But how? For
a few moments he racked his brain, while the deserters started tossing
bundles of brand new US Army blankets from the back of the wrecked
truck.  Those blankets would be turned into overcoats for the Belgi
before the week was out, selling for a small fortune on the black
market where warm winter clothing was at a premium.

Then Kessler had it.  When they arrived on the scene the MPs wouldn't
miss something carved white on the green, moss-covered trees close to
the road.  He prayed, at least, that they wouldn't.  He backed of from
the men crouched in the undergrowth, watching what was happening to the
truck on the road.  No one noticed him.  They were too intent on the
looters.

Hurriedly he backed off a hundred yards and pulled out his knife, the
only weapon he possessed.  He cast a hurried look to left and right. No
one was looking his way.  There was no time to be wasted, sooner of
later the SS would miss him.  Swiftly, trying to make no sound, he
started to hack at the soft bark of an old tree, lifting up the
greenery and preparing to leave his mark.  It had to be big but not too
big.

He could not have the SS spotting it before they continued on their
way.

He began carving the sign.  It was an arrow pointing westwards, the
direction in which SS Assault Regiment "Wotan' was taking, with, below,
his own sign known only to Eisenhower and those others privy to the
great secret.  In addition, every outfit connected with security,
including all MP stations, had been warned to keep a lookout for it,
even though they wouldn't know what it signified.  All they knew was
that they'd be in for a rough time if they spotted it and didn't report
the sighting to the next highest HQ.

Minutes later he was finished and stepped back to admire his handiwork:
the arrow pointing out the direction, and below it his code-sign'T',
for Traitor.  He said a quick prayer that it would be spotted before
too long.  It was just as he was about to put away his jackknife when
he was startled by a harsh, rasping voice just behind him demanding, "
Was geht hier vor?  Los, raus mil tier Spraclw, Mensch."  - "What are
you up to?"

Slowly, reluctantly, miserably, he turned.  He had been discovered.
There, staring hard at him, a look of overwhelming triumph on his pudgy
face, was Dietz.  In his chubby fist he carried a pistol aimed directly
at the American's heart .. .

Chapter Six

Kessler caught his breath.  His chest was heaving frantically.

He knew he had to calm himself, quickly.  It could be only a matter of
minutes before Dietz called to the others, though Kessler suspected
that he would wait till von Dodenburg had dealt with the deserters.
Dietz had that much sense, he couldn't get in the way of operations.

Dietz stood, legs astride in what he judged was a masterful pose,
pistol in his pudgy right fist, his weak eyes behind the thick glasses
alert for the slightest wrong move on his captive's part.

Leo Kessler's mind raced as, slowly, he succeeded in calming himself.
Soon, he told himself, Von Dodenburg's grenadiers would go into action
against the US deserters, and the noise they would create would drown
any that he made dealing with the fat swine opposite him.  How
sickeningly confident Dietz looked, as if nothing could go wrong.  He
was in complete charge.  That's what you think, Leo Kessler told
himself scornfully.  I've eaten arse holes like you for breakfast.  But
how was he going to do it?  At that range, even a four-eyed bugger like
Dietz couldn't miss.

"Well?"  Dietz demanded imperiously, puffing out his skinny chest in a
self-important manner, "What have you got to say for yourself spyT "I'm
sorry, Oberfalmrich" Leo Kessler quavered as if he were a broken man,
keeping his gaze lowered to the ground i on so that Dietz couldn't see
the look of sudden determination in his blue-grey eyes.

"What in three devils' names were you carving on that damned tree?"
Dietz snapped.

"I don't know," Kesslcr answered in apparently miserable confusion.

"Don't you shit me," Dietz said angrily.

"Don't you know who you're talking to, man?  I can have you strung up
without trial."  He grinned evilly, "Just like that."  And he snapped
his fat fingers.

"You're up to something, and you'd better drop that knife."  He
threateningly jerked up the muzzle of his pistol.

Kessler did as he was commanded, as if his spirit was completely
broken.  But a plan was already forming in his brain as he listened
with one ear for the firing to commence.  Then he'd do it and the fat
bastard would be in for the surprise of his life, one that he frigging
well richly deserved.

"Los, Manner" Kessler heard von Dodenburg order.

There were metallic clicks as his grenadiers whipped off their safety
catches.  They were about to attack the deserters.

The time for action on his part had come.  It was now or never and he
knew that he had only moments before he carried out his plan.

Suddenly, Kessler clutched his face, a look of agony on his features.
He made a gesture as if he were biting something hard.  Dietz looked at
him in sudden alarm.

"What's going on?"  he demanded.

Kessler forced a hollow laugh.

"You'll never take me alive," he choked.

"What?"

Kessler pointed to his mouth.

"Do you think they'd have sent me on a mission like this without having
taken precautions?"

mi

"What are you saying?"  Dietz demanded as behind them a ragged volley
of fire erupted as the grenadiers started firing upon the unsuspecting
deserters.  Abruptly all was noise and confusion.

"They're not going to torture me.  There's too much at stake."

"You mean a poison pill?"

Kessler nodded, clutching his stomach, as if he were in too much pain
to answer in words.

"Shit on shingle!"  Dietz cursed and lowered his weapon, as if his
prisoner no longer presented any danger.

Kessler didn't give him a second chance to find out he was wrong.  He
darted forward, the look of absolute agony suddenly vanished from his
conforted face.

"What-" Dietz never finished his question, as Kessler's jackknife slid
into his fat guts with a horrifying sucking noise.  His eyes turned
upwards.  Kessler struck again, Dietz's glasses fell across his face in
a comic position.  His knees started to give beneath him, but not fast
enough for an urgent Kessler, who knew he had only a matter of minutes
left before someone turned and spotted what was going on in the little
forest glade.

"Die you fat bastard," he panted.

"Die!"

He thrust home the sharp, blood-red blade once again.

Dietz quivered, every limb in his body trembling as if with sexual
ectasy.  He went down on one knee, fighting death to the very last.
Kessler kicked him in the face.  He gave one last stifled moan and then
sprawled backwards, arms outwards like a crucified Christ, blood arcing
from his punctured stomach.  An instant later his head lolled to one
side, his mouth gaped open.  He was dead.

For a moment Kessler didn't know what to do.  Then he realised his
danger.  The deserters, at least those who had survived that first
murderous volley of fire, had broken and were streaming back through
the trees in panic-stricken groups firing wildly at the Germans behind
them and they were heading straight in his direction.  In a matter of
moments they'd be all over the place.  Then he would be discovered with
the murdered Dietz at his feet.

He acted.  Hastily he stripped off his jacket, assuming the Germans
would know it was his.  He bent and dipped it in Dietz's blood.  Then
he tossed it carelessly next to the corpse as if to indicate that he
might well have suffered the same fate as the pudgy officer and had
staggered off to die somewhere in the thick undergrowth.  He flashed
one last look at the German positions and wondered for a moment what
would happen to all those bold young men in their black uniforms.  For
a second he felt a kind of sympathy for them.  They were going to die
soon, their fate had already been sealed by his betrayal.  He bent down
and picked up Dietz's pistol, rubbed the blood off it and clutched it
hard in his right hand.  Then he was running for his life through the
trees.  His mission was over.

They were shooting the deserters now.  Forced to kneel and despite
their pleas and tears, the backs of their heads were blown off with
shots to the rear of their skulls and the grass was splattered with
their blood and brains.  The Germans felt no sense of guilt.

"They were a bunch of treacherous rats," Schulze, who was trying to
keep some sort of tally, snarled to Matz.

"They deserve to die.  The world's better rid of swine like that."

Watching, von Dodenburg knew that Schulze couldn't arrive at an exact
figure.  They hadn't known how many deserters there were at the start
and the survivors, in their panic-stricken terror, had been incapable
of supplying that information.  He guessed that several of them had
escaped and were fleeing down the heights.

He turned his attention to the dead Dietz and the bloodstained jacket
next to him.

"It belonged to the Ami,

Kessler," one of his officers informed him, "I remember it from where
the blood-hole was patched."

Von Dodenburg nodded his agreement.  He remembered that hole, too, from
the first day that Kessler had arrived at his headquarters, those grey
eyes of his revealing nothing.

A young officer, Haberle, watched his chief carefully.

Finally, he asked: "What do you think, sir?"

Von Dodenburg knew what the man meant without further explanation.

"I don't quite know," he answered slowly.

"He seemed to be on our side.  After all he did volunteer to join us
and he did kill his own people, which must have taken some doing if he
was not heart and soul with us.  After that is said," he hesitated, "he
was a strange chap.  I always thought I could read people, but not Leo
Kessler.  He was a private person, he kept his thoughts to himself."

"What do you think happened to him?"  the young officer persisted.

"Do you think they killed him or did he do a bunk?"

Von Dodenburg shrugged.

"Hard to say.  But I don't think it matters much now.  I mean he knew
quite a lot about us, but he didn't know our objective and when and
where the balloon goes up, and that's the main thing."  He dismissed
Kessler.

"Have a scout round in the immediate neighbourhood, Haberle.  He might
have staggered into the undergrowth and snuffed it there.  But not too
far.  Don't run any risk.  Besides, we're moving off in a few
minutes."

"Sir."  Haberle looked at his CO, curiously, but said nothing.

In a strange reverie, his mind buzzing, von Dodenburg turned and walked
back up the road to where they were looting the dead spread out in the
strangely grotesque, abandoned manner of the violently done to death.

"Schulze and Matz," he ordered.  They needed no further orders from
their beloved CO.  They abandoned what they were doing immediately,
unslung their machine-pistols and followed him wordlessly as he walked
to the rise at the top of the mountain road.  They could see that the
CO was wrestling with a problem so they kept their opinions to
themselves, moving forward in silence.

Von Dodenburg reached the rise and paused.  Below, the plain of the
River Meuse stretched out in front, revealed ever more as the dawn
gloom vanished swiftly with the rays of the rising sun, clear, crisp
and wintery.  Here and there was still hoar frost on the skeleton
branches of the December trees.

He stared down at the plain as the other two flanked him warily,
machine-pistols at the ready as if they half-expected trouble at any
moment.

"There's Hamoir," he pointed out, indicating the smoke rising from the
little Belgian provincial town and there, beyond, the river," he paused
as the sun brightened even more and he could just make out the dull
silver snake of the great river Meuse, the only natural barrier between
them and the coast.

Again the two NCOs nodded but said nothing.

Von Dodenburg stared hard at his key objective remembering what Kraemer
had said when he had first briefed him on the role of SS Assault
Regiment "Wotan' in the great attack westwards.

"Get me one Tiger on the other side of the Meuse at Huy, the next town
after Hamoir, and I'll go down on my bended knee, von Dodenburg, and
give thanks to God."  And that notorious cynic had meant every word of
it.  So there was Huy.  He had seen enough.  He turned and snapped,
"We're going back, you two rogues.  The armed reconnaissance is
over."

They turned and walked back thoughtfully to where their comrades were
still looting the American dead of their pathetic bits and pieces, as
if a crumpled half-packet of "Lucky Strike' was a great treasure.

"That's enough," von Dodenburg ordered.

"We're moving out!"

"You heard the CO."  Schulze snapped when the looters didn't move fast
enough for him.

"Digit out of the friggin' orifice and move it- or else."  He
threateningly doubled a fist like a small steam shovel.  That did it.
The men began to hurry back to the waiting armoured vehicles, where the
drivers were already beginning to start up their powerful engines.

Von Dodenburg waited a moment more before they were ready.  Then he
clambered aboard the "Gruesome Twosome'.

With difficulty, one after another, the drivers turned on the narrow
mountain road.  Then they were off, rumbling back the way they had
come.  The next time they would reach these remote heights they would
be heading for their doom.  But then, at that moment, all those eager,
confident young men didn't know that.

Chapter Seven

Fran Bender and Wanda von Wettersheim, both dressed in shabby, floral
frocks and coats made of US Army blankets borrowed from the maids at
the chateau, pushed their way through the drunken crowd of off-duty
servicemen and leave men from the VIII Corps front, only miles way.

They passed the long line of soldiers who had just had sex with the
swarms of whores, professional and amateur, who were everywhere selling
their tawdry wares, lined under the green light of the prophylactic
station, the FFI room.  Here the men would receive their anti-VD
treatment.  Fran and Wanda knew that if they didn't receive it and
later caught VD, they would automatically receive 56 days inside the
feared stockade.

They carried on, forcing their path through the coarse mouthed rough
soldiery, dragging their feet through the slush (it had snowed for the
first time this winter), haversacks filled with coffee, cigarettes and
butter which would buy the services of the cheap, heavy-breasted whores
lurking in the doorways, flashing their little blue torches to attract
the leave men's attention.

A crowd of drunken GIs, wearing German black leather belts stuffed with
captured Lugers to sell to the rear-line men, tried to stop the two
women.  One of them, a big villainous fellow with an unshaven chin,
grabbed his crotch and yelled to his comrades, "Like to taste this
baby?  It's the flavour of strawberry jello.  You've never had anything
like it in all your life."  His comrades laughed uproariously at his
filthy attempt at crude humour.

They moved on watching a whore touch a serviceman's penis as if
weighing it before giving it a squeeze, saying, "Five dollars.  Ten for
round the world."

Wanda shook her head in disdain.

"How disgusting they are!"  She forgot that her companion was an
American too, saying, "And they have been sent to liberate us!  If this
is American democracy, 1. for one, can do without it.  I prefer German
order and discipline."

Fran Bender made no comment.  She was too excited at the prospect of
what the evening might bring.  Dressed illegally in civilian clothes,
she knew instinctively that her lover had some sort of adventure in
mind for her.  Dressed in her cheap borrowed frock that smelled of
stale sweat, she was heading for a place which Wanda had promised her
would make her eyes pop at what she would see and experience there.
Besides, she had something to tell Wanda later which was sure to make
her aristocratic lover desire her even more.

They turned into the narrow Rue de Notre Dame in the old city,
overshadowed by the city's ancient cathedral on the heights which
dominated the city.  Here with no whores lounging in doorways peddling
their wares they were still catholic enough not to do so near the great
Gothic church it was quiet.  There were no GIs on the prowl here,
though she could make out faint noises of music and the muted sound of
many voices.

Wanda paused and carefully looked to left and right.

Satisfied they were not observed, she tapped lightly three times on a
worm-eaten 18th century baroque door.  Nothing happened for a moment or
two, then Fran Bender heard the sound of footsteps echoing hollowly
down a long, empty hall.  A slot, like that of some 1920s speakeasy in
prohibition New York, was pulled.  They were surveyed by a single
eye.

A few words were exchanged in the guttural Luxembourg dialect and the
door was opened.

A gruff voice, though with a strange undertone, urged, "Enter, we don't
want anyone nosing about watching who comes in and out."

The door closed behind them and in the yellow light.

Fran saw a huge woman, a head taller than she, dressed in rough male
clothing with the suspicion of a moustache, watching her curiously. For
some reason she felt herself blushing.

Wanda took the woman and the place in her stride.  She said, her voice
abruptly excited, "Fran, I think you'll find this place interesting
quite interesting."  She turned to the huge woman and snapped like
someone accustomed to giving orders and having them obeyed: "Lead on to
the main room.  Find us a discreet table to the rear.  I prefer not to
be seen by the er people who frequent this place.  It will be worth
your while."

"Yes, Madame," the big woman said tamely.  She led the way down the
dingy corridor with its dirty, peeling walls, the sound of the Ballet
Musette music getting louder.

Fran Bender blinked as she entered the main, well-lighted room, packed
with women, the air thick and blue with cigarette smoke.  There was not
a man in sight.  As for the women, they came in all sizes and age
groups.  They were dressed in everything from shabby, too short floral
dresses, to expensive pre-war silver foxes and tiger-skin coats.  But
they all had the same look in common: hard, rapacious faces like
predatory creatures of the night, and their eyes gleamed far too
brightly.

"Drugs," Wanda explained briefly, as the female giant went away to
bring the vintage champagne she had ordered.

A little apprehensive yet at the same time curious.  Fran Bender gaze
round the room.  Opposite, a middle-aged woman was bent over a
bejewelled tube, one nostril closed with a blood-red tipped finger,
sniffing hard.

"Coke," Wanda said.

"CokeT "Cocaine."

A plump youngster with sleeked, pomaded hair came up, simpered
fawningly and bowed.

"We're glad to see you again at the Boule d'Or, Madame.  I think we
shall have something, er, novel for you tonight."

Wanda made no comment.  Instead she snapped, "Where's my grand cm!  My
guest is very thirsty."

"Immediately, Madame.  I shall see to it personally."

The plump girl in the male gear moved away with a slight sway of her
fat buttocks in the too-tight black trousers.

"A

woman," Wanda explained, "despite the trousers and suit."

She lowered her voice.

"The Boule d'Or is reserved for our kind, you know."  She pressed
Fran's hand to emphasise the special bond between them.

Fran felt herself flush with pleasure.  She remembered what she had
overheard in Bradley's office and said, "Wanda I have something for you
I heard this morning at work-" "Ssh," Wanda muttered.

"The parade is about to start.

Look."

"Parade?"

"Yes.  Look."  She indicated the door.  It was open and through it Fran
Bender could see the line of giggling, naked women waiting for their
entrance.

At that moment the little all-woman band on the raised platform, each
player with a great stein of Mutzig Pils beer between her legs, began
to play softly, then broke into what seemed to be a slow march.

Jostling and pushing in their attempt to attract attention, the women
entered to the drunken, drugged applause of the spectators.

i in

The first, a buxom blonde with obviously dyed public hair, squeezed her
great breasts provocatively, raising the painted nipples as if to
attempt to suck them.  The applause was tremendous.  She beamed at the
audience and passed on.  A skinny girl with the look of a consumptive,
followed.  Her pubes were shaven and she kept wetting her middle finger
and running it slowly down the centre of the shaven organ.

Again the audience applauded wildly and next to her Fran noticed that
Wanda was breathing a little heavily, savouring the perverted scene.

"You'd like to do that, too, Fran," she said thickly, not taking her
gaze off the emaciated girl.

Fran Bender didn't reply.  She couldn't.

"They are all lesbian whores," Wanda explained.

"Working class girls who work in the munition factories by day and sell
themselves to rich women at night.  Most of them hope to find a rich
middle-aged benefactor so that they won't need to do any more rough
work."

Fran Bender looked at her aristocratic lover out of the corner of her
eye and wondered for a moment whether Wanda employed such female
whores.  Somehow she thought she might well do so.

Now the noise was getting out of hand and the band was forced to play
all out, their cheeks red and sweating with the effort.  The show, it
appeared, was beginning to come to its climax.

The plump woman dressed as a male waiter put the expensive champagne in
a cooler in front of them.

"Bubblyl" Fran explained in delight.

"I never drank it until recently!"

Wanda looked at her almost pityingly.  What a provincial cow she is,
she told herself.  Ugly and unskilled, too.  Still she was useful, very
useful, working for General Bradley as she did.

"The main show begins in a minute," the waiter said, serving the
expensive champagne with a great flourish.

Ill

"A really delightful exhibition.  No donkeys.  Something much more
sophist-" She stopped short.  There was a sudden, strange whirring
noise that a startled Fran couldn't identify.

But it was obvious that Wanda could.  The exhibition forgotten
instantly, she gave Fran a hearty shove.  Caught off balance, she
tipped backwards and her chair tumbled to the ground.  Next moment she
followed, crying above the noise "What's going on?"

Wanda didn't answer.  A great, frightening banshee howl came out of the
night.  There was a tremendous explosion.

Tables shook, glasses tumbled and shattered.  Women screamed
hysterically, as suddenly the club was filled with an acrid choking
smoke that set most of them coughing and wheezing like asthmatics.

Wanda reacted immediately.  She pulled a frightened, dust-covered Fran
to her feet.

"Quickly!"  she barked, gasping for air.

"On your feet!"

"What is it?"

"Shelling.  No more talk.  Move it!"

They fought their way down the corridor as the big drum rolled across
the dance floor.  Behind sat the drummer, minus her head, bold upright,
sticks still at the ready as if waiting anxiously for the signal to
play on.

They stumbled outside past a door now hanging at a crazy angle and by a
single hinge.

Outside all was chaos and confusion.  Somewhere a lurid flame seared
the street like a giant blowtorch.  Ambulance bells jingled urgently.
Men shouted angrily.  Women continued to scream.  A man in burned,
ragged clothing staggered like a blind drink outside the cathedral.
Rescuers in white-helmeted tin hats pelted down the suddenly cobble
littered street.  A police car raced by, its blue light flashing.

Carefully ignoring the chaos, Wanda steered the confused

American woman towards the bridge across the deep ravine in the
direction of the Place de la Gare.

"We're getting out of this!"  she shouted above the racket.

"We're going back to the chateau until they've cleared up the mess."

"What happened?"  Fran asked again in a daze, as a stretcher party
passed carrying a blanket-covered body.  An arm, hanging out of the
blanket, flopped back and forth.

Blood dripped from the soaked canvas.  Fran repressed a cry of
horror.

Wanda pressed the American girl's upper arm till it hurt.

"Get a hold of yourself," she snapped.

"It'll be all over as soon as we reach the gare and get underway for
the border."

Fran Bender pulled herself together, fighting to get over her shock as
another great shell thundered down and struck the outskirts of the
little capital city near the airfield.

"Wanda, I've got something to tell you.  Perhaps it might be
important."

Wanda looked at her curiously, her face looking like a scarlet death's
head in the flickering flames of a burning house.

"What?"

"Something I learned at Army Group HQ this morning."

"Go on," Wanda urged, her thoughts of flight forgotten in curiosity.

Fran Bender related what she had heard, while Wanda frowned.

"Tell me again," she commanded when the American had finished.  When
she did so, Wanda snapped her fingers.

"So that's what this bombardment's about!"

"What'?"

"They know something's going on.  What exactly it is is perhaps still a
mystery to them, in spite of what I've already told them."

Fran Bender looked at her shocked.

"What are they trying to do?"

"Knock out Bradley's HQ.  I've told them that the American knows
something of their plans.  So far they haven't believed me.  Now
apparently they do."

Fran Bender looked at her aghast.

"You mean the Germans?"

Wanda looked at her pityingly.

"Who do you think?"

Abruptly Fran Bender realised what she had been doing ever since she
had become Wanda's lover.  She looked shocked.

"You mean you're working for the Germans?  Is that right?"  Horrified
she gasped, "My God, I'm a spy I" Suddenly, Wanda von Wettersheim's
heart nearly stopped beating.  For the first time she realised the
danger that this plain silly American woman presented.  She couldn't
take her back to the chateau as she had first thought.

"Does anyone know about us?"  she blurted out.

"Come on tell me!"  she demanded angrily.

"Well, not exactly."

"How do you mean?"

"I've not told anybody of course.  You know you are my only friend in
the whole of the HQ.  There is nobody that I can tell about you.  But-"
"But what?"  Wanda interrupted savagely.

"Come on.  Spit it out.  I haven't got all the time in the world you
know, woman!"

Fran Bender was so shocked by the sudden angry outburst that for a
moment or two she forgot that she had spied for the enemy.

"The men the guards, the MPs, the drivers and the like they've seen us
together," she answered a little lamely.

"I think they might have guessed that something funny was going on
between us.  Naturally, I didn't tell-" Wanda didn't give her a chance
to finish.  Roughly she grabbed her lover's arm.

"Come on," she snarled.

"Let's get out of here.  Someone might see us by the light of those
fires."  A moment later, her mind buzzing and confused, Fran found
herself being propelled unwillingly into the shadows, the tears at the
change of Wanda's attitude already beginning to well up in her weak,
short-sighted eyes.

Chapter Eight

"Tell me again," Wanda snapped urgently.

They crouched in the shadows cast by the skeletal trees on top of the
bridge, above the valley far below.  A spectral moon scudded now and
again through the low cloud, but Wanda, worried and anxious, guessed no
one would see them here.  The authorities were too busy with the
casualties and the burning.  For those of the ordinary citizens who had
chanced breaking the somewhat lax curfew laws by being out at this time
of the night, they had already hurried home to recount their
extraordinary news of what was happening in Luxembourg centre.

In a hurry, Fran Bender told her once again what she knew while Wanda
weighed her every word.

In the end, when she was finished her somewhat breathless account, her
lover said in a tiny voice, "So you think they know."

Fran nodded.

"About us, definitely.  What I told you and to whom you passed that
information, I'm not so certain."  She grabbed her lover's arm in a
sudden frenzy of passion and worry.

"You'll look after me, Wanda!"  she gasped.

"You'll see I'm all right, won't you?"

Wanda shrugged her off, "Yes, yes," she said carelessly, her mind on
other things, in particular her own safety.  Two years ago her lover
had been a monocled Berlin actress who affected an aristocratic title
when in fact her name was Schmidt and she had been a working-class
actress who had worked herself up by sleeping with every important man
in show business.  When she had recruited Wanda she had warned,
"Remember, at this moment you are simply a harmless sleeper," an agent
who does nothing until roused from 'sleep' by the spymaster and
activated.

"But one day those male pigs in Berlin will want their pound of flesh."
Her eye had flashed through the monocle she wore, "and then you'll have
to go to work.  And remember this," she had lowered her voice
warningly, "your life will be on the line every minute of the day.  So
my advice to you, my dearest Wanda," she said, kissing the young
aristocrat tenderly on her soft lips, "be on your guard.  Work out a
plan to save yourself when the time comes in advanced That had been
back in the spring of 1944 when it appeared Germany was still winning
the war.  The Berlin actress had long vanished back to her homeland
together with a decadent French countess who believed in a menage a
trois, the two Lesbians in bed with a male homosexual.  All the same,
she had taken that advice seriously right from the start, she wasn't
her father's child for nothing.  Then he had started to drink
excessively, but he had always been a great survivor.

She had a pre-war two-seater Panhard which had once belonged to a
butler, long called up to the Wchrnuichl then vanishing into the bloody
maws of the war in Russia.  The car had been hidden in a barn.  It was
filled up with petrol, with several spare cans of fuel, food and gold
hidden in the boot.  With the money and the petrol, she could easily
reach one of the neutral countries to the south.  For her escape she
would not even trust her German spymaster bosses:

everyone was betraying everyone in the Reich these days after the
attempt on Hitler's life by his own generals the previous July.  In
Spain, her Spanish cousins would easily provide her with false papers.
With them in due course she'd leave for Brazil.  The family had large
plantations out there too.  Her life would be secured and it was said
that the young half-breed Brazilian women were very accommodating to
both sexes for a small financial consideration.  Oh, yes, her plan of
escape had been long worked out and she was sure that she could manage
all by herself.  She had always had a kind of male resourcefulness.

There was only one catch this silly American woman.

She knew too much and in a moment of drunken exuberance in bed after
sex, in order to show the stupid American cow how smart she was, she
had told her something of her escape plans, indicating that she had
made them in case there was a communist revolt against the
steel-and-coal bosses at the end of the war.  Not that Fran Bender
would believe that now.

She was smart enough to put two and two together and realise that Wanda
was working for the Germans.  That is why she needed a plan of escape
once the balloon went up, if it ever did.  Now that time had come and
the only person who stood in the way of her successful escape to a
neutral country was the cowed and depressed woman standing next to
her.

Again, on the German side of the front that great railway gun thundered
and a huge 140mm shell came howling with deadly purpose towards the the
little Luxembourg capital.

Next to her Fran Bender shivered violently and by sheer naked
will-power suppressed a scream of fear.  Wanda realised that time was
running out.  Something had to be done and soon.

"What are we going to do, Wanda?"  Fran Bender quavered.

"Don't worry," the other replied.

"I'll take care of you.

I've got everything worked out."

"You mean the car in the barn," the American said hopefully.

"Yes."  Wanda felt a sharp stab of anxiety.  At that moment, ugly,
unloved, silly, Fran Bender had just signed

her own death warrant, though she didn't know it.  Wanda told herself
that the American had remembered too much.

She couldn't be left behind because she would blab once the American
police and secret service got hold of her, which they would in due
course.  And she couldn't be taken southwards.  Again, if they were
stopped, the American would give the game away.  How could she pass as
a Frenchwoman during their long journey southwards, through that
country towards Iberia.  Dammit, she couldn't even order a cup of
coffee in the language!  She had to die now!

"What's that?"  she asked suddenly.

"What's what?"

"Is it my imagination, or can I see a light down there below?"  She
forced a note of worry into her voice, which wasn't difficult at the
present state of her nerves.

"Do you think someone's watching us, Fran darling?"

The "Fran Darling' worked.

"Where?"

"Down there in the ravine.  Can you see to the left, my beloved.  Look,
there it is again!"

Involuntarily the American woman bent straining to peer over the side
of the bridge at the rocky ravine far below.

"I can't see anything, Wanda", she began.

Her lover didn't give her a chance to finish.  With all her strength, a
crazy light in her cruel eyes, she suddenly rushed forward both arms
outspread, hitting the unsuspecting stenographer in the small of the
back.

Fran Bender hadn't a chance.  She was caught completely off guard.  She
screamed shrilly.  Then she was falling and falling at a tremendous
rate, her body twisting and turning, trailing a scream of total fear
behind her.  To no avail, then she blacked out, the scream dying on her
lips, and she hit the spiked guard rail below with tremendous force.
The spike, blunt as it was, skewered her stomach.  Another thrust its
way through her right shoulder, while another penetrated the other
shoulder.  There she hung, dead and lifeless, like a bundle of
abandoned rags.  Fran Bender had paid the ultimate price for her few
hours of pleasure in a lifetime that had been lonely, soulless and
devoid of pleasure until she had had that first fatal meeting with
Wanda von Wettersheim.

On the bridge far above, Wanda peered down at the ravine through the
inky darkness.  For a moment or two the spectral moon cast its ghastly,
cold-silver, unfeeling light on the scene and for an instant the
Luxembourg woman imagined that she could see Fran, spreadeagled there
like a latter-day female Christ on the Cross.  Then she told herself
she was imagining it.

She concerned herself with the present, casting a swift, anxious glance
to left and right.  Nothing!  Everybody was too concerned with those
shells which were beginning to fall from the night sky once more.  No
one was wasting time lingering to watch what was going on, except those
whose duty it was to do so.

She waited no longer.  She had to get back to the chateau and start up
the old three-cylinder Panhard.  The air felt very cold.  She knew she
had to be on her way before the snow, which would probably be at or
around dawn.  Suddenly she gave a taut little smile.

"Screw them, screw them all!"  she said aloud to no one in
particular.

"To the locals, the Amis, the Prussians.  I'm finished with the whole
damned bunch of them!"

She thought of the bronzed Brazilian half-breeds with their firm, taut
breasts and the heavy, shapely buttocks that the locals loved, and
found pleasure at the thought.  What a time she would have at some
remote farm where her money could buy her anything and anybody she
wanted.  Let silly old decadent Europe get on without her.  Whoever won
the battle to come they'd still go on fighting.  The Europeans always
had; they always would.  Nothing would change, she told herself
contemptuously, pulling up the shabby collar of her blanket coat
against the icy wind blowing in straight from Siberia.  It meant
nothing to her.  They'd still be fighting among themselves, different
uniforms, different flags, different slogans naturally, when she had
become an old, old woman.

She gave one last malicious grin at the dead Ami far below.

"Bye", she said in the American fashion.

"Remember you died for democracy."  Then she was off, hurrying towards
the Place de la Gare and freedom from Europe.

Chapter Nine

"Well?"  Bradley snapped.

"Let's get on with it, Major."

It was dawn, grey and overcast.  There was snow in the December air.
Already the first white flakes were beginning to drift aimlessly down.
But Bradley knew from his weather people that heavy snows were
forecast.  He should have been pleased with the news.  No general in
his right mind would attack through that rugged mountainous country in
heavy snow.  But the Krauts were crazy, everyone knew that.  Soon the
balloon would go up.  There was no denying it.

"Sorry, sir," the giant MP officer who guarded the entrance to his
office said.

"Sorry to bring you out in this kind of weather."  He stamped his black
overshoes on the frozen earth next to the dead body at the bottom of
the ravine, the crowd of MPs, special agents and Bradley's bodyguard
standing back at a respectful distance.

"Just wanted you to officially identify the body, sir," Brigadier
General Sibert, his cunning-faced chief of intelligence, beat the
harassed military cop to it.

"Matter of routine.  But got to be done, sir."  He nodded to the MP
major.

Swiftly, like a conjuror whipping away the top hat which covered the
white rabbit to the delight of his children's audience, he pulled back
the army blanket draped over the body impaled on the blunt railings.

Bradley frowned.  He didn't like what he saw.  The woman in her cheap
frock had had her skull smashed like a too-lightly boiled egg struck by
a teaspoon.  But it wasn't the broken skull which shocked him.  It was
the way the dead woman had been impaled on the railings, her legs
spread with the shock of the impact in an obscene fashion, as if she
were offering herself sexually in the moment of death.  He noted from
the thin black thatch between them that she hadn't been wearing the
official khaki WAC knickers.  Idly he wondered why.

The MP looked at him curiously and when the Army Group Commander didn't
respond, Sibert asked softly, "Is she one of your stenographers,
General?"

"Yes," Bradley said thoughtfully, stroking his ugly lantern-like jaw.

"Yes, she is."  He hesitated.

"Fran .. . er .  "

"Lieutenant Fran Bender, sir," Sibert supplied the name quietly in the
manner of the trained staff officer that he was.

"Yes."

"OK," Sibert said.

"That's a formal identification, Major."

He nodded and indicated that the major should cover up the body once
more.  The latter did so gratefully, as if he were glad not to have to
see the murdered woman any more.

"Thanks," Sibert said, turning to a thoughtful, even morose, general.
Anything more, sir?"

"No," Bradley shivered.

"I've seen enough.  Let's get back to the Packard.  I'm wearing two
pairs of long Johns and I'm still damn well freezing, goddam it  Never
thought Europe could be this cold."

They entered the big Packard which the driver had somehow managed to
get to the ravine from the tiny road far above.  Slowly they started to
make their way up the slope towards Bradley's HQ at the Hotel Alpha,
opposite the main station.

"So the woman has flown the coop."

Bradley said after while.

"I guess she must have realised that once the Germans attack, we'd get
on to her eventually as one of their agents."

Sibert, who one day would help to found the CIA, nodded.

"We were already beginning to suspect there was a leak at GHQ."

Bradley frowned.

"Hope Ike doesn't get to hear about this.  Wouldn't look good in
Washington."

"Don't worry, sir," Sibert reassured him.

"Ike's got other problems on his mind now."  In the distance the big
gun thundered again.

"That damned gun's a dead give-away.

They're softening us up."

Bradley, not a humourous man normally, clasped his hands together and
bent his head in mock piety, as if in prayer.

"For what we are about to receive," he intoned, "let the Good Lord make
us truly thankful."

"Exactly, sir."  Sibert said, wondering idly if the old man was losing
his marbles.

"That's what is going to happen."

They breasted the rise and waited impatiently as a convoy of two and a
half ton trucks, all open and bearing a cargo of frozen young infantry
replacements, some with snow on their skinny, bowed shoulders, drove
past, heading for the front.  Bradley stared down the road they were
taking.  It was, he knew, the one the Germans would take when they
attacked.

"What about the fall guy?"  he asked as the Packard started to move
again.

"Ike's HQ has reported early on that he got through."

"And?"

"Kessler?  He thinks the Krauts suspect nothing."

Bradley grunted something which Sibert couldn't make out.  Then
suddenly, completely out of the blue, he said:

"You know we stand to lose up to 20,000 Americans of Middleton's corps
when the Krauts do come?  It's one helluva a price to pay.  Do you
think I should resign before it all starts?"

Sibert shook his head firmly, jaw set and hard.

"No, sir.

Not now.  It might look like the rat trying to leave the sinking ship
before it's too late if you'll forgive the expression."

"Yeah, I suppose you're right, Sibert."  Bradley sighed and slumped
back in the hard leather seat.  For the rest of the journey they didn't
exchange a word.

Nothing now could stop the great attack.  The last battle for the West
was about to commence.

Book Three

THE LAST ASSAULT

"He who sups with the Devil needs a long spoon."

Old German Saying

Chapter One

Dawn, Saturday 16 December 1944.

Colonel von Dodenburg had worked till 0300 that Friday.

Now he had dozed off, but awoke just before dawn on that fateful
Saturday, his inborn clock functioning perfectly as usual.  How many
pre-attack dawns like this had he experienced in the last six years of
combat!

The fog curled around the tented camp like a soft-furred, silent-footed
grey cat.  Hollow-eyed and heavy-headed he lay there in the warm
bedroll, reluctant to rise and face what this day must bring.  He
promised himself he would get up at the first clatter of the cooks'
dixies and the comforting smell of the troops' 'nigger sweat'.

Now he lay there gratefully, listening to the camp come to life: the
hoarse caw-caw of the protesting crows in the skeletal trees; the sound
of some sentry relieving himself in the new snow; the harsh stamp of an
NCO marching from tent to tent and beating on the canvas with a
pick-handle and yelling the traditional cry, "All right, you perverted
banana suckers, hands off yer cocks and on with yer socks!"

the cries of sleepy protest; the thick asthmatic sound of a truck being
started reluctantly in the chill dawn air.

Abruptly the lean, wolfish-faced colonel's thoughts were disturbed by a
drunken howl, though he couldn't guess who could manage to get drunk at
this time of a winter's morning in the remote Eifel forest. Reluctantly
he rose and peered out of the dirty, cracked window of his inn

HQ.  He rubbed a hole in the frost-glazed pane in order to see
better.

It was Schulze and Matz swaying badly and surrounded by half a dozen
suspicious chain dogs (German MPs, known for the silver gorget plate of
their office worn around their necks when on duty), all with their
pistols drawn warily.  A young officer, shaking his head as he did so,
signed for them and the NCO in charge ordered the military police back
to their vehicle.

Von Dodenburg shook his head in dismay, though glad that his two old
hares had returned from their drunken orgy to take part in what was to
come this freezing Saturday.

"Heaven, arse and cloudburst!"  he cursed, as he pulled on his black SS
panzer uniform, "how in three devils' names do those damned sauce
hounds do it?"

Despite the freezing cold Matz was totally naked save for boots and a
pair of lace-trimmed red frilly knickers round his head, moaning
slightly as the headache hit him in full fury.  Over his shoulder
Schulze was carrying Matz's wooden leg like a rifle and supporting his
old running mate with one great horny paw.

"Dammit!"  von Dodenburg cursed outside, "Corporal Matz, you're
improperly dressed."  He was too shocked by the appearance of the two
drunks to think of anything else to say.

"He's got his dice-beakers on, sir," Schulze said happily indicating
Matz's one jackboot.

"Unfortunately he had to piss urgently in the other one.  That's why
I'm carrying it.

Pissed ten different ways at the same time," he confided to the CO in a
whisper.

"Think he's got a nice juicy dose of the clap, don't you, sir," he
added happily.

"Get out of my sight!"  von Dodenburg thundered in mock anger, happy
all the same that he'd have the support of his two old hares after all
knowing them, they could easily have 'taken a dive' and deserted.

Schulze gave him a tremendous salute and nearly fell over with the
effort.  He grinned all over his brick-red drunk's face.

"Buy combs, sir."  he advised sagely, "there's lousy times ahead." With
that the two of them, trailing the stench of stale beer and women's sex
behind them, staggered off to their own tent, leaving a confused von
Dodenburg to shake his head in their wake.

They didn't get far.

As von Dodenburg's watch showed 0530 hours, the 'ghost front', silent
for months, suddenly erupted into a wild ancestral fury.  One thousand
guns burst into abrupt life.

Mortars, field artillery, great heavy-calibre cannon, howitzers, banks
of rockets, which the stubble-hoppers called "Stalin organs' crashed
into action, as standing by their tanks the young fanatical officers of
the elite SS Assault Regiment "Wotan' read out the order from the
Fuhrer himself:

Soldiers of the Western Front.  Your great hour has come.  At last you
nil I attack the Anglo-Americans and drive them into the sea.  More I
need to tell you not.  You feel it in your very bones, that pure German
blood of yours.  We gamble everything.  You carry with you the holy
obligation to give all to achieve the super-human objectives for our
Folk, Fatherland and Fuhrer.  SOLDIERS OF THE REICH, WE

MARCH!"

A mile away Sergeant Rosenkranz said, "I'm not one of your ordinary,
ragged-assed kikes", he would often say this to anyone prepared to
listen "I'm a kike from the Queen's, New York City, right up against
Forest Hills next to where they have the tennis.  Get it, guys?"  Now
Rosenkranz, brawny, big and brainy he had been smart enough to become a
cook in an infantry outfit stirred another can of waffle mixture for
"my boys", as he always called the young infantrymen of Company K. The
other cooks were nervous.  Some of the young replacements were too,
waiting as they did for the fresh batch of Sergeant Rosenkranz's
waffles.  All the time they kept glancing at that burning horizon, the
flames lurid above the green, fir-spiked hills, as yet another German
salvo slammed home and made the earth tremble like a live thing.

"What's up with you guys?"  Rosenkranz said encouragingly.

"What ya creaming ya skivvies for?  Even us hash slingers he indicated
the other cooks in their dirty white aprons, as they prepared the usual
breakfast of hash on biscuits, "shit on shingle," as the troops called
it.

"But what are the Krauts up to, Sarge?"  one of the pale faced teenaged
replacements quavered nervously.

"We was supposed to come to this here ghost front to be trained for the
line."

Sergeant Rosenkranz stared at the boy, a look of contempt on his
swarthy, unshaven face.

"Hey, there's a guy here who actually believes what the Army told him!
He ought to be section-eighted,"certified.  All the same, Rosenkranz a
peacetime short-order cook in a kosher deli, knew that there was
something wrong.  The Krauts hadn't fired a single shot ever since he
had arrived at this sector of the front.  Now they were firing all out
as if ammunition grew on trees, which it didn't, especially for the
Krauts.

"Okay, start to line up," he called above the ear-splitting racket,
"I'm gonna put the waffles on the griddle-" The rest of his words were
drowned by the rattle of tracks and the roar of a heavy tank advancing
in low gear.  He looked up puzzled.  A lone Sherman had breasted the
rise to their front and was slowly advancing on the infantry positions
with its turret buttoned up, as if ready for instant action.

"Hey!"  someone exclaimed in sudden alarm, "What the friggin' Sam Hill
is that-?"

Next to him the young GI with his front teeth missing and the freckled
face, who was whistling the latest Ring Crosby hit "I'm dreaming of a
White Christmas' stopped doing so abruptly and shouted above the
racket.

"Hey.  that tin can's coming from the Kraut lines, guys!"

Next instant his worst fears were confirmed.  Suddenly the 75mm cannon
of the sinister, mysterious Sherman cracked into action.  It was
followed a moment later by the hoarse, hysterical burst of its co-axial
machine-gun.  Slugs slapped into the snow.  Just behind the makeshift
cook house in a long hut, the shell from the Sherman exploded in a
burst of angry, cherry-red flame.  Razor-sharp chunks of red-hot
shrapnel scythed through the air.  Men went down, screaming with fear
and pain. Suddenly there were dead and dying soldiers everywhere,
colouring the new snow with the red of their blood.

Rosenkranz cursed as his tin of waffle mixture overturned with the
impact.

"Jesus H!"  he cursed angrily.

"Fuck this for a game of soldiers!"

"Medic .. . medic, get me out of this shit .. .!  Medic, they've
friggin' shot my leg off..  . I can't walk!"  The frantic appeals for
help went up on all sides, as the first infantry came walking slowly
over the ridge opposite, bodies bent, faces contained and thoughtful.

"KRAUTS!"  Rosenkranz yelled urgently and flourished his ladle like a
club.  There was no mistaking them.  German infantry in white
camouflage suits or the mottled ones of the SS panzer grenadiers.

"Run for it!"  the young shave tail lieutenant in charge of the
company, whom Rosenkranz thought had not started to shave yet, yelled,
"Do a bunk!  They're-" The captured Sherman on the point of SS Wotan
fired again.  The young officer screamed.  Blood pumped in a bright
scarlet stream from his shattered chest.  Vainly he fought to remain
upright. His hands clutched at the air.  He plunged forward into the
new snow, dead before he hit it.

That did it.  The company panicked and broke.  They started to throw
their weapons away and run for the forest to their rear.

"Hold friggin' fast!"  Rosenkranz cried desperately.  But as the
Sherman fired once more and the attackers came streaming down the hill,
crying in triumph "A lies fur Deutschlandl" the big cook knew it was
hopeless.

He dropped his ladle.  Next moment he was running with the rest as the
eager young panzer grenadiers swarmed into the abandoned US positions
to begin their looting.

Von Dodenburg looked up from his maps as the prisoners were herded past
him and his staff.  They trudged through the snow like very old men.
Some of them, their young faces pinched and frightened, had wrapped
blankets around their heads and shoulders in an attempt to keep out the
biting cold.  Fear was writ large in their staring eyes.

Schulze, standing just behind von Dodenburg knew why.

The guards escorting them to the rear were members of an SS penal
battalion, murderers, thieves, rapists and the like.

They had been condemned virtually to death by being assigned to a penal
battalion, the lowest of the low.  They made their own discipline and
as Schulze whispered to Matz, "Old house, I don't think them Amis are
gonna go far.

Those murdering bastards of the 666th will see to that."

Matz nodded but said nothing.

"How are things?"  von Dodemburg asked his operations officer, Major
Stapelveld.

"Excellent!"  the other officer beamed.

"All positions taken even with the tardiness of the assault infantry.
One fly in the ointment though, sir."

"What's that?"  von Dodenburg asked, his mind already on Wotan's next
objective, as the American artillery started sporadic, poorly aimed
counter-fire.

"We're already beginning to run out of "Otto'?"  He meant fuel.

"Great crap on the Christmas tree!"  von Dodenburg cursed in a sudden
fury.

"That already?  As I frigging live and breathe" He never finished.  In
the trees beyond, into which the men of the SS penal battalion had
escorted their prisoners, there was a sudden burst of angry small-arms
fire.  Schulze looked significantly at Matz.

The latter nodded grimly, but said nothing.  What could he say?  The
ex-prisoners were shooting the Amis and no one gave a thought to the
first atrocity of the great assault.

Hiding some quarter of a mile away, Sergeant Rosenkranz, alone with
"VD' and "Hairless Henry', two old hands like himself, did however.

"They're shooting our boys, them SS bastards."

"Yeah."  Hairless Harry, bald as a coot although he was only 20,
agreed.

"They're from SS Wotan, I saw their arm patch.  Hard, ruthless
bastards."

"I'll remember that," Rosenkranz said grimly.

"They're not gonna get away with murder like that if Mrs.  Rosenkranz's
handsome son has got any say in the friggin' matter."  Cautiously, very
cautiously, he parted the snow heavy bush in front of him as they
crouched there, hardly daring to breathe.  The firing had died away.
The SS had finished slaughtering their prisoners.  Now the rest of the
German point came rumbling over the ridge line: great 60ton monsters,
their long, overhanging cannon twitching from side to side like the
snouts of primeval monsters.  All around were the Wotan's half-tracks,
packed with excited young grenadiers, ready at a moment's notice to
drop over the side and mop up any opposition that might endanger the
Tigers.

"That's their boss man," Rosenkranz hissed, his dark eyes full of
sheer, naked hate as he pointed at von Dodenburg, busy packing away his
battle maps into the leather pouch hanging from his belt.

"I'm going to get that guy."  He licked his cracked, parched lips.

"I'm gonna have the balls offn that jerk for what he's done this
morning, if it's the last thing I ever friggin' do.  Come on, guys." He
rose.  Moments later he and his two hard-bitten old buddies had
disappeared into the forest.

Behind them they left the aura of sheer, naked, overwhelming hatred.

Chapter Two

It was dawn next day, a dreary, overcast Sunday.

Over the last 24 hours the initial US resistance had faded away.  The
front line of Middleton's hard-pressed VIII Corps had fled in panic.
Everywhere the back roads leading westward, to what the harassed
American infantry thought was safety, were packed with retreating US
traffic, packed tail to nose.  Abandoned equipment lay everywhere in
ditches and the sodden fields on both sides of the winding Belgian
countryside.  It was the 'big bug-out', as the troops were already
calling it in their overwhelming, unreasoning panic.

"It's everybody for himself!"  they proclaimed.

"The friggin' Krauts are everywhere.  Nothing can stop them, the
bastards.

Make a run for it, buddy, while there's still time.  And remember the
bastards are taking no prisoners.  They're shooting our guys where they
stand, even when they raise their hands in surrender .. . BUG OUT ..
.

NOW:'

Now Wotan, with hardly any casualties, though low on fuel, were through
and ready to tackle the first natural barrier in their advance to the
River Meuse, the border river of the Ambleve valley.

Carefully, von Dodenburg and Stapelveld surveyed the little town of
Stavelot, on the other side of the swiftly flowing river, through their
glasses.  It seemed deserted of troops.  They guessed its anxious,
apprehensive citizens would be barricaded in the cellars of their tall,
shabby,

medieval houses, dug into the steep cliff on which the town was
located.

Von Dodenburg lowered his glasses.

"What do you think?"  he asked the other Wotan officer.

"Easy as falling off a log, sir," he replied.

"You can hurt yourself falling off a log, man.  The river doesn't
present a problem.  Our grenadiers can wade it easily," von Dodenburg
continued.

"But that little bridge does.  We need it for our tanks, but it's very
narrow and the angle of approach is difficult.  If they've got an
anti-tank gun hidden across there, the Amis can knock our tin cans off
one by one as they make their approach in first gear."

"No sign of a cannon," Stapelveld answered with his usual cheerfulness.
The young officer was a born optimist; he never seemed to see
difficulties.

Von Dodenburg made up his mind.

"All right, we attack.

The grenadiers will go in first on both flanks to left and right of the
bridge.  It will be their task to secure the bank on both sides of the
bridge by a coup de main, then Wotan's tanks can go in."

"Sir!"  The young major hurried away to carry out the CO's order.

"Mount up!"  von Dodenburg commanded five minutes later as the
grenadiers started to wade into the fast-flowing white-flecked stream,
pulling faces at the sudden freezing cold.  Here and there they eagerly
grabbed the stick grenades which the NCOs on the German bank handed
them.

Rapidly the tank commanders yelled their readiness.

"C

Company, ready sir ... B Company prepared to move out!"  Von Dodenburg
nodded his approval as Stapelveld saluted and snapped proudly, "SS
Assault Regiment "Wotan' prepared for the attack, sir.  We await your
orders."  He winked at the formality as on the other side of the river
a slow US machine-gun opened up like an irate woodpecker.

"ATTACKS

They needed no urging.  The grenadiers quickened their pace.  They knew
they were sitting ducks in the water.  The first Panther began to roll
towards the little medieval hump-backed bridge, its turret buttoned
down for action.

Von Dodenburg ordered his own Tiger buttoned down.

Next to him, the gunner peered through the periscope.  So far the
Americans, if there were any in Stavelot, had not reacted.

They started to rumble forward after the lead tank.  The approach was
narrow and difficult.  Von Dodenburg, sweating despite the dawn cold,
prayed they'd make it.  If they didn't, they'd be walking straight into
a trap.

They came ever closer to the silent bridge.  In the water the
grenadiers were splashing towards the opposite bank.

Everything seemed to be going well.  In a matter of minutes they'd be
across and established on the far bank.  Then Stavelot would be theirs
within the hour and they could move on to the key Route D, picked by
the Fuhrer for the advance on Huy and the Meuse.  Von Dodenburg started
to relax.  Perhaps the Amis had already abandoned Stavelot?

Schulze, below in the driving compartment that stank of diesel and
gunsmoke, said to no one in particular, "Wait till I get my good German
salami in some of those Belgie knickers.  I'll give them a good rattle
in the mattress polka.

Then they'll really appreciate the full value of German Kultur-" He
stopped short abruptly.  A brilliant, blinding white light blinked just
beyond the medieval keep.  The air was rent by a wild tearing noise,
like canvas being tipped apart.

Suddenly their 60-ton Tiger was rocked wildly, by a tremendous blow
like a punch from a gigantic fist.

"Heaven, arse and cloudburst!"  von Dodenburg cursed madly as he saw
the tank closest to the bridge being struck.  A track flew off like a
severed limb.  The Panther rolled to a slow stop, thick white smoke
pouring from its ruptured engine.

"Bail out for Chrissake, bail out!"  von Dodenburg yelled urgently.

Too late.  The blinding light near the keep flashed again.

He caught the flash of a muzzle break.  It was an enemy-antitank gun
concealed there.  At that range the Amis couldn't miss.  The Panther
reeled once more.  Its ruptured engine caught fire.  Something vaguely
human, charred and shrinking flopped out of the turret and dropped to
the cobbles, the greedy blue flames already wreathing its head.

Von Dodenburg choked with horror.  He fought back the vomit and cried,
his mouth full of bitter bile, "AT.  Three o'clock .. . FIRE!"

The Tiger's 88mm cannon thundered.  The shell streaked from the muzzle.
And missed.

"Advance and make smoke!"

von Dodenburg ordered, hoping to panic the enemy gunners.

It wasn't to be.  The Amis kept their heads.  They fired once more. The
Tiger trembled.  Von Dodenburg realised that they were sitting ducks in
the narrow confines of the road leading to the bridge.

"Reverse .. . for God's sake n'ver.sel" he shrieked.

The crew didn't need any urging.  They knew the danger they were in.

Perhaps they had only moments to live.  Discharging thick white smoke,
they started to pull back.  Von Dodenburg cursed and slammed his naked
fist against the cold, dripping metal of the turret's interior.  They
had failed to take the bridge by a coup de main.  Now they had an
infantry battle on their hands.  It was up to the panzer grenadiers.

Furiously the grenadiers, the elite of the nation, waded the last few
metres towards the opposite bank.  Shrouded in smoke, the tall brick
factories waited for them in silence.  Not for long.  A lieutenant, cap
set at a rakish angle, pistol in his fist, yelled confidently.

"After me, lads!  The captain's got a hole in his arse!"

A moment later he had a great gaping scarlet hole in his chest, as the
opposite bank sprang into violent, lethal life.

Men went down everywhere, cursing, splashing, screaming in their death
agonies.  In an instant the water had turned pink with their blood,
dead and dying panzer grenadiers falling on all sides.

Still the survivors pressed on.  They moved forward through the
bullet-lashed water, bent double like men advancing against a gale. Red
and white tracer cruelly swept the surface of the river.  They stumbled
on, fighting their way over the thrashing bodies of their dying
comrades, their numbers growing fewer and fewer by the second. The
first survivors staggered up the muddy bank, running, gasping and
choking, their faces lathered in sweat, gleaming as if vasclined,
straight for the houses containing the Ami defenders.  The two sides
clashed wildly.  Bayonets flashed.

Tommy-guns chattered frantically.  Men cursed and swore in English and
German as they engaged each other in desperate hand-to-hand combat in
which no quarter was given or expected.  A rifle butt thudded into an
Ami face.  A kick in the crotch.  The downward plunge of a bayonet, its
blade gleaming scarlet with fresh blood.

But already the steam was going out of Wotan's bold attack.  The
follow-up force was being slaughtered by the Ami machine-gunners as
they attempted to cross the river, filled with the bodies of the dead,
silent witnesses to a failed effort as they drifted away downstream in
the current.  The grenadiers hoped to aid their hard-pressed comrades
in the houses, but already they, too, their numbers reduced to a
handful of survivors, were beginning to retreat, pausing and firing
defiantly to their rear, but always moving backwards.

Watching the uneven battle on the opposite shore.

his heart filled with black despair and frustration, von Dodenburg knew
his young panzer grenadiers didn't stand a chance against the
entrenched enemy position.  He raised his signal pistol and snapped off
a green and two reds.  The flares sailed high into the grey winter sky,
hanging there for what seemed an age, colouring everything below in
their unreal glowing light.  It was the signal for retreat.

Immediately Wotan's mortar crews came to the aid of the survivors.
Without orders, the worried mortar men began to fire smoke.  Their
bombs landed in numbers on the opposite shore.  The wind was in the
right direction for the handful of surviving SS.  The thick grey
choking smoke started to drift across the surface of the river.  The
survivors needed no further orders.  Still firing as they retreated,
they started to stumble and splash back the way they had come.  Von
Dodenburg watched them, trying to count their number, but guessing
without an exact figure that he had lost nearly a whole company of
valuable infantry in the abortive attack on Stavelot.

He leaned back wearily in the turret as the first terrified survivors
reached their own side of the river, faces white and drawn, eyes wild
and bulging like those of men demented.

He, too, was exhausted.

Schulze looked up at him and felt a twinge of pity for his beloved

CO.

"What now, sir?"  he asked, very quietly for him.

For a moment von Dodenburg hadn't the strength to reply.  Finally he
said wearily, "They've beaten us.  I don't think we'll take Stavelot
today.  We'll have to outflank the place.  That'll make them retreat."
He looked grim.

"But it damn well means hours wasted when every minute counts if we're
going to reach Huy on the Meuse in time."

Schulze didn't reply.  It wasn't important to do so.  What did Huy and
the grandiose plans of the Fuhrer and the High Command mean to a lowly,
hairy-arsed old stubble-hopper like him and the rest of the old hares'?
If they didn't die this day, it would be on another.  All that
concerned him was to survive another few hours, enjoy a cup of hot
'nigger sweat' and a bowl of 'fart soup," the standard thick pea soup
and get a bit of gash if there was any available in this Goddamned
place.  That was all.

Von Dodenburg seemed to sense Schulze's black mood, for he said, a note
of almost pleading in his voice as the last of the retreating
grenadiers collapsed on the west bank, chests heaving madly, "It's the
last chance for our country, Schulze.  If we fail this time-" he left
the rest of his sentence unsaid, he didn't need to say anything more.

Schulze shrugged but didn't react.  Instead he stared at the grenadiers
below in the wet grass.  Most of them were barely out of their teens.
He suspected that half of them didn't even know where the friggin'
River Meuse was.  Yet the powers-that-be, the big shots, were expecting
them to risk their young lives to reach the Belgian river.  Was it
worth it?  He concluded it wasn't.  For him, suddenly, the offensive
had died almost as soon as it had started.  At that moment Schulze, not
usually a feeling, compassionate man, decided that the fate of the
young troopers, green beaks for the most part, was his major concern,
as he whispered to himself, "Adolf can go and fight his own friggin'
war. Frau Schulze's handsome son has just declared a friggin' separate
peace."

Ten minutes later SS Assault Regiment "Wotan' was withdrawing in an
attempt to find another way through that maze of high hills and
water-filled tight valleys to Route D and up above Stavelot Sergeant
Rosenkranz was cautioning VD and Hairless Harry.

"We'd better beat it, guys.  The Krauts are pulling back, but they'll
try again."

His face twisted into a grim, hard little smile.

"And Sarge wants to be there when we give that Kraut colonel the Order
of the Purple Shaft right up his Kraut cissholel" Minutes later they
had vanished too, leaving the debris and body-littered bank of the
River Ambleve to the dead and the dying.

Chapter Three

On the morning of Sunday, 17 December 1944, in Versailles, Eisenhower
made his decision.  He would meet his top US commanders in the field
and discuss Middleton's situation with them.  The Krauts were advancing
a little too fast for him, though they had come out of their fortified
positions in the Siegfried Line, which he had been hoping for for
weeks.

Now they were out in the open where he could bring the full weight of
his armour and air power to bear upon them.  But they were going a
little fast.  The General had to bring his reserves to bear down upon
both the enemy's flanks.  But the going in Belgium, France and
Luxembourg was horrendous.

The snows had started in full fury and where the snow was not holding
him and his armour up, it was the slick, iced-up roads.  He decided on
the following Monday he would meet his top people, put his cards on the
table and see what they would come up with.  Time was of the essence.

Thus it was that at eleven o'clock precisely, at the same time that von
Dodenburg, far off in Belgium, was beginning to work his way round
Stavelot heading to the west and the mountains beyond, Eisenhower's
convoy started to enter the French garrison town of Verdun.  The
streets were empty though Eisenhower, chain-smoking as ever, had the
impression that anxious civilians were hidden behind the tumbledown
shutters of their ancient houses, listening to the rattle of tracks and
wheels, wondering what was going on.

The convoy passed through the town and entered the suburbs dominated by
that bare height where in 1916 the greatest battle in history had been
fought between the French and the Germans, resulting in the decimation
of both their armies.  Not that a worried Eisenhower was concerned with
the past; his mind was concentrated totally on the present and the
crisis on Middleton's front.

The jeep load of heavily armed military policemen just in front of the
armoured car in which Eisenhower had travelled from Versailles there
were anxious rumours going the rounds in Paris that the Germans had
dispatched assassins to murder the Supreme Commander skidded
dangerously in the ice-slick cobbles of {he pave.  Then it was leading
the convoy round the bend which led to the Maginot Caserne, which
housed the headquarters of "Eagle Main."

The top brass was already waiting for the Supreme Commander as he and
his Paris staff filed into the bitterly cold squad room, heated by a
single, wood-burning, ancient, pot-bellied stove.

Shivering after the heat of the vehicles, Eisenhower and his officers
took their places facing Bradley and General George "Blood an' Guts'
Patton, who commanded Bradley's Third Army.

Greetings were exchanged, a few quips and half-hearted cracks, then
General Strong, Eisenhower's chief of intelligence, filled them in on
the latest reports from the fighting front.

The news wasn't good, according to the dark-featured Scot with the
soft, careful burr.  Sepp Dietrich's 6th SS Panzer Army in the north
was hitting hard at the shoulder of the "Bulge', as the dent in
Middeton's line was now being called.  Below, von Manteuffel's Fifth,
according to Strong, was making another determined attempt to reach the
River Meuse.  Already the US 106th Infantry Division had vanished into
the bloody pit of war, with nearly

10,000 green American infantrymen surrendering to the triumphant
Germans and both Middleton's 99th and 28th Infantry Divisions were in a
bad way.  Strong, wondering why Eisenhower didn't seem so particularly
concerned at the exceedingly bad news, said the Allied armies in Europe
had not before faced such a terrible crisis.

Eisenhower looked around at the circle of pale-faced, worried senior
officers, those who were not in the know, and said cheerfully: "The
present situation is to be regarded as one of opportunity for us and
not one of disaster."  He smiled.

"There will be only cheerful faces at this conference table."

Strong frowned and wondered why and how the Supreme Commander could be
so cheerful under the present circumstances.

As usual, Patton was first off the mark.  Eisenhower's remark appealed
to his pugnacious nature.  He snorted:

"Hell, let's have the guts to let the sons of bitches go all the way to
Paris.  Then we'll really cut 'em off and show 'em up!"

The ice was broken.  Even Bradley allowed himself a cold little smile.
The vital conference could begin.

Strong stepped up to the big wall map of the front.  He sketched in the
German breakthrough in more detail, then finished and handed the
conference over to Eisenhower.

Swiftly Eisenhower explained his counter measures in some detail and
haste, as if he had had them prepared long in advance, which naturally
he had.

His expose finished he turned to Patton once more.

"So you see, George," he announced, trying to appease "Blood an' Guts',
who hated losing men and formations to other Allied armies, "Monty is
sending a British corps, Hodges and Simpson," he meant two other of his
army commanders, "are sending both armoured and infantry divisions.
Now, George, I want you to go to Euxembourg and take charge of the
battle, making a strong counter-attack with at least six divisions to
the south.  When do you start?"

The others waited with hated breath for the explosion to come.  They
all knew what a hair-trigger temper Patton had when it came to his
beloved Third Army.  None came!

Instead Patton said calmly, as if he had worked it all out long before
(in fact, he had been coached secretly by Eisenhower), "As soon as
you're through with me, Ike."

Eisenhower pretended to frown as if he were angry with the bumptious
Third Army Commander.  Bradley and Bedel Smith looked grave.  Strong,
the only one not in the know, looked very serious.  After all, Patton
would have to move 133,000 vehicles over nearly two million miles of
road under terrible weather conditions.  How was that possible at such
short notice, the Scot asked himself.

Patton seemed undaunted.  He answered: "I left my HQ in Nancy, in good
order when I left for here."

'"When can you start?"  Eisenhower snorted.

"The morning of 22nd December," Patton answered without batting an
eyelid.

The effect appeared to be electricifying.

"Don't be famous, George," Eisenhower said.

Calmly, Patton puffed at his big cigar.

"This has nothing to do with being famous, sir," he answered calmly.

"I've made my arrangements and my staff are working like beavers at
this very moment to shape them up."

Eisenhower had known that all along.  Still he pretended to look
severe, even angry, at the headstrong army commander.

Hastily, Patton explained his plan, which he had worked out finally
with his staff at eight o'clock that morning.  He said that if Ike
agreed, all he needed to do was to give a simple order over the
telephone.  His staff would take care of the rest.

He added: "I am positive I can make a strong attack on the 22nd, but
only with three divisions, the 26th and 80th Infantry, plus my Fourth
Armored Division.  I cannot attack with more till a few days later. But
I'm determined to attack with what I've got.  If I wait I'll lose the
surprise."

He pointed his big cigar like an offensive weapon at the wall map.

"Brad," he meant his boss.  General Bradley, "this time the Kraut has
stuck his head in the meat grinder and this time I've got hold of the
handle!"

With that the great conference broke up.  As they rose, Eisenhower
wagged a warning finger at Patton.

"Remember, Georgie," he warned.

"The advance has to be methodical, sure."

Patton flashed his teeth.

"Ike, I'll be in Bastogne before Christmas."

Patton and Eisenhower walked to their waiting staff cars.

"Funny thing, Georgie," the latter remarked, "every time I get another
star, you have to bail me out!"  He winked.

Patton winked back.  He knew the score.  The plan was working.  He
reached out his hand and Eisenhower shook it warmly.

"Thanks Georgie," the Supreme Commander whispered, afraid of being
overheard, "the plan's working out splendidly!"

"Thanks to me."

But Eisenhower didn't hear his subordinate's comment.

His mind was elsewhere on his own glory.  Soon, if everything worked
out as he had planned it, he would be the hero of the hour, the saviour
of his country.  Then he could concentrate on other things than being a
mere soldier.  Like Washington, Andrew Jackson and Grant before him,
all successful generals, he could start to realise that other great
ambition.  He could become President of the United States.

Chapter Four

The going was murderous.  In thick, bitter flurries the snow swept in
straight from Siberia, blinding the purple-faced lookouts and tank
commanders as they huddled in their turrets, peering through the
whirling white gloom for the first sign of the enemy.

They had left Stavelot long behind them.  Wotan had ventured down the
narrow, almost snow-blocked Belgian side roads, skirting known hamlets
and villages, heading for Werbomont and the route to Huy.  It had been
a desperate, hair raising passage.  One wrong move on the part of a
driver and his heavy tank would go skidding and slipping out of
control, heading for the deep drainage ditches on both sides of the
road, with the sweating driver cursing and swearing, desperately
attempting to keep control before disaster struck.

All the same, von Dodenburg, huddled in a looted Ami greatcoat, was
grateful for the terrible snowstorm.  It gave him the cover he needed,
as his long, strung-out column crawled along the valley as if they were
the last men alive in this lonely snowbound world.  It protected him
from the dreaded Amijcibos, which he could hear droning constantly
above the level of the storm, waiting for a gap in the flying snow so
that they could commence their lethal aerial attacks.

Before them the fir-covered heights leading to Werboment began to be
glimpsed through that terrible storm and von

Dodenburg thought the flak gunners in their leather face masks deserved
a break from the freezing snow.  He pressed his throat mike and
croaked, "To all flanks.  Stand down.

There'll be no air attack in this weather for the time being."

As he did so he prayed fervently that he was right.

They rolled on at a snail's pace.  It was now 1400 hours.

Von Dodenburg calculated they had two hours of precious daylight left.
By the time night fell he wanted to be under the cover of the
snow-heavy firs on the heights.  There, Wotan would be safe.

But that was not to be.

It was just about then, with the snow beating down upon the column
relentlessly with never-ending fury, that a flare hissed into the
leaden sky on the other side of the Ambleve.  Von Dodenburg's heart
skipped a beat.  He stared at the garish flame which covered the snow
below in its unreal light.

What did it mean?

Matz, the veteran, soon enlightened him.

"Amis," he yelled urgently.

"Friggin', fat-arsed Amisl" Another flare ignited.  This time it was
closer to the long, strung-out column on the winding, narrow road.  Von
Dodenburg peered to the other side of the valley.  Khaki-clad figures
were emerging from the trees, running clumsily across the
gleaming-white, fresh snowfield, their coats flapping, yelling
triumphantly, as if they were drunk or doped, or both.  They felt they
had caught the heavy German tanks by surprise and were taking advantage
of it.  But they didn't know the veterans of Wotan and how quickly they
could react to situations of this nature.

Von Dodenburg yelled an urgent order.  The flak gunners sprang back to
their deadly twin-barrelled 20mm quick firing cannon, as the other
gunners worked hard to bring their turrets round and their heavy guns
to bear on the attackers.

The flak gunners beat them to it.  Immediately the flak cannon started
to pump out their music of death, hysterical, high, lethal.  It was as
if the attackers had walked into a solid wall of deadly steel.

Americans dropped everywhere in the snow:

dramatically, pathetically, silently, reluctantly, almost as if they
were lying down to a well-earned sleep.  Others fell screaming,
clapping hands to ruined faces, ripped-open guts, intestines flopping
out.  The first Ami wave disappeared within seconds.  The desperate
American officers shrilled their whistles; angry red-faced noncoms
bellowed their orders, kicking the reluctant second wave forward on
into that deadly fire.  That wave broke too.  A third wave came
raggedly from the trees.  Again the sweat lathered cursing flak gunners
opened up.  With their terrible weapons they ripped great holes in the
attackers' ranks.  The Americans were now only 50 yards from the
stalled column.

This time it seemed as if their numbers would pay off; they were going
to do it.

But already the momentum was going out of the surprise attack.  The
Americans switched to the right flank, trying to dodge that terrible
barrage.  To no avail.  The old hares beat them to it, reading their
minds.  They hesitated.  It was the opportunity that the Tiger
turret-gunners, now ready for action, had been waiting for.  The
thunderous roar of their great cannon echoed and re-echoed dow the
length of the tight, wooded valley.  It was like swatting a fly with a
sledge-hammer.  The Americans simply disappeared, leaving the
battlefield littered with their severed limbs.  Arms and legs hung from
the shattered trees like monstrous human fruit.  Thus it was that the
attack ended as surprisingly and as speedily as it had commenced, with
the surviving Americans, the wounded ones, hobbling pathetically for
cover and crying, "Give me a hand, buddy!  I'm shot bad," streaming
back the way they had come.

"Very good," von Dodenburg yelled, cupping his hands about his mouth.

"But cease firing .. . CEASE FIRE!"

Raggedly, the firing died away as the last of the attackers disappeared
into the safety of the trees, leaving the shattered snowfield to the
dead and dying.

Schulze licked his cracked lips.

"Loot," he said unfeelingly.

"Yer," Matz agreed eagerly, "Friggin' de luxe Ami cancer sticks and
chocs useful for getting up Belgie knickers."

Schulze nodded and croaked, "Come on, don't stand there like a friggin'
bishop waiting to get a stiff diamond cutter.

Bags me any friggin' Ami firewater!"

Haifa mile away, watching the black figures of the looters spread out
against the glaring white of the snowfield, Sergeant Rosenkranz snarled
miserably, "Hellfire, ain't there nothing to stop the friggin' Kraut
bastards?"  Then he, too, was running after the rest.

Now, for some reason, perhaps it was because the snowstorm had let up,
the long armoured convoy rolled forward into the mountains at a faster
pace.  Up front Matz and Schulze, having emptied a bottle of looted
bourbon between the two of them, snored happily at the back of a
Volkswagen jeep, leaving the point to the two anxious greenhorns in the
front seat.

"Make a fuck-up of this," Schulze had threatened the two teenagers
straight from the depot, "and ole Sergeant Schulze'll have the eggs off
n yer with a blunt razor blade!"  And then he had indicated what his
terrible threat had meant by dramatically grabbing the front of his
baggy combat pants before lapsing into a drunken sleep.

Half a kilo metre to the rear of the lead jeep, von Dodenburg also
relaxed a little.  To either side, grenadiers on foot and in
half-tracks were plodding through the deep snow between the trees,
securing their flanks against another surprise attack.

As he said to his chief-of-operations, "Stapelveld, we can assume that
by now the Ami High Command knows the general direction of our
advance."  He frowned at the memory, "I suspect that that supposed
renegade, Kessler, was a spy for them, reporting on the reconnaissance.
But he didn't know everything, in particular our final objective.

How could he have?  Besides the Ami generals react very slowly, we know
that from France in the summer."

The young major nodded his agreement.

"So with a bit of luck on our side," von Dodenburg went on, staring out
at the white wilderness and telling himself it was beautiful in a
rugged sort of a way, "we shall be ready and in a position to take that
bridge at Huy before the Amis cotton on to our plans."

The major shrugged carelessly, "Even if they did know, they're
piss-poor fighters anyway.  Cardboard and Christmas soldiers, the lot
of them, Obersturmbannfuhrer."

Von Dodenburg looked serious.

"Don't underestimate them, Major!"  he snapped.  They're inexperienced
and their officer class is pretty green, too concerned about going with
the book to keep their noses clean.  But the men are brave enough when
they are led by the right kind of officer.

Remember, I think it was Napoleon who said There are no bad soldiers,
just bad officers."" Major Stapelveld didn't seem too convinced but he
said nothing.  He knew that an old hare like von Dodenburg, who had
fought in a dozen different countries over three different continents
since this terrible war had commenced, was too experienced to listen to
his advice.

Up front, Schulze was considering the problem of their objective too,
as he woke slowly, sucking at his parched mouth, "I think we ought to
lay in a supply of Vaseline the next time we get an opportunity to do
so, Matzi," he announced.

Matz looked at the big Hamburger as if he had just gone off his head.

"What's that supposed to fuckin' mean?"  he snorted.

Schulze gave him a cold smile.

"Exactly that, we need the grease for fucking.  My salami's so full of
ink I don't know who to write to first."

Matz held up his middle finger in contempt.

Schulze took the obscene gesture in his stride.  In a good humoured
fashion, he said as he had said many times before "Can't, old house.
Got a double-decker bus up there already!"  His smile vanished and the
'heaver' was forgotten for a while.

"Mind you," he remarked, suddenly serious, or as serious as he could
ever be about the war, "I think the old man'll get us through to Huy
safely, but the real Belgie gash will be in Antwerp.  I know, I once
spent a leave there in '42.  Only got VD once I think.  And I doubt if
Papa Dietrich will make it that far, the Bavarian barn shitter in spite
of that big trap of his."

Matz nodded his agreement.

"Let Dietrich worry about that, old house," he said.

"Let's get to Huy first and our flippers under the table with some
Belgie cunt."

"Spect you're right, you little piece of Asiatic ape shit Schulze
agreed carelessly.

"Yer common-or-garden stubble hopper should be grateful for small
mercies, I suppose."  He looked pointedly at Matz's crotch.

"And you've certainly got a small mercy."

Matz made an unprintable remark and then the two of them lapsed into
silence and concentrated on surveying the ground to their front and to
both sides of the narrow mountain road as von Dodenburg had ordered
them to do.

"Lawdie, law die me!"  Hairless Harry moaned in his plaintive Alabama
accent, "Ah've never been so cold in the whole of my life.  Nosuh!"

Rosenkranz looked up from the canteen of cold lemonade made from powder
which he had found in a C-ration pack in the hastily abandoned MP post
close to the mountain road.

Outside it had begun to snow fitfully again.  His swarthy face looked
thoughtful as he looked at VD who was rummaging around the little shack
looking for something to eat or smoke.

"VD," he said.

"Yeah?"  that celebrated sex fiend said without interest.

"You was the company radio operator, wasn't you?"

"Yeah.  What of it?"  He threw away another empty C pack in disgust.

Rosenkranz pointed to the MP's radio in the corner, presumably used for
controlling the Red Ball Express trucks that had come this way to the
front until the "Big Bug Out' had commenced.

"Can you use that rig, VD?"

"Damn sure I can.  Easy.  Why?"  he emphasised the question.

"Do you think you could raise the rear with it?"

"Yeah, if I knew the code, which I don't."

"What's the code got to do with it?"

"Well," VD answered, "If I send in clear the guys at the other end
might well think I'm a Kraut trying to lead them up the friggin' garden
path.  It's bin done before."

"Get you," Rosenkranz said.

"But can't you convince them that you come from the good ole
US-of-A?"

"I could try.  But what's the deal?"

"Yeah," Hairless Hairy chimed in.

"By the time they'd be able to do something the Krauts might be miles
away."

"Not if our guys use the right weapon," Rosenkranz answered somewhat
mysteriously.

"We could give it a try, VD, doncha think?"

"OK," VD answered.

"There's nothing better to do in this friggin', freezing arse hole of
the world."

Moments later he was squatting behind the khaki-painted radio, twirling
the dials, trying to raise another military operator.  It took some
time but finally he did so and the grilling commenced, as the
suspicious radio man at the other end asked him about popular American
figures and activities, while the other two prompted a harassed VD with
their answers.

"Betty Grable's husband?  How the fuck should I know?"

he asked once in frustration.

"I'm not screwing that dame in the hay, am I, buddy?  I'm just a
friggin' ordinary-dogface."

They prompted him, Rosenkranz hissing, "A nice Jewish boy band leader
Harry James."  In the end the unknown radio operator was convinced and
he started to take down the message which the ex-short-order cook had
waiting for him.  It was simple but it was going to help change the
whole course of World War Two in the West.

Chapter Five

Suddenly, as the soft snow ceased, the aircraft dived out of the hard
blue sky.  There were about a dozen of them, fat bellied silver and
decidedly threatening.  One minute they weren't there; the next they
were zooming in over the tops of the firs at 300 miles an hour, making
the branches whip back and forth madly with the force of their prop
wash.

"JABOSl" von Dodenburg yelled urgently.

Crazily the gunners ran for their weapons.  The machine gunners fumbled
with the breeches.  Riflemen did the same.

Everywhere the column was transformed into a wild group of frightened
men, their ears deafened by the roar of their attackers, prepared to
die in defence of their stalled column.

Von Dodenburg groaned.  He knew what was to come.

They didn't stand a chance as he saw it.  All the same he couldn't let
the men see how downhearted he was.

"Stick it right up their soft Ami arses!"  he yelled, to encourage his
frantically firing grenadiers.

"Come on!  They're gonna do a bunk soon!"

The Thunderbolt leader waggled his wings.  Once, twice, three times. It
was the attack signal to the others.  They came shrieking in in a
shallow dive.  The flight leader headed straight for the column, diving
through the grey and-black puffballs of smoke.  All around von
Dodenburg, frantic with worry, digging his nails into his palms till
they bled, his men blazed away furiously.

Just when it seemed that the first Thundebolt would slam into the lead
tank, the pilot levelled out.  Black steel eggs came tumbling from its
fat silver belly in lethal profusion.

For one long moment nothing happened.  Then the bombs straddled the
tank, exploding on impact.  The turret rose from the shattered chassis,
all 10 tons of it.  It rose 20 metres into the air.  Then it slammed
back into the field.  It was followed by the tank's ammunition
exploding.  For a moment the Tiger was obscured by flame and smoke.

When it cleared, there was nothing but a tangled, twisted mass of
smoking steel.  The Tiger and its crew had perished in seconds, as if
they had never existed.

Now Thunderbolt after Thunderbolt pressed home their attack.  Cannon
chattered viciously.  Flak guns spat fire.

Machine-gunners hosed the burning sky with a thousand rounds a minute.
Everything was ear-splitting chaos and confusion.

Crouched next to a tank, already hit, its armour scoured a bright
silver where the 20mm shells had skewered into its metal hide, Von
Dodenburg groaned, as the Thunderbolts came zooming in again to press
home their attack with reckless abandon.  Then the Wotan gunners struck
lucky.

One of them hit the squadron leader with a lucky burst of glowing-white
tracer shells.  The fat-bellied fighter-bomber disintegrated at once,
shattering into a million pieces, snuffed out like a candle in a giant
puff of white, incandescent smoke.  That ended the disastrous
bombing.

The death of their squadron leader took the heart out of the rest of
the pilots.  Perhaps they didn't know what to do next without him. They
turned and began to fly off, heading for their base in central
Europe.

"Yer, the friggin' fly boys," Matz quipped bitterly.

"Back to their friggin' bacon and eggs and friggin' coffee, served by a
lot of friggin' gash in short skirts."

His litany of envy and obscenity suddenly ceased.  As the shaken
grenadiers came out of their funk holes to survey the death and
destruction all around them, a squadron of twin-engined Mitchell
bombers came roaring in at less than 200 it.

u'Oh my shittitr aching back!"  Schulze moaned and clapped a big paw
dramatically to his forehead.

"Not agen!

Can't they leave us in shittin' peace!"  But he never finished his
complaint.  Instead he dived for cover under the bogies of the nearest
Tiger as the Mitchells swept over them, dragging monstrous shadows
behind them on the surface of the snow.

Then 500-lb bombs came tumbling out of their blue-painted bellies in
deadly profusion.  The earth beneath Schulze, lying full length on the
snow, mouth open, hands clasped about his ears to prevent his eardrums
from being punctured by the tremendous concussion, heaved and trembled
like a wild creature.

The German flak hit one of the bombers.  Thick white smoke started to
pour from its port engine.  It began to come down, trailing smoke
behind it.  A dark shape sprang from the doomed bomber, but the Ami
flier's parachute failed to open at that height.  Whirling over and
over, hands clasped around his knees like a professional circus
acrobat, the Ami struck the ground at a tremendous speed.

"Hope it gives him a friggin' headache!"  Matz growled unfeelingly as
the American's body burst apart, blood and gore splattering the snow.

But von Dodenburg was oblivious to the comment.  For the enemy bombers
were directly overhead.  The world was transformed into a howling,
earth-shaking crazy nightmare of death and destruction.  Frantically he
clutched at the tank tracks as the tremendous blast from the exploding
carpet of bombs swept across the snowfield and threatened to blow him
away.  Next instant the impact tore his hands from the track; his nails
were ripped from his frozen fingers.  A wave of almost unbearable pain
swept through his hands.

Thick, yellow, acrid smoke filled his lungs.  He coughed and choked,
blinded by the biting smoke.  Desperately he fought for breath, gasping
and choking.

Another carpet of bombs straddled the convoy.  A Tiger sagged, its
tracks severed.  A half-track, filled with cowering grenadiers, rose
into the air, tossing soldiers to left and right like helpless rag
dolls.  The steel sprockets splintered as if made of matchwood.  A
headless grenadier flew through the air and his head rolled behind him
across the snow.

Once again the heaving, trembling earth came up to meet von Dodenburg.
Something slapped him in the face hard.

Silver and red stars exploded in front of his eyes.  He shook his head
violently.  The stars danced even more frantically.  A red mist swept
forward, threatening to engulf him.  He tried to fight it off, but it
overcame him.  His head lolled to one side, a lock of damp blond hair
escaping from his battered cap with its dreaded silver SS insignia.  He
fainted.  The murder and mayhem all around him was blotted out for the
time being.

Shit!"  von Dodenburg groaned weakly as Schulze lifted his battered
head and held the water bottle to his CO's lips.

"Say that again, sir."  Schulze agreed.

"You all right now, sir?"

"Yes," his CO, answered, "Help me up, old house."

"Holy straw sack sir.  Do you really want to see what's happened?"

"I have to, you big horned ox!"  von Dodenburg replied weakly.

"It's my duty to do so."

Schulze heaved him to his feet and von Dodenburg stood swaying there,
as things came back into focus.

"Christ!"  he exclaimed when he saw them.

"What a mess!"

"You can say that again, sir," Schulze agreed grimly, still supporting
his beloved CO.

"It's like everyone is agen us.  It ain't fair.  They seem to be
soddin' well waiting for Wotan at every friggin' turn."  His old
optimism had suddenly vanished.  Von Dodenburg had never seen the big
rogue so down in the dumps.

"War isn't fair, Schulze," he said gently.

"It isn't supposed to be."  He shook himself free and stared around at
that dreaded scene left by the departing bombers: the dead lying in
blackened, smoking pits; the wounded hopping around on bloody legs
crying piteously for help; the shocked unwounded, still numb from the
bombing, staring aimlessly and hopelessly into nothing.

"Tell Major Stapelveld to report to me," von Dodenburg said finally in
a toneless voice, "If he's still in the land of the living."

"He is, sir -just like the rest of us."

Minutes later, the young major, his uniform singed and ragged in
places, reported, giving the CO a shaky salute with a hand that
trembled badly, his face still blanched with shock.

"Well, Stapelveld?"

"A shitting mess, sir," the young major answered in a shaky voice that
he could barely keep under control.

"How many?"

"Half our effectives at first count, sir."

Von Dodenburg bit his bottom lip in despair.  He stared at the
ashen-faced, shocked survivors staring at their charred or destroyed
vehicles as if they couldn't believe the evidence of their own eyes.
Were these the same bold young men who had marched into the Wotan
barracks only a month ago, bursting with energy and good health, eyes
full of confidence and pride?  Now they seemed two years older,
shrunken in stature, the lustre gone from their dull eyes.

He raised his voice.

"Comrades," he said thoughtfully, "I don't have to tell you that we
have suffered a nasty blow.

Many of our comrades have paid the supreme sacrifice for Folk,
Fatherland and Fuhrer.  But," he licked his cracked, parched lips, "the
battle must go on.  We must achieve our objective.  Then the sacrifice
will have been worth while, don't you think?"

There was no response from his listeners and Schulze shook his head
silently, as if to say, "It's all wasted effort:

we've had it.  We're beaten!"

Von Dodenburg ignored Schulze's look.  He stared as a blood-stained
panzer grenadier, bandage wrapped round his wounded head, stepped
hesitantly from the ranks and said, "I'm sorry, sir.  We'll be I mean
the wounded a drag on Wotan now.  I think you should march without us.
We can make our own way back."

Von Dodenburg stared at that empty white waste, devoid of habitation,
which stretched to the horizon.  How many of them would survive that
march to the rear without able bodied men to protect them?  He opened
his mouth to object, but Sergeant Schulze beat him to it.

"He's right, sir.

They stand a chance and we do too, sir if we split up now."

Reluctantly von Dodenburg nodded, his hand to his battered cap, "I
salute you, brave men that you are.  I shall see you again in the
Homeland."  Even as he said the words, he knew it wasn't to be.  He'd
never see them again.

The wounded panzer grenadier looked oddly embarrassed, though he, too,
knew that they might well be going to their death in that bleak
wasteland, with every man's hand against them.  He turned and said,
"All right, lads, lift up yer heels and let's get going.  We've got a
lot of ground to cover before it gets dark."  He shivered
involuntarily, as if he had just thought of something very
unpleasant.

Wordlessly they moved off, avoiding the gazes of those who would
continue the attack, as if they too were somehow embarrassed.

Von Dodenburg's eyes suddenly flooded with tears at the thought of
those young men's sacrifice, as they began to trail towards the east,
the lightly injured supporting their badly wounded comrades, hopping
and stumbling through the snow, trailing their blood-stained bandages
behind them, shoulders hunched against the biting cold.

"There they friggin' well go, the halt, the lame and the blind," Matz
exclaimed, finishing off trimming a fence pole into a crude crutch
because his wooden leg had been shattered in the bombing.

"Shut up!"  Schulze growled, "Get on with that friggin' peg leg of
yourn or I'll stick it up yer arse till yer friggin' eyes pop out of
yer friggin' ugly mug!"

The terrible threat worked.  Matz got on with his task as the others
started to disappear into the trees.

With an effort of sheer, naked will-power, von Dodenburg shook himself
out of his lethargy.

"All right, let's have a look-see at the vehicles.  Time we got
underway again."

Almost happily, as if they were glad to see the back of the wounded,
the men turned to their tasks.  The minutes passed in intense effort.
Suddenly von Dodenburg wanted to be away from this dread place as
quickly as he could.  He seemed possessed of new energy, as if the
adrenalin was pumping through his frozen body at a tremendous rate.  He
was here, there and everywhere, ordering, recommending, commanding, as
the troopers worked on their vehicles, loading fresh ammunition and
supplies from the ones they would leave behind, while the dead,
sprawled like bundles of abandoned rags, stared at them with sightless
eyes.

Ten minutes later they were ready to move off.

"Roll

'em!"  von Dodenburg commanded, as the grenadiers and tank men
clambered into their positions.  Engines burst into a throaty roar. 
Noise flooded the little valley.  The air was suddenly full of the
cloying stink of fuel.  Von Dodenburg cast one last glance behind him
and then gave the signal to move off.

Then they were moving westwards once more, driving towards the new
battle.  Behind them the long black fingers of the night started to
poke into the winter white of that remote valley, the faint
snap-and-crackle of small arms fire behind them indicating what was
happening already to the walking wounded.  Von Dodenburg ignored it.
Now all that mattered was that bridge across the Meuse at Huy.

Chapter Six

They passed through the vast empty landscape of impending doom like a
trail of insignificant black ants.  The very fields breathed hostility.
Conditions were again terrible.  Time and time again the drivers lost
control of their vehicles.  The wind blinded them as they danced
crazily across the slick roads, slewing round and round like drunken
dancers, missing the ditches by a hair's breath, snapping off the
snow-laden firs like matchwood with their cannon.

For those in the turrets and the open half-tracks life was one long
torture.  Men wept with the acute agony of the cold.  Icicles hung from
their bearded cheeks.  Their eyebrows were a furry white with hoar
frost.  Every breath was like the stab of a razor-sharp knife to their
lungs.  The metal of their vehicles ripped off flesh of their fingers
if they were unwary enough to touch it without gloves.  Here and there
desperate young soldiers, tears frozen on their ashen cheeks like cold
pearls, closed their eyes wearily and prayed for death.

Von Dodenburg showed no mercy.  He forced them on.

Now and again they spotted shelter during gaps in the raging snowstorm,
but he wouldn't let them stop to take cover.  The Meuse had to be
reached before the column was discovered again by the prowling Allied
jabos.

Then, as abruptly as it had started, the raging snowstorm ceased.  One
moment it was howling away at full fury, the next it had stopped.  A
thin, watery yellow sun made its i A

appearance.  But it wasn't the miracle of the sun which caught their
attention.  It was the cluster of houses, grouped around an
onion-towered church, perhaps a kilo metre of so away, with beyond the
dull-silver snake of a river.

"As I live and breathe!"  Schulze gasped, thrusting back his helmet, as
if in amazement.

"We've done it, sir, we've done it!"

"That we have," von Dodenburg agreed, drinking in that vision, which
was the Meuse.

"Yes, the River Meuse at last."  Slowly two cold tears started to roll
down his frozen cheeks.  Behind him someone else started to sob too,
and Matz said, though there was more relief than cynicism in his voice,
"Hand out the friggin' hankies, the ladies' school is gonna have a
quiet wee pie

Schulze shot him a threatening look, but said nothing.  In truth he
felt like shedding a few tears of relief himself.  It had been a long
time and many a good man had died for them to have reached this far,
but here they were, for better or worse, at last.  Tomorrow the bridge
at Huy would be theirs and perhaps the future of the Homeland would be
secured, as the Fuhrer anticipated.  If they didn't pull it off Schulze
shrugged and left the rest of that thought unsaid.

Thirty minutes later an officer and NCO patrol, led by von Dodenburg
personally, had scouted the handful of shabby brick houses at the top
of the steep slope which led to the Meuse at the bridge below.  They
were empty.  Just as in 1940, the Belgian peasants had seemed to sense
when trouble was brewing and had fled, abandoning virtually everything
in their flight south and west.  As Schulze said, chewing on a wrinkled
summer apple which had been stored in an upper bedroom under the great
sagging bed, next to the chamber pot, still unemptied.

"Too poor to have a pot to piss in."  He indicated the apple, the only
food he had been able to find.

"Well, not exactly, you big rogue," von Dodenburg commented with a
short laugh, indicating the chipped enamel chamber pot.

He peered down through the dirty window at the blacked-out town below.
Near the bridge a fire burned and now and again he could spot dark
figures pass in front of the blaze.

"Sentries," he said, almost as if to himself.

"Yes, but not many of them," Schulze agreed.

"I've counted twelve.  Nothing to worry us!"

Von Dodenburg ignored him.  Instead he said, "We'll rush the bridge,
firing all out.  We're weak, but I think we might well panic them.
They're only second-line troops after all according to Sixth SS Army
Intelligence."

Schulze sniffed.

"You know what they say about Intelligence, sir?  Intelligence could
even screw up a wet dream."

"An apt comment.  But this time I think the eggheads are probably
right.  I haven't seen any other kind of defence, Schulze."

He had seen enough.

"All right, Schulze, let's get some sort of fodder going.  It's
freezing cold.  The men need something warm in their guts.  It's been a
long day."  He sighed wearily and stretched.

"We've got about twenty tins of old man," Schulze meant tinned meat,
reputedly made from the corpses of old men who had died in Berlin's
workhouses, "and some dried potatoes.  That'll have to do."

"As long as it's hot, Schulze.  Let's get cracking."

Half an hour later they had devoured the sparse meal, washed down with
hot water with a sprinkle of sugar in it, and were huddled in their
blankets, listening to the howl of the wind around the heights, each
man wrapped in a cocoon of his own thoughts and apprehensions,
wondering what the morrow would bring.

One by one they fell into an exhausted sleep.  But not von Dodenburg.
His mind was too full, as he pondered his problems.  Outside, apart
from the noise of the wind, there was no other sound save the shuffle
of the sentries as they tried to stamp some warmth into their frozen
feet or the occasional light cough they gave, for all of them had colds
and coughs.  Von Dodenburg told himself he would be having men with
serious lung problems, if they didn't get some rest and good, really
warm food inside them soon.

He dismissed the problem.  On the morrow everything would be decided,
finally, one way or other.

"March or croak", as they used to say in Wotan's good years when
nothing seemed able to stop them.  He sighed at the memory.

Slowly, very slowly, he started to drift into an exhausted sleep, lying
there absolutely motionless in his bedroll, as if he were already
dead.

"Fuck Monty!"  the irate voice said as the battered old Sherman rumbled
to a stop next to the river bank.

"Here I was, just getting my plates of meat under the table with that
big fat Belgie lass and the sod lands us in this friggin' mess!"

"Yer get yer share o' it, Alf," his mate said, as he dropped wearily
from the turret.  It had been a long trip through the freezing fog from
the docks at Antwerp, moving off at a moment's notice.

"What's your lass gonna say if she hears you're having it off with a
foreign hint, eh?"

"She's not gonna hear," the other Tank Corps man snorted, "the way
things are friggin' well going.  Over here since Normandy, ordered to
turn over them clapped-out tin cans to the depot at Antwerp and while
we're waiting for the new Fireflie's" the updated version of the
obsolete Sherman "we're promised seven days leave in the UK.

And what do we bloody get?"

"An immediate recall and those wankers of the Ordnance

Corps are handing us back our old tin cans," his mate beat him to it.

"Ay, right up the creek agen without a friggin' paddle.

What a Kate Karney, Alf!"  The unknown Tank Corps trooper sighed like a
man sorely tried.

Listening to them in the darkness, while more and more tanks rolled
into position to defend the east bank of the Meuse just outside Huy,
Brigadier Bird, the CO of the 18th Armoured Brigade, smiled a little
grimly.  He hoped that Field Marshal Montgomery's confidence in his
brigade's ability to hold up the Jerries when they came, which he was
sure they would, wasn't misguided.  His chaps were as worn out as their
tanks, and the brigade was badly under strength after five solid months
of almost constant combat.

He dismissed that unsettling thought and concentrated on the task at
hand.  Intelligence were sure that the bridges at Liege, Dinant, Huy
and Sedan were the enemy's objectives.

He was sure they were right.  It would be the same route they had taken
back in 1940, when he had been a subaltern, and they had blitzed their
way westwards and into France.  In those terrible days, he had been a
green young officer who had run for his life like the rest of the
British Expeditionary Force.  Things had changed since then.  There had
been Africa, Italy, Normandy, and he and his boys still didn't have the
right tanks.  All the same, they were experienced and a good match for
the Jerries.

Hastily, as the cooks set up their soup kitchens and started to prepare
the first hot meal the men had eaten since leaving Antwerp that
morning, Bird began to work out fields of fire and possible German
approach roads.  If they were heading for their bridge and he guessed
that would be their main objective he knew it would be no use tackling
them with the Sherman's pathetic little cannon.  The Sherman's 75mm
shell would bounce off the thick frontal armour of the enemy Panthers
and Tigers like ping-pong balls.  His gunners would have to hit the
enemy from the side.  Then they might have a chance of penetrating
their metallic skin.

By two that freezing morning, in the third week of December 1944, the
obsolete, battered British brigade was in position, the men had been
fed and those off duty were curled up in their blankets, trying to keep
warm.

But Bird couldn't get off; he was too worried, having suddenly realised
how much depended upon his brigade, composed mostly of 'hostilities
only' men, wartime conscripts, grouped in unfashionable regiments with
no century-old traditions behind them.  He clambered on to the roof of
a tobacco factory accompanied by a lone aide, and waited.  The minutes
ticked away in leaden slowness as the two of them shivered and smoked.
Soon the enemy would be coming.  It wouldn't be long now.

"Obergruppenfuhrer .. . Ohergruppenfuhrer" Kraemer said urgently,
fumbling about in the pre-dawn darkness; for in his drunken stupor
Dietrich had forgotten to get his orderly to put up the blackout in the
little Belgian inn in the village that now served as his battle HQ.

Dietrich got his false teeth out of the glass at his bedside and slid
them into his mouth with difficulty.  He felt awful.

His headache was throbbing with the schnapps he had consumed the
previous night.

"What's up?"  he asked thickly.

"They've done it!"  the other man said eagerly.

"They've done what, man'?"

"Von Dodenburg, sir.  He's reached Huy on the Meuse."

"How do you know'?  Wotan's radios went dead seventy two hours or more
ago."

"I know, sir.  But we didn't hear directly from Wotan."

Dietrich sat up hastily, and wished he hadn't.  It felt as if someone
had just thrust two red-hot rods towards the back of his eyes.  He
moaned.

Kraemer didn't seem to notice.

"We heard from the Tommies."

"The Tommies!"

"Yes sir.  Our people picked up a radio message they sent to
Montgomery's HQ in Holland.  It was faint but clear.

They've got some sort of armour in place on the Meuse and their people
have just heard the sound of tanks coming from the east, and, sir, the
only tanks that have reached that far in the east are von Dodenburg's."
He paused and then added, his voice suddenly low and hard to hear, "The
two forces are on a collision course, sir.  and von Dodenburg doesn't
know it .. ."  He let his words die away, as if overcome by the
enormity of what he had just said.

Slowly, solemnly, Dietrich crossed himself in the elaborate Bavarian
Catholic manner.

"Then may God look after him!

We can't any longer."  The big, coarse Army Commander raised his voice.
Gruffly he ordered, "Bring me a drink a stiff one.  I think I'm going
to need it, Kraemer .. .!"

Chapter Seven

Schulze was caught completely by surprise as his decoy Sherman came
round the bend from the height onto the river bank.  Behind him
followed what was left of Wotan, each trooper tensed and waiting for
Schulze's reaction to what he would find there in the grey, grim light
of this December dawn.

"Christ on a crutch!"  Schulze yelled as he saw the massed, if battered
Shermans, waiting for him there.

"Tommies!"  He recognised them immediately from their colourful little
pennants.

"Sherman at two o'clock, Matzi," he cried through the throat mike.

Matz didn't hesitate.  He pressed his eye against the rubber sight
guard.  The crosswires dissected the nearest enemy tank.  He pressed
the foot pedal.  The tank shivered.

Scarlet flame stabbed the muzzle.  A wave of hot, acrid smoke flooded
the compartment.  Next instant the enemy tank trembled violently, as if
in the throes of virulent fever.  A moment later it was blazing
furiously, its crew bailing out before it was too late.

Almost immedistely a ding-dong battle started, as both sides began
firing at ranges where they couldn't miss.  Tank after tank was hit.
The Shermans, with their vulnerable petrol engines, burst into flames
on all sides.  Still the surviving crews fought on gamely, trying
desperately to stem the German tide.

Schulze remembered von Dodenburg's instruction: "Stop for nothing.  Get
through to that goddam bridge come hell or high water!"  Now the big
Hamburger, cursing angrily, attempted to do just that.  He smashed into
a burning Sherman and cleared it out of his way in a groaning and
grinding of rending metal.  A couple of infantrymen attempted to throw
grenades at the monster bearing down upon them.  It was a brave try,
but they didn't get far.

Schulze popped up from behind the turret hatch and loosed off an angry
salvo from his Schmeisser.  They went down in a confusion of abruptly
bleeding and shattered limbs.

More khaki-clad infantry appeared from the surrounding houses.  They
milled around in momentary confusion.

Schulze, still cursing furiously, didn't give them a chance to get
organised.  He dropped his Schmeisser and lobbed stick bombs into their
midst.  At that range he couldn't miss.  On all sides, men went down
screaming, to disappear an instant later under the churning, abruptly
blood-stained, gory tracks of the decoy Sherman.

They trundled on.  Once, the long, overhanging cannon of the decoy hit
a solid brick wall.  The engine stalled under the impact.  Almost
immediately British infantry swarmed forward.  They cried in triumph.
The motionless Sherman was a sitting duck, or so they thought.  Not for
long.  Madly, Schulze swung the co-axial machine-gun round and hosed
the running men.  They went down in a mess of screaming confused
bodies, bowled over like ninepins.  Next instant a furious Matz had
restarted the engine.  With a roar, it sprang into throaty life and
they were rumbling forward once again, getting ever closer to that
vital bridge which spanned the Meuse.

Even in the dim grey dawn light, Schulze could see the engineers
pelting to the detonator chambers, packed with explosives, beneath the
ancient structure.  He knew why.

They were going to check them out, for at the far end, on the western
bank, what looked like an officer was bent over a green detonator box,
checking the wiring.  If the Sherman ever reached the far end, he had
obviously orders to blow the bridge.

Schulze pressed the throat mike.

"Tempo, Matzi, you friggin' crippled garden dwarf!  TEMPO!  GIVE HER
ALL YER'VE Got!" 

"I'll give you all I've got," Matz yelled back in a
paroxysm of apprehension and rage, "right up yer fat Hamhurger arse!

Any more juice and the whole friggin' tank'll go up!"

Still he pressed his one foot down harder on the accelerator so that
the Sherman trembled at every plate, as if the tank might burst apart
at any moment.

The lead Tiger was 20 metres behind them, its great gun swinging from
side to side as it swept off the British infantrymen trying to clamber
on its chassis like flies; von Dodenburg prayed they'd make it.  Once
the decoy had done so, his remaining infantry would take up their
positions around this Sherman and fight it out to the death or until
their relief arrived from the Sixth SS Army's follow-up team, which he
expected confidently would now be racing across the plain to link up
with them.

But that wasn't to be.  Suddenly Schulze swung round a bend, the slugs
pattering off the steel hide of the Sherman like tropical raindrops on
a tin roof, when a British 17pounder anti-tank gun loomed up out of the
morning gloom.

It was the biggest gun that the British had and Schulze knew it was
dangerous.

"Tommy anti-tank at two o'clock!"

The gunner needed no urging.  He swung the turret round.

The crosswires of the Sherman's gun-sight centred squarely on the gun's
shield.  He didn't hesitate, and fired.  The Sherman jerked backwards
on its rear bogies.  At that range the Sherman couldn't miss.  The blur
of the armour piercing shell slammed into the anti-tank gun, which rose
two metres into the air under that terrific impact.  Then it slapped
down again and disintegrated, the shattered remains of the five-man
crew a mess of severed, gory limbs flying in all directions.

But Schulze's luck had begun to run out.  Under the cover of the
anti-tank gun, two lone soldiers had doubled forward to within firing
range of the decoy.

It was only at the very last minute that Schulze in the turret spotted
them.  A finger of fear traced its way down the small of his back as he
recognised the weapon the lead soldier carried.

"Flame-thrower!  Gunner-" Too late.  The Tommy, standing there like
David facing Goliath had directed the nozzle of his frightening weapon
at the metal monster.  A frightening hiss came and Whooshl A hard
bright-red bar of flame, tinged with black oil, hurtled towards the
Sherman.  Instantly it was ringed with a terrifying flame.  Schulze,
his face contorted, cringed behind the cover of the turret.  With eyes
bulging out of his head, he watched horrified as the insides of the
metal turned a dull purple.  The heat dragged the air out of his lungs.
He gasped for breath, choking and swallowing, as if he were drowning.
Then the flame had vanished, leaving the turret blackened and smoking,
while he took a great gasp of pure air.

The gunner grabbed for his co-axial machine-gun.  Too late.  The lone
Tommy, supported by his bodyguard, stood his ground as the tracer
zipped lethally all around him and fired again.  Once more that
terrible weapon smothered the stalled Sherman with a circle of greedy,
all-consuming flame.  There was the harsh, acrid stink of burning.  To
the rear of the Sherman something ignited with a loud pop.

Greedy blue flame immediately started to rise upwards.

The heat was impossible.  Schulze broke into a furious lather of sweat
as a horrified, panic-stricken, Matz yelled, "The rear bogie's on fir
el" Schulze knew what that meant.  In seconds, the whole 30ton tank
would be blazing furiously.  It was not for

1 7 A

nothing that Sherman crews called their tanks "Ronsons'.

Like the well-known lighter that ignited instantly.  Schulze knew they
had only moments to save themselves from the terrible fate of being
burned alive.

"Bale out!"  he yelled and snapped off a shot from his pistol at the
triumphant Tommy with the flame-thrower, who yelled with pain.  He spun
round and at the same time he pressed the trigger of his weapon in one
last dying effort.  The flame seared skywards like a giant blowtorch.
Next moment Schulze, Matz and the rest were running for their lives,
leaving the Sherman to burn furiously, completely blocking the slip
road to the bridge.

Brigadier Bird of the Armoured Brigade didn't need a second invitation,
as the German armour started to pile up on the slope leading towards
the Huy bridge, unable to move forward because of the burning Sherman.
It was a gunner's dream.  He remembered that terrible day in Normandy
when they had been green and trapped in a similar situation and a
handful of German Tigers to the flank had wiped out nearly his whole
brigade.  Firing from the flank they had blocked the road with the
tangled, burning wreckage of his Comets and Churchill tanks.  It was
now his turn.  He snapped into the throat mike: "Fire at will, targets
of opportunity," adding for good measure, "knock the stuffing out of
the Jerry bastards!"

Now the British tank gunners on the right flank went to work
systematically, laughing and chortling like a bunch of happy schoolboys
released at last from a long, boring lesson.  Their 75mms crashed into
noisy action.  White, solid, armour-piercing shells zipped lethally
towards the trapped Germans, a mere 200 yards away.  At that range even
the worst of Bird's gunners couldn't miss and the Germans were so
tightly packed together that they couldn't turn and attempt to escape.
The slaughter of Wotan's last armour had commenced.

Desperately, frantically, von Dodenburg, bleeding from a shrapnel wound
in the forehead, cried through his mike for his crews to attempt to
break out of the trap.  Here and there a bold tank commander attempted
to do so.  Ruthlessly ordering their drivers to slam into the burning
Tiger and Panther to the front and rear in order to make room to
escape.  But in a flash the Tommies were on to such ideas.

They forgot the other trapped victims for a few moments and
concentrated all their fire on the would-be escapees.

The air rained shells.  Time and time again a great 60-ton tank would
shake and tremble violently as yet another salvo of shells slammed into
it.  The Tigers, with their tremendously thick metal hide, were able to
withstand terrible punishment.  But not in such volume and at such
close range.  As Bird grinned, mentally rubbing his hands at the
punishment the hated Germans were taking at last, parts flew off the
would-be escapees like metal rain.  First the plates.  Then the bogies.
After that the tracks, snapped and severed, rolled out behind the
smoking, trapped victims like shot-off limbs.  In the end a great,
overhanging cannon, that could deal out such murderous punishment,
would sink as if to acknowledge final defeat.

One after another the Tigers were destroyed.  The surviving crew
members, a few moments before proud members of the most elite formation
of the German IVehrmacht, were suddenly disorganized, terrified
fugitives, running for their lives, with every man's hand against
them.

Over the other side of the river, a ravenous Sergeant Rosenkranz and
his two sidekicks, Hairless Harry and VD, wolfed down the hot
corned-beef sandwiches which the British cooks had prepared for them
with something they called proudly "Sarn't-Major's Char', a thick,
rich-brown mixture of tea well laced with rum and evaporated milk.

Idly, Rosenkranz wondered if the beef was kosher, but then dismissed
il.  After all, the Chief Rabbi wouldn't want him to lose his strength,
he told himself, especially now it was time to deal with these frigging
Nazis, who had massacred his comrades back in the Ardennes.

The sound of gunfire at the bridge rose to a crescendo and one of the
cooks sauntered in from the latrine to inform the three ragged,
unshaven American fugitives that the "friggin' Jerries all SS are
taking a real friggin' pasting down on the bridge."  Rosenkranz knew
the time had come to leave.

"All right, you guys," he announced solemnly, swallowing the rest of
the greasy, warm corned-beef, "Stop stuffing yer guts.  We've got a job
to do."

Hairless Harry looked up at him from the ration case on which he was
sitting and stroked his hairless head.

"Why?"

he demanded, "It's nice and warm in here."

"Yeah, and it'll be fucking warmer at the toe of my boot," Rosenkranz
snarled threateningly, "if yer don't get yer skinny frigging keester
offn that packing case."  He pulled on the pistol belt he had stolen
from one of the sleeping limey officers.

"We've got a debt to pay back."

"You think it's them, Rosie?"  VD said.

"I know it's them.  By my mother's blood, I know it," he added
fervently.

"Now come on before some other asshole gets his paws onto that Nazi
colonel and decides he ought to go to some nice warm POW camp for
questioning."  He grinned, showing a mouthful of rotten teeth.

"This day the bastard's gonna die.  There's gonna be no pussy-footing
around with that cunt!"

With that, followed a little reluctantly by the other two, he left and
entered the blood-red crazy world of war outside.

The end, it seemed, was very near for Colonel Kuno von Dodenbure.

Chapter Eight

"Well, Dietrich?"  Hitler rasped, his voice very shaky over the
telephone.

Dietrich, who had already drunk half a bottle of Kognuk although it was
only nine in the morning, looked at Kraemer a little helplessly.

Inwardly, his chief of staff shrugged.  Why should he worry?  The Party
bully boy had dropped the clock in the pisspot, as he would have
phrased it in that crude manner of his.  Now let him pull the tick-tock
out of the piss.

"The news isn't too good, Mem Fuhrer" Dietrich ventured carefully.  On
the horizon the sky flickered an ugly pink, as the barrage commenced
once more.  Outside more tanks and other armoured vehicles, carrying
fresh reinforcements for the greedy blood-maws of the front, rattled by
through the mud and snow slush.

"What is that supposed to mean?"  Hitler demanded.

Again Dietrich looked pleadingly at his chief of staff for some sort of
help.

Kraemer took pity on the big Bavarian, hopeless as he was.  He took the
ivory cigarette holder out of his mouth and mouthed.

"Situation fluid, but not hopelessly so."

Hurriedly Dietrich repeated the words and waited for the tirade that
could well come now from the Fuhrer, who was obviously excited and
anxious.

But when Hitler spoke, his voice was quite reasonable.

"I

see," he said calmly, "But that bridge must be taken.  It's vital.
Reinforce von Dodenburg with everything you can lay your hands on. I'll
see you get immediate reinforcements, Dietrich, Good luck. Encle."

"Thank you, me in Fuhrer" Dietrich mumbled, but the line had already
gone dead.  He put down the phone and looked at Kraemer, who was again
smoking one of his gold-tipped, hand-rolled cigarettes.

"What do you think'?

Hitler said we've got to reinforce von Dodenburg with everything we can
lay our hands on.  He'll support us to the hilt."

Kraemer shrugged cynically.  Slowly he took the ivory holder from
between his thin, calculating lips.

"Words," he commented.

"Idle words.  We can do nothing more for that particular young hero von
Dodenburg."  He laughed softly but without warmth as if he were
remembering someone who had gone out of his life a long time before.

"Young hero, eh?  Dead hero!"

"What do you mean?"  Dietrich growled.

"Obvious isn't it, ObergruppenfuhrerT"I In that sodden, drunken manner
of his, Dietrich looked puzzled, his brain addled by years of
over-indulgence.

Kraemer explained: "There's no way out of the trap for him.  He's cut
off from the rear and our lead elements, at least those of your 1st SS
Panzer, the Adolf Hitler Bodyguard, have still got no farther than
Stavelot.  The weather's improving.  Met says that the overcast skies
will vanish till at least Christmas Day.  So," he shrugged, "the enemy
air force will be out in all its strength.  We've nothing to stop
them.

There's not a hope in hell now of breaking through to von Dodenburg.
Bcistci."  He folded his arms deliberately, as if he had said the last
word on the subject; and that was that.

"He has been an arrogant bastard all the time I've known him," Dietrich
commented.

Kraemer noted the use of the past tense, but didn't remark upon it.

"Still, he pulled our chestnuts out of the fire many a time.  I
remember once in Russia in '43.  Kharkov, it was .. ."  He droned on,
but Kraemer was no longer listening.  He stared out of the dirty window
at the slush and wet snow outside, already beginning to melt as the
temperature rose.  He told himself that he'd better start making some
provision for himself.  Germany had definitely lost the war.  First
thing he would do was to somehow wangle himself out of the SS and back
into the regular Wehrmacht.  He didn't fancy spending the rest of his
life behind bars, as most of these high-ranking SS officers, including
Dietrich, would.  So he planned things, von Dodenburg and the war
already virtually forgotten, while outside the young cannon-fodder,
still singing those brave, bold chants of the years of victory, rolled
by truck after truck, heading for their date with destiny.

"Oh, sc honer Wcstenvald" they sang lustily .. . "Oh, you beautiful
Westerwald."

But the sc honer Westerwcikr would soon be burned down and there would
be nothing beautiful about it any more.  The dream of world domination
was over.

Gasping for breath and attempting to staunch the blood streaming from
his head wound, von Dodenburg watched aghast as the pathetic remains of
his command staggered back to the heights.  In what seemed another age,
they had set off a full regiment.  Now Wotan was a handful of wounded
or exhausted men, their transport gone, their only weapons handguns and
they had little ammunition left for those.

He crouched on the heights, staring down at the smoke filled valley of
the Meuse, crowded with burning tanks and half-tracks, mostly those of
the shattered SS Assault Regiment "Wotan', a regiment that a
crestfallen von Dodenburg knew instinctively would never be reformed.

Wotan was finished for good.  There'd be no second chance.

A dark figure loomed up out of the fog of war.  He raised his
machine-pistol and clicked off the safety.

"Don't shoot!"  a well-known voice cried at the sound.

"You .. . you, Schulze?"

"Who did you think?"  Schulze, exhausted and virtually at the end of
his tether, said in a manner in which he had never addressed his CO
before, "Bloody hell!"

Von Dodenburg said nothing.  He knew just how overwrought Schulze must
be.  They all were at this great blood-letting.

"All right, you and Matz bring up the rear, you horned ox."  He
attempted some of the old warmth, but failed lamently.

"I'll march my er command eastwards."

Schulze muttered something under his breath and Matz said to his old,
disgruntled running mate, "Knock it off, arse-with-ears.  The CO can't
help it.  The luck of the game."

"Fuck the game!"  Schulze snorted, unappeased.

Slowly, like men walking in a dream, the survivors began to file up the
rest of the shell-pitted slope to where von Dodenburg waited to guide
them to the rear.

Over their heads he stared at the Meuse below.  He knew he was seeing
it for the last time.  Once it and the town of Huy had seemed all
important, perhaps the most important bridge in the world for a few
vital hours when history had depended upon its defence or capture.  Now
it had become a mere map reference once more, like so many other map
references marking now obscure heights and features: Godforsaken
villages, abandoned trench lines, rivers that 'had' to be taken.  They
had fought and died for such places for five years now.  Those little
numbers marked in red on their combat maps would never again be able to
conjure up the emotions or passions of who fought there and survived:
the burning heat, the passionate self-sacrifice, the object cowardice,
the suffering, the fear, the terrible madness of war.

Those places, just like the bridge at Huy, had become history.  Who
would ever know when those who were dead who had fought there, what
emotion had gone into the attempt to take it?

Von Dodenburg dismissed the bridge.  It was as if it had never been
there from the very first.  Now all that mattered was saving the
handful of survivors.  Without a second look, satisfied that all his
men who had survived were with him, he turned and started to plough
wearily through the melting snow to the east.  He didn't look back.

Chapter Nine

Slowly, silently, almost insidiously, the fog started to move in on the
heights as the survivors of SS Assault Regiment "Wotan' toiled,
bent-backed, eastwards.  At first von Dodenburg, wrapped up in his own
bitter thoughts, didn't notice the opaque white mist that wrapped
itself around his feet and slowly started to deaden all sound, even the
heavy, laboured breathing of his almost exhausted men.

But when it reached his knees and the cold penetrated to the bone, he
told himself it was caused by the contrast between two fronts: the
warmer one coming up from the valley of the Meuse below and the colder
one of the still snow-laden heights above.

Pushing himself, as virtually all his energy had vanished more, he
suspected, from emotional causes than physical ones he toiled to the
head of the strung-out column of survivors, led by Schulze carrying
someone else's weapon in addition to his own, slung over his massive
shoulders, and Matz, hobbling along as best he could with the aid of
the fencepost as a primitive crutch to replace his shell-shattered
wooden leg.

Schulze looked at his CO without interest or warmth.  At his side,
little wizened-faced Matz frowned.  It was almost as if Schulze had
taken a dislike to the CO whom he had admired, even worshipped, for all
these years.  He said nothing as von Dodenburg came parallel with them
and Matz had to break the heavy, brooding silence and the

ISS

sudden tension between the two men: "Everything all right, sir?"
adding, "With a bit of luck we might have dodged the buck-teethed
Tommies in them pisspot helmets o' theirn in a few minutes."

Von Dodenburg nodded his agreement and answered, "My thinking exactly,
as long as we don't allow 'em to latch on to any stragglers.  So,
Sergeant Schulze, I'm going to bring up the rear to see that doesn't
happen."  He unstrapped the compass from his right wrist and handed it
over to the morose, stoney-faced Schulze, "Here you are, you big rogue.
You can lead the column.  You know how to use one of these things," he
indicated the compass.

Schulze nodded, but otherwise didn't respond.

Von Dodenburg nodded and halted, allowed the weary men to file by him,
automatically counting their number and again groaning inwardly as he
became aware of their grievous losses.  The end of the column came into
view and then as the last man passed, he slipped into the rear,
machine-pistol at the ready in case the Tommies were close.

Up front, Matz snapped, "You're a right ray o' friggin' sunshine, ain't
yer, yer long streak o' yeller piss.  Yer didn't have a friggin' good
word for the CO and at the moment he needs all the friggin' support he
can get, arse with ears!"

"He's an officer, ain't he?"  Schulze said, apropos of nothing, "That
is what they get paid for.  Why should a hairy-assed common-or-garden
frigging stubble-hopper do his friggin' worrying for him?"

Matz shook his head in dismay.

"What for fuck's sake has got into you, Schulze?  You have changed!" He
looked up at Schulze's brick-red, hard face that revealed nothing of
his emotions.

"The way we've taken so much shit of late," he answered, "anyone would
have changed."  He took out a cigarette, thought better of it though
the mist was getting thicker by the minute, and put it back behind his
right ear for later.

"When this little lot is over, Matzi," he intoned solemnly, "I'll tell
yer one thing for nuthin.  I'm transferring from the SS to the corps of
shite-shovellers or the quartermaster bulls, where I can shag frigging
ugly grey mice," he meant the Wehrmucht's female auxiliaries, "for what
they're worth!"

"That'll be the day," Matz snorted scornfully, "you and the
shite-shovellers."  He shook his greying head in disbelief, but said
nothing more.

At the back of the column, von Dodenburg kept throwing apprehensive
glances to his rear, eyes trying to penetrate the milk-white gloom. For
some reason he couldn't fathom he was overcome by apprehension; it was
almost like his schooldays as a little boy in his native Bast Prussia,
returning home from the Volkschuk of a late winter's afternoon, alone
in the thick, silent fir wood making his way to his father's remote
estate, his mind full of the Grimm fairy tales or "Hansel and Gretel,"
with the witch and the sugar house.  Now he was a grown man, his chest
heavy with orders for bravery, yet he sensed that old feeling of
unease;

the feeling of being followed noiselessly in the fog.  By whom?  a
sharp, cynical voice rasped at the back of his mind.  Come on, by whom?
But he had no answer.

Rosenkranz slithered down the wet snow bank, followed by Hairless Harry
and VD, who often boasted that he could get 'siff even in a goddam
nunnery.  They knew the Germans were somewhere up ahead of them.  But
they heard nothing save the sound of their own laboured breath and the
steady drip drip of the melting snow on the firs, all muted by the
thick mist.

Hairless Harry, breathing hard, said, "We'll never find them in this
pea souper, sarge.  I say we go back and bum some more chow from the
Limeys.  At least it's warm in their kitchens and my nuts are freezing
solid."

Roscnkranz looked at him scornfully, "Are you forgetting what they did
to our poor guys?"  he asked scornfully.

"But the Limeys?"

"Fuck the Limeys!"  Roscnkranz interrupted the bald soldier harshly.

"The Krauts'll be back across the border into that friggin' Siegfried
Line o' theirs before the Limeys have finished their friggin' cups o'
friggin' China tea.  You know what the Limeys are like!"

His two running mates said nothing, staring at the white, damp wall of
fog in front as if it was suddenly important to do so.

"Ner," Rosenkranz shouldered his grease-gun more comfortably on his
broad shoulder.

"Come on, let's haul arse, we've shot the breeze too long.  Let's get
them goddam Kraut killers."

They came across the first straggler 15 minutes or so later.  Somehow
or other von Dodenburg hadn't spotted the man as he had begun to lag
behind the rest; perhaps it was due to the thickness of the fog in that
particular section of the fir forest.  Now the totally exhausted SS
sergeant slumped against the bank at the side of the track, sobbing
softly to himself like a lost, broken-hearted child.  It seemed to take
him an age to raise his head and stare at the three Americans looking
down at him with his dull, uncomprehending eyes.

Rosenkranz waited a moment or two before demanding in poor German.

"Which way did the rest go?"

The wet-eyed NCO looked at him blankly.

Rosenkranz repeated the question, making up for the words he didn't
know in German with Yiddish.

Finally the SS man, blond, young and terrified at the sight of the
three tough-looking Americans, understood.

He pointed to the track bearing to the right, away from the main one.

"Don lung st he croaked.

Rosenkranz had heard enough.

"Do him," he commanded VD.

"Why me?"  the former Casanova demanded.

"Cos I've fuckin' well said so.  Anyhow you're the only one with a
knife, and don't let the Kraut bastard squeal.

The rest must be near."  He pointed to the footprints in the main track
slowly filling up with melted snow water.

"That tells us they can't be far."

VD said nothing.  Instead, he advanced upon the German, slumped
exhausted against the wet bank.  He had his knife concealed behind his
back like a dentist about to pull a child's tooth, hiding his forceps
from the frightened kid.

Suddenly he thrust out his free hand and seized the young German by his
throat.  He tried to cry out for mercy.

VD didn't give him a chance.  He plunged the blade straight into the
German's chest.  The man quivered violently, as if in the throes of
sexual ecstasy.  Blood flooded VD's clenched fist with its warm, red
stickiness.  He struck home again.  The SS man gave a soft moan and
slumped backwards, eyes closing slowly like someone suddenly overcome
by sleep.  Carefully, VD released his hold.  The man dropped slowly and
fell noiselessly to the bank.

It was just then that Obersturmbcmnfuhrer Kuno von Dodenburg stepped
into the glade, raising his machine pistol in shocked silence at the
terrible scene before him as he did so.

"What-" he began.

Rosenkranz was quicker off the mark.  He jerked up his grease-gun and
pointed the muzzle directly at von Dodenburg's heart.

"Freeze the mitts," he snarled.

Von Dodenburg didn't understand the Americanese, but the threat was
quite clear.  He let the machine-pistol

ISO

drop to his chest by its belt, trying to take his eyes off the dead SS
man lying on the bank, staring into the fog with sightless eyes.

Rosenkranz allowed himself a slow grin of triumph.

"Well, Kraut," he said slowly and carefully, concerned that the hated
German SS officer should understand every word he spoke.  Soon the
Kraut would die.  He wanted him to writhe and plead for mercy like
those poor devils of Company K had done before those SS bastards had
slaughtered them in cold blood so cruelly.

Von Dodenburg knew he was in a tight fix.  The survivors were too far
ahead now to miss him and he could see from the villainous looks on the
unshaven faces of his captors that he could expect no mercy from them.
They were going to kill him just as they had done with the exhausted SS
sergeant.  Now everything depended upon his own cunning and quick
thinking.  He waited for the Amis' next move.

"Kneel," the big Jew commanded.

"No," he said firmly in English.

"I won't kneel for anyone-" but his defiant words ended in a
high-pitched grunt of pure agony as Rosenkranz's boot lashed out and
caught him sickeningly between the legs.  He staggered back and dropped
to his knees, hands clasping his crotch.

"That's better," Rosenkranz said.

"You're learning fast, Kraut!"

Von Dodenburg said nothing; he couldn't speak for the agony.

Suddenly, without even a trace of fear, he realised that he was lost,
finished, done for: "KD in yer heart and the tick-tock in the pisspot"
as Schulze would have put it if he had been there.  But already he knew
he would never see Sergeant Schulze, or any of them for that matter,
ever again.  Instinctively, Kuno von Dodenburg knew he had only a
matter of seconds to live.  They were going to kill him.

ion

"Say your prayers if you know any, Kraut," the big Jew said happily,
raising his grease-gun.  It was almost as if he expected the man on his
knees to raise and wring his hands in the classic position of
supplication and plead for mercy.

But von Dodenburg didn't.  His lean, hollowed-out face showed no
emotion and revealed nothing.  It was as if he had been expecting this
to be his fate all along, as if ordained on high by some terrible God
of war years before.

Perhaps it had.

Rosenkranz said, "Well this is it."  His words were almost casual.

Von Dodenburg looked up at him in the very same instant that the
ex-short-order cook pressed the trigger of his grease-gun.  Bone
splintered.  Blood splattered the wet snow in ugly red gobs.  Urine
flooded von Dodenburg's lower body warmly, unpleasantly.  Not that it
mattered.  As his bullet-riddled body was thrown against the nearest
tree he felt he was falling into an abyss from which there was no
escape.

A red mist threatened to overcome him.  Through it he could just
glimpse that dark angry face like that of some Jewish God of Wrath. Von
Dodenburg's aristocratic nostrils were assailed momentarily by the
smell of kitchen grease and cooking.  He opened his mouth and wanted to
laugh at the thought.  He, the commander of the Germany's most elite
regiment, had been killed by a Jewish cook.

He tried to speak.  Nothing came.  Rosenkranz hawked contemptuously. He
puffed out his thick, sensual lips and spat venomously into von
Dodenburg's bloody face.  Spittle dripping down his wan, handsome
features, Kuno von Dodenburg, the last commander of SS Assault Regiment
"Wotan', drifted into unconsciousness and death.

IT WAS all over at last.

ENVOI

"Ende gut .. . alles gut German Saying Literally: "End good .. .
everything good," All that ends well is well.

Postscript The snow of that terrible winter had almost vanished.  Here
and there there were still hard patches of frozen dirty-white among the
abandoned foxholes and grim, shell-shattered craters of those lonely,
war-torn heights.

Doggedly, Captain Kessler plodded across the height, along the way the
Germans had fought that December, his eyes here, there and everywhere,
taking in and recording the aftermath of battle before it vanished for
ever.

Since he had been wounded at the end of December, Eisenhower had
appointed him personally to his staff at Versailles.  As "Ike' had told
him, his pale, drawn face happy that the 'surprise offensive' was over
and the Germans were in full retreat through the Siegfried Line,
heading straight for the Rhine: "No more front line for you, Kessler.
You're too valuable to be captured."

"Ike' had not mentioned 'killed' which would have solved the Supreme
Commander's problem with him for good, for dead men don't talk.

"From now onward, Kessler, you are to be my personal observer way
behind the line."

Kessler had already been briefed to make the appropriate noises of
thanks and gratitude by "Beetle' Smith, who had added in warning just
before he had finished with him, "And get this through your head,
Kessler.  Forget what happened.

Never write a word about it.  Ike might be giving you a medal for
bravery in the field, but cross him and-" He left the rest of his
threat unspoken, but Kessler had understood all right.  He hadn't
needed a crystal ball to get the message.

One word out of place and he'd be for the chop.

But that had been in early January.  In February, with the Germans
gone, he had almost forgotten the Chief of Staffs threat.  Now he
concentrated on registering what an abandoned battlefield looked like
for the future, when the fact that Middleton's VIII Corps had lost
12,000 men in the course of the great deception to lure the Krauts out
of the Siegfried Line to the great slaughter in Belgium.

Slowly, a lone, bent figure in a smart HQ uniform, complete with snappy
brand-new trenchcoat, he walked that sodden height, littered with the
debris of war, the shattered vehicles, the abandoned cannon and the
bloated bodies of the dead in their scores, now revealed from beneath
the vanished snowdrifts of the previous December.

Now with his mind and eye he recorded the gory, sad details of that
grim height, the field of blood and sudden violent death.  He knew he
must remember how the shattered, rusting cannon was twisted and wrought
into that grotesque shape; the rifles dug, muzzle-first, into the
ground to indicate where the dead were still buried; the obscene
severed limbs scattered into the skeletal boughs of the surviving trees
like terrible human fruit.

Oh yes, the dead.  In death they were still more important that those
who were alive this cold February day.  For they would be the silent
witnesses for all time to the treachery and counter-treachery that had
once taken place on this remote heath.  In those long white rows of
rigid white stone graves in the huge military cemeteries, now being
established behind the front, dressed in death like soldiers on parade,
they would bear testimony for all time to their betrayal by their own
commander: killed before they hardly had time to live.

Behind him, the blacks of the Graves Registration Commission were
leaving their trucks on the hillside road.

carrying their stretchers and spades, moving upwards at a leisurely
pace, as if they had seen it all before and there was no hurry: the
dead could no longer run away.

Swiftly, before they began to pick up the dead for transportation back
to Belgium, for no American soldier would ever be buried on enemy soil,
he started to sketch their postures on the GI pad, pencilling in
remarks wherever necessary.  He concentrated on a young infantryman
slumped waterlogged at the edge of a shell hole.  One side of his face
had been shot away completely, but the other was intact.  It bore a
strange sort of lopsided grin, as if in death the youngster was somehow
amused at what had happened to him.

"Features, pinc, rosy, healthy looking," he wrote at the side of the
sketch.

Wonder what he was thinking of when he was fatally hit?"  He put in
more detail, working swiftly, accurately.

"Flies burst," he scribbled.  He finished the sketch, writing: "Pockets
turned inside out... obviously corpse has been looted.  Damp papers
everywhere ... letters from his sweetheart, folks ... dirty
photographs, looks French, torn in half ... looters prudish perhaps?

"You an official war artist, cap'n suh?"  a thick Southern voice cut in
and startled him.

He looked up.  A pleasant-faced negro with dark, intelligent eyes stood
there, leaning on his long shovel, looking down at him, his boots heavy
with grey mud, the black slicker he wore streaked with it as well, as
if he may have just dug a grave.

He shook his head.  In a strictly segregated US Army it wasn't
customary for a black to ask a white soldier for information,
especially if the latter was an officer.

"Forgive me, suh," the black said, face suddenly solemn, "do you know
what the dead are really like?"

"How do you mean?"  he asked puzzled.

"Well, sir, they stink.  Lordie.  lordie, how they stink!  Tve buried
hundreds of 'em and they all stink, black and white,

officer and private.  They all us have.  I guess they all us will."

He looked at Kessler like some black oracle, standing in that lonely
place, the wind whipping the slicker against his skinny frame.  Then he
tipped his helmet liner in a kind of civilian salute and, shovel over
his shoulder, trudged away, whistling tonelessly to himself.  He was
searching for more of the dead.

Kessler watched him depart, suddenly deflated, all enthusiasm for the
dead vanished.  Would people in later years really be interested in
what happened up here?  For a few minutes he was confused, without
purpose.  Then his tough young face hardened.  Of course they would.
Wasn't that the business of a writer to make people feel, understand,
remember.

Once more he started to draw, make notes, as enthusiastic as ever: a
big, lonely man who would never forget .. .and finds it can be done after all -though only at great cost.  But all
the while Eisenhower has known the German intentions and in order to
trap them has deliberately thinned his lines to allow the Germans to
get through... Based on fact, Operation Fury is an action-packed story,
full of deceit and counter-deceit in the highest places.

Other titles by the ever-popular Leo Kessler available from Severn
House include March of Death, The Wotan Mission, Breakout From
Stalingrad, Flight from Berlin, The Hitler Werewolf Murders and SS
Attacks.  Leo Kessler is the pseudonym for the author Charles Whiting,
who also writes as Duncan Harding and John Kerrigan.