The parachutist FG-42s and STG-44s hammered the opening armored doors of the big vehicles, ripping up clouds of metallic jet spray, lashing against the troopers who tried to disembark to get into action. They went down as the spitzers scythed them, plunged into the compartment, and ricocheted off the heavy armor. Wili was already adjusting his aim on the long nozzle that was the flamethrower’s snout, and he squeezed another half second’s worth of oxidation off, this gust to shroud the third vehicle in the same cloak of burning, and those poor devils, screaming, flaming, tumbled over the rim of the machine and landed, ran, and went down, smoldering and still.
Suddenly there was nothing to shoot. The stench of burned fuel and meat filled the air, and a cloud of grimy smoke hung over everything. The captain still flickered away on the ground, as his flesh had not all been consumed.
“Comrade!” came a call from inside the second panzerwagen.
“We will throw more grenades next, then burn out the rest of you. Leave your weapons, come out hands high. If we do not see palms, we fire. Quick, quick, quick.”
The Serbian survivors emerged from each vehicle; they were searched and led to the road and ordered to sit, hands still up, hands always up. Parachutists with their STG-44s circled them.
Wili dumped the fifty-pound apparatus, which was almost out of fuel anyway, and walked over to Karl. “Well,” he said, “I don’t think this is the battle they had in mind, but we won it nevertheless.”
“Interesting development, isn’t it?”
“Good shot, by the way.”
“Yes, I did better this time. Now what? Have you figured anything out?”
“No, I’ve been rather busy.”
“I know this is hard to believe, but I have an actual idea myself.”
“Amazements never cease.”
“I note we have two basically undamaged panzerwagens at our disposal.”
“Some bodies inside. But they’re easily attended to.”
“I note also that if we strip our prisoners, we have, what, fifteen or twenty, whatever, enough SS jackets and helmets to cover us all.”
“Yes, we do. I think I see where you’re going with this.”
“We have Die weisse Hexe, our ticket to that FW-200 now on the tarmac at Uzhgorod.”
“Yes.”
“Let’s put on the SS tunics. Let’s release the SS boys, who, naked, will be of little harm to us. They can walk out of the mountains in any direction they choose. Then let’s take the young woman. Let’s blow Ginger. That’s our mission, after all. Let’s drive to the Uzhgorod airfield. Let’s board the plane.”
“So far, so good,” said Wili.
“Then let’s fly to—somewhere we won’t be executed, as will happen if we fly to Berlin.”
“This plane has great range. We can fly low, so no radar will read us. I’m sure our pistols will convince the pilots to cooperate. After all, they benefit, too, assuming we can find the right airfield.”
“I’m open to suggestions.”
“I don’t want to go to prison, either,” said Wili. “It involves being locked up, I understand.”
“Well,” said Karl, “that means Moscow’s out. Russians. Rome’s out. Americans. Alexandria’s out. Brits.”
“Hmmm,” said Wili.
* * *
Karl jumped into the trench. She sat in a corner, no longer guarded, and looked at him.
She had shaken her hair loose, so it tumbled down, tawny and complex. Her blue eyes were wide open, her cheekbones sharp, pulling her tanned skin tight, almost concave. There was no panic in her, only a kind of languid intelligence. She wore the peasant smock over a white blouse, with a bright scarf around her elegant neck. He had not noticed these details before.
“Care for another cigarette?” he said.
“That would be nice. By the way, who got killed?”
As Karl got out the cigarette, and one for himself, lit then them both, he said, “They were from Police Battalion, attached to Thirteenth SS Mountain Division, called Scimitar, which is a kind of sword, I’m told.”
“One of those curved things, is that right?”
“Yes. More dramatic than effective. I suppose it has symbolic meaning to certain people.”
“Since you’re alive and I don’t see any lightning flashes about, am I to assume you shot it out with the SS?”
“I suppose we did.”
“Odd, you don’t look insane. But now you’ve killed a batch of your own people, so it seems we’re both going to die.”
“Not exactly,” he said. “On that ‘your own people’ remark, I think I would disagree. But more important for now, I have a plan. It’s quite good, even if I was the one who came up with it, and my plans are usually pretty awful. It seems you’re our ticket to a perfectly good airplane, and I hate to let a good plane go to waste.”