But today General von Bink made time for tea. Von Bink, his white shirtsleeves rolled up, his Knight’s Cross with oak leaves displayed not at his neck but in a drawer somewhere, his riding breeches with their red stripe for general officer disappearing neatly into his highly polished riding boots, his gray hair bristly, was one of the old guys. He was Panzer Aristocracy: he’d fought in the Great War, then Spain, and rolled his machines across the flat countries of both Europe and Ukraine. He’d been shot at a million times, wounded half a dozen, and was still full of pep and vigor. He really did enjoy the hell out of war.
“Nice of you fellows to come by,” he said, as if an issue of free will had been involved. “Sergeant, you’re the one with six wound stripes, is that so?”
“Yes sir. Almost as many as you,” said Wili Bober.
“Sir,” said Karl, “I’d like to get him sent back to Germany. He’d make a superb training NCO. The new boys could use his wisdom.”
“An excellent idea. If we were winning the war, I would say yes, yes, immediately. But as you know, we are losing, and the situation is somewhat different. Oh, and Sergeant, I have six, too, but I was sitting down when I got most of mine!”
That brought a laugh. Yes, sitting down in a burning Panzer IV with Ivan 76s whizzing through the air! Anyway, he poured each parachutist a little more tea. He was nothing if not a stickler for ceremony.
The office was huge, with a wall map of the immediate operational area obscuring one whole side. Otherwise, it was the kind of room where piano recitals may have taken place, and coming-out parties and all the social niceties that filled the work of Tolstoy but not Dostoyevsky. Compared to the frenzied activity on all other floors, this room was serene. The outward wall was given to broad sheets of window, out of which could be seen a terrace, cherry orchards, Panther tanks, and mountains.
“Well, you know you’re here for a job.”
“Yes sir.”
He led them through the glass doors to the patio beyond. It was a cooler day than normal, and for once the oppressive humidity wasn’t melting everything. A breeze kept the exhaust miasma in circulation, so the air seemed fit to breathe. It was a good day to be alive, even if too many like it weren’t left, both the “good day” part and the “alive” part.
“Come, over here,” the general said. He pointed. “The mountains.” Not so far away, the bulk of the green Carpathians humped up against the western horizon.
“We used them to navigate our way back to the lines after the bridge job.”
“Good, then you’re familiar with them. A road runs through them, called the Yaremche Road, for the biggest village along the way. It’s too steep and too unstable, the engineers say, for tanks. At most it could support a Panzerwagen, but no more.”
“Yes sir,” said Karl.
“The road takes you through them, and then to Uzhgorod. At a certain point, four-point-six kilometers beyond Yaremche, it rises and passes through a gap, high stone cliffs on each side for about a hundred meters, which is called Natasha’s Womb. No one know who Natasha was, but the point is, we need to hold her private parts.”
“Yes sir.”
“Ivan has a partisan army in those mountains. He may order them to the Womb. He can land several platoons of paratroopers not far away. He might infiltrate a special group, commandos like yourself, overland, through the forests. If he closes it off, he cuts down what I think many see as a last-minute escape, the shortcut to the next operating area behind our newly established lines. I cannot move a tank army or an infantry division through it. But there are many who could make use of it, men who want a quick, sure way out, our staff, the other divisional and regimental staff, the intelligence people, the signal people, anyone too valuable to join the long, slow-moving escape north of Lemberg and link up with what’s left of Army Group Center, subject to strafing, bombing, artillery, do you see?”
“And of course the SS?”
“Yes, yes, the SS, correct.”
“It’s sort of a secret escape route for the SS, then?” said Karl.
“I sense sourness in your voice. Why can’t SS invest its own troops in protecting its way out? The answer is, the Waffen-SS units are very badly mauled, almost nonoperational. We do have a new group from Thirteenth SS-Mountain, called Scimitar, a police battalion I’m told, but they’re specialists in anti-bandit operations, not in static warfare. This would seem perfect for them, but they’re on their own special security assignment for Dr. Groedl. They work directly for him. Not available. So it’s fallen to us. That means I need a bunch of extremely professional boys to hold Natasha’s Womb until the very last second, then blow it so that no Russian vehicles can pursue, and get out the best way possible. Obviously, Battlegroup Von Drehle is best suited for a special-needs job like this.”