Craig DiLouie with David Moody and Timothy W. Long

THE FRONT

EPISODE 3: BERLIN OR BUST

FALLSCHIMJÄGER RANKS

MENTIONED IN THE 3RD FALLSCHIRMJÄGER (PARATROOPER) REGIMENT (3FJR)

Jäger: Private or paratrooper, derived from word, “hunter”

Oberjäger: Private first class

Gefreiter: Corporal

Feldwebel: Sergeant, commands squad

Oberfeldwebel: Master sergeant or sergeant first class, commands squad

Leutnant: Second lieutenant, commands platoon

Oberleutnant: Lieutenant, commands platoon

Hauptfeldwebel: Company sergeant major

Hauptmann: Captain, commands company

Oberst: Colonel, commands regiment

Generalmajor: Major general, commands division

PROLOGUE

NIGHTMARE

The front dissolved under the onslaught.

The great German winter offensive, involving half a million fighting men, died and rose again to fight the living. Hordes of dark figures materialized from the fog. Pickets sounded the alarm. Machine-guns rattled. The gunfire rose to a constant rolling roar. Officers shouted, Hold the line! Pour it on, boys! Keep it hot!

They had no idea what they were fighting.

The dead staggered under the gunfire, shrugged at the impacts of dozens of rounds, and kept coming. Grenades tossed them like ragdolls. They got back up smoking. As they neared their prey, they broke into a lurching jog.

Swarms overran the trenches at a dozen points. Grinning under their steel helmets, they poured through the gaps. The survivors fell back, fighting as they moved. One by one, the guns fell silent. The retreat became a rout.

The roads choked with panicked soldiers and screaming civilians. Vehicles moved at a crawl in the endless jam. The dead right behind, never tiring, never stopping. The rout became a slaughter.

At his Verdun HQ, Eisenhower and his top generals watched grainy recon films in a dead-quiet, smoke-filled room. Men running across the snowpack, the dead loping behind. A soldier firing wildly as a mob of uniformed figures brought him down. Somebody gasped at the sight of American soldiers tearing their countrymen to shreds. The screen turned white as the last film stopped.

Somebody switched on the lights. Nobody spoke for a while. The war had changed, but nobody understood what it meant.

Hitler’s desperate gamble had come close to whipping them, but the Twelfth Army Group had hung on while Montgomery and his Twenty-first Army Group still held in the north. Now this. This impossible horror. They had to stop the advancing undead at all costs before the front was lost and with it, all Europe.

Eisenhower unleashed Patton and his Third Army. Patton had three armored divisions pointed east, which he said he could swing north in two days. He promised to send the Boche to the infernal regions even if his boys had to kill them three times. Ike said that was fine, but the juggernaut had to be stopped. If not stopped, delayed long enough to organize a new line of defense at the Meuse.

Patton marshaled his divisions and got them moving. A major feat, wheeling an army of 100,000 men and heavy vehicles across narrow roads in snow, rain, and fog. Third Army covered 100 miles of ground in two days and made contact with the vanguard of the undead horde in a dismal sleet.

The tanks plunged into the shambles of a vast convoy. Abandoned tanks and five-tons, equipment and luggage. The heavy beasts shouldered aside vehicles and ground everything else to shreds beneath their shrieking treads. Soon, they were flinging shells into the trees in a constant barrage.

The undead crumpled under the withering fire. The tankers felt confident, shooting at somebody who rarely shot back. Patton pushed them forward. He held a fierce belief in the doctrine of mobile warfare. To him, territory meant nothing. Victory depended on finding the enemy and crushing him.

As his divisions struggled through sleet and mud toward Bastogne, the crowds of undead thickened into armies. They poured out of the dense forest on all sides, drove the infantry back, and covered the tanks in writhing carpets of bodies.

Patton ordered his men to push harder, resulting in a bloody battle of attrition that lasted four days before cold, exhaustion, constant losses, and depleted ammunition took their final toll. The dead didn’t sleep. They didn’t tire. After Patton’s HQ was overrun, the Americans broke and ran, leaving behind equipment and blinded tanks that became tombs after draining the last of their fuel.

Of the 100,000 men who drove north toward Bastogne, four out of ten did not return. Demoralized, isolated units streamed west. Ike rallied them at the River Meuse, where a thin green line prepared its last stand. A pell-mell of mixed units, green replacements, and rear-echelon cooks and clerks.

They had clear lanes of fire here. If the weather improved, they could finally bring their airpower to bear. Artillery officers set up killing zones with their howitzers. They dug in and waited. Here, just 100 miles from Paris, they’d hold.

They had no choice. If they didn’t, they couldn’t retreat fast enough to escape the undead tide.

Thousands of shell-shocked soldiers and civilians still crowded the roads, fleeing the undead advance. They warned the defenders the hordes were close behind, too many to count. Military police directed them to hastily thrown together field hospitals and refugee camps in Reims, Verdun, and Metz. These survivors brought infection with them.

The camps all reported outbreaks behind the American line as the first of the dead marched out of the Ardennes Forest, a gaunt SS officer in a leather greatcoat. A vast mass of half-frozen, rotting figures followed, lurching eagerly across the snowy fields toward the American trenches.

Christmas, 1944.

Along the line, the giant field guns opened fire on the horde.

CHAPTER ONE

WORK FOR VICTORY

Jäger Yohann Muller and Gefreiter Otto Steiner hauled the groaning rifleman across the tiled floor.

“Victory at all costs,” the rifleman said and vomited.

They heaved the man the last two meters until they were able to position his head over the bidet.

“Christ, Wolfgang,” Steiner said. “You vomit as accurately as you shoot.”

“Work for victory.” The rifleman coughed a stream of bile.

Muller had joined the Fallschirmjäger because they were the best, and he wanted to be the best. He’d survived the hard training and was now one of the elite paratroopers. Three months in Genoa, though, and still he hadn’t seen combat. The regiment had fought the Allies from Sicily to Cassino and stopped them there, at the Gustav Line, until the Amis flanked them. After five months of brutal fighting, the paratroopers withdrew to Genoa to lick their wounds and refit.

Now they celebrated because of the armistice, which had arrived like a second Christmas.

Just weeks ago, the situation seemed bleak. The Allies had thrown the Germans out of Africa and then Sicily, rolling up the Italian peninsula until stopped first at the Gustav Line and then at the Green Line farther north. The enemy had landed in Normandy and pushed across France almost to the German border. In the East, the Russian juggernaut swept through the Balkans.

One disaster after another. Hell, the way Muller’s comrades told it, it had stopped being a real war. They were fighting just to survive.

Still, he had joined the Army to do his part. Germany was his nation, right or wrong, and he would fight to stop foreigners from invading it.

Back home, everybody except the diehards knew Germany had lost the war. The better the propaganda became, the worse everything got. All the while, Adolf Hitler promised experimental super weapons that would deliver victory, though few believed him. The Führer’s aura of strength and genius had faded. The Leader no longer trusted the Army, and word had it he’d lost his mind.

But he’d done it. Operation Autumn Mist. An all-or-nothing gamble in the Ardennes Forest. Half a million men in the assault. For the past few weeks, the Wehrmachtbericht, the daily State Radio broadcast about the military situation, buzzed with the great victory and promised an end to the war. Muller wouldn’t have believed that either if it weren’t for the Avro Lancasters.

Due to Genoa’s importance as a port, the English had pounded it from the start of the war. Planes and naval guns had flattened one out of three buildings. Early this morning, the air raid sirens wailed. English bombers roared again over the Ligurian Sea, and Genoa girded itself for another pounding. Instead of bombs, papers rained from the sky, announcing a unilateral ceasefire.

While overjoyed that Germany had triumphed, Muller worried he might never see combat. He might have missed the war and the chance to prove himself to his comrades. He’d begun to wonder if he’d enlisted for Germany or for his own personal reasons. Not that it mattered, as he would have been drafted anyway.

Wolfgang retched into the bidet. The door opened, flooding the room with the piercing notes of the swing band out in the dance hall. Oberjäger Erich Schulte entered and wrinkled his nose at the smell.

“Delightful,” the sniper sighed. “Just delightful.”

Schulte marched to the mirror and inspected his appearance. Probably touching up before making his move on some local girl. The squad constantly ribbed the handsome soldier for being a ladies’ man.

“Your appearance doesn’t matter if you’re paying for it,” Steiner said.

“That kind of thinking is why you’re always paying for it, Otto,” Schulte said as he combed his hair into a neat side part. “And while you’re paying for it tonight, I’ll be bedding a sexy taxi dancer.”

“And here all this time I thought your scoped rifle was your girlfriend.”

Schulte laughed.

Steiner said, “She’s probably a partisan, you know.”

“Not after I’m done with her.” The sniper sauntered out the door.

“It’s all the same,” Steiner shouted after him. “You pay no matter what.” The lance corporal shook his head. “That asshole thinks he’s better than everybody.”

Muller agreed, but had learned to keep his mouth shut. The veterans were fiercely loyal to each other even as they squabbled.

He patted the rifleman’s back. “You all right, Wolfgang?”

“God is with us,” the man mumbled and passed out.

“Give me a hand,” Steiner said. They hauled him into a corner and left him. “Makes you wonder.”

“What does?” Muller asked the machine-gunner.

“These idiots, that’s what. War made them hardened killers, but peace turns them into raging beasts. When they aren’t fighting, they become insatiable for alcohol, food, and tits. I hope we get back in the fight before we sack the city. It’s a beautiful city, and I’d hate to see it burn to the ground.”

The soldier pushed the door open, and they returned to the crowded dance hall. Soldiers caught sight of the Fallschirmjäger patches on their sleeves and stepped aside. Along with the mountain troops, the paratroopers were the most elite infantry in the Wehrmacht, or German Army. But Muller didn’t feel like a real Fallschirmjäger, not yet.

“Do you think there will be more fighting?” Muller said.

“We haven’t beaten the commies yet, Yohann.”

They rejoined their table. The paratroopers grinned at them, eyes bleary. Muller sat next to Oberfeldwebel Jurgen Wolff, his squad leader. The thickset veteran brooded over his glass of beer. When he raised it for a drink, Muller spotted the puckered scar on the back of his hairy hand. He suspected the master sergeant had more scars than that, both on the outside and inside. The man wore four wound badges on his chest, the Iron Cross at his throat.

“How goes it, Herr Oberfeldwebel?” Muller said.

Wolff finished stuffing his pipe with Turkish tobacco and lit it. “Tired.”

Tired of it all, sounded like. Muller envied him his world-weariness. The things he’d seen. The ordeals he’d suffered and survived. Wolff was alte hasen, one of the “old hares,” the veterans who’d survived the horrors of the front line. He’d seen it all, and it had shaped him.

“Do you think it’s over? The armistice?”

The sergeant exhaled a puff of smoke. “There’s still Ivan.”

“At least we’re not fighting the whole world anymore,” Oberjäger Weber said, the soldier everybody called Kugelfest. Bullet-proof.

Muller had heard the stories. Believing Hitler watched over him, Weber often charged enemy positions under withering fire, but had never even gotten a scratch.

“Tsk, tsk, comrade,” Steiner corrected. “You forgot we’ve still got the Macaronis on our side.”

The paratroopers smirked at the joke that told itself. The Italian Royal Army was famous in the German ranks for running away in battle. A bitter joke, as they ran precisely when needed most. Now the joke was growing old as it wasn’t quite true anymore; the southern half of Italy had declared itself for the Allies.

“Have you fought the commies, Herr Oberfeldwebel?” Muller asked.

The sergeant nodded. “At Orel.”

“I wish I’d been there.”

“Careful what you wish. It was hell on earth. Now we might be going back. Last time, the Ivans killed most of my squad.”

“Were you an oberfeldwebel then?”

“No, I was a green recruit like you.”

“Ah, scheisse.” Shit. Steiner nudged Wolff. “SS, Herr Oberfeldwebel.”

A squad of Waffen-SS panzergrenadiers had entered the dance hall. They looked down their noses at everybody before finding a table for themselves.

“Pricks,” Wolff growled.

“Psychos,” Steiner agreed. “But they’re our psychos.”

Muller eyed the Waffen-SS panzergrenadiers, who stiffly shed their green wool coats around a table they’d confiscated from some artillerymen. The Führer didn’t trust the Wehrmacht anymore, so he’d built up a shadow military called the Waffen-Schutzstaffel (SS, or ϟϟ in Armanen runes) or armed protection squadron. The state media constantly trumpeted the great fighting abilities and triumphs of the SS, most of which Muller had no doubt were fabricated.

He’d heard that over the summer, a combat group from the Sixteenth Waffen-SS Division had fought the Americans at Anzio and later destroyed the Red Star Brigade, an Italian partisan force. Which was well done except for the rumored massacre of a thousand civilians in Tuscany. What kind of animals would do that? Murder, torture—no act was too brutal for the SS in service to the Fatherland.

The paratroopers prided themselves on their chivalry. They didn’t abuse civilians or prisoners. Muller was glad for it. Back home, the propaganda portrayed the war as a very romantic and sanitary affair. The soldiers told a different story, that it had reached an unprecedented level of savagery. Muller hadn’t had any romantic illusions, particularly after seeing Berlin bombed, but also had no desire to shoot non-combatants. He wanted to survive the war with his moral self intact.

Steiner said, “Uh-oh, here comes one of the ass—heil Hitler, comrade!”

“Heil Hitler,” the soldier said, raising his hand in a lazy salute. “Leutnant Ludwig Fuchs, Sixteenth Panzergrenadiers, at your service. Always a pleasure to meet Fallschirmjäger. You are the Reich’s greatest heroes.”

The Reich. The Nazi empire that was supposed to endure a thousand years.

Wolff fixed him with a cryptic stare. “Your unit is also well-known.”

“We must compare notes sometime. I feel we have much to teach each other. Such as where my comrades and I can find company this evening. We’ve only just arrived in Genoa. I thought you would make a suggestion.”

“I know just the place, Herr Leutnant,” said Steiner.

“A clean establishment,” the Waffen-SS officer added.

“Ja, it’s—”

“With a fair price.”

“Have you ever heard of Abrielle’s?”

After Steiner gave him directions where the SS would find nothing but an empty, bombed-out tenement, Wolff asked, “Do you have any information about Operation Autumn Mist, Herr Leutnant?”

“Surely, Oberfeldwebel, you already know it was a complete success. Our armies are advancing on Paris as we speak.”

“Of course, but how was such a great victory accomplished?”

“A new super weapon developed by our brilliant Führer.”

Muller couldn’t guess what the weapon might be that could defeat the Allied armies so decisively. He’d all but given up hope of victory. Still skeptical, he wondered what this particular victory was going to cost Germany in the end.

“So we’ll be heading to the Eastern Front.”

“If at all,” Fuchs said. “The same weapon has been deployed against Ivan.”

“This could be the end, Herr Leutnant?” Muller asked. “The war could be over?”

Around the table, the paratroopers’ faces shined with hope. Muller would miss his chance to find himself in combat, but he couldn’t begrudge these men their longing for peace.

The SS officer smiled. “The end is coming very soon, comrades.”

CHAPTER TWO

ORDERS

“Achtung,” Leutnant Klaus Reiser shouted. Attention! “The captain is about to call assembly. Schnell, schnell, you idiots.”

The men groaned from their sleep sacks in the empty warehouse where the Army had billeted them. Most had slept in their uniforms, too drunk to undress.

Otto Steiner rolled onto his side and smacked his lips. “Ja, schnell.” Hurrying up sounded good. He’d do it as soon as he finished his dream.

Greta smiled and reached out to him—

Reiser kicked him in the ribs. “Get up, pig-dog.”

The gefreiter jumped to his feet and made a show of straightening his uniform. “Jawohl, Herr Leutnant. Einsatzbereit.” Yes, indeed, Lieutenant. Ready for action.

Standing behind the lieutenant, Oberjäger Schulte eyed him with a slight smile, his handsome face glowing from his night of wild sex. Jäger Beck, the rifleman the squad had forgotten in the dance hall bathroom, had also managed to rise early.

“Schnell, schnell, Steiner,” Schulte said as if saying, tsk, tsk.

“Ja, Steiner,” Beck chimed in. “Schnell.”

“I should have let you drown in shit in that bidet, Wolfgang.”

“Schnell,” the lieutenant roared at them all.

Reeling with hangover, the platoon flinched and hurried as the lieutenant commanded. Steiner took a swig from his water bottle and spat. Poured more into a tin and lathered his face for shaving.

The last lieutenant had led the platoon in a counterattack among the rocks surrounding the monastery at Cassino. A tank shell punched his head clean off. Hunched over his MG42 machine-gun, Steiner had seen it all. One moment, the dashing young officer exhorted his men to glory. The next, the air vibrated around the space where his head had been.

Steiner would never be able to erase that image from his mind. The headless body wobbling and still holding the upraised Luger, which fired once in final defiance before dropping. He remembered thinking: That’d look great on a propaganda poster. Fight to the death, comrades, and beyond!

Reiser joined the platoon in Genoa and had been itching to get into combat ever since. He struck Steiner as a halsschmerzen, an itchy-necked commander out for glory so he could win the Knights Cross of the Iron Cross medal, the coveted tin necktie. A typical Prussian bastard who felt that anything worth doing was worth overdoing, and that not overdoing was the same as failing.

Commanders like that took big risks in the field. As fanatic as the SS but for personal rather than national glory.

Steiner turned from his mirror. “Any word on why the company is having an assembly, Herr Leutnant?”

“Ja,” sneered Reiser. “We are going to England.”

The paratroopers glanced at each other and smirked at the second-lieutenant’s attempt at humor.

“Did you hear that, kid?” Steiner asked Muller as he finished his shave. “We’ll be drinking Schnapps in London!”

The rifleman looked up from his kit. “What?”

“Maybe the SS arschloch was right. Germany’s enemies all capitulated thanks to a magical weapon the Führer cooked up. Maybe we really are going home.”

Muller nodded glumly, the poor romantic fool.

Out in the courtyard, the band started playing the Horst Wessel Song. The company was mustering. Assembly had started.

“Schnell, schnell,” Steiner said with a grin, wiping his face clean. “Hurry up and wait.” He opened his prized tin of Scho-Ka-Kola and ate a piece of the bittersweet dark chocolate as a make-do breakfast. Then he buttoned his tunic, pulled on his steel helmet, and followed his comrades outside.

Eagle Company, 3rd FJR, mustered by platoon in a neat U-shaped formation as the band played its stirring march. A paratrooper regiment consisted of 2,600 men, comprised of three combat battalions of 850 men each plus battalion headquarters, communications platoon, and battalion supply train. Each combat platoon boasted a strength of forty men organized into three nine-man squads. Sixteen rifles, nine machine pistols, and six machine-guns.

Of course, these numbers only existed on paper now. Combat, illness, and accident had reduced the regiment to just 800 men and Hauptmann Werner’s Eagle Company similarly to sixty combat effectives. These paratroopers stood at parade rest in the cold in their blue-gray Luftwaffe (Air Force) uniforms. Highly disciplined and well trained, they were the best and they knew it.

Steiner thought it comical that he counted among them. He’d volunteered for the paratroopers to impress a girl back in his hometown. Greta Fischer, a big-breasted Aryan beauty who idolized the Führer. Her great bosom heaved and her cheeks blushed as she talked about German boys giving their lives in droves at the front. Steiner didn’t know if it was the mass death or the garish pageantry of it all that aroused Greta’s passion, he didn’t care. He just wanted in on it.

Next thing he knew, he was living with men and getting shot at by gum-chewing Amis who’d come 5,000 miles just to kill him. Lice, dysentery, iron rations, cruel officers, and retreat. A year of savage fighting, and he barely remembered what Greta looked like, while he heard she’d married a Party official and was enthusiastically doing her part to make blue-eyed babies for the Reich.

Steiner no longer fought to impress her. He didn’t fight for the Fatherland and its superior ideology and wounded pride. He didn’t fight for all the pageantry designed to exalt the ridiculous into something deadly serious. He fought just to survive, ripping bullets from his MG42 to make the goddamn Amis stop trying to kill him. Just twenty years old. He’d barely lived.

For two years, his main concerns were staying dry, getting rid of body lice, thinking about women, bitching about officers, keeping his machine-gun working, sleep, scrounging food, writing letters, reading the same worn-out books, playing cards, and getting drunk whenever possible. He wanted to go home.

As the band played on, Steiner stared at the helmeted figures facing him across the courtyard and wondered how many of them had joined to impress a girl. Most, probably. Only a maniac liked killing and was willing to die for it. The biggest fools were like Muller standing next to him, wishing he could make love to the war. No, the average paratrooper wanted to be a hero, and nobody wanted to do what it took to be a hero unless he thought it would get him the pick of girls. And here they were, all dressed up and without a girl in sight.

Seeing the comedy of it all kept him sane, though the joke was also on him.

“Brave Fallschirmjäger!” Hauptmann Werner shouted after the band stopped playing. Wearing his Iron Cross on his throat and a black patch over his scarred left eye, the grizzled captain addressed them from the head of the formation. “Heroes and defenders of the Reich! I stand before you at the threshold of victory. The Führer’s super weapon has defeated the Allies in France. Daily, State Radio declares our triumph. Hostilities with the Allies have ceased.”

Werner glared at them all with his good eye, which gleamed a bright blue. “Generalmajor Schulz has issued orders.” Schulz commanded the 1st Fallschirm Division in the Adriatic Sector. “The 3rd Parachute Regiment is assembling. Transport has been organized to deliver us to the airfield. There, we will board planes and fly to England.”

The stoic paratroopers stirred before resuming their rigid attention. Steiner couldn’t believe what he was hearing. The lieutenant hadn’t been joking, he’d been serious. That or the captain was joking.

“Our orders are to form a joint task force with our American and British counterparts,” Werner said. “We will train together. We will fight a common foe. The English and the Amis were once our enemies, but no longer. In fact, they are now our allies in the struggle to contain the Red menace in the East.”

Werner nodded to Hauptfeldwebel Vogel, who barked, “Company dismissed!”

Muller smiled. “The Russian Front!”

“So much for going home,” Steiner said.

CHAPTER THREE

AIRFIELD

Oberfeldwebel Jurgen Wolff marched his squad back into the warehouse, where they fell out to collect their gear. Ungainly two-ton Opel Blitz trucks were already lining up in front of the ancient stone building, coughing acrid exhaust.

“What do you think, Herr Oberfeldwebel?” Muller asked him. “Our new orders?”

“I’m a soldier,” Wolff said. “I don’t think. And I don’t engage in latrine talk. The only thing that matters is our orders.”

But he was also a man, and men thought, and the orders didn’t make sense. Right now, he thought the entire operation was too strange to take seriously. A combined division made up of paratroopers from nations who just weeks ago had been bitter enemies?

The Fallschirmjäger hated the British, though they respected their fighting ability. They didn’t hate the Americans, though they had little respect for them.

A joint task force against the Soviets? This was going to be interesting.

If the order hadn’t come through Hauptmann Werner, he wouldn’t have believed it. The captain had fought from the beginning of the war, one of the few survivors of the original regiment the man had trained with at Stendal. Wolff had seen a photo of him in Signal, which showed him charging during the invasion of Crete, the last big airborne operation of the war. The man was tough as nails and a genuine hero. His word commanded respect.

Too bad the Waffen-SS lieutenant was wrong, and the Führer’s new super weapon hadn’t worked on the Russians. Wolff was tired of it all. During his two years with the regiment, he’d fought in Russia and Italy. He’d trained and lost his squad four times over to the meat grinder. He was tired of seeing cocky and scared German boys like Muller and Beck die one by one, so many he forgot their names.

All he wanted now was to see these boys go home. He wanted it all to end.

He packed his gear, taking special care with his jump smock and old triangular RZ36 parachute. He’d volunteered for the paratroopers in late 1942 and had undergone eight weeks of training at Stendal-Borstel airfield.

Half basic training, half parachute instruction. All of it demanding. The paratroopers got the same training the infantry grunts got, only much harder. He remembered his first thirty-kilometer forced march. Brutal. Until he earned his parachute wings, he was nobody to the instructors, who never passed up an opportunity to demonstrate they were the best at everything.

Weapons, demolitions, tactics. Ground rolls from a height of three meters. Unhitching a parachute while being dragged by wind created by airplane propellers. Live-fire exercises and jumps with a one-percent fatality rate being accepted. Then jumps from moving aircraft, Junkers and Heinkel He-111s.

The drill instructors were tough and demanding, but their discipline wasn’t as harsh as with other unit types. They expected their boys to succeed based on inner strength. Many didn’t have it. Two of Wolff’s comrades committed suicide before their first jump out of fear of failure.

Wolff didn’t give up. Indoctrination, high expectations, unit pride, and inner strength had driven him to succeed. After six successful jumps, he earned his parachute wings. He was Fallschirm for life. Still, he’d never made a combat jump himself. After Crete, few major operations had been undertaken.

“What are the commies like, Herr Oberfeldwebel?” Muller called out.

“Hard men,” Wolff said. “And women, too. They fight like animals.”

Reiser sneered. “Afraid, jägers? Three months of idleness, and you’ve all gone soft. Plenty of fat for Ivan to carve up.” The man seemed to run on schadenfreude—harm-joy, happiness at others’ misfortune. “Training in England will make you commandos again.”

Reiser was showing them how not thinking was done. To him, orders followed an iron chain of command that led straight up to the Führer himself. Go to England and train with their enemies? Fine. If Hitler ordered him to jump in the nearest lake, he wouldn’t even ask how deep, and God help you if you tried to stop him.

No matter that the lieutenant had never fought the Russians, while Wolff had. Reiser was an officer, an aristocrat in the least aristocratic branch of the Army, who saw the men under his command as a rabble requiring hard discipline and steady leadership to glory.

The lieutenant berated his men until as they loaded their equipment and then piled themselves into the two-tons. Wolff’s squad sat on the opposing benches stony-faced with their weapons between their knees, enduring the steady stream of insults. Nobody cracked a joke about the lieutenant going on another tirade. Wolff didn’t tolerate disrespect of officers in his presence, even those that were jerks.

The last stragglers loaded up. Strident calls sounded down the line. The convoy rolled out to join a line of vehicles rumbling toward the airfield. The entire regiment was on the move, undertaking an operation so important it warranted an extraordinary amount of vehicles and fuel.

All for a plane ride to England.

The United Kingdom. The great enemy fortress, the unsinkable aircraft carrier, home to men with stiff upper lips and tea and biscuits and the fat clown Winston Churchill. Just across the channel from Europe but as remote as the moon.

It still felt to Wolff like he was dreaming.

Distinguished by their steel gorgets hanging around their necks, Feldgendarmerie had cordoned off Genoa’s narrow streets and waved the trucks along. At an intersection, Wolff glimpsed the old terraced lighthouse, soaring over a hundred meters into the sky at the waterfront. The column was moving east. That meant no travel by flying boat, the water having served as Genoa’s airport since 1930. Instead, the jägers were going to the Luftwaffe airfield northeast of the city.

The vehicles ground to a halt alongside the airstrip, where a large collection of old up-gunned Junkers 52 transport planes and a few decrepit Heinkel 111s lay parked. A handful of Focke-Wulf 190 and obsolete Stuka fighters circled the airfield, filling the air with propeller buzz.

Werner’s Eagle Company would be the first to board the old transports. Reiser was already barking at the platoon to dismount the trucks and get moving. Wolff gripped his FG42, a semi-automatic rifle built specifically for Luftwaffe parachute units, and hopped down from the truck bed onto the cold dirt. The men began to load weapons containers onto their assigned plane. The Auntie Jus’ propellers cranked to life, the big transports straining against their wheel chocks.

A motorcycle with a sidecar roared across the airfield and came to skidding halt. An SS grenadier and officer dismounted. The officer began to shout at one of the squads still sitting on the back of their assigned truck.

“What is happening, Herr Oberfeldwebel?” Muller shouted over the propeller hum.

Wolff tapped his head. “Dachshaden.” Roof damage. In other words, in his view, the SS weren’t quite right in the head.

He wouldn’t abide any criticism of the Fallschirmjäger. SS, however, were fair game in his book.

Steiner said, “I should have given them the address of a real brothel.”

The grenadier raised his StG 44, a big, ugly-looking rifle, and the paratroopers raised their hands in surrender.

Wolff growled, “What the hell is this?”

Leutnant Reiser marched over to the SS officer and started a screaming match.

At the end of the airfield, more vehicles arrived loaded with SS troops. The grenadiers dismounted and aimed their weapons at the Battle Axe, the last company in line, veterans of Crete and the Gran Sasso raid.

The rest of the squad gathered behind Wolff.

“Is it me, or does this whole thing stink?” Weber said.

“Like a shithouse, Kugelfest,” Schulte told him. “Obviously.”

Wolff strained to listen but only caught snatches of the argument. The SS didn’t want the Fallschirm to board the planes and leave. Reiser intended to obey his orders unless an appropriate higher authority countermanded them.

Gunfire popped along the edge of the airfield. The crackle quickened to a steady roar as Battle Axe and the SS blazed away at each other point blank with everything they had.

Muller paled. “What’s going on, Herr Oberfeldwebel?”

“Bürgerkrieg,” Schulte said. Civil war.

Wolff looked to Reiser for orders. The lieutenant was still shouting at the hawk-faced SS officer while the grenadier aimed his StG 44 at the paras.

Then Reiser ceased his gesticulating and went quiet as the gunfire rose in volume at the end of the airfield. The SS officer stopped shouting as well but kept talking, still making his case for the paratroopers to submit. He stabbed his finger at nearest plane and then swept his hand in a cutting gesture. Do not board the planes.

Reiser nodded once, twice.

Then he pulled out his Luger and shot the officer in the face with a loud bang. The grenadier wheeled in time to take three slugs in the chest.

The two SS men crumpled to the airstrip at the same time.

“Christ!” Steiner yelled.

Even while deeply shocked by what he’d just witnessed, Wolff was impressed. He couldn’t hit a Sherman tank from five meters with his Luger. The lieutenant was a dead-eye shot.

The squad stiffened to fearful attention as Hauptmann Werner stomped onto the scene and took in the two dead men.

The company commander said, “Leutnant, lead your men onto your planes.”

Reiser holstered his smoking pistol and clicked his heels. “Zu befehl, Herr Hauptmann!” By your command, Captain!

The Stukas fell out of the sky to plunge into a screaming dive. Tons of blasted dirt sprayed above SS positions. An Sd Kfz armored special purpose vehicle fireballed into the air and crashed back down in a flaming wreck.

The paratroopers didn’t need orders to move. They shouldered their kit and rushed to board the planes as machine-gun tracers flashed in the distance. Wolff climbed into the door aft of the wing and buckled himself in along with seventeen other troopers. The cabin smelled like sweat and old canvas.

Reiser screamed at the terrified pilots. “Get us in the air now!”

The lieutenant staggered as the plane lurched forward. The propeller hum raised in pitch as it built up speed. A bullet cracked off the fuselage with a loud ricochet that made the men flinch. Muller prayed out loud.

Wolff brooded as the plane lunged into the air and veered north toward the Alps. The Allies capitulating, the hasty transfer to England, previously unthinkable fighting between SS and Luftwaffe units. None of it added up.

Somebody was lying to him.

It wouldn’t be the first, but this time, the stakes possibly involved treason.

CHAPTER FOUR

THE MEUSE

Muller stopped praying, though he kept his hands clasped in front of his chest just in case he needed to make a quick return.

The Ju-52 shot up four meters per second until it reached its cruising altitude of 5,000 meters. There, the three-engine plane bounced on air pockets, its windows offering a glimpse of the other transports falling into formation before they entered a gray cloudbank.

The Luftwaffe and the SS were fighting each other. It didn’t matter who was right or wrong. The SS was the military arm of the Nazi Party, which ran everything. Along with his comrades, Muller would likely be branded a traitor.

Traitors were shot, no questions asked.

He wanted to know why, but the paratroopers knew as much as he did, which was to say, nothing. The whole world, it seemed, was dachshaden.

Home now felt farther away than ever.

He’d grown up in Berlin during the hard times, the hungry times. One of three men out of work. Everything cost too much to afford. An egg was 300 marks, a pound of coffee 30,000. His father relied on barter to scrape a living. Political parties fought in the streets. Everybody criticized the government, which had sold out the country to France and England. The communists burned the Reichstag. Muller grew up understanding the world was topsy-turvy, everybody was against Germany, and Germany needed to defend itself.

Then things got better. No more socialist marches under their red banners, no more street fights. Men found work, including his father, who joined the Nazi Party and took a job at a ministry. After his Jewish best friend disappeared without a word, leaving young Muller to believe the boy’s parents had uprooted, he made new friends during his compulsory stint in the Hitler Youth, where he learned about Nazi ideology. He found it simple enough if a bit silly, though of course he kept this to himself. He did, however, enjoy the uniforms, songs, and hiking trips. Every boy his age wanted to be in a club, and the Youth was the ultimate. His parents took him to Norway on vacation, a benefit of the government’s Strength through Joy program.

The New Order had arrived.

When he reached his teen years, he began to chafe at how the Nazis controlled everything and viciously patrolled for non-conformity. Everything was forced enthusiasm and German glory. He didn’t want to have to be enthusiastic about everything the government was doing. He hated being bossed around. One of his teachers disappeared. His friend got in big trouble for swing dancing. He began to piece together that his Jewish childhood friend hadn’t simply uprooted but was instead forced into a ghetto. The history he’d learned in school was already being rewritten. When he turned fourteen, he had to work a year at either a farm or a coal mine, and spent a dreary year milking cows and shoveling shit.

Muller had grown up with a passion for painting. People had always told him the Führer himself was an accomplished artist. But even the arts were political in the new Reich. No art or music or books or film or anything else could be produced or consumed without approval and ultimate control by the Party, which churned out mediocre and bland creations. Fearing Muller’s moodiness might swing toward ideological purity and lead to his son denouncing him to the Party, his father began parroting Hitler at the dinner table, which made for tense mealtimes. Everybody, it seemed, wore a uniform. The block warden spied on everybody in the area. Every other day marked some national pride event requiring families to hang the Nazi flag. The newspapers carried screaming headlines like, POPE SPARKS COMMUNIST TERROR IN SPAIN! You had to yell “Heil Hitler” at everybody you passed on the street.

So Muller’s world was already looking bleak when the war came.

Five years of constant warfare brought together the worst of both times of his life. It was like going back to the uncertainty and rationing of his childhood, but with the Nazis controlling everything and turning it into a caricature of glory.

Still, when he reached draft age, there was no doubt he’d be serving the empire, most likely in the Wehrmacht. His father tried to pull strings to have him trained as an officer, but Muller didn’t want that. He didn’t want to order men to kill. He volunteered for the paratroopers purely for the challenge.

While he’d grown to despise the Nazis, he loved Germany, and he loved his parents. In the Flieger, he’d prove himself both to his father and himself. Now he was wondering if he’d ever see his family or country again.

In the seat next to him, Ricard Schneider, who operated the flamethrower, was looking out one of the small windows that ran all the way up to the cockpit. The big soldier grunted. “Somebody needs to tell them the war’s over.”

With that statement, the paratrooper whom everybody called Animal grunted and released a tremendous fart, pure sulfur. Muller winced as it seared his nostrils. He hadn’t been overly romantic about joining the Army, but so far all it had delivered was calisthenics, bad food, rotten company, and the threat of typhus.

“The SS just started firing,” Muller said. “That’s what happened. Right?”

“I’m not talking about them, kid.”

Hearing muffled booms, he turned to look out the window. “Where are we?”

“My guess is France, maybe Belgium.”

An incredible battle was taking place below him. Clouds of black smoke drifted over the scarred earth. Mushrooming fireballs and waves of dust rose from the snow-covered, blackened ground. The booms became a steady rumbling thunder that grew louder by the moment.

He shook his head and squinted to see more clearly.

Thousands of figures loped toward a series of trenches. Singly, in pairs, in massive crowds that at this height looked like strange herds. Howitzer shells exploded in the middle of these crowds, producing empty craters.

Muller gaped. The crowds didn’t scatter but instead kept marching toward the trenches. Another vast crowd was expanding from the river in the east. Hundreds of men appeared at its edge.

They seemed to be walking out of the water—

“Schneider…”

Animal stared down at the ground in a stunned silence. Then the gray clouds closed in and obscured everything in permanent fog. Pale, he turned away and lit an ersatz cigarette with trembling fingers.

Muller looked across the cabin. One by one, the paratroopers turned from the windows to stare off into space, shivering. Oberfeldwebel Wolff frowned as if trying to figure out a riddle that couldn’t be solved.

Were they civilians being slaughtered by the Allies? It couldn’t be. The people down there had marched straight into deadly shot as if it were mere rain. An attack? No. The shooting only went in one direction.

He said, “Sch-schneider?”

“Shut up, rookie.”

“What was that down there?”

A trick of the eyes, maybe.

“I don’t know!” The man gripped the sides of his head. “I’m going crazy! Nothing makes sense!”

Miller turned to study his formidable comrade. The big soldier wore a fur-lined ski cap favored by mountain troops, snow camouflage quilted jacket, gray-green combat trousers with the hilt of a gravity knife jutting from his right thick pocket, and a Luger strapped over his left thigh. Black leather gloves, jump boots, gas mask in canvas bag across his chest. Yellow on his collar patch marking him as a paratrooper.

Schneider was a veteran soldier who’d killed men with fire and didn’t appear to know fear himself. But what he’d seen down there on the banks of the River Meuse scared him.

Which only made Muller far more terrified.

When the Fallschirmjäger feared something, it was time to be very, very afraid.

CHAPTER FIVE

ENGLAND

The cloud cover broke to reveal water below. The Fallschirm had finally achieved its dream of crossing the English Channel.

Unless the British shot them down first.

“We’ve got company,” Steiner told Schulte.

Spitfires, Typhoons, and Hurricanes braced the squadron on all quadrants, leading them toward England.

“Hmm,” murmured Schulte, who was trying to sleep. “What company?”

“Enemy planes.”

Schulte crossed his arms and nestled back into his seat.

Steiner snorted. “How can you nap at a time like this?”

“Are you afraid they’re going to shoot us down, comrade?”

“Of course I’m afraid they’re going to shoot us down.”

“Then do something about it besides keeping me awake with your whining.”

As always, Steiner found the sniper insufferable. He turned away to look out the windows again. Below, land returned, brown beaches followed by the odd geometric patches of farms freckled with snow cover.

Then an X appeared, the familiar shape of an airfield.

“Where do you…?” Steiner kept the rest of his thoughts to himself. He’d learned his lesson about talking to Schulte.

Next to him, the sniper’s lips curled into a slight smile.

Some of the transports had already started landing. Steiner’s plane reduced altitude but began to circle the airfield. Freezing air whistled through the cabin.

Reiser marched to the cockpit. “What are you doing?”

“Making sure it’s safe,” the co-pilot shouted back.

“Do we have orders to land?”

“Ja.”

“Do we have enough fuel to get back to Genoa?”

“Nein.”

“Then land the plane, idiots!” the lieutenant screamed.

“Christ, please don’t shoot them,” Steiner muttered to himself.

Next to him, Schulte chuckled.

The pilots steered into a sharp turn, banking to line up the Junkers for a landing.

“Oh, no,” the sniper opined in falsetto. “Where are we? Who are those bad men? Who am I?”

“Shut up, Erich,” Steiner said.

The sniper laughed. “The children are crying and I don’t have any soup. They’re so hungry, Otto. And mother says—”

Steiner sighed as the wheels slammed the airstrip. The propeller hum’s pitch deepened to a throttled roar. The plane rolled until braking bled out its momentum. Royal Air Force ground crews guided the plane toward a hangar.

Reiser stood and opened the door. The men stared at him, expecting a speech.

“Get off the plane,” he barked. “Fall in at attention.”

The paratroopers stood with a fierce shout and put on their steel helmets, which lacked brims and had camouflage cloth covers. They snapped the leather chinstraps into place and straightened their uniforms.

The Fallschirmjäger marched off the plane in perfect time and formed up on the airstrip as the Junkers’ three engines powered down. Nearby, Oberst Heilman, the regiment’s commander, and his staff met with a crowd of Brit and Ami officers. They all saluted each other, another milestone on this bizarre day.

Hauptmann Werner marched past the platoon with his own headquarters, pausing to point out a hangar to Reiser. “Billet there and await orders.”

Reiser clicked his heels. “Jawohl, Herr Hauptmann. Platoon, marsch, marsch!” Yes, indeed, Captain. Platoon, march, march!

The man marched crisply and smartly, already belting out a song. For the paratroopers, pride and cockiness had become as instinctive as aggression and obedience. The column tramped in perfect time into the hangar.

Several platoons of British and American soldiers were already billeted there, stowing their gear after the day’s training exercises. The Americans gawked while the British eyed them warily with their hands thrust in their trouser pockets.

With their red berets, these Brits were airborne, the fierce paras called the Red Devils. The Americans were likely airborne soldiery as well, elite fighters.

“Look out, fellas,” one of the Amis said, “here come the Supermen!”

Steiner knew some English, as did some of the other Fallschirmjäger. “And here are the Amis,” he muttered, “chewing their gum.”

The Germans had their Italians, the British their Americans. The Americans hadn’t fought so well at the start, but damn, they enjoyed an endless supply of equipment, especially devastating artillery and airpower. They’d learned fast and had become formidable opponents, though nobody was as tough as the indomitable British, particularly these Red Devils.

Still, he’d never fought the American airborne infantry. These men had battled from Normandy to Germany and were rumored to be among the best the Amis had.

Leutnant Reiser nodded at the Tommies, returning their wary glare, then sneered back at the Americans. “This is to be our new home, jägers.” His eyes flickered to take in his troops. “We will show our enemies how the Fallschirmjäger conduct themselves as professional soldiers. Is that clear?”

“Jawohl, Herr Leutnant,” Steiner roared with the rest of the platoon.

“Fall out and stow the equipment.”

The men stacked their weapons, hauled the battered weapons containers into the hangar, and then argued over bunks.

One of the Americans sauntered over. “Welcome to RAF Station Martlesham Heath.” He held out a pack of Chesterfields. “Cigarette, Jerry?”

The American wasn’t much to look at. Medium height, average build. He had a boyish face belied by the eyes of an old man. The same eyes as many veterans of this war, something important they had in common.

“Danke,” Steiner said. He refused to smoke the ersatz cigarettes handed out by the Wehrmacht but wouldn’t refuse an American brand. “Thank you.”

The paratrooper looked surprised. “You speak American?”

“A little.”

The American surprised Steiner in turn by thrusting out his hand. “Corporal Frank Grillo, 101st Airborne.”

Another soldier growled from a card game, “Quit fraternizing with the Krauts, Grillo.”

Steiner had to agree. If the lieutenant caught him talking to the Americans, there’d be some imaginative and cruel punishment. You like the Amis, Steiner? How about you dig them a latrine? Schnell, schnell!

“Haven’t you heard, Sarge?” the paratrooper said. “They’re our allies now.”

Which was another fair point. Still, Steiner didn’t trust it. The 101st Airborne had been nearly annihilated in the Ardennes Snow during Autumn Mist. It was obvious Corporal Grillo had gone through hell. The kid had killed Germans and very likely developed a taste for it, fueled on hate.

Steiner felt the same way after fighting the U.S. II Corps along the Gustav Line. He had to admit it was hard to stand so close to an American soldier—one who wasn’t a prisoner—without lunging for the man’s throat in self-defense.

He wondered what genius had come up with the idea of the Germans billeting between the Americans and British. Allies or not, he was bunking with his gravity knife under his pillow tonight, not that he expected to get any sleep.

“Hey, listen,” Grillo went on. “Since we’re friends now, you up for a trade?”

Steiner blinked. “A what?”

“You got a Luger?”

“Ja, ja, I have a Luger.”

The kid grinned. “What do you want for it?”

Steiner laughed. So that explained the odd friendliness. This unteroffizier wanted a worthless Luger to bring home as a war trophy.

“What’s so funny, Jerry?”

“You have no idea how much we envy you Americans.”

“Freedom and apple pie, pal. You Nazis should try it.”

“I am not a Nazi. And I meant we envy your equipment.”

“You’re a machine-gunner, right?”

“Ja,” said Steiner.

“Hitler’s zipper. That’s what we call it from the sound.” The MG42 fired so fast, one couldn’t hear individual bullets. “What I’m trying to say is you have some pretty good weapons too.”

Steiner had meant the quantity of equipment, not its quality, which he didn’t think too much of. No matter. “Ja, perhaps, but the barrel overheads—”

Grillo’s expression soured. “You want to trade or not? I don’t have all day.”

Schulte called out, “How’s the diplomacy going, Otto?”

Steiner turned to share the exchange with his comrades. “The Amis are souvenir shopping. Anybody want to trade his Luger?”

Some of the Fallschirm looked around and, seeing no officers, broke into devious smiles. They stepped forward with eagerness.

“Remember, comrades,” Steiner told them, “if you want me to translate for you, you’ll have to give me two Ami cigarettes.”

The Americans quieted to watch the tense negotiation unfold. Animal walked away with an armful of chocolate, cigarettes, and dirty magazines.

“If the lieutenant finds out, you’ll be in big trouble,” Steiner told him.

Animal gave him a menacing smile. “Then we’d better not tell him.”

“You know me, comrade. I don’t mess with guys who stand behind me in battle with a flamethrower.”

The big paratrooper laughed and marched to his bunk with his booty.

Steiner called after him, “You still owe me two smokes, though, Schneider!”

“Nice doing business with you, Jerry,” Grillo said.

“Otto.”

“What?”

“My name is Otto.”

The kid nodded. “Otto it is.” Then he held his Luger high for his friends. “Look what I got!”

His sergeant shook his head. “You just got taken, Grillo.”

The Americans shot glances at each other. Then a third of them jumped up and crowded around Steiner, shouting offers while the Red Devils looked on in silent contempt.

CHAPTER SIX

THE DRAUGR

In the mess hall, Oberfeldwebel Wolff devoured a simple meat and vegetable hash and strong coffee. After months of meager rations, it was an exquisite feast. And the coffee was real coffee, with whole milk and sugar.

Having eaten their fill, his squad rested their elbows on the table and lit their Ami cigarettes with a sigh. Wearing a drowsy smile, Wolff stuffed his pipe with his own tobacco and lit it. Damn, the Americans had the best of everything.

Still no word about Battle Axe Company. The sergeant feared the SS had killed or captured them. Another unsolved mystery in this strange day. He’d survived this long by doing his part and keeping his mouth shut. Honest answers would come in due time, and if they didn’t, welcome to Nazi Germany.

The paratroopers lunged to attention as the doors burst open, revealing Oberst Heilman and other German, American, and British officers. The officers marched in a train to the front of the room and spread out.

RAF men followed and set up a projector and screen.

Wolff doubted it was for their entertainment. Finally, he’d be getting some answers. The sight of massive herds of human beings lurching into concentrated shellfire still haunted him.

Then he spotted the SS man among the officers. Wolff’s eyes narrowed.

“Fallschirmjäger,” Heilman said with his customary fierce scowl. “I have news that will come as a shock, but I trust in your composure as soldiers of the Reich.”

Yeah, thought Wolff. Here it comes.

“We are not fighting Ivan,” the colonel went on. “The situation has changed. The circumstances are unprecedented. Our regiment will be joining our former enemies in a drop on Berlin.”

Treason!

Wolff snarled, seething with rage. The Fallschirm erupted in jeers and shouts.

“Silence!” the oberst roared.

Obedience drilled into them for years, the men quieted.

Heilman’s intense gaze roamed among the men. “Operation Autumn Mist was a complete success. And also a complete failure. Aus der traum.”

Whereas the colonel’s roar had quieted them, that last phrase struck the room completely silent. The dream is over.

The rank and file often said it with fatalistic humor. The line had broken, and high command wanted the regiment to jump into the meat grinder? Aus der traum. The company wasn’t getting artillery support? Aus der traum. Withdraw and dig in all over again fifty meters down the road? Aus der traum!

Spoken by a senior officer, however, it was a very serious statement.

Heilman turned to the tall SS officer. “Obergruppenführer Wolfensohn?”

With his platinum hair neatly combed to the side, bright blue eyes, and square jaw, the SS officer looked every bit the Aryan man the Nazi leadership idealized.

Whoever he is, Wolff thought, he’s a fanatic. Not just SS but a senior group leader, an officer with far-ranging responsibility in the paramilitary organization.

It was bastards like him who’d attacked the Battle Axe.

“Good evening, comrades,” Wolfensohn said. “Sieg heil.” Hail victory.

“Sieg heil,” the Fallschirmjäger grumbled.

“To win the war, the Party began work on a wonder drug to make our soldiers invincible. The Overman project. The Führer sent me personally to a research station in Poland to investigate its potential. It was remarkable. I saw a man turn into a savage fighter. Even after he died, he kept on fighting.”

The paratroopers laughed. The SS officer pursed his lips and waited before continuing, “I was not joking. The problem was he lost his humanity and could not be controlled. I assessed the Overman drug unfit to give to our half-million soldiers preparing for Autumn Mist. But too much was riding on the operation’s success. At the Führer’s command, it was widely deployed along the front.”

Wolff gasped with disgust. He believed Wolfensohn. In desperation, the Nazis had used the Wehrmacht as guinea pigs.

“At first, Overman achieved remarkable success. Then our super soldiers began fighting uninfected comrades. They spread in all directions, attacking all who stood in their way. Their hate was so complete they… fed on the corpses. And then those corpses got up and started fighting too. Because the wonder drug is not a drug at all but a carefully engineered organism bred for violence. A pathogenic bacterium that animates its hosts and drives them to kill and feed. That is Overman. A disease that turns men into draugr. Nachzehrer. Gjenganger.”

The officer paused to let that sink in, though Wolff doubted it could. Nobody laughed this time. There was only a stunned silence. The draugr were men who returned from the dead with superhuman strength to feast on flesh and blood. Undead things out of Viking mythology. Legend had it only a hero could kill them. They had to be beheaded and burned until ash.

The nachzehrer was a creature of German folklore that fed on corpses like a ghoul or the souls of the living like a wraith. Only beheading or a stake through the heart killed it. Similarly, the gjenganger, creatures of Scandinavian lore, were reanimated bodies that returned to murder and spread disease.

The Nazi scientists had found a way to combine all three creatures into a single fact. They hadn’t created soldier soldiers, they’d made monsters. Monsters out of stories mothers told their children to force them to properly behave, brought to life to attack the living.

That’s what Wolff had seen lurching out of the River Meuse.

To wage war, men had built incredible machines capable of slaughter, chemicals that made a man’s lungs foam out his mouth, incredible firebombs that burned cities to the ground. In the draugr, they’d taken the next step by turning man himself into a terrifying weapon. But this weapon couldn’t be controlled.

“I see you remain skeptical,” Wolfensohn said. “We shall correct that.”

The projector began rolling film as the lights turned off. Even the toughest veterans among the Fallschirm gaped with wide eyes at the jerky, silent, black-and-white images of men being torn to shreds. Americans and Germans, allied in their undead state, hurling themselves at the living who fled in sheer terror.

In two hard years of fighting in Russia and Italy, Wolff had seen incredible barbarism and every kind of atrocity. He’d never seen anything like this.

“Entmenscht,” somebody muttered. Bestial, inhuman.

Some of the paratroopers were crying. A man vomited his beef and vegetable hash on the floor, followed by another. Then Wolff’s vision blurred, and he realized he was crying as well.

“God in Heaven,” he gasped. “What have we done?”

“Germany is under attack,” Wolfensohn told the horrified soldiers. “The Allies had enough men to stop the draugr’s advance, but every available combat-ready German unit along the front was committed to Autumn Mist. Many of them went east into the Fatherland as far as Cologne and Bonn. We also administered the Overman germ to troops on the Eastern Front, many of whom turned west into the Reich. As a result, we have lost contact with Berlin. It has fallen. The Reserve Army has been defeated. The fate of the Führer is unknown.”

Red-faced, Muller jumped to his feet. “You monsters! You fucking monsters!”

Many of the paratroopers echoed his outraged cries.

The jäger had family in Berlin.

Wolff grabbed the kid’s arm and wrenched him back onto the bench. “Alive or dead,” he hissed, “your father wouldn’t want his son in front of a firing squad.”

Muller lowered his head into his hands, sobbing. Wolff gripped the back of his neck and squeezed, hoping to share his strength. Trying to convey to the young soldier that he was with family right now, Germans who would take care of him.

“Achtung,” Oberst Heilman snapped. “We are no longer facing the possibility of defeat but extinction itself. The nation needs you to be strong.”

The colonel’s words calmed them long enough for Wolfensohn to go on. “I assisted the Wehrmacht and Allies in negotiating a cease-fire. Many of our comrades are right now fighting alongside the British and Americans at the Meuse. The government is broken, however, with Party officials giving contradictory orders. Some love the nation and humanity enough to work with our enemies to save it. Others consider us traitors and will do anything to stop us.”

As the SS battalion had tried at the airfield.

“The British dropped on Poland and found the camp where the experiments were taking place,” the SS officer said. “The next step is Berlin. There, we will find a pure sample of the pathogen and specialized antibodies synthesized to neutralize it. From this, we can create a vaccine to prevent its continued spread. Possibly even a cure for those infected not yet crossed into a mortal state. Maybe even a weapon to allow the dead to rest in peace.”

Heilman stepped in again. “For the next three days, you will train for Operation Valhalla. We will certainly see the hardest fighting of the war, but we will gain victory. Failure means the destruction of the fatherland.”

Wolff didn’t have to think about it. Whatever it took to save Germany from annihilation and prevent this disease from spreading, he’d do it. He stood with a fierce cry, raising his clenched fist.

The rest of the Fallschirm rose to their feet with a roar.

CHAPTER SEVEN

TRAINING

At dawn, the Fallschirmjäger awoke to calisthenics and training. Most of the men had to be issued British parachutes, lacking their own. These had four straps, not two like the German counterpart. As a result, the Tommy paratroopers could steer in the air, though it hardly mattered from a jump height of 250 meters.

Muller marched to the top of the wood platform and jumped into space. His stomach lunged into his throat as he fell the three meters toward the hard ground.

He struck the earth and went into a clumsy roll that left him on his back.

Sergeant Wilkins, the British trainer, clenched his fists. “I thought you were a bloody parachute unit!”

“No excuse, Herr Feldwebel,” Muller gasped.

Actually, he had an excellent excuse. Major airborne operations had all but ceased. He hadn’t received parachute training. Today’s Fallschirmjäger were elite light infantry, not true airborne troops.

It didn’t matter. He wanted to go to Berlin.

“Bloody ball of chalk, this is,” the British sergeant growled. “Get in line, craphat! Do it again.”

“Jawohl, Herr Feldwebel!” Muller cried as the squad groaned. They’d exercised, learned, ate, and trained without pause all day on the cold airfield.

“Good lad,” Wilkins said in German, though it didn’t quite translate. The next man went up to make his practice jump.

The Fallschirm didn’t mind hard training. They’d suffered worse in basic training and in combat. Paratroopers were expected to rush into battle, often against terrifying odds. Many times, they hurried to the front without orders, following a latitude for action unique in the Wehrmacht. They fought to achieve their mission objective until shredded, and even then they’d keep going until victorious or dead. For all this, they took appalling losses.

They were lethargic now, however, their once unquenchable spirit diminished. Few of them slept more than a few hours last night, if at all. They’d lost the war. Their country was being overrun by horrible creatures created by their own leaders, and now they had to make a drop on Berlin to stop the spread.

Aus der traum. The dream really was over, replaced by a nightmare.

“Remember,” said Wilkins, who’d fought the creatures in the Ardennes and Poland, “don’t let them get too close, aim for the head, and never, ever hesitate.”

It sounded simple, but it wasn’t. As the British sergeant had explained, this wasn’t going to be sustained, long-range fire between units moving through cover and concealment to pin and flank the other. In other words, what Muller and the other replacements had trained for, what the veterans knew of battle.

This was going to be getting close enough to fire a reliable headshot against an unarmed man loping right at you, a man who might be wearing a steel helmet. Barring that, a bayonet thrust under the chin up into the brain. The enemy could come singly out of nowhere or rush you in vast numbers.

Miss enough times, allow the undead to get close enough, and you’d find yourself both on the menu and drafted into the army of the undead. If you were bitten but left alive, you had anywhere from three to six hours before you turned, the sergeant had told them.

Colonel Adams sauntered over with his British riding crop to inspect the men. “How are they coming along, Sergeant?”

Muller had learned enough English in his year at university to follow the conversation.

“They’re good soldiers, the best the Jerries have, but we already knew that, sir,” Wilkins said. “I’ll make them good paras.”

The colonel twirled the end of his mustache. “They don’t jump anymore. More than one-half of these fellows haven’t even trained for it, I suspect.”

“Morale’s an issue. They’re a spirited lot, but what we told them last night must have come as quite a shock. Three of them took their own lives last night.”

Muller started at this news. He’d heard about it but dismissed it as rumor.

“All the more reason to get them moving,” Adams said. “The fog over the Channel’s lifted. The operation has been moved up. We’re jumping tomorrow night if the weather holds.”

“Christ.” The sergeant flinched. “Sorry, sir. I meant to say, ‘Splendid idea.’”

Weber hissed, “What are you staring at, Muller? You’ve got an odd look.”

“I’m listening to the Tommies talk about the operation.”

“Oh? What are they saying?”

Muller shushed him and listened. Another paratrooper hit the ground and rolled.

“You feel strongly about the three days?” the colonel asked.

“For an operation like this? Six weeks would do nicely, sir.”

“Monty and Eisenhower won’t hold. You’ve got one more morning and afternoon to teach these men our equipment. The party’s on, Sergeant.” The colonel regarded the Germans with cold hatred. “Quite. Carry on, then.”

Wilkins saluted. “Sir,” he said, pronouncing it sah. He turned to the Fallschirm. “All right, once more around, chaps, then you can go get your scoff.”

Muller returned to the top of the platform and made a flawless last jump.

“Well done, para,” Wilkins told him.

“Dankeschön, Herr Feldwebel.” Muller was ready to go to Berlin.

He wasn’t sure he was ready for what he might find when he got there, however.

The city had gone dark. Most of his memories of the capital were troubled. The hard times of his youth, followed by the stifling paranoia of the Nazis. But he had plenty of happy memories with family and friends. Berlin was home.

His father, mother, sister, aunts and cousins lived there. His university professors, the loud neighbors, the friendly postman, the swearing butcher, the girl he’d flirted with in class but never had the courage to ask out.

Everyone he ever knew back home was possibly either dead or worse, one of those ravenous things.

Whatever he’d find, Muller had to know.

“Excellent progress today,” Wilkins told them. “Your officers will have an update on the operation schedule. Dismissed.”

The paratroopers marched to the mess hall eager for dinner.

“Did you see the lieutenant make his jump?” Beck said. “It looked like a suicide attempt.”

“We should be so lucky,” Schulte said.

The men chuckled. Reiser had particularly hated a British sergeant ordering him around, snapping, “Aufgewärmter kohl war niemals gut.” Take heed of enemies reconciled and of meat twice boiled. An old German proverb.

“The lieutenant isn’t so bad.” Weber nudged Muller. “Now tell us what the Tommies said.”

Schneider growled behind them, “I’ll bet they said we’re going on a fool’s errand to clean up their mess.”

“What do you mean by that, Animal?” Schulte said. “Their mess?”

The big soldier spat on the ground. “The godless Americans made the germ, not us. They dumped it on Berlin and killed everybody.”

Weber nodded. “And then they made it look like we did it.”

Muller shook his head. Schneider and Weber was expressing the weltanschauung, or world view, of many Germans. Everybody hated Germany, and the entire world had united in a global conspiracy run by Marxists and Jewish bankers. The only answer was kadavergehorsam. Absolute obedience until death.

“Why are they sending us to Berlin for a pure sample of the germ if they already have one?” Schulte wondered.

Schneider had no answer for that. “I don’t know how they think.”

Facts and logic didn’t matter when stacked against weltanschauung.

“They didn’t do anything,” Steiner said. “We did it. Get it through your thick heads. We’re the bad guys.”

The men fell silent until Schneider said, “It’s all part of the plan to liquidate the Aryan race—”

Steiner let out a loud sigh. “So what were the Tommies talking about, Yohann?”

“We’re jumping tomorrow tonight,” Muller said.

“Good,” Oberfeldwebel Wolff said from his place several ranks ahead. “Once I’m back in combat, I won’t have to listen to this crap anymore.”

“Are you saying you believe Herr Wolfensohn, Oberfeldwebel?” Weber asked.

The sergeant snorted. “I don’t believe anything the SS says, Kugelfest.”

Schneider’s faced broadened in a smug smile. “So you’re saying you agree the Amis cooked it up to destroy Germany.”

Steiner sighed again. “They’re working with us to save Germany—”

“What I’m saying,” Wolff said tersely, “is it doesn’t matter who made it. It’s here, it’s killing our people, and our duty is to destroy it. We’re going. That’s all you need to know.”

CHAPTER EIGHT

BLAME

RAF Station Martlesham Heath fell silent as the world turned black with night. Lying in his bunk, Steiner couldn’t sleep despite his exhaustion. Around him, the paratroopers of three nations murmured and tossed in their sleep. A man cried out, reliving some personal horror.

Horror kept Steiner awake.

Ghouls walked the earth. They shambled toward the Allied lines in their thousands and tens of thousands. They were everywhere in Belgium and Luxembourg. Even more of the things migrated across Germany, turning it into a charnel house.

The war was over, already lost while he got drunk and played cards in Genoa, and a new war had begun. A war of survival against the undead.

He just couldn’t get his head around it.

The Nazis had given the same bug to Wehrmacht forces on the Eastern Front. Right now, it was likely spreading through Poland and the Balkans.

Denied victory, Hitler might just take the whole world down with him.

The scale of this nightmare was too much to comprehend.

No use sleeping now. He got up, pulled on his trousers, and hitched his suspenders over his shoulders. He put on his boots and quilted jacket and quietly crept through the cavernous hangar until the freezing night greeted him outside.

His back to the hangar’s metal wall, he lit one of his Chesterfields and blew a stream of smoke into the frosty air. Around him, the RAF station’s crisscrossing airstrips and big utilitarian buildings stood silent under a starry sky.

The weather was continuing to clear. Good for flying.

As the Brit officer had said, the party was on.

The machine-gunner sagged against the wall until sitting on the cold ground. A crushing weight had fallen on his chest, not just a bone-deep weariness but also an exhaustion in his soul. The crushing weight of shame.

He’d fought for the madman who’d done this.

Steiner hated Hitler now. He’d hated him for a while but had never had the courage to admit it, even to himself.

The black-and-white images came back to him, one grisly sequence standing out from the rest. A German soldier emptying his MP40 into a lurching American. The American staggering, chest smoking, before lunging forward.

The German tearing off his helmet to throw in a final desperate defense against the creature, whose jaws opened impossibly wide as he closed…

Huddled on the ground, the machine-gunner lowered his head against his forearms and sobbed.

Soldiers found different ways of denying death. Wolff knew if he died, it would be for the Fallschirmjäger, the man’s personal god. Schulte was cynical and chased skirts. Muller had his sense of family honor to uphold. Weber held to his belief in vast conspiracies against Germany. Animal antagonized everybody.

Steiner just laughed at it. The psychotic SS, the shrieking officers, the crazy Italians, the spunky Americans, the stiff Brits, the savage bloodshed over patches of dirt. These were all jokes that told themselves. The whole war was a big joke, a cosmic joke about the ridiculous things people believed and what they’d kill and die for. Limitless fodder for endless sarcasm.

But this. This just wasn’t funny anymore.

A voice above him: “What’s wrong with you?”

Steiner looked up through blurred vision to take in three dark figures standing over him. Americans.

He didn’t answer. Couldn’t answer, as he faced the inevitability of shame for the rest of his life, something no amount of humor could ever help him deny.

“Thinking about what you did, you fucking Kraut?” The man kicked him hard with his boot. “I know you speak English. Answer me.”

“We did not know,” Steiner sighed in his heavily accented English.

“You knew. All you Krauts knew.”

Another American said, “Or you didn’t want to know.”

“Maybe he thought a guy like Hitler would never, ever do something like this.”

“What could I do?” Steiner moaned.

He was one man, fighting for his country and following orders. His unit had never abused prisoners or killed civilians.

What could he do? What could one man have done?

Nonetheless, the shame crushed him.

“What could you do, Fritz? How about kill yourself—”

“Do it,” Steiner said.

The Americans looked at each other. “Do what?”

“I know why you followed me here. I want you to do it.”

The Americans said nothing. The gravity knife one of the paratroopers held glimmered in the starlight. The air thickened with impending violence.

Make it quick, Steiner thought.

“Christ, look at him,” one of the Americans said. “I can’t.”

“Because we aren’t him, Escobedo.”

“Better he live with what he did,” the third said. “It’s punishment enough.”

Another man stepped out of the hangar. “You boys have three seconds before I put my boot up each of your sorry asses.”

The Americans jumped. “Sorry, Sarge.”

One spat on Steiner’s shoulder. “Maybe another time, Fritz.”

“Back in your bunks, you stupid idiots,” the newcomer growled. “We’re seeing action tomorrow night. Get your shut-eye while you can.”

The men skulked back into the hangar under the sergeant’s frosty glare. The sergeant approached Steiner and sat next to him, looking up at the stars.

“Weather’s clearing,” the man said. “We’ll be able to launch bombers and fighters to help out our guys fighting at the Meuse. It’ll buy us time to do our jobs. Your officers told you we’re jumping tomorrow?”

Steiner nodded. His mouth had gone dry. He was shivering with burnt adrenaline. He’d thought the Americans were going to put him out of his misery.

“I’m Sergeant Pierce,” the American told him. “You speak English, right?”

“Ja,” Steiner said. “A little.”

“You come out here to commit suicide by American?”

“Everybody I know back home might be dead because of a madman for whom I fought for years.”

During the war, everybody horrible thing he’d had to do with his MG42, he’d stuffed it in his rucksack. A little more weight to carry every day. The weight of at least twenty Americans mowed down under his gun’s withering fire.

This new weight might be too much to carry.

“We fought those things at Bastogne before we ran out of ammo and ran like hell,” said Pierce. “It was hell. Those men who almost jumped you, they lost a lot of friends.” He sighed. “Even if my boys survive this, I don’t know how many of them are going to be right in the head at the end of it.”

Steiner understood. The Americans carried their own unbearable weight.

“Are you still loyal to Hitler?” Pierce added. “Are you fighting for him now?”

“Nein.”

“Good.”

Rage burned in Steiner’s chest now. “Fuck Hitler.”

“Don’t fight for him then. Don’t even fight for Germany. I’ve got a suggestion exactly where to put your loyalty and lay down your life.”

Steiner frowned. “Do not ask me to fight for America.”

“That’s not what I’m saying, pal.”

“Then where? Where should I put my loyalty?”

“The human race.”

“The human race,” Steiner echoed.

“Yeah. Fight for that. Our countries, this war, none of it matters anymore. Not when facing this. We’re all in this together. And we happen to need you. And when I say ‘we,’ I mean anybody with a pulse.”

Steiner thought about it. He couldn’t erase the stain, but he could make amends. “I will fight.”

Sergeant Pierce stood and dusted his pants. “That’s good to hear. Because if we don’t do our part, it’s the end for all of us.”

CHAPTER NINE

MISSION

The Fallschirmjäger tramped into a separate hangar used for the mission briefing. Oberfeldwebel Wolff took his seat in one of the folding chairs and lit his pipe. Schulte sat next to him and crossed his legs with a futile sigh. Schneider’s bulk filled the chair on the other side, releasing a sulfurous fart.

The officers had told the paratroopers they were jumping tonight, weather permitting. The Fallschirmjäger knew they were going to Berlin. Otherwise, they had few details, which would be forthcoming.

By tonight, Wolff would be back in the field braving the elements, hard fighting, fuckups, and bad rations.

A hard existence, being in combat, but it was the devil he knew. It beat idleness. He wanted to be useful. He wanted to end this scourge.

The last of what was left of the 3FJR, 550 strong, marched into the room and took their seats facing a stage and enormous map taped to the wall. The air filled with babble and cigarette smoke.

The map showed Berlin.

Oberst Heilman stomped up the steps onto the stage carrying a wooden pointer as long as a spear.

At the sight of their fierce and vaunted commander, the paratroopers rapped their knuckles against their metal chairs, creating a racket like military drumming.

Heilman said, “Fallschirmjäger, destiny has an odd sense of humor.”

The last of the knocking, the German version of applause, died out.

The commander extended his pointer and slapped it against the map behind him. “Our destiny is taking us to Berlin to save our nation, to save all nations, from a unique enemy that has united us with our former foes. Operation Valhalla.”

“Couldn’t they pick a better name than a place where heroes go after they die?” Schulte muttered next to him.

Wolff was thinking about what Heilman had said. He didn’t care about other nations, not really. Less than a week ago, he’d fought to subjugate the whole world to Germany’s will. He wanted his country to survive above all others. For that alone, he was all in for this operation.

The pointer shifted to a section in downtown Berlin. Tiergarten. “There is an Army Research Center located in the park here on its western side.”

Obergruppenführer Wolfensohn chimed in. “The special projects research facility was constructed in Berlin due to enhanced security need. It was built in the park on the assumption the Allies would not bomb it. However, as it conducted biological weapons research, most of the four-level facility is underground for the city’s protection. The most vital research is on the bottom level.”

“That is the prize,” Heilman said. “And it’s ours.”

“Lucky us,” Schulte murmured.

“Shut up,” Wolff said.

The sniper’s mouth curled in a slight smile. The man lived for a reaction and didn’t mind provoking one even from his sergeant.

The first phase of the airborne operation was for C-53 Skytrooper planes to drop American Pathfinder units onto the drop zones. These airborne troops would place radar beacons and marking lights. The lights would be different colors, designating the drop zone as friendly or hostile.

Heilman tapped an area west of Berlin. “Our regiment will drop here, five miles from Tiergarten. Farmland near Spandau. We will assemble on the west bank of the Havel and cross by raft to the Grunewald. From there, we will travel along Reichsautobahn 2 straight to Tiergarten.”

Wolff studied the map. The plan called for the regiment to stick to unpopulated areas as long as possible. Farmland, then cross the Havel River, then through the densely forested Grunewald.

After that, however, they’d be in the thick of it. Heavily populated areas. Would those infected still be there, or would they have migrated away from the city in search of fresh meat? Would areas they assumed were less populated, such as farms and forests, be relatively free of the beasts?

They were dealing with an enemy about which little was known. The ghouls fought with tooth and nail, though some carried weapons their diseased brains remembered how to use. They could see, and they were attracted to sound. They didn’t sleep and didn’t suffer from the cold. They could only be killed by destroying the brain. They had vast numbers that were increasing by the day.

Heilman swatted the map. “A battalion from the British 2nd Parachute Brigade will drop on Tempelhof Airport and secure it. The American joint 101st and 82nd Airborne battalion will seize the Berlin-Schönefeld Airport.

“We will penetrate the research facility, secure everything we can find on the project, and transport it to Tempelhof. If Tempelhof is not secure, the planes will transfer to Berlin-Schönefeld. A much longer march for us.”

The colonel explained that the Americans would provide insurance in case the British were unsuccessful. Otherwise, they would play a combat support role to the other elements and, if necessary, divert the infected to them.

“That is the plan.” Heilman checked his watch. “Prepare to synchronize. The time is 1931. We will board the planes at 0200. We expect to drop around 0500, just before dawn. Any questions?”

Wolff and several other men stood at attention. Heilman called on him.

“Oberfeldwebel Jurgen Wolff, Second Platoon, Eagle Company, Herr Oberst,” he said. “What kind of resistance are we expecting, either infected or living?”

“Reconnaissance photography shows heavy concentrations of infected in the city, Oberfeldwebel. These concentrations are constantly moving.”

Hunting, Wolff clarified in his mind.

The commander continued, “As for any Reserve Army elements still operational, that is also unknown. Anybody alive in the city is no doubt hiding. Darkness will conceal the drop from both infected and any local military elements who might interpret our actions as hostile. Otherwise, we expect hard fighting to the objective and then to the extraction point. This is why we are going in force, 1,500 men in total. A small team would be quickly destroyed.”

Satisfied, Wolff returned to his seat.

The colonel called on another man to ask his question. The sergeant only half-listened. He knew everything he needed now. Schedule, objective, expected resistance.

Operation Valhalla was what the troops called a himmelfahrtskommando, a trip to Heaven. A Knight’s Cross job. A suicide mission.

“Fallschirmjäger,” Heilman said. “Fallschirmjäger! For years, we fought for our nation and our families. The war is over now but a new war has begun. Now we must fight again. Again for our families, who need us now more than ever. Again for our nation, but not the old Germany. No—a new Germany!”

The men pounded their chairs in approval. The colonel whistled. Several paratroopers from his headquarters staff marched onto the stage. They seized Wolfensohn’s arms.

“What are you doing?” the SS officer cried.

“Obergruppenführer, we are taking you into protective custody for crimes against the German people and all humanity,” Heilman shouted over the paratroopers’ cheering. “For your role in creating these monsters that are destroying our country.”

“Traitor!” Wolfensohn screamed. “When the Führer hears—”

“The Führer is dead. Lock this bastard up!”

Schulte muttered, “It’s about damn time.”

CHAPTER TEN

INSURANCE

Sergeant Robert Wilkins knocked on Colonel Adams’ office door.

“Enter,” the colonel barked.

Wilkins marched into the room, came to attention, and saluted. “Reporting as directed, sir.”

“At ease, Sergeant.” Adams stood at the side of the office, where he kept a decanter of brandy. “Care to join me in a snort?”

“I wouldn’t say no to it, sir.”

Music softly played on a record player. “The White Cliffs of Dover” by Vera Lynn. The colonel poured two fingers and handed him the glass. “Have a seat.”

The sergeant dropped into a chair. “God save the King.”

The men drank.

“Are the Jerries ready for this?” Adams said.

“As ready as they can be, sir.”

“They just arrested that loathsome SS man. Wolfensohn.”

“They hold him responsible for the biological weapon, sir. If I may ask, do you intend to intervene on his behalf? Wolfensohn has been very useful to you.”

“I don’t intend to do anything at the moment,” the colonel said coldly. “The Jerries needed a sacrificial goat to clean their conscience before the operation. We need the Jerries.”

“Right, sir. That’s good thinking.”

“After the operation, I shall take another hard look.” Adams swirled his brandy. “So they’re as ready as they can be on short notice. What about our lads?”

Wilkins shrugged. “Same answer, I reckon.”

“These are perilous times, Sergeant. The whole world has gone arse over kettle. This party may be our only chance to save Europe from utter ruin. It will succeed. It must succeed.”

The sergeant took another sip, relishing the burn. “Yes, sir.”

“That being said, what odds do you give success?”

He inspected his glass. “I’d give it fairly low odds, sir.”

“Right.” The colonel sighed.

“The Germans will have the hardest go of it. They must make the drop, get over the Havel, secure the facility, and then cross the city to the airport.”

“Any changes to the plan you’d recommend to improve the odds?”

“No, sir. Given the parameters, it’s as sound as it can be.”

“So we have the best plan we can produce, but low chances of success.”

Wilkins said nothing, hoping the colonel would take this as his cue to come to the point of this meeting.

Colonel Adams stood and waved at Wilkins’ glass. “Come on, finish up, and I’ll pour you another.”

The sergeant tossed back the last of his brandy and handed over the empty glass. “Obliged, sir.”

Adams poured fresh drinks. “The Americans are going as insurance, as it were, for our paras. If our lads fail to secure the Tempelhof Airport, the Jerries will egress from the Berlin-Schönefeld Airport.”

“Correct.”

“What we’re missing is insurance on the Jerries.”

Wilkins’ stomach flipped as he accepted a fresh glass of brandy. This didn’t sound good. In fact, it sounded as if the colonel had cooked up some dangerous task for him. “Thank you, sir. What did you have in mind, exactly?”

“A second mission to secure the facility. A small team dropping directly onto Tiergarten itself.”

“Chri—! I mean, splendid idea, sir.” It was absolute rubbish.

Adams smirked, the expression accentuated by his upturned white mustache. “Chin up, Sergeant.”

“Yes, sir.”

It was still a rubbish idea, though. The whole area was a death trap for a para drop. There were only a few open, flat, and firm spaces in the park, each surrounded by a vast concentration of hazards. Trees, monuments, buildings, the River Spree, and the ravenous dead.

“Should this team succeed,” Adams went on, “they’ll dash to the airport and mission accomplished. If they succeed but run into trouble, the Jerries will help. If they don’t succeed, we’ll be relying on the Jerries.”

“Do the Germans know about this, sir?”

“Of course not. If they did, do you believe they’d make the maximum effort?”

“Perhaps not,” Wilkins admitted. “Though I feel like we’re using them as a decoy. Hardly a sporting way to treat a new ally, sir.”

“Allow me to get one thing clear, Sergeant. I don’t give a flying toss about the Germans.”

“Of course.” Though he remembered how Von Boeselager, a Fallschirmjäger with the 9FJR, had saved his life in the Ardennes during the Battle of the Bulge. He wondered how the man was faring in his dying country. If he ever made it home.

“They’re bloody good at war, and we need them for this operation,” Adams said. “After that, they can go hang. Nod if I’m clear on exactly where our new ally stands with Great Britain.”

“Crystal clear, sir. I have to point out something dodgy about the plan, however. It’s a precision drop. If the planes miss, our boys will be landing on roofs and alleys.”

“The Pathfinders will take care of it. If not, our lads will have to make do.”

Wilkins sat back in his chair and sipped his brandy. “Brilliant, sir.”

“It’s a shambles, Sergeant, but it’s the best we can come up with. Now listen.”

And here it comes, Wilkins thought. “Sir?”

“I want you to go along on the mission. When it comes to fighting these bastards, you know your onions better than any of our lads. Pick your own shooters. You’ll report to Lieutenant Chapman, who will lead. Like you, he speaks Kraut, which should be useful. You know Chappie?”

“He’d be my choice to lead as well, sir.”

“Then it’s settled,” said Adams. “We’re counting on you, Sergeant. Get it sorted.”

Wilkins took this as his cue to leave. He drained the last of his brandy and stood. “I’ll see to the necessary preparations then, Colonel.”

Adams was already rifling through the paperwork on his desk. “Very good, Sergeant. Good luck to you. Good night.”

Wilkins walked back out into the freezing night. So now he was the British Airborne’s resident expert on ghoul fighting.

All because he’d been lucky enough to survive two battles against them. Luck that was bound to run out at some point.

The result was another suicide mission.

Jocelyn would never forgive him, not that he had a choice in the matter, orders being orders. He pictured her smiling at him with her innocent eyes, her figure stunning even in her drab wren uniform.

In his mind’s eye, her smile faded. You want to go, don’t you, she said.

He did. He wasn’t fooling anybody, least of all himself. He’d known the moment he set foot in the colonel’s office he’d be getting a choice but dangerous mission. A part of him had been hoping for it.

The only way Jocelyn would ever be truly safe, the only way the United Kingdom would ever be safe, was to stop the undead the Nazis had unleashed.

CHAPTER ELEVEN

BERLIN OR BUST

The Fallschirmjäger tramped onto the moonlit runway toward their assigned C-53 Skytroopers, which were C-47 cargo planes modified for para drops and towing gliders. They fell out in “sticks” of eighteen men per plane and watched the ground crews load their weapons containers under the wings.

One and a half meters long and color coded by unit, each drop canister carried 100 kilos of weapons, ammunition, and other equipment and supplies. After they dropped, the first thing the paratroopers would have to do would be to locate these containers and arm themselves, which struck Jäger Muller as highly precarious.

Otherwise, he carried everything on him he’d need to survive and fight. German triangular RZ36 parachute harness attached to D-rings on his waist belt. Wool toque and brimless helmet with its camouflage cloth cover. Jump smock that buttoned down the front and around the upper legs. Knee pads to cushion his landing. Snow-camouflage quilted jacket and trousers, black leather gloves. Heavy wool socks and jump boots. Water bottle kept under the smock to keep the water from freezing. Bandolier and every pocket bulging with spare ammunition for his Mauser K98 rifle. Luger strapped over his thigh.

Three days’ supplies of rations, compass, bayonet, spade, Esbit cooker, medical kit, and four stick grenades. And as they’d be traveling over water, a Mae West flotation device hung around his neck, nicknamed for an actress with large breasts, a typically crude Ami attempt at humor.

The planes started their engines, which coughed to life in a cloud of exhaust until they emitted a steady roar in the cold night air.

Wolff nudged Muller. “Are you scared?”

“Nein, Herr Oberfeldwebel. Excited.” Which was true. He was excited about making his first combat jump, anxious about seeing Berlin.

“If you aren’t now, you will be,” the veteran said. “It’s normal to be scared. Being brave is being scared to do something dangerous but doing it anyway.”

“Jawohl, Herr Oberfeldwebel.”

“We’re all in the same boat tonight, Muller. As far as I know, the Fallschirmjäger has never made a night jump. It’s going to be interesting.”

“Interesting.” The trooper gulped in sudden dread.

“There’s nothing we can do about it. Just remember your training. If the Amis and Tommies can do it, we can.” Wolff smiled. “You should be happy you joined up in time to get issued the new jump smocks. You had to take the old smocks off if you wanted to take a crap. It’s the little things…”

The sergeant often sermonized on that theme. Dry socks, smocks that let you crap without a hassle, warm chow, a cleaned and well-oiled weapon. In his mind, these things won wars more than grand strategy and tactics.

The rest, like jumping out an airplane at night, would take care of itself.

Wolff wore his FG42 semi-automatic strapped to his back. Other men carried machine-pistols tied to their thighs, similarly risky, but it’d allow them to jump ready to fight. Muller felt naked without his rifle. All he had was his Luger, which he’d wisely held onto and hadn’t traded away for Ami luxuries.

The moonlight made the transport planes glow along the airstrip. The air filled with the acrid smell of engine exhaust.

“Jumping out an airplane sounds like a very clever way to commit suicide,” Schulte said. “But it beats marching.”

Steiner broke off a piece of the last of his Scho-Ka-Kola and passed it on. Schulte took one, then Weber, then Muller. The chocolate had a strong bittersweet flavor and packed a wallop of caffeine from the cocoa and kola nut mix.

“Come on, let’s go already,” Animal said while he chewed.

Leutnant Reiser marched up to them wearing a fierce smile. “Ready for glory, Fallschirmjäger?”

“Jawohl, Herr Leutnant!” they shouted dutifully.

“Herr Leutnant, what happens after?” Muller said.

“After what, jäger?”

“After we destroy the undead. Endsieg.” Final victory. “What happens then?”

“We all get a pony,” Reiser said. “Parachute infantry, enter your aircraft!”

The Fallschirmjäger started forward at a slow march under the weight of their kit, singing “Auf Kreta, Im Sturm, und Im Regen,” a favorite among the paras.

On Crete, while on guard duty in storm and rain, a paratrooper dreams of home, where his girl laughs…

“Give ’em hell, Krauts!” an American shouted from one of the hangars. “Berlin or bust!”

“Ja, ja,” Schulte said with his usual sarcasm. “Onward to glory.”

One by one, the Fallschirmjäger stuck their static-line parachute hooks between their teeth and heaved themselves onto the aircraft. The stick of paratroopers filled the plane, sitting knee to knee.

“Interesting question, what comes next,” the sniper told Muller.

“It interests me.”

“Interesting in that you actually think we’re going to survive this.”

“Didn’t you ever dream what it’d be like to go home?” Muller thought about it all the time. Now he was dreading what he’d find when he got there.

“Right now, I’m dreaming about whether this Ami parachute will open and whether I’ll break an ankle on my fall.”

Muller glanced at Schulte’s parachute with open envy. He’d been issued a German parachute. He wondered where it had come from, how old it was.

“‘Your honor lies in victory or death,’” Animal quoted from the Führer’s Ten Commandments to the Fallschirmjäger. “Not bustled ankles.”

“‘Agile as a greyhound, tough as leather, hard as Krupp steel, you will be the embodiment of a German warrior,’” Weber called out, laughing.

“‘Men act, women chatter; chatter will bring you to the grave,’” said Schulte.

“Berlin or bust,” Steiner said.

The Skytrooper bounced along the runway. Gravity pushed against the paratroopers’ bowels as the plane lunged into the air.

In minutes, the plane reached cruising altitude over the Strait of Dover. All the planes fell into formation and banked onto an oh-two-oh bearing toward the North Sea. Muller looked out the window and saw moonlight glimmer off the Air Force star painted on the nearest transport plane. The propeller hum purred through his spine, filled his chest, and numbed his brain.

Hurry up and wait. Two hours until Berlin.

There was little talking. It was past the time for pep talks by the officers, too late for strategy and tactics, too meditative for their usual singing. And Schulte was right, Muller’s mind had no room for thoughts other than a safe landing. Everybody he knew back in Berlin might be dead and the world might be ending, but all he cared about right now was safely getting his feet on the ground. The men chain-smoked and either looked inward or bargained with their god.

After two hours, Muller checked his watch. Berlin should be below him now, though the ground was an endless sea of black and gray. The planes veered into a circular run. They’d reached the city but couldn’t find the drop zone. The beacon drew the planes within a few miles; the lights on the ground zeroed them in.

Muller looked down and saw no lights. Which meant they were off course or the Pathfinders hadn’t completed their mission.

“God in Heaven,” Reiser swore and rose from his seat. He shambled to the cockpit to scream at the American pilots. “Can’t you people fly a simple plane?”

Muller jerked as flashes of light popped outside the window. Lightning?

No. Tracers.

A dogfight in the sky.

Berlin was still defended by interceptors.

A German airplane screamed out of the dark. A Messerschmitt Bf 110 heavy fighter, good at night fighting. Muller’s heart swelled with a moment of idiotic pride. Opening up with its big machine-guns, the plane raked the C-53 traveling on the port side of Muller’s. One of the engines exploded in a fireball. Half the wing spun away as the plane plunged toward the ground streaming smoke.

Muller didn’t see it hit the ground.

Tracers zipped up from Berlin into the distant sky. The air shook with flak bursts.

The plane banked again, hurling the lieutenant against the bulkhead. “Get us over the drop zone or I’ll shoot you in the head!”

Muller wanted to call out that the Americans probably didn’t speak German in the hopes the lieutenant wouldn’t actually shoot them, but the plane banked hard again as it engaged in evasive maneuvers. The cabin lit up as a fighter plane disintegrated in flames outside the window. Shards of fuselage ricocheted off the plane’s hull.

Muller started praying. Immediately, something dark slammed into the window next to him and cracked it, like an answer from God.

The Skytrooper screamed now just 150 meters over the ground, traveling at a drop speed of 130 kilometers per hour. Farmland flashed past the window while fighter planes dogged it out above, Messerschmitts against Mustangs fitted with external fuel tanks that had allowed them to go all the way to Berlin.

The red light flashed on. Six minutes until the jump.

“On your feet, pig-dogs,” Reiser ordered. “Prepare and hook up!”

The Fallschirmjäger stood heavily, laden with parachutes and gear. They hooked their static lines to the anchor cable suspended across the airplane’s length.

“Equipment check!”

Each paratrooper checked the parachute of the man in front of him and sounded off.

“Any day now,” Schulte said.

The light flashed green. The klaxon blared.

“Los!” Reiser screamed. “Gehen, gehen!” Come on, go, go!

The plane shuddered. The weapons containers were dropping from the wings like 100-kilogram bombs. The line moved forward as First Squad jumped out of the plane, followed by Sergeant Wolff, Weber, Beck, Steiner, Animal, Schulte—

Then Muller stood in the doorway, feet braced wide on the ledge, gloved hands gripping the rails, facing the howling void.

“Gehen!” The lieutenant held his Luger and tapped it against his thigh in warning.

Muller bent his knees and flung himself into the wind.

The cold air smacked him hard. His stomach seemed to slam into his throat. He was falling, spread-eagled, the ground swimming in his tearing eyes. The static line deployed the parachute. The ground rushed up at him at dizzying speed. He felt a tug, a sudden resistance to gravity, as the ’chute fully deployed.

Gasping for breath, he studied the ground. They’d taught him to steer but with a German parachute he had to do it the Fallschirmjäger way, jerking and flapping his arms like an ungainly bird never designed for flight. Finally, he had himself pointed downwind, falling at five meters per second. He was going to land in a snowy plot of farmland.

Muller gasped again, this time with exhilaration. He was flying.

Around him, other parachutes swayed in the wind as they fell. It had taken only ten seconds for the entire stick to jump. In the distance, he thought he saw the colored canopies of the weapons containers, which would land on their crash pads.

No time to enjoy any of it. At the height he jumped, it would take only about thirty seconds to hit the ground. He was coming down fast, though in the dark it was hard to tell exactly when he’d hit.

Here it comes—

His feet hit the snow. He fell forward onto his padded knees and went into a roll that left him gasping on his padded elbows and knees.

Nothing broken or sprained. He’d done it.

Behind him, the parachute rustled, billowed with a strong wind, and began to pull. He snapped out of his daze and worked at the clips. He removed one before the parachute yanked him backward and began to drag him through the snow.

Muller turned himself around and dug in with his heels. He grabbed the shroud lines and pulled the deflating ’chute toward himself.

Another paratrooper approached. Good. The ideal dispersion was twenty to twenty-five meters, which would allow them to concentrate fast along the 400-hundred-meter stretch of ground where they’d landed.

“Help me here,” Muller said.

“Ja, ja.”

“Hurry, I’m tangled up.”

The soldier lurched closer, the moonlight revealing a ghastly pale face under a steel helmet. Champing jaws. Eyes missing over its lipless death grin. A gray greatcoat belted at the waist. Hands stretched into claws.

“Ja, ja,” it said like a skipping record, its mouth barely moving as it spoke.

“Scheisse!” The thing was every nightmare he’d ever had rolled into one.

The draugr continued to trudge toward him. Muller let go the shroud lines to reach for his Luger. The parachute redeployed with a crack, dragging him along the snow again.

After a few meters, he yanked on the cords and removed another clip attached to his belt. The undead soldier turned slowly with its horrible eyeless grin and began to shamble after him.

As the draugr closed, he let go again on a prayer, which was answered by the ’chute dragging him another few meters.

This time, his gloved hand closed around the hilt of the gravity knife jutting from the pocket on his right thigh. He pressed the button to release it.

He cut the cords and rolled away from the thing’s outreached claws as the parachute blew away into the dark. Back on his feet, he unholstered his Luger and aimed it with two shaking hands.

A pistol banged. The draugr shrugged, its head remaining tilted at an obscene angle to thud against its shoulder while it walked.

Muller looked around for the source of help. He hadn’t fired. Then he did.

The bullet pinged off the creature’s helmet. The head flopped back before returning, seeming to dance on the thing’s shoulders as it lurched toward him. The grin stretched on its dead face until it become impossibly wide.

Another flash and bang in the dark. The draugr toppled into the snow and lay still.

Muller fell to his knees panting.

Leutnant Reiser holstered his smoking pistol. “Los, los, you idiot. We are wasting time here.”

Muller pulled himself to his feet and followed the lieutenant into the darkness.

He’d dropped into hell.

CHAPTER TWELVE

DISORIENTED

Gefreiter Steiner struck the ground and rolled to a dazed stop. His parachute floated away across the snow like a startled ghost. Somehow, he’d undone all four clips on his harness and shrugged it off along with his Mae West.

He sat up and surveyed his surroundings. Deep snow barely illuminated by starlight and the waning moon. A line of trees, probably a hedgerow. The black silhouette of a distant farmhouse, which he intended to avoid as if it were Dracula’s castle. Several kilometers away, the wreck of a downed C-53 blazed energetically, having taken God knew how many German souls with it.

On an ideal drop, the planes would fly as close together as possible at low altitude over a visible target. That was the best way to drop paratroopers in a very tight dispersion. It also wasn’t what happened. The German interceptors had wreaked havoc on the American transports, scattering the sticks.

The skies were quiet now. And he was lost.

You aren’t lost, he thought. You’re closer to home than you’ve been in eighteen months.

He was quite a ways from Meissen, his hometown on the Elba River, near Dresden. Still, this drop felt like a homecoming, even if he returned as an invader.

Liberator, he told himself. It was all a matter of perspective.

God, he missed the old war. His side had been losing, but at least things were simple.

Weapons banged around him with yellow light bursts, mostly Lugers. Two men shouted at each other before the wind swept their voices away and delivered a blood-curdling scream from somewhere else.

Steiner jumped to his feet fumbling for his own Luger and found the .45 pistol he’d received in trade. An excellent trade, actually; it was a solid handgun. Their tanks couldn’t stand up to the Tigers and Panthers, but otherwise the damned Amis had the best of everything and a seemingly inexhaustible supply of it.

Gone was his fleeting death wish born of shame from serving a regime that created the monstrous super soldiers. He’d challenged the Americans to punish him, but he hadn’t thought they’d actually kill him. He’d figured they’d rough him up a bit and scratch his shame’s itch. Now he had zero wish to die, especially by being chomped on by carnivorous corpses.

Another pair of Lugers popped in the dark. The flashes oriented him. The strong wind hadn’t taken him as far afield as he’d thought. If he was right, First Squad and some of his own squad was just on the other side of the hedgerow, along with a weapon container for the platoon.

Right now, for him, happiness was a machine-gun. He felt naked without it. The MG42 was one of the most brutal infantry weapons of the war, and he had one of his very own. Weighing only twelve kilos, the bipod-mounted medium gun blasted anything in front of it with up to 1,500 rounds per minute.

Though it was rugged and able to function in dust and mud, so many were lost that they were hard to get these days. Many squads made do with the lighter MG34, which had a tendency to jam. Steiner jealously guarded his MG42 and took care of it as if his life depended on it, which it did. He longed to get his hands on it again and hoped Weber and Braun, his assistant gunners, had survived the drop.

Time to move before this scheisse sandwich got any worse. Damn this jumping at night. It was hard enough to organize after a jump in daylight.

Steiner crept to the hedgerow with his .45 held out in front of him, ready to punch a hole in anything that moved. The hedge was thicker than it had looked in the dying moonlight. He flailed through the branches, growling at real and imagined terrors, and spotted a group of figures moving around a weapons container downed in the middle of a field. They froze and looked his way, some appearing to have weapons raised.

Steiner let out a bird call.

One of the figures said, “Halt, wer da?” Stop, who goes there?

“Are you real?” Steiner called out.

“Get your ass over here, Otto,” Animal said.

He hurried across the field, grunting at the effort of trudging across a thick blanket of snow. “Give me my goddamn MG.”

He spotted Oberfeldwebel Wolff, Schneider, Weber, Beck, Braun, Engel, and two shooters from First Squad.

“Have you seen the leutnant?” Wolff asked him as he approached.

“Nein.” Steiner smiled as he hoisted his beloved MG. “When I do a bird call, you’re supposed to answer.”

“You bring a friend?”

The men raised their weapons again as another figure thrashed through the hedgerow and walked up to them.

“Friend,” the thing rasped.

Animal torched it with a burst from his flamethrower. The creature kept on advancing without breaking its stride. Then it pitched forward into the snow with a high-pitched squeal that went on for an unnerving amount of time.

“Scheisse,” Beck said. “Scheisse, scheisse, scheisse.”

“Gefreiter Schneider,” said Wolff, “conserve your fuel. Your weapon is our last resort.”

“Verstanden, Herr Oberfeldwebel.” Understood, Master Sergeant.

The sergeant said, “We’re kilometers from the drop zone. We can’t wait for the others. We have to get to the assembly point.”

The paratroopers continued to load up on as much ammo as they could carry, mostly linked ammo belts for the MG42. Weber hauled out the skis and poles, which would get them through the snow much faster until they reached the city.

Wolff checked his compass and pointed. “Berlin, east. We’ll go in that direction and keep looking for landmarks. If we run into Spandau, we know we have to head south. If we run into the Havel, we wait for the rest of the regiment. Is that clear, Fallschirmjäger?”

“Clear, Herr Oberfeldwebel,” they murmured.

“Contact!” Beck raised his bolt-action rifle and fired a round, which triggered the entire squad to shoot wildly into the dark.

“Cease fire!” Wolff roared. “Is the target down?”

“Fucking idiots!” a voice yelled from the darkness.

“Oh,” Steiner said. “That’s Schulte.”

The sniper walked toward them dusting snow from his sleeves. “I’m glad your aim is no better than your judgment, Wolfgang.”

“His judgment ain’t bad,” Animal said. “You have to know by now we’re all dying to shoot you, Erich.”

Schulte retrieved his scoped K98 rifle and loaded a clip of five cartridges into the internal magazine. “I’m in the company of true heroes.”

Oberfeldwebel Wolff shook his head. “Let’s go then, heroes.”

CHAPTER THIRTEEN

ASSEMBLY

Oberfeldwebel Wolff led his men on an eastward ski trek until the sun began to burn off night’s edge.

“Halt,” a voice called from a line of trees ahead.

“Second Platoon,” Wolff called out.

“Come in.”

He looked back at his squad, who leaned panting on their poles by the twisted bodies of two dead draugr. “This should be the assembly area.”

The men nodded, no doubt thinking about brewing up hot American coffee. Animal dragged the tied-up rafts behind him in the snow.

A makeshift camp occupied the assembly area along the banks of the Havel River. Fallschirmjäger heated rations and boiled water on their Esbit stoves. Dropped on gliders, motorcycles with sidecars zipped in an out of the camp, ferrying wounded to the aid station. Despite the difficulties of the landing, the men seemed to be in good spirits. They again stood on German soil.

Wolff assigned his men to a patch of ground under a copse of trees and roamed the camp searching for Leutnant Reiser and Jäger Muller.

Instead, he discovered Eagle Company’s headquarters, where Hauptfeldwebel Vogel, Hauptmann Werner’s staff sergeant, was ordering his men to dig in.

“Herr Hauptfeldwebel,” he hailed.

The grizzled sergeant major smiled. “Jurgen. How goes it?”

“My squad is accounted for except for one. Leutnant Reiser is also missing.”

“We’re missing over eighty men,” Vogel said. “Which isn’t too bad considering a night jump and losses in the air. Any of your men wounded?”

“Nein, Herr Hauptfeldwebel.”

“That is good. We suffered fifteen percent casualties just from the jump. Twisted ankles and ghouls. Get your men some hot food and a little rest. We’re moving out in an hour to stay on schedule.”

“Verstanden.”

“The river’s frozen over, so we’ll be leaving the rafts.”

“Good. That’ll help us make up some lost time as well.”

Vogel didn’t answer, distracted by a messenger. Wolff saluted and watched the men dig in while medics treated the drop casualties. He returned to his squad shaking his head. The Fallschirmjäger were elite troops, suicidally brave and good at killing, but they were fighting a new war with old doctrine. Vogel had ordered his men to dig in because that’s what you did. The draugr, however, weren’t about to come at them shooting, making it a waste of energy.

He found his men huddled around their stoves, boiling coffee. Wolff sat on a log and produced a box labeled, US ARMY FIELD RATION K, BREAKFAST.

Chopped ham and eggs in a can, biscuits, malted milk tablets, dried fruit bar, Wrigley’s gum, toilet paper, and Halazone water purification tablets. He devoured the food, grateful for the calories, and pocketed the rest. Then he drank his coffee.

Steiner held up his pack of Wrigley’s to inspect in the early light. “They’re trying to turn us into gum-chewing Amis.”

Weber laughed. “It is the source of their kampfgeist.” Fighting spirit.

Wolff thought that wasn’t far from the truth. The gum aided digestion, gave the soldier sugar, and released tension. Good rations won wars. In the German ranks, a deteriorating diet had led to scurvy, dysentery, even typhus.

“Ugh,” said Steiner. “Cinnamon flavor.”

Beck held out his pack. “What flavor is this? I will trade you.”

“Wintergreen. Sure, I’ll trade.”

Gunshots echoed across the snow at random intervals, though nobody seemed to care. Wolff did. It gave him an idea.

“Squad, gather weapons and follow me,” he said.

He led them onto the snowy field past the pickets and raised his binoculars. Attracted by the gunfire, draugr lurched across the snow toward him. Two more poor souls from the Reserve Army, wearing steel helmets and field-gray greatcoats.

“Everything you know is wrong,” he told his men. “Consider yourselves raw recruits again.”

“What do you mean, Herr Oberfeldwebel?” Beck asked him.

“Suppressing fire means nothing against these ghouls. Covering fire. Cover itself. Even concealment, unless you’re actually hiding from them.”

The men had learned fire and maneuver as the two pillars of light infantry tactics. Lay down as much lead as you could to establish fire superiority and suppress, and then flank on one or both sides to destroy the enemy.

None of that mattered to the draugr.

Wolff said, “You keep fighting like the war is still going on. You have to unlearn everything and start fresh. Watch.”

He lay prone on the ground and extended his FG42’s bipod from the barrel collar to give him a firing platform. He loved the automatic weapon, which had been designed specifically for paratrooper use. It delivered the size and weight of a standard infantry rifle but with the firepower of a light machine-gun. Normally, he selected automatic fire to punch the enemy with short, lethal bursts. From now on, he’d favor single shot, as the enemy had changed.

As the ghouls grew near, they let out a moan. Of joy or despair, he didn’t know. Probably both for these creatures that embodied schadenfreude. He took hold of the angled pistol grip and nestled the ribbed buttstock against his shoulder. Then he aimed at one of the ghouls using iron sights.

He exhaled and squeezed the trigger. The first draugr pitched back and toppled. The second quickened its pace, growling now with arms swinging as it dragged its mangled leg behind it.

“I almost feel sorry for the poor bastards,” Beck said.

“You should,” Wolff said. “Enough pity to kill them. It’s an act of mercy. See how he hurries so I can stop his suffering. So he can finally rest in peace.”

He fired again and heard the slug punch through the thing’s helmet with a metallic sound, as if it had been struck by a hammer.

The ghoul fell on its face and lay still.

Wolff stood patting his rifle. “Take your time. Aim carefully, firing prone when you can from a distance and with somebody watching your back. Conserve ammunition. Stay close together, covering 360 degrees around you.”

He imagined the ideal formation in a pitched battle against the draugr would be something like a Napoleonic square, as long as it was mobile, had more ammunition than there were ghouls, and had an egress path in case they needed it.

“Now then,” Wolff said, “who wants to be next?”

Everybody did. Over the next hour, the men lay in the snow and slew draugr. At first, the paratroopers hesitated at shooting unarmed men, especially Germans. Schulte balked at shooting a civilian woman who capered at them across the snow. It had to be done, and they all had to do it, as it was first and foremost an act of mercy. Every kill rewired their tactical instincts and renewed their confidence. They were taking heart. They could do this. It might not even be that difficult.

Wolff knew better. When they reached the city itself with its buildings crowding all around, the balance of power would shift to the infected.

CHAPTER FOURTEEN

TIERGARTEN

The sun was coming up as the C-53 howled over Berlin’s red rooftops. Heavy with eighty pounds of gear, Sergeant Wilkins shambled to the door.

The light turned green.

Wilkins grunted as he bent his knees, but he was too heavy to jump. His gear snagged in the doorway, holding him fast.

He’d seen men towed by a plane in the air, battered beyond recognition until his comrades pulled him back inside. “Wait!”

Lieutenant Chapman shoved him into the wind. “Tally ho, Wilkie!”

His canteen, bayonet, and God knew what else ripped away as he tumbled forward. He remembered to twist in the air as he plummeted toward the earth like a three-hundred-pound bomb.

The parachute deployed with a crack. Slammed by the jerk, he swayed under the canopy. His general-purpose bag dangled below him like a ball and chain.

Wilkins worked his shroud lines to steer into the wind. Then he set his eyes on the ground, looking for his landing point. The Brandenburg Gate loomed to the east. The landmark oriented him.

The pilots had done their work well. He wouldn’t be coming down a chimney like old St. Nick. Right now, his biggest worry was trees.

Which were everywhere in the vast city park.

The ground rushed up at him perilously fast. He spotted one of the amber lights the pathfinders had placed to mark the drop zone. Brace for impact!

The bag struck first, followed by the rest of him in a practiced roll.

The ground broke under him, following by an electrifying shock.

He’d landed on a frozen pond. The fall had broken the ice. Freezing water covered his back and soaked into his rucksack, making it heavier. He struggled and floundered as he tried to gain purchase.

Another para hurtled out of the sky and struck the ice, going straight through.

“Bloody hell!” Wilkins screamed.

The ground appeared to swallow the paratrooper, leaving only the parachute canopy. Then the hole sucked that down too.

The ice around Wilkins crackled. He stopped moving. The freezing water burned his numbing back. That Yank paratrooper song grated through his mind, repeating the line, “Gory, gory, what a helluva way to die!”

“Hello?” he gasped. “Help!”

The rest of the team was landing, thankfully on solid ground.

“Hang on!”

The voice belonged to Davies, who’d shed his parachute and rucksack and now crawled toward him on all fours.

“Can you take hold of my rifle, Sergeant?”

“A tad closer, if you please, Corporal,” said Wilkins, who’d had five years of maintaining a stiff upper lip drilled into him.

He grabbed the rifle. Davies heaved.

Wilkins rolled out of the hole. The corporal dragged him far enough for comfort and helped him shuck his waterlogged ’chute and pack.

The other paratroopers gathered around.

The lieutenant grinned at him. “Close shave, eh, Wilkie?”

“We lost a man in the ice.” Wilkins’ teeth chattered as he surveyed the team. “Brown, sir. He’s gone.”

The grin evaporated. “Damn. Well, let’s not lose you too. Dry off.”

The sergeant stripped to the waist, dried himself, and put on fresh thermals. The rest he wrung out as best he could and put back on. The men rubbed his back to get his blood flowing. Pins and needles followed by fire.

“Any sign of the Pathfinders, Lieutenant?”

“No,” Chapman said. “They laid down their beacons and lights as instructed, but there’s otherwise no sign of them. No sign of a struggle. Not even footprints.”

“It’s eerie, sir,” Davies said.

Wilkins chafed at the attention he was getting. He hated anybody babying him except Jocelyn. He shrugged off their hands. “I’m good to go anytime, sir.”

The team moved out. Wilkins snatched up his jungle carbine, a lighter, more compact version of the Enfield rifle, and followed. West, into Tiergarten.

They were nine shooters, all veterans and very capable men. The colonel had told Wilkins he could pick his men, but he couldn’t choose men for this type of operation. They had to come to him.

He’d quietly sent around a call for volunteers. To his surprise, he’d received far more volunteers than he had seats on the plane, and had chosen carefully until he’d sorted a crack squad for Chappie’s approval.

They were the best of the best.

With its woodland scenes, monuments, lakes, and pathways, Tiergarten must have been a beautiful sanctuary from the hustle and bustle of Berlin. Now windswept garbage rustled along the ground, the trees bare, the monuments broken by bombs, massive impact craters scarring the once pristine landscape.

Aside from nationalist tinkering by the Prussians and then the Nazis, Tiergarten stood pretty much as it was originally designed in the 1800s, and modeled after English gardens at that.

They found numerous tracks in the snow, both animal and human. Still no sign of the American Pathfinders, however. No ghouls, either. Smoke rose in the distance from a downed plane. The eastward wind brought a smattering of gunfire from the German drop zones. Booms resonated from the east; the British paras were assaulting Tempelhof Airport.

Phase one of the operation, it seemed, was proceeding apace. Wilkins considered it a bloody miracle they’d all made it this far.

They passed a broken statue of Adolf Hitler, hand raised in classical oration like a Roman senator, headed tilted toward the heavens. Now the Leader lay on his side facing the mud, his marble feet turned into rubble. Ahead, a pillar soared into the air, still proud and intact. The Victory Column, topped by the goddess Victoria, built to commemorate the nation’s victory in the Danish-Prussian War. To the south, damaged statues of Prussian kings framed Victory Avenue cutting into the park.

So much history here, Wilkins thought. And yes, greatness. A great nation and a proud people. All hijacked by Hitler and his thugs and harnessed to totalitarianism and war. The waste of it all sickened him.

After they’d marched two kilometers across the park, Corporal Wright spotted the army research center through the trees. The building had been constructed on a little island on the Neuer Lake, now frozen by winter’s cold.

Chapman raised his binoculars to investigate. The facility appeared to be unguarded. He waved at Wilkins and communicated using hand signals.

The sergeant patted Wright’s back and gestured at him to follow. Together, the two men scurried to the barbed-wire fencing. Wilkins held the wire while Wright cut it. After folding it aside to make an entrance point, Wilkins dashed to the pillbox by the entrance while Wright covered with his Sten submachine-gun.

The pillbox was empty, the heavy steel door to the dome-shaped facility unlocked and kept ajar by snowdrift. Wilkins gave the all-clear signal.

Chapman led the team forward.

The research center’s top level appeared to be drab and utilitarian administrative space, complete with offices, filing room, and radio shack. Papers littered the floor, some of them burned; the people here had left in a hurry and tried to destroy the evidence as they did. The lieutenant casually tore a massive swastika-emblazoned banner from the wall and let it crumple at his feet.

The next level underground was research space, derelict machines and long tabletops splattered with broken class and chemicals letting up an acrid stench. The squad donned gas masks just in case and kept moving, observing everything but caring about nothing. Their objective, they knew, would be on the lowest level.

The team piled out onto the third level. There, they found bodies near a long table stacked with champagne flutes under a sign. The paras kept going, securing the level before returning to the room of the dead.

They were scientists, around twenty men and women in pristine white lab coats. They lay strewn on the floor as if dropped from a great height. Wilkins inspected one without touching her and found no visible cause of death.

Suicide, most likely. Or, he thought with alarm, maybe something else.

He glanced up at the sign, which read: “Die ganze Natur ist ein gewaltiges Ringen zwischen Kraft und Schwache, ein ewiger Sieg des Starken über den Schwachen.”

The whole of Nature is a mighty struggle between strength and weakness, an eternal victory of the strong over the weak.

“Poor buggers just dropped dead,” Davies said.

Wilkins jumped to his feet waving his gloved hand. He held a finger in front of his gas mask. Quiet!

The woman Wilkins had just inspected sat up, eyes closed and face contorted as if struggling to awake from a deep slumber. Her blond hair had frayed around its austere bun, giving her a helpless quality.

Chapman crouched in front of her. “Are you all right, miss?” he said in German.

“No pain, no progress,” she said sleepily.

“Get away from her, sir,” Wilkins warned.

Her eyes flashed open as she turned toward him. They were completely white.

“No pain,” the other scientists murmured. “No progress.”

They stirred, some straining to rise to all fours, continuing their lethargic chant.

“They’re infected, sir,” Wilkins said.

The lieutenant frowned. “Are you sure? They’re blind, not dead.”

“Sir!”

“We have to confirm. If they’re alive, they can give us information.”

A grizzled scientist wrapped his hands around Chapman’s ankle and bit into it.

“Christ!” The lieutenant kicked to free himself and inspected the bite, which had failed to penetrate the leather of his boot. Another close shave.

A scientist rose unsteadily to her feet and lurched grinning at Wilkins.

He didn’t wait for orders. He raised his rifle and fired.

The rest of the squad joined in, shooting the scientists in the head as they struggled to rise or crawled toward the soldiers.

The slaughter finished, the paras stood in a cloud of smoke. The gunfire still rang in their ears. Nobody spoke, too stunned by what just happened.

A speaker on the ceiling startled them with a loud screech. “Achtung, achtung.” The man’s calm, deep voice resonated throughout the level. “What is the disturbance?”

Chapman and Wilkins looked at each other.

“We heard shooting. Respond now.”

The lieutenant pulled off his gas mask and picked up the phone. “We’re on level three. Please send help.”

At his signal, the team took up firing positions near the stairwell.

Nothing.

Then: “We have orders not to leave our post. The door must remain secured.”

“Please, comrade!” Chapman said, doing an admirable job with his acting. “If you don’t come, we’ll all be killed and our research destroyed!”

“Nein,” the speaker blared.

“I order you to come!”

Nothing.

“In the name of the Führer!”

Nothing.

The lieutenant hung up the phone. “So here’s the situation. There’s still a military presence in the facility, possibly SS types. Likely, they’re at the bottom level and have barricaded themselves in with the serum. Wilkie?”

“I agree, sir.”

“If you’ve got a brilliant idea, I’d be all ears.”

“We may not be able to get inside to have a go at them. We don’t have time to starve them out. That leaves talking, sir.”

“Talking?”

“As in convince them to surrender.”

Chapman sighed. “A nice little chin wag with the SS. Right.” He picked up the phone, chewed his mustache a bit, and set it back down. “Any more brilliant ideas on how I should do that?”

Wilkins shrugged. “Tell them Germany surrendered?”

“Smashing,” the lieutenant said. “Attention any German military who can hear my voice: We are the 2nd Para Brigade with Her Majesty’s 1st Airborne Division and have arrived to secure this site. Your Führer unleashed a plague from this facility, which we believe originated here. Germany has since surrendered. The plague, however, is out of control. We ask you to surrender so that we can reduce unnecessary loss of life not only in Europe but in Germany itself.”

Good going, Wilkins thought. The lieutenant had told the truth and kept it short and simple, ending with an appeal the man’s humanity.

After a long silence, the speaker came to life again. “What is the Führer’s status?”

“Who am I speaking to?”

“Waffen-Schutzstaffel.”

SS. Scratch that appeal to the man’s humanity. He was a fanatic likely to follow his last orders to the death, no matter how ridiculous.

“What is the Führer’s status?”

Chapman winged it. “The Führer became infected himself. Surely, you’ve seen what happens to men when they’re infected. They go insane, they kill, they die, and then they go on killing. If you let us in, we’ll be able to cure him.”

The SS didn’t answer.

“Come on, man. You can save the Führer.”

“Hang up,” Wilkins said.

Chapman did. “What’s the ruckus, Wilkie? I’ve got this well in hand.”

The SS had sworn to follow Hitler to the grave.

The speaker blared again. “Remain in your present location, British. We are coming to you.”

CHAPTER FIFTEEN

GRUNEWALD

Jäger Muller trailed Leutnant Reiser through the dense woods.

Gaunt pines wherever he looked. Stately oak trees devoid of greenery. Light and shadow played tricks on his eyes, making him see lurching dead everywhere.

The thrashing he heard turned out to be a terrified snow hare.

Muller carried his rifle, bayonet, Luger, and stick grenades, along with a bandolier holding a hundred rounds and additional clips stuffed into every spare pocket. Still, he felt defenseless.

Something moaned in the trees. He looked at the lieutenant to make sure he hadn’t imagined it this time.

Leutnant Reiser shouldered his MP40 submachine-gun and fired a burst. The stream of bullets punched the grimacing ghoul in the head and nearly tore it clean off. The body toppled a moment later in a puff of smoke and dust.

“Good shooting, Herr Leutnant,” Muller said in wonder.

“Ja,” said Reiser. “Send my trophy in the next post. Los, jäger.”

The trooper pursed his lips and followed. Damn it, did the lieutenant have to be so good at shooting on top of everything else? Did he even know what fear was?

It was just one more thing that was intimidating about Reiser. Maybe that was how it was supposed to work. Muller feared failure more than he feared the undead. He feared being a feigling, a coward. And he feared Reiser most of all.

Not just fear. He despised the man, found him almost entirely lacking in warmth and personality. Muller didn’t like officers in general, and not just for that. The higher up in rank you got, the closer you were to being Hitler.

If Oberfeldwebel Wolff were here, he’d tell Muller what to do instead of forcing him to tag along in the middle of the woods, part spectator, part cannon fodder. The sergeant cared about his men as much as he did the mission. Wolff would give him the chance to conquer his fear by drawing blood with a kill.

Reiser couldn’t be bothered. He didn’t care about Muller at all, didn’t even know his name. And every downed ghoul brought him closer to his objective.

“Herr Leutnant, are you sure the platoon is ahead of us?”

The lieutenant answered with a grunt. “Ja.”

In the darkness, they’d stumbled upon the weapons container, already opened and almost emptied of weapons and ammunition. They’d armed themselves and marched east until dawn found them in this thick forest.

Muller was certain they’d overshot the assembly area. This wasn’t a patch of woods. It was the Grunewald Forest, on the other side of the Havel River, which put them far ahead of the regiment and very much on their own.

He was sure enough about it he opened his mouth to tell Reiser, then wisely shut it again. “Surely,” he ventured, “we should have caught up to them by—”

Reiser raised his MP40 and fired again. Two bodies crumpled to the snow among the trees. “Los.”

“Zu befehl.” While obedience was highly valued in the Wehrmacht, the Fallschirmjäger were expected to take initiative, especially if it meant being aggressive. “I’ll take point, Herr Leutnant.”

He ranged ahead before the lieutenant could respond with some scathing rebuke. As long as he was out here, he was going to prove himself.

They crossed a small footbridge over a frozen canal linking two lakes. The distant woods appeared a cloudy gray.

Fog? No, smoke. A fire smoldered deep in the forest.

He advanced bayonet first, ready for anything. The lieutenant tramped behind him. The woods opened up to a meadow shrouded in a thick smoky haze.

Massive pyres of corpses smoldered by several three-ton trucks. Two German soldiers and a civilian dug through the charred bodies with their hands.

His first thought was they were crazy. The ash was still intensely hot.

His second thought was they were draugr.

If he turned around and checked with the lieutenant for orders, Reiser would shoot the infected himself. Muller raced ahead to get his kill.

As he marched, he spared a thought for the morality of it. As a soldier, he’d often questioned when it was right and wrong to take another man’s life. Then he reminded himself these things weren’t men, not anymore.

The draugr turned at the sound of his approach. The civilian’s scalp fell forward in a bloody flap over his face. The thing brushed it out of the way with his clawed hand and let out a sound like snickering.

Any moral qualms Muller might have had died right there.

Then he slid into the pit.

So focused on the draugr and the smoke, he’d completely missed the hastily dug trenches. He’d fallen into one of these to come to a skidding half on top of thick carpet of stiff, lime-covered corpses.

Arms, legs, hands, eyes, bloody torsos, and faces, so many dead faces, all tangled together as if fused together into a single monstrous organism.

He cried out in horror. The draugr sighed as they staggered toward him.

Where was the lieutenant? Why wasn’t he firing?

A hand gripped his jacket and yanked. It was Reiser. The lieutenant hauled him out of the pit. “On your feet, dumb-head! Shoot your weapon!”

“Jawohl!” Muller raised his K98 rifle and fired with a loud report.

And missed.

More than panic affected his aim. Even now, he shied from killing unarmed people at close range.

This didn’t make him a coward. This made him normal.

Muller worked the bolt to chamber another round and fired again, with similar results. The draugr were getting too close for comfort. He backpedaled straight into Reiser, who grabbed him by the back of the neck and shoved him forward.

“Do your duty, jäger!” the lieutenant barked.

They weren’t people. They were monsters wearing the faces of people.

He fired again.

The civilian spun like a top and toppled into one of the lime pits. Emboldened, Muller steadied his breathing and shot the soldiers in rapid succession.

If he felt bad about it, that would have to wait until later.

Right now, he felt good.

He was alive, and they were dead. He hadn’t failed. He could do this. He turned hoping to catch some sign of approval from the lieutenant, but Reiser was already walking away to inspect the bodies in the trenches.

Which was well and good, as far as Muller was concerned. He was glad the lieutenant hadn’t caught him looking for a pat on the head.

He gazed down at the horrific mass of bodies, wondering how they ended up here. Many had their wrists tied behind their backs with rope. Nearly all had broken skulls.

These people had been executed.

Something was alive in the trenches. More than one thing. The mass of bodies appeared to pulse as several ghouls at the bottom tried to squirm their way out.

“Interesting,” Reiser mused. “They have plenty of meat. Why do they want to get out and try to kill us?”

Muller winced at the idea of people being meat. His stomach soured.

“Because killing us is their main passion, Herr Leutnant,” he guessed. “Eating is just a part of it.”

Reiser’s eyes narrowed, and the jäger realized the lieutenant had posed the question rhetorically to himself. Then he nodded. “That may be so.”

Gunfire rattled to the southwest.

“And we’re in the Grunewald, Herr Leutnant,” Muller said, pressing his luck. “That’s the regiment shooting. They’re behind us.”

“What is your name, jäger?”

Muller came to attention. “Jäger Yohann Muller, Herr Leutnant.”

“We will wait here for the regiment, Herr Muller. In the meantime, investigate the trucks and let me know if they are operational.”

“Jawohl, Herr Leutnant!”

“Then it is back to heimatkurs for us, eh?”

Heimatkurs, the way home.

The Fallschirmjäger were on the move again, again homeward bound.

For the first time, Muller felt like he had truly joined their ranks.

CHAPTER SIXTEEN

REICHSAUTOBAHN

The regiment marched out of the Grunewald Forest onto Reichsautobahn 2, one of “Adolf Hitler’s Roads” built by the Nazis after they took power in 1933. Lined with trees, this major east-west national highway cut through Berlin and would lead the Fallschirmjäger directly to Tiergarten.

Toting his machine-gun over his shoulders, Gefreiter Steiner looked around Berlin’s Charlottenburg district like an awed tourist. The German Opera was nearby, as was Kurfürstendamm Avenue with its shops and restaurants. In the Golden Twenties, the district was famed for theater, music, and dancing.

For a small town boy like Steiner, the west side of Berlin and its notorious decadence before the puritanical Nazis seized power represented some fabled age of fun, debauchery, and easy women.

Now it was a dead place.

Violence had devastated the district, both from Allied bombing and the draugr plague. The buildings stood blackened, scarred, and derelict. Many were in ruins, only partially standing and filled with bricks and dust. Charred motorcars and military vehicles stood silently, surrounded by abandoned luggage and garbage.

The apokalypse had come to Berlin.

Muller grimaced at the sights. “If we don’t stop the plague, all of Germany will look like this soon.”

“God,” Steiner mused, “you spend a few hours with the leutnant, and you’ve got a wasp up your ass, just like him.”

“I grew up here. This is my city.”

His chiding smile disappeared. “Ah. Right. Sorry, Yohann. Whereabouts did you grow up?”

“Schöneberg. It’s in the south side of Berlin.”

“It looks like there was an exodus. I’m sure your folks got out.”

Muller glowered and said nothing. He looked like a soldier. Overnight, it seemed, the kid had grown up.

The paratroopers ahead relayed the signal to halt.

“What’s happening now?” Steiner said. “Can anybody see?”

Nobody answered. They’d find out when the officers saw fit to tell them. Then they’d march again. March, halt. March, halt. It was the soldier’s life.

What Steiner couldn’t see, he heard. The growl of engines.

Somebody was coming.

An officer blew a whistle. Noncommissioned officers relayed hand signals down the ranks. Wolff wheeled and chopped his hand to the right.

Off the street.

The squad rushed to cover with a clatter of gear. The distant growling grew louder, joined by the shriek of armored vehicle treads.

Steiner found himself with the rest of the squad in the charred ruins of a cafe. Churned up by their boots, ash floated in drifts. The air tasted like charcoal. The other squads in the platoon pounded upstairs to occupy apartments overlooking the autobahn.

Just a minute ago, he’d felt completely safe in the middle of a column of heavily armed, elite light infantry. Not anymore. This didn’t feel right.

The squad looked to Wolff, who said, “Sichern und laden.” Lock and load.

Steiner exchanged a wondering glance with Animal. “They’re not going to ask us to shoot Reserve Army, are they?”

Because of its strategic importance as the center of the Third Reich, Berlin was a heavily militarized district. Steiner thought it as likely they’d run into a battalion of the Reserve Army as a battalion of draugr.

Schneider shrugged. “They might be SS. In which case, we might have to shoot if they shoot at us first.”

“I don’t want to hurt any German who’s alive.”

The big soldier patted his flamethrower. “Anybody shoots at me gets torched.”

Schulte adjusted the scope attached to his K98. “I’d rather not be ordered to shoot you next, Steiner. So do what you’re told.”

“Get that ’42 set up!” Wolff snarled.

Steiner mounted the gun on the cafe countertop and raised the belt feed cover. Weber fed it the end of a fifty-round belt and slammed the cover shut. Steiner pulled the cocking handle and braced the stock against his shoulder. While firing, he’d hold the stock with his left hand as well for even more stability.

Times like this, he felt popular. The Wehrmacht placed enormous tactical importance on the machine-gun as the central player in an infantry unit. In a sense, the other men in his squad were there mainly to provide him security and carry extra ammo for him.

That popularity extended to the Americans he’d fought, however. Whenever they heard the distinctive ripping sound of an MG42 in action, they threw everything they had at it. If he paused to reload or change out an overheated barrel, they often chose that time to rush and try to kill him.

Every soldier at some point took the impersonal act of combat personally. Why are they shooting at me? They’re trying to kill me! Why me?

In Steiner’s case, however, it was real. They really were trying to kill just him.

He didn’t want any of it. He didn’t want a war. He didn’t want to save the world. He wanted a girlfriend. A decent job. A normal life in a normal world.

“Feuer auf mein kommando,” Leutnant Reiser said. Fire on my command.

The shriek of the treads grew in volume. The big engines let out a throaty growl. The building trembled. One of the surviving windows shivered in its pane. Ash danced on the floor. The vibrations crawled up Steiner’s legs and settled in his chest. He licked his lips and waited for a target.

A gaunt soldier in a belted brown coat shambled glumly past, followed by a motley crowd of the same. Some carried rifles. Dust puffed from their coats with each step.

Then the first tank appeared, a massive T34.

They were Soviets, a long way from the Eastern Front in Poland.

Still following their last orders by advancing westward, ever westward.

Seven meters long and two and a half tall, the medium tank advanced sluggishly on the blacktop, breathing a cloud of exhaust that wafted over the crowd of bloodied Russian and German soldiers marching around it. A massive red flag bearing the hammer and sickle of the USSR flowed from a slanted pole protruding from its turret.

Then Steiner heard the hum.

At first, he thought it was the tank engines. The deep baritone hum resonated in the air, a dirge expressing an ancient sorrow.

The Russians were singing.

The tank disappeared from view, followed by another. The army of the damned thickened and now included civilians, even women and a few kids in Hitler Youth uniforms. The women sang as well, adding a single eerie soprano note to the ghostly chorus.

One tank after another rolled past. Steiner shivered as the singing grew louder than the rumble and clank of the advancing machinery.

God, it was an entire mechanized battalion.

Another surprise dawned on him. The draugr retained enough of their minds to operate weapons. That changed things considerably for him.

Please let them go, he prayed. Don’t make me fire at them. Just let them keep going.

But that wasn’t the Fallschirmjäger style. They couldn’t abide a force like this in their operational rear, where the wounded were still being brought forward by the three-tons they’d captured in the Grunewald. They had the Soviet column in an ideal ambush condition. Their operational motto was, “Die beste verteidigung ist der angriff.” Attack is the best defense.

Yes, they were going to attack.

A panzerschreck team set up among a tangle of dining chairs. The loader slammed an 88 anti-tank rocket into the stove pipe and tapped the back of the gunner’s helmet. The gunner raised the launcher and waited.

A whistle blew at the last unit in line, followed by others in a chain all the way up to the vanguard.

“Glück ab!” somebody cried the Fallschirmjäger war cry. Good luck!

“Feuer frei!” Reiser screamed. Fire at will!

The ghouls’ heads swiveled toward the sound as the Fallschirmjäger opened up with a rain of hot metal. The T34 ground to a halt, bullets pinging off its thick hull. The squads in the upper floors fired panzerfaust anti-tank grenades down at the tank. The shots exploded or ricocheted off the tank’s sloped armor in showers of sparks. Around the metal beast, ghouls jerked and danced as rounds struck them. One fired back with his drum-fed submachine-gun, the rounds buzzing past Steiner’s ear like wasps. The surviving window panes exploded in a cloud of glass. Draugr poured from the other side of the tank and lurched into the guns.

Steiner squeezed the trigger in seven-round bursts that cut a Russian soldier in half. Dust filled the room as the building shook from the impact of a tank shell.

“Aimed fire, goddamn it!” Wolff roared.

“Jawohl,” the men called out. Steiner used iron sights to decapitate another soldier, screaming every obscenity he knew while inventing a few he didn’t.

The T34’s turret swiveled to aim its high-velocity gun directly at him.

The most popular guy in the room, Steiner thought and closed his eyes.

Then the panzerschreck team fired their launcher with a cloud of smoke.

The shot struck the T34 under the turret and exploded inside. The tank shrugged at the blast then sagged. Smoke poured out of the hole. On fire, the tank commander heaved himself out of the hatch and tumbled to the ground.

“Cease fire, cease fire!” Wolff said.

The gunfire trickled off to single shots. Oily black smoke poured energetically out of the dead T34. A gray haze filled the air. Steiner patted the machine-gun that had gotten him through another brush with death.

The squad went outside to regroup. Third Platoon had gotten hammered by two T34s before destroying both tanks, but otherwise the regiment’s casualties appeared to be minimal. Everywhere Steiner looked, there were burning armored vehicles and piles of Russian dead under their red flags. The paratroopers roamed among them, finishing the writhing wounded with single shots to the head.

“Fucking communists,” Animal said and spat. “Ivan just met his match.”

“Sieg heil!” somebody called out.

The paratroopers grinned at their handiwork and clapped each other on the back. They were alive, and the Russians were dead. Victory.

Steiner sagged, exhausted.

He wondered if the entire world had gone insane, or it was just him.

CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

THE OBJECTIVE

Eagle took over as lead company in line, with Second Platoon as the tip of the spear. Oberfeldwebel Wolff marched with a fresh sense of purpose.

This war, this objective, felt right to him. No longer was he training eager young men to die like flies for a patch of rocky ground. The Fallschirmjäger were here to save Germany from itself. In such a conflict, dying meant something.

And his boys were again living up to their reputation as the best of the best. They respected the draugr but no longer feared them.

As they neared Tiergarten, signs of war were everywhere. A splintered tree scattered across the autobahn among a cluster of motorcars chewed up by machine-gun fire. Ladders abandoned around a bombed tenement. Carts with half-eaten horses lying next to them. Volkssturm, mostly old men and boys who should have been in school, lay dead around sandbag positions. Snow blanketed everything.

In the distance, a jarring rumble as a large building collapsed. A cloud of dust rose over the red rooftops. Muffled booms and splashes of gunfire rolled from the southwest, the Tommies defending the airport they’d taken by force. The squads leapfrogged down the autobahn, two providing over watch while the rest bounded forward.

“Help us!”

Civilians filled the windows of a tenement, waving white sheets at them.

“We have nothing!”

“Are the traitors gone?”

“Are you here to say?”

The platoon slowed, waiting for the order to stop and provide aid.

“Keep moving,” Leutnant Reiser snarled.

“My children need milk!”

“Arm yourself and join us,” the lieutenant shouted back. “Otherwise, shut up.”

The men’s faces darkened. Misery seemed to settle across the entire platoon. Chivalry was ingrained into the Fallschirmjäger psyche.

The huge boost in morale they’d gained by destroying the Soviet battalion, they’d lost by ignoring German women and children in need.

Wolff veered to march alongside Reiser. “Herr Leutnant—”

“Wer zwei hasen auf einmal jagt bekommt keinen,” the lieutenant snapped. He who chases two rabbits at once will catch none. “I would have thought a soldier of your experience would remember that.”

Wolff swallowed shame and anger. “Verstanden, Herr Leutnant.”

“The best way to help our countrymen is to stop the plague.”

The platoon reached the edge of Tiergarten, a welcome relief for eyes made sore by the ravaged urban landscape. Dense with trees, the park appeared peaceful, offering sanctuary to the paratroopers.

The squads continued their leapfrogging progress into the park. Wolff spotted the white dome of the Army Research Center and called it out to Reiser. The lieutenant placed a squad to wait for the next platoon and led the remainder into the woods. They crossed the frozen lake, cut the wire, and approached the building.

The heavy steel entry door stood wide open. Bloody boot prints led away to the north. The paratroopers eyed the cavernous doorway with trepidation. A warm, hellish stench steamed out into the cold air.

Wolff looked at Reiser, who said, “Das glück hilft dem kühnen, Herr Wolff.” Fortune favors the bold.

The sergeant turned to his squad. “We’re going in. I’ll lead the way. I want good trigger discipline in there. You shoot me in the back, I’ll kill you.”

“Jawohl, Herr Oberfeldwebel.”

“Schneider, I want you up here with me. We see a ghoul or even a few, leave them to me. We see a big crowd coming at us in close quarters, I want you ready to torch them. Verstehen sie?”

Animal grinned. “Verstanden, Herr Oberfeldwebel.”

Wolff shouldered his FG42 and stepped into the administrative area. Their boots stomped against the dead quiet. A thick layer of trampled paper covered the floor, some of it burned in a pile of ash and charred sheets.

The area was clear. He ignored the lift and proceeded to the stairs.

The next level was clear as well.

The paratroopers found bodies and a harsh chemical stink on the third level. From a side room came a strange drumming. The sound of fists pounding a door in a tireless frenzy.

As the squad filled the space, the pounding stopped.

Something growled deep in its throat.

The paratroopers spread out, weapons raised.

“Come and get it,” Wolff called.

Two figures sprinted howling into the room. The squad dropped them with a salvo.

One was an SS fighter, the other a British paratrooper, his shredded sleeves revealing arms gnawed to the bone.

“They’re Tommies,” Steiner said, surveying the dead carpeting the floor. “Tommies and SS and scientists.”

“What are the Red Devils doing here?” Muller said.

“They don’t trust us,” Reiser said behind them. He turned to address the squad coming down the stairs. “Keep going. Secure the serum.”

“Jawohl, Herr Leutnant.”

“Now we shall see who these two unlikely comrades were trying to get at,” the lieutenant told Wolff.

They entered the side room, another lab space. Test tubes and other glassware had toppled from the metal shelving and had been ground into glass dust.

Wolff knocked on the door. “Fallschirmjäger!” He added in his poor English, “You let us inside.”

The door opened to reveal a wide-eyed British paratrooper in a cramped storage closet.

“Herr Wilkins,” Wolff said in surprise.

“Thank you, Herr Wolff,” the man said with British aplomb. “You saved me quite a lot of bother.”

Another Red Devil lay shivering in a ball with a bandaged leg, his face flushed and glistening with sweat.

Wilkins glanced back at his comrade. “This is Lieutenant Chapman. He’s wounded.”

“This is it, Wilkie,” the British officer said. “Thank you for everything. Carry on.”

“Ask the English if his man is bitten,” Reiser said.

“He is,” Wilkins said in German, “but—”

Reiser stepped into the storage room and shot the British lieutenant twice in the head.

“Christ!” Wilkins shouted.

The lieutenant swung the Luger to aim it at the man’s face. “Were you bitten?”

“I’m clean,” the sergeant said. “Honest! Now put the bloody gun down. Nicht schiessen!” Don’t shoot!

“As you wish.” Reiser holstered his pistol. “Herr Wilkins, a pleasure to see you again. Now explain your presence here.”

Wilkins said the brigade had dispatched a commando team to the facility as insurance in case the Fallschirmjäger failed.

“Just ten of you,” Wolff grunted. “That was your first mistake.”

Wilkins shrugged. It obviously hadn’t been his call. He’d followed orders.

“We made contact with some SS who’d barricaded themselves in the bottom level,” he said. “Hoping to entice them out, the lieutenant told them Hitler had been infected, and if we had the germ, we could cure him.”

“That was your second mistake.”

If the Führer died, the SS might have gone out in a blaze of glory or simply shot themselves where they stood.

But the Führer hadn’t died, not quite. They believed he’d become infected with the Overman germ.

They’d injected themselves so they’d be draugr too.

The British paratrooper shrugged again. He hadn’t made that call either. “We waited an hour. Strong ambush position, clear lanes of fire. The SS charged in like wild animals. There was no stopping them.” He looked down at his dead lieutenant. “At the end, Chappie and I lost our weapons and made it into this cupboard. I was hoping to give him some comfort before ending it for him with my knife. He was a good man. He’d earned that much.”

“A touching sentiment,” Reiser sneered, “which easily could have resulted in your death. You have two choices now, English. Run along and join your comrades at the airport, or come with us.”

“If it’s all the same to you, sir, I’ll tag along with you and your men. The devil I know, so to speak.”

“You will submit to my authority as your superior.” Reiser glanced at Wolff. “Oberfeldwebel Wolff will see to it.”

Wolff crossed his arms and nodded. “We’ll put this English to good use.”

“Since he does not trust us to do our duty, give him the most dangerous tasks so he can show us how they’re accomplished. Ja?”

A paratrooper rushed into the room and saluted. “We have secured what we believe is the original serum, Herr Leutnant.”

“That is good news,” Reiser said. “Prepare to move out.”

The Fallschirmjäger exchanged grins. They’d fought to their objective and obtained it.

Now they just had to fight their way out.

CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

BIVOUAC

They made it as far as the top level before a messenger from Hauptmann Werner told them the regiment was bivouacking here for the night.

“Billet where you stand,” Reiser said.

Muller sat on the floor exhausted. Steiner moved along on his hands and knees, sweeping as much of the loose papers as he could into a pile.

“What are you doing, Otto?”

The machine-gunner grinned. “Making a bed.”

The squad exchanged glances then dove to the ground to sweep up the paper. Tonight, these pages documenting the Reich’s secret weapons projects would make great bedding and future kindling. The British sergeant watched them with amusement before joining in to fashion himself a pillow.

“Herr Leutnant, should we dispose of the bodies?” Wolff asked Reiser.

“We achieved our objective,” the lieutenant said. “Heroes do not clean up. Let the other platoons deal with the mess.”

Muller picked up a random sheet from the dusty floor. The top of the page was stamped with a swastika and the words, TOP SECRET. He read:

Once the body’s surface is penetrated, the Overman bacterium, like any foreign bacterium, scavenges for free iron required to multiply, invading tissues and encountering complex defense mechanisms that respond with inflammation.

The Overman bacterium then distinguishes itself, in several ways. First, it is encased in novel proteins that protect it from opsonization and phagocytosis—

He crumpled it up with disgust. The corruption of the Wehrmacht, the fall of Berlin, the threat of creeping extinction for Germany, none of it just happened. It was the result of dedicated effort by minds far brighter than his. A grand scientific endeavor documented in fifty-mark words typewritten on thousands of sheets of paper.

Given time and resources, the scientists might have succeeded. They might have created the Overman, a super soldier of limitless strength and endurance. They might have conquered the world.

But Germany had been losing the war. Hitler was about to gamble everything on Autumn Mist. The scientists didn’t have time. They cut corners, jury-rigged what they needed, experimented on prisoners in Poland.

And produced this malevolent bug that took over its host and reprogrammed it to kill, eat, and destroy.

The squad jumped to its feet. Oberst Heilman had entered the center, trailed by his staff. The British sergeant remained on the floor, scooping up sheets and reading them before either discarding or shoving them into his jacket.

Hauptmann Werner snapped his fingers. Another squad of Fallschirmjäger set a series of steel vacuum flasks on the floor.

“It is time to meet the enemy,” Heilman said.

What was left of the Wehrmacht and Allied armies wasn’t at war with the dead, not really. They were at war with a bacterium, one of the tiniest forms of life on the planet. A mindless aberration of life carefully engineered to organize in a host and control its behavior.

Werner unscrewed the cap on one of the thermoses. Dry ice fogged into the air. He reached inside, gingerly extracted a sealed test tube, and handed it over.

Heilman held it up to inspect in the waning daylight. The mottled solution glowed a faint green that made the officers look like ghouls themselves.

Muller winced in disgust. Burn it, he thought. Kill it.

The bug was a work of profound, diabolical genius. It was also evil.

“Your company is to be commended for securing it,” the colonel said.

Werner raised his chin in pride. “Danke, Herr Oberst.”

“At dawn, we will proceed to the airport on schedule. You will deliver these samples to the plane. You will guard them with your life. Ist das klar, Herr Werner?” Is that clear?

“Klar, Herr Oberst.”

“All of us are expendable from this moment on. These materials are not. They must be returned to England. The future of the German nation depends on it.”

“Jawohl! Leutnant Reiser, come with me.”

The officers left while the rest of Eagle Company filed into the facility to bivouac on the lower levels.

Muller glared up at a portrait of a stalwart Hitler gazing down at him wearing a glowing white lab coat, surrounded by symbols of technologies the Nazis claimed to have invented, highways and rockets and medicines. Hitler portrayed as greatest scientist who ever lived, just as the war propaganda always proclaimed him as the Greatest Field Commander of All Time.

“Expendable,” Muller snarled. The whole country was expendable. The whole world, all to feed one man’s infectious vanity.

Schulte lay on his paper nest and rested his head on his helmet. “Ja, ja. Like we weren’t expendable before?”

The paratroopers shared grim smiles at the gallows humor.

“You know who’s expendable—the rest of the regiment that has to camp outside in the woods,” Beck said. “Glad I’m in here. Safe and warm.”

Steiner produced his steel Esbit stove, which looked like an animal trap and was about the size of a pack of cigarettes. “Ivan put us behind schedule. The whole regiment should be sleeping in apartments on the other side of Tiergarten.”

He unfolded the stove, inserted a little chemical brick into the base, and struck a match. The tablet ignited with a barely visible blue flame. The machine-gunner keyed open a few cans filled with K rations and dumped them into a mess tin, which he set on the burner to heat up for the squad’s supper.

Muller’s stomach roared at the rich aroma of meat. Another canned dinner, but he didn’t care. He was starving.

“Better to camp here anyway,” Wolff grunted.

“How do you figure, Herr Oberfeldwebel?” Muller asked him.

“Fewer ghouls in the park, and less chance of a big swarm walking up to us. If one does show up, the men outside won’t be trapped in a building with only one exit.”

Muller looked around at the research facility’s concrete walls. Suddenly, being outside, with the ability to retreat in almost any direction, looked better to him.

Leutnant Reiser returned wearing a rare happy smile. “Achtung, Fallschirmjäger. Hauptmann Werner commended our platoon on securing the facility without loss.”

Muller smiled too. The rest of the squad stared back at the lieutenant with taciturn stares. He wiped the smile from his face to imitate their cool.

The British sergeant turned away with a wince. In his view, securing the facility had come at an enormous loss.

The lieutenant set three steel canisters on the floor. “The hauptmann ordered us to safeguard the samples. Each squad will receive three.” His piercing blue eyes roamed Muller’s squad. “Oberfeldwebel, you will carry one. Your machine-gunner another. And…” His eyes lighted on Muller. “Ah, Jäger Muller.”

Wolff stood and scooped up the vacuum-sealed canisters. He gave one to Steiner then set Muller’s in front of him. “Guard it with your life, jäger.”

“Jawohl, Herr Oberfeldwebel,” said Muller.

He’d wanted to prove himself to Reiser and apparently had. As a result, the officer now more likely to assign him difficult tasks.

Scheisse, he thought.

Reiser surveyed the tired squad still wearing his smile. “Eat well, heroes. At dawn, we will complete our mission.” With that, the lieutenant left again, never tiring nor seeming to need food himself.

Muller looked at the canister and shuddered with loathing, his appetite gone.

CHAPTER NINETEEN

LIONS AND DEVILS

A splash of gunfire outside. The Fallschirmjäger bristled, cocking their ears.

The firing stopped. The men relaxed.

“Ring ding, jägers,” Steiner said. “Supper is served.”

The men held out mess tins to receive their share of the beef stew. They filled their canteen cups and took out their metal silverware to eat.

The machine-gunner blinked when Wilkins held out his tin. “I forgot you were here. Every time I see you, I want to grab my weapon. Old habits.”

“I’ll try to be less British, mate,” Wilkins said drily.

Steiner snorted. From his red beret to his stiff upper lip, Wilkins couldn’t be less British no matter how hard he tried. “You’re fine the way you are. I like having you on my side. I’d rather fight the draugr than you. The average Tommy is tough as hell.”

“Lions led by mules,” Beck laughed.

“And whatever do you mean by that?” the British sergeant wondered.

“It’s how we view the British Army,” Wolff chimed in. “Your average soldier is brave. But your tactics are outdated and clumsy, and your officers aren’t very creative. They don’t adapt to circumstance.”

“It’s how an army works, Master Sergeant. An officer must follow through on his orders until he no longer has practical means of doing so.”

“In our military, independent initiative at the lower ranks is valued as much as obedience. We’re much more flexible in the field as a result.”

Steiner let out another snort. “Ironic, wouldn’t you agree?”

Wilkins nodded, getting it. Great Britain was a democracy, but its military operated with rigid top-down decision-making. In the Reich, you could barely take a dump without written approval by the Nazis, but the Wehrmacht permitted broad latitude in independent thinking from the ground up.

Wolff said, “You’re far better than the Americans, though.”

Wilkins shrugged. “They seem all right.”

Steiner said, “They just throw everything they have at you.”

Wolff nodded. “They’re aggressive, but their tactics are simple and outdated. They send in their tanks, you knock out a few, the tanks run, the infantry ends up stranded, and then they call in a big artillery strike.”

“Their artillery is very good.” Steiner shuddered. “And their planes.”

“We’d rather fight them than the English any day,” the oberfeldwebel said. “Especially you Red Devils. We’ve heard stories about the Battle of Arnhem.”

Wilkins looked down at his stew. “That was a rough party.”

He’d been with the 4th Para Brigade then. Out of 10,000 men dropped on Arnhem, only around 2,000 made it out. After that disaster, the brigade had disbanded, with most of the men going to the 1st Brigade. Wilkins ended up freelance, performing special missions for Colonel Adams.

Another splash of gunfire outside. This time, the men ignored it.

“A waste of good infantry,” Wolff said. “Your Market Garden operation was doomed from the start.” Wolff spooned stew into his mouth and chewed. “No, I’m with Steiner. I’d rather fight draugr than you Red Devils or the American airborne.”

“We fought some of you Fallschirm blokes at Arnhem. We called you the Green Devils.”

“Now we’re all on the same side,” Schulte said from his nest. “How inspiring.”

“Ja, ja,” Steiner said, imitating Leutnant Reiser. “Everybody gets a pony.”

The men chuckled at that.

“Steiner does all the wet work with his MG,” Weber said. “The rest of us just carry his ammo around our necks.”

This observation raised another round of laughter along with groans. Everybody carried ammo belts for the MG.

Steiner grinned. “An army of mules led by lions.”

The men hooted and threw crumpled-up Nazi documents at him.

Muller said, “What will you do after the war, Herr Feldwebel?”

Wilkins shrugged. “This gopping war has gone on so bloody long, it’s hard to imagine anything else. I try not to think about surviving it. The only way to be effective in combat and survive—”

“Is to believe you won’t,” several Fallschirmjäger finished together.

“There’s a girl back home, though.”

The paratroopers perked up and went quiet.

“Go on,” Steiner leered, all ears.

“Her name’s Jocelyn. The only thing I allow myself to see in my future is being with her. It gave me something to fight for besides king and country.” The sergeant set his meal down and lit a cigarette. “What about you blokes?”

“Rebuild Germany,” Weber said.

“That goes without saying,” Steiner said. “From the looks of it, we’ll be rebuilding the rest of our lives. Me, I’d like to get a girlfriend and get busy repopulating it.”

“I’d like be an artist,” Muller said. “Travel a Europe at peace.”

“Get my old job back at the post office,” said Schneider.

Steiner looked at Wolff. “What about you, Herr Oberfeldwebel?”

“I’d like to go back to my farm,” the sergeant said. “And never shoot a gun again.”

“You have a girl back home?”

“I did, but I haven’t written her. I hope she moved on.”

“I tried to end it with Jocelyn before my first big operation,” Wilkins said. “I’d rather break her heart that way than have her see me come home in a coffin. I just couldn’t.”

“I understand,” Wolff said. “It was not an easy choice for me.”

The British sergeant pinched off ember at the tip of his cigarette so he could save it for later. “I do hope this draugr menace is the end of war. Once we beat these things, I want peace between our countries. More than that, friendship. I don’t want my sons to have to fight yours in twenty years.”

The men nodded. None of them wished this on their children.

“Ja, we’re all the same under our uniforms,” Schulte said. “How touching.”

Steiner laughed. “Shut up, Erich—”

“Alarm geben!” somebody screamed in the distance. “Alarm, alarm!”

Rifles popped. An MG42 opened up with a ripping snarl Steiner knew well. Machine pistols and submachine-guns joined in, turning the crashes of fire into a steady roar. Figures flickered past the doorway shouting. Tracers and muzzle flashes burst in the darkness. Mortars thumped.

The squad jumped to its feet and collected weapons. The mortar rounds crashed louder than they expected. The mortar teams were firing almost on top of the regiment’s position.

Leutnant Reiser entered the facility as they were coming out. “Seal the door!”

The paratroopers looked at each other. Otherwise, nobody moved.

“The samples must be protected,” Reiser snapped.

Wolff frowned. “Herr Leutnant, the regiment—”

“Will take care of itself. Our mission is to protect the samples.”

Men screamed in agony and terror out in the dark amid the steady flashes of gunfire. The paratroopers looked each other again with wide eyes.

The lieutenant unholstered his Luger. “Schnell!” He kicked Steiner in the leg, making him jump. “Move, pig-dog!”

The squad rushed to the steel door and heaved it shut, shutting out the sounds of combat and slaughter.

CHAPTER TWENTY

REICHSTAG

Sergeant Wilkins sat on the floor on his doss bag while the battle raged all night and Lieutenant Reiser paced in front of the door. The German officer still had his Luger out and tapped it against his thigh like a nervous tic.

The door was staying closed.

A soldier pounded on the entrance with his rifle butt, shouting something, the words tinny and distant as if coming from deep underwater. Wilkins didn’t know what the man was shouting, but he felt certain it was along the lines of, Let me in, mates, before I’m torn to shreds by chomping jaws.

Reiser ignored the pounding. His platoon tried, flinching at each blow.

As for Wilkins, he imagined finding a nice, quiet space to vomit. The horrific sounds left too much to the imagination. The gunfire, the cries for help or ammo, the dead chanting what sounded like, sie, sie, sie, sie, the German word for you.

He just wanted it to stop, especially the screaming. These were men who only a few weeks ago could have all dropped dead without him losing so much as a single tear, men he would have happily shot himself. But the death the Germans faced outside was the kind you didn’t wish on your worst enemy.

The pounding stopped. The muffled rattle of gunfire went on.

He kept his eye on the lieutenant, who paused his pacing long enough to down another tablet. Benzedrine to keep himself awake.

Pep pills. Wakey-wakey pills.

The British War Office issued them as well. The Red Devils ate them like candy during the endless days of fighting at Arnhem, though nobody liked them much. They had a way of making you quite thirsty, and when the drug wore off, you had a nasty tendency to nod off, even during combat.

Then there were the side effects among a few who popped the stuff, which included panic, anger, and homicidal urges.

Wilkins suspected Reiser was the high-strung sort even without adding heavy stimulants to the mix. The sergeant’s stereotype of the average German was a neurotic. He knew for sure the lieutenant had it in for him and that they’d knock heads at some point, German severity clashing with British mettle.

He’d best watch his step if he wanted to return to base, and he needed to do just that. He’d found very interesting Overman project documents, which he’d stuffed in his jacket. They explained the characteristics of the bacterium. Plenty of scientific mumbo jumbo he didn’t understand but that seemed important.

The gunfire melted away, becoming even more distant.

“The regiment is retreating,” Corporal Steiner whispered.

He had no need to whisper. The ghouls couldn’t hear them, and the only trooper sleeping was the insufferable sniper named Schulte. Still, it somehow seemed the right thing to do.

“There must be a million of those things out there,” said Private Muller.

“More bullets than our comrades have,” the machine-gunner agreed.

“Are we trapped here then?”

“Not necessarily,” Wilkins grunted.

Colonel Adams had shared intel with him that he’d gained from Wolfensohn. There was another way out of here.

Muller perked up. “What do you mean?”

Wilkins eyed Captain Werner conferring with his staff in a corner of the room. “I believe you’re about to find out in just a moment.”

As if on cue, Werner called out, “Achtung, jägers.”

The men sluggishly rose to their feet, all of them exhausted.

“The regiment has withdrawn to the south,” the captain said once he had their attention. “We will be going east, through an underground tunnel.”

Back at Martlesham Heath, Colonel Adams had explained the tunnel led east under Tiergarten clear to the Reichstag.

At one time, the proud old building housed the Weimar Republic’s parliament, the central institution in Germany’s fledgling democracy, and before that the Imperial Diet. Then it caught fire in 1933, which led to the Nazis blaming the Communists and suspending the Constitution with the Reichstag Fire Decree. Mass arrests of Communists followed, which fed the policy of appeasement in the capitalist West. Hitler may have been an authoritarian buffoon, but at least he wasn’t a Red.

The German parliament next formally surrendered its powers with the Enabling Act, which set up Hitler as dictator. Since the war began, the Nazis began to use the Reichstag for military purposes.

Which meant the 3FJR’s Eagle Company might be marching directly into a bombed-out ruin, another research facility, or another bunkered SS unit.

No way to know until they got there. Wilkins grabbed his gear.

“We will move out in ten minutes,” Werner said. “Be ready, jägers.”

Reiser roamed among his platoon, encouraging his men to greater zeal with stinging rebukes and well-placed kicks.

“Get up,” he fumed at Schulte, who’d slept through the captain’s speech. “You can sleep when you’re dead.”

Wilkins looked down at the handful of dog tags he held in his clenched fist. He thumbed Lieutenant Chapman’s, which flared in the lantern light. Maybe the Jerry sergeant was right, and the average British officer fought in a box. Chappie wasn’t a bad sort, though. He was one of the good ones.

He pocketed his dog tags and shrugged his pack onto his broad shoulders.

“We have volunteered to take point.” Reiser smiled at Wilkins. “Since we will surely bungle it, the English will lead the way to show us how it is done.”

The Brit looked from the pill-popping lieutenant to the burly Sergeant Wolff, who looked formidable as a one-man platoon. Any barbed rejoinder that crossed his mind died on his lips.

“With pleasure, Herr Leutnant,” he said.

“The pleasure is all mine, English.” Reiser surveyed his paratroopers, tough sons of bitches the lot. “We’re going quiet, jägers. Fix bayonets.”

The Fallschirmjäger riflemen obeyed, though they didn’t look happy about it. Wilkins had cut a few throats in Arnhem, but he doubted many of these men had. It was bad enough to shoot a man, a terrible thing to stick him like a pig.

Muller turned so green one could mistake him for a ghoul. Having killed men with a knife himself, Wilkins couldn’t say he blamed the kid.

But smart thinking, if they wanted to get out of this alive. These men were cocky, but they were learning to respect their new enemy. Despite all their firepower, and training some of the world’s best infantry had just been routed outside. A single company could be destroyed piecemeal on Berlin’s terrible streets. If they could keep moving and dispatched any draugr they ran across quietly, they could avoid a pitched battle they might not be able to win.

Sergeant Wolff directed his taciturn stare to the big man the squad called Animal. “Schneider, I want you up with the English. Now we need you.”

Schneider grinned at Wilkins. “Be sure to stay out of my line of fire.”

Wilkins glared back. He’d take it from the lieutenant and even Sergeant Wolff, but not these rankers. “If that weapon winds up aimed anywhere near me, I will shove my boot so far up your arse you’ll have to cut my laces to sing the ‘Horst Wessel.’ Understood?”

Schneider’s face turned scarlet. He glanced at his sergeant, but Wolff just scowled. The big soldier turned away. “Verstanden, Herr Feldwebel.”

“There’s a good fellow,” Wilkins said. “Carry on.”

Wolff’s mouth, ever a hard straight line, curled into a slight smile. He nodded with something like respect. Whatever it was, Wilkins would take it.

A bang on the steel entrance door. A voice calling to them.

The paratroopers looked at each other in wonder.

“What’s he saying?” Steiner said.

Schulte stood by the door. “He keeps asking for ammo. Over and over.”

The men winced. The ghouls had an unnerving way of latching onto a tiny shred of their memories and identity, repeating the same phrase over and over.

“Fallschirmjägerzug, gerade aus,” Reiser said. “Langsam und stille.” Parachute platoon, move out. Slow and quiet.

The platoon took the stairs one level at a time until reaching the bottom. The atmosphere was oppressively cold and damp, even for an Englishman. And it stank, saturated with a musky, rotting animal odor radiating from a series of cages. The Nazi scientists had kept a monkey house on part of the level. They’d experimented on the animals, which had torn each other apart in their cages.

Wilkins switched on his angle-head electric torch, an RAF variant of the American TL-22 flashlight. The incandescent beam spilled down a concrete passageway that turned into an earthen tunnel crudely buttressed with timber. The air was completely still here. The tunnel felt ancient, like it didn’t enjoy being disturbed.

The platoon tramped after Wilkins and his torch’s beam, which barely dispelled the inky blackness. Behind Second Platoon, the rest of Eagle Company was stacked in the research center, waiting their turn to go in. The clomp of boots and rattle of gear echoed down the passage, impossibly loud.

Wilkins hoped he wouldn’t find himself at the front end of a firefight down here. In a passage like this, sustained gunfire would blow out his eardrums. A lot of men would be shooting behind him, and it’d be all too easy to catch a bullet in the back, threat or no threat to put his boot up someone’s arse. And retreat would be no simple feat.

The Red Devil motto, utrinque paratus, came to mind. Ready for everything.

Fortunately for him, the way ahead looked clear. Just empty tunnel stretching into gloom. It inclined on a slight uphill angle, each step taking him closer to the surface. He lost track of time as minutes and hours become entangled. His breath fogged in the dead air. The air smelled like minerals and mold.

At last, a ladder going up. The tunnel kept going who knew where, but according to the intel Adams had given him, this was his stop.

He grabbed the rungs to haul himself up.

And emerged into a utility room beneath the German Reichstag.

Sergeant Wolff’s squad emerged behind him, followed by Reiser.

“Move,” the lieutenant snapped. “Make room for the others.”

Wilkins carried on, mounting a set of stairs that took him up into the parliamentary building itself. He emerged, weapon ready, in a set of offices converted to military use but since abandoned. Large wall maps showed red pins on military units in the Ardennes and Poland, likely distribution points for the Overman serum. Somebody had scrawled on one in big capital letters, like graffiti: THE DREAM IS OVER. No time to collect more documents. If Reiser wanted them, he’d collect them himself. Wilkins was just along for the ride.

The offices led to the empty parliament chamber, covered in dust and masonry dislodged by Allied bombing raids. The walls were still blackened by the 1933 fire. So great was Hitler’s disdain for the institution housed here that the building had never been fully repaired. A row of bodies lay on the floor, covered in Nazi banners used as shrouds.

In the grand lobby, Wilkins raised his fist to signal the platoon to halt.

Reiser came forward. Seeing nothing ahead, his eyes narrowed to fiery slits. “Why are we stopping?”

Wilkins signaled to listen.

Outside, a man was shouting.

And beneath that sound, a steady stomp, stomp, stomp.

A military unit marching.

Reiser grinned and hurried ahead. “Come! The Reserve Army is here.”

The squad rushed after him. Wilkins scowled and followed. So much for slow and quiet. The fact was they had no idea what was out there, friend or foe. The regiment had taken severe losses and broken up. Right now, they were a single company in a hostile city with no intel about threats.

Rushing off was a bad idea.

They reached the edge of the lobby and the grand doors flung open to the late December cold. In the hazy light of first dawn, a man dressed in a Nazi Party uniform stood with his back to them on the Reichstag steps, one fist on his hip, the other pounding the air next to his head.

Before him, on the Königsplatz square, a formation of what appeared to be SS in black uniforms marched in crisp goosestep under eagle standards and Nazi flags, rifles shouldered with bayonets fixed. Behind the soldiers, the Kroll Opera House smoldered.

“Ein volk,” the man cried. “Ein volk!”

One people. Part of the Nazi Party slogan, “One people, one empire, one leader.” Even now, the Nazis dreamed of ruling the world.

Reiser gaped. “Mein Führer?”

The man wheeled to glare at the lieutenant. Behind him, the SS formation stopped and executed a neat about face without orders.

At least 2,000 well-armed Nazi fanatics.

Wilkins barely noticed them.

My God, he thought. It was him. It was him.

Adolf Hitler.

“You’re kidding me,” he said.

Reiser came to attention, clicked his heels, and threw his arm out in salute. “Sieg heil, mein Führer!” The man was glowing. “What are your orders?”

The man who’d persecuted millions, launched a horrific war, and started a global plague slowly raised his fist.

“Ein volk!” he screamed.

The man’s eyes glowed white.

The SS lowered their rifles from their shoulders and began to march quick-time toward the Reichstag in an endless black river, teeth clacking under their steel helmets. The hooked crosses of swastikas unfurled in the wind.

The typical draugr shambled until they closed with their prey, at which time they attacked with a surprising burst of speed. These draugr were different, advancing with energy and vigor.

Eagle Company was in trouble.

Sergeant Wolff raised his weapon. “Permission to fire, Herr Leutnant?”

Reiser opened fire, dropping one of the guardsmen. “Obviously! But do not harm the Führer!”

Even with Hitler being a draugr, the man was still loyal as well.

The front rank of SS collapsed as the squad opened up. Wilkins killed one after another with his jungle carbine, fueled by his hatred of the SS as much as his loathing of the undead. The rest of the platoon poured out of the building and took up firing positions on the squad’s flanks. Then everybody shrank back as the SS charged, mouths wide open in a soundless roar.

“Now would be the time,” Wolff told Schneider.

The big soldier shot a stream of flame across the front ranks of the draugr. Still they advanced until collapsing. On the right, the SS speared First Squad with their bayonets. Screams rang out.

“Fall back!” Reiser ordered.

The platoon retreated into the Reichstag, dropping stick grenades as they moved.

Not Wilkins.

He stayed long enough to send a clip’s worth of hot metal downrange that obliterated the Führer’s face.

CHAPTER TWENTY

RUN

Confusion.

Eagle Company fell back on itself, cramming the lobby as the SS charged inside with a roar. Howls of pain filled the space as the draugr tore into the Fallschirmjäger, bayoneting anything that lived.

Oberfeldwebel Wolff found himself doing something he’d never done before and never thought he would.

He ran for his life.

The English sergeant huffed alongside him. On his other side, Leutnant Reiser ran, his face purple with rage. Wolff spared a final glance over his shoulder and saw Animal at the center of a wide circle of charred and burning corpses, firing bursts from his flamethrower at the swarming dead.

Then he went down under the flashing bayonets.

“We will regroup,” Reiser fumed. “Then return and butcher the bastards!”

The lieutenant was nuts. Instead of taking his time and reconnoitering, he’d led the company to its slaughter. All because of his blind loyalty to the Führer, who’d emerged from his Führerbunker to rule over the undead.

The soldiers pursuing them were Hitler’s Leibstandarte Guard Battalion and Führer Escort Battalion, his palace guard, 2,000 strong. Like Hitler himself, they’d all injected themselves with the Overman serum and continued to follow him even after the bacterium had destroyed their minds.

They’d carried on miming their pageants and rituals, like a cartoonish caricature miming their former glory.

Wilkins pointed. “There!”

Wolff didn’t wait for orders. He veered onto a side corridor and headed toward daylight flooding in through a hole blasted in a wall.

Gunfire echoed through the hallways. The remnants of Eagle Company were falling back in good order towards the tunnel.

Where they’d be trapped.

Wolff scrambled over the rubble and reached the outside. From here, he had a clear view of SS pouring into the building, which was now smoking.

The last stragglers came out of the hole. Besides Reiser and Wilkins, he counted Beck, Weber, Braun, and Engel. They were missing Schneider, Schulte, Muller, and Steiner.

They were also missing the rest of their platoon.

“This is it, Herr Leutnant,” he said. “I recommend we occupy the opera house and attempt a diversion.”

“Nein.” Reiser watched the building burn, his face pale and drawn. “You still have a pure sample of the Overman serum.”

“But the company—”

“Will fend for themselves,” Reiser grated. “We must carry on with our mission. We will proceed to Belle-Alliance-Platz and rejoin the regiment.”

“Zu befehl, Herr Leutnant,” Wolff growled.

They jogged south down Wilhelmstrasse.

Two SS officers stepped in the avenue, their faces grinning death masks under their peaked black caps. The first croaked, “Lebensraum,” his Luger clicking empty as he fired.

Braun and Weber rushed forward and knocked him on his back. Beck bayoneted the creature under the chin, the blade sliding up to destroy the brain.

The lights in the ghoul’s eyes went out.

The other SS officer blew a whistle.

A whistle answered in the distance, followed by others. No need to play it quiet anymore. Wolff raised his FG42 and sent a round between the SS officer’s eyes. The man toppled like a sack of meat.

“Herr Wolff!” Wilkins said and pointed.

Platoons of the Führer’s personal guard had peeled off at the sound of the whistle and were now marching down the street towards them.

Even more whistles answered in the distance, a chorus that spread in a chain reaction across the city.

“Time to go,” Wolff said. “Los, los, los!”

The squad again bolted down Wilhelmstrasse. Hardened by training and war, they made a good distance before the weight of their gear forced them to pause.

The draugr didn’t tire. As far as Wolff knew, they didn’t sleep. They only paused to eat. They kept coming in a shambling flood. The platoons chasing him had grown to hundreds of howling undead cramming the streets behind him.

And still more let up a howl as they advanced along side streets.

Reiser drew his Luger and glared at the army of the undead. “They are seeking to flank us. I need a volunteer to stay and divert them.”

Wolff didn’t hesitate. “I’ll do it, Herr Leutnant.”

The lieutenant aimed and fired with a loud bang. Wilkins collapsed onto the cold pavement with an anguished cry, writhing and clutching at his leg.

The squad stepped back with a stunned gasp. A puff of smoke drifted in the air. They looked from their lieutenant to the Englishman in horror.

Wilkins would serve as a distraction for the dead, who would tear him to shreds and devour the pieces.

Wolff fell to his knees besides the wounded man and tore his fatigues to expose an entry and exit sound in his calf. Both were pouring blood. He only had seconds before the lieutenant ordered them back on the move.

He pulled out his med kit and set it on the pavement next to Wilkins while the man raved at him in English, trying to reach for his carbine. Reiser kicked it away. The sergeant cursed him.

“Expendable,” the lieutenant said. “Aren’t we all, Herr Wilkins? Gehen, Herr Wolff. That is an order.”

“Jawohl, Herr Leutnant.” To Wilkins, he hissed in English, “Bandage yourself up, get back on your feet, and move. You can still make it.”

Then he ran after his comrades, leaving the Englishman to fend for himself or die. The lieutenant had acted with a cruel pragmatism, crossing a line Wolff considered uncrossable. But orders were orders.

His first loyalty was to the Fallschirmjäger. Nothing else mattered compared to that, not even his family farm back home, and certainly not a British soldier.

White tenement buildings with red roofs framed the wide avenue, pristine and untouched by the Allied bombing. For a fleeting moment, Wolff could imagine none of this five-year nightmare had ever happened. That he wasn’t being chased by flesh-eating ghouls who looked like Germans. That his madman of a senior officer hadn’t shot a friendly soldier in cold blood to buy time for his escape.

Then a woman appeared in one of the windows overlooking the avenue, jarring him back to reality. Other civilians appeared in windows along the tenement block, old men and women and children, all banging on the glass, begging for his help.

Considering his options, he slowed his pace.

“Keep moving, Herr Wolff,” Reiser snapped, “or you will be next.”

Above him, glass shattered. He looked up in time to see a ghoul claw at the air as it plummeted to the earth. The thing struck the ground with a splat that sprayed blood across Wolff’s boots.

Then more draugr burst from their apartment windows to smash against the pavement like bombs filled with rotting meat.

“Keep going,” Wolff told his squad. “The Platz is just ahead.”

The Belle-Alliance-Platz loomed in front of a wall of smoke rising up from some uncontrolled fire on the other side of the Landwehr Canal. The circular plaza was surrounded by tall tenements.

A practical location for a regimental stand.

As they approached, Wolff saw no signs of life. The rising wall of smoke was closer than he’d thought. A building surrounding the Belle-Alliance-Platz appeared to be burning.

And there was no sign of the regiment.

“Halt!”

Three Fallschirmjäger stepped out of concealment and aimed their weapons.

“Second Platoon,” Wolff called to them. “Eagle Company!”

The paratroopers didn’t ask if they were all that was left of Hauptmann Werner’s command. They appeared to simply assume it.

Wolff had made it back to the 3FJR, but things seemed nearly as bad here.

CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE

ESCAPE

Muller fired wildly and bolted down the hallway while Schulte dropped draugr with calm precision.

He came to a window and stopped. “We’re trapped!”

“Or,” Schulte said as he drilled another ghoul through the skull, “you could break the window and we could climb down.”

“God, you’re insufferable even in combat!”

Muller raised his K98, turned his head to avoid flying glass, and worked the bolt and trigger until he’d punched several big holes in the window. His rifle butt finished the job.

Freezing wind howled into the hallway like an angry spirit, flinging a cloud of Nazi papers across the advancing draugr. They marched steadily with their bayonets, the tramp of their booted feet vibrating through the floor.

“Sie, sie, sie, sie—”

“Any time would be good,” Schulte called out.

Muller looked down. “It’s pretty high.”

“You’re Fallschirmjäger, kid. Jump!”

He dropped his rifle onto the snow below. The wind had swept a tall dune of it against the side of the building. Cushion for his landing.

“I’m going down!”

Fortunately for him, the architects of the Reichstag had chosen a neo-Baroque architecture, with a highly ornate facade offering numerous projections as handholds. He lowered himself from the ledge and began to work his way down.

Schulte flew past him, hit the ground, and rolled. Muller sighed and did the same, landing hard in the snow.

The sniper held out his hand. “You all right?”

“Ja, fabulous.”

“Four more of those, you’ll earn your parachute wings.”

Muller looked around. “It’s just us.”

“Just us.”

They ran, sluggish in the snow, until they reached the street. Behind them, the draugr spilled out the shattered window. The ghouls went rigid in the air until smashing against the ground.

“They’re scary, but they’re idiots,” said Schulte.

The draugr pushed themselves out of the massive pile of squirming bodies and hobbled after the paratroopers.

The sniper paled. “Or I am. We’d better keep moving.”

The paratroopers ran south on Stresemannstrasse, pausing to shoot any ghouls who came too close. As they passed a group of motorcars snarled in an accident, Muller slowed to inspect the vehicles.

“Look at this.” He stood in front of an old BMW R12 Wehrmacht motorcycle with a sidecar, which had an MG34 mounted on it. “I wonder what happened to the driver?”

“Wonder about it later,” Schulte snapped. “Get the MG and let’s move.”

“The bike isn’t damaged. It might have fuel.” Muller hopped onto the seat and kick-started the motorcycle, which roared to life. “Hop on!”

The sniper smiled. “Good thinking, kid.” The smile disappeared. “But I’m driving. Get in the sidecar.”

Muller climbed into the sidecar as Schulte sped off. “Where are we going?”

“The airport,” the sniper shouted over the wind.

“Nein! We need to rejoin the regiment!”

Neither man spoke as the motorcycle navigated a loose herd of ghouls in front of the Reich Chancellery building, weaving around them spraying rooster tails of snow. Muller hunched behind the machine-gun, holding his fire to conserve ammunition.

Once they cleared the undead, Schulte said, “Our mission is to get the Overman serum out of Berlin.”

“My parents,” Muller cried. “They live in Schöneberg.”

Schulte let off a bit on the throttle. “Listen, Yohann. I know you want to find your folks, but even if you did, all you’d end up doing is dying with them. If you want to save them, help me get the Overman serum to England.”

Muller knew all that. He knew his family was very likely dead or, worse, roaming the streets with the other cannibals. He knew if they were alive, there was a good chance they’d fled the city and could now be anywhere. And even if they were alive and sitting at home waiting for him, there was little he could do to keep them alive.

But he had to know. He had to see. He had to help if he could.

“All right,” the sniper sighed. “I’ll drop you along the way.”

“Nein,” Muller said. “I’ll go with you. I’ll leave after we reach the airport.”

For all he knew, they were the only survivors of Eagle Company, which made him the only man with the Overman serum. Besides, he owed it to the men who’d died to get it to England. He was a Muller and family would always come first for him, but he’d also become a Fallschirmjäger in his heart as well as his uniform. He was one of them now. They were family too.

Schulte was no longer listening. “Get that MG ready. We’re going back.”

“What? Why?”

The sniper wheeled the motorcycle and turned right at the intersection they’d just crossed. They were going back north again, toward the draugr.

Then he spotted the figure Schulte had seen.

It was the British paratrooper, half jogging, half limping while using his carbine as a cane. Behind him, the SS marched steadily after him, rank after rank bristling with bayonets. They were gaining with each step.

Schulte opened the throttle, flying up the avenue. “Get him in!”

He slowed as they neared. Muller jumped out of the sidecar and shoved Wilkins into it before hopping behind the sniper, who cranked the throttle again.

Herr Wilkins fought to catch his breath. “I never thought I’d be so glad to see a bloody German. I thought I was dinner.”

“If you’re bitten, that is going to complicate things,” Schulte said.

The Englishman shook his head. “Accidental shooting.”

“Who was it? Beck?”

“No, your lieutenant. Who then left me for the draugr.”

The sniper chuckled. “This is why I don’t take Benzedrine.”

“Are you able to shoot?” Muller said.

Wilkins said, “I can fight.”

“Good…” Muller pointed at the street ahead, which was swarming with ghouls.

“Hang on,” said Schulte.

The motorcycle roared onto a side street, heading west again. Muller recognized a bakery, post office, and bookstore that had good books before the Nazis took over. All of them had been looted for food or kindling.

Which meant people were still alive and in hiding. It gave him hope.

Then they were on Reichsautobahn 2, built for the Nazis by prisoners of war, Social Democrats, Communists, and other inmates from reeducation camps. British small arms fire crackled in the east. Plumes of smoke rose up from mortar strikes. The airport was close, and they drove quickly over streets where the draugr hordes had stomped the snow into a hardened sheet.

Schulte swung east onto Kolonnenstrasse and swore at the dismal view of undead thronging the avenue near the airport. “Damn it, they’re everywhere.”

He wheeled south onto Boelckestrasse, trying to get around them.

Muller pounded the sniper’s shoulder. “Bad idea!”

“Why?”

“Residential district!”

A square kilometer of narrow streets and houses set on treed land. Horrible for tactical maneuver. The draugr could come from anywhere and surround them. Many of the houses and trees had been turned into piles of rubble and shattered stumps, like some surrealist nightmare Max Ernst might have produced.

“No choice,” said Schulte.

Muller held on tight as the sniper careened through a crowd of lurching undead, hands clawing at his jacket as he passed. Wilkins fired bursts from the MG34, which rapidly consumed the link ammunition belt.

“Turn left here,” Muller shouted.

“But that’ll take us—”

Schulte’s helmeted head pitched to the side with a metallic crack. Slivers of brick raked Muller’s face. Then the motorcycle flipped.

Muller tumbled through the snowy road until he landed on his back facing the gray sky. He couldn’t breathe. Cold stabbed his flesh. Snow was packed around his neck and down his back. He spat a mouthful of it and struggled to his feet on shocked limbs, fighting the pain in his gut enough to take quick, shallow breaths.

Schulte lay two meters away in a tangle of limbs half under the bike, head cocked to the side. Muller worried his neck was broken. The wheels pointed in the air, still spinning as the engine howled and sprayed hot oil. Wilkins was trying to gain his feet but kept falling back on his ass. Muller looked for his rifle and spotted it just as a draugr picked it up and pointed its bayonet at him. A woman in a simple dress, beautiful even in death, smiling with an irresistible urge to kill and eat.

He fumbled for his Luger and managed to get it out of its holster. The draugr closed in on shuffling feet. Soon, they’d lunge like coiled springs. Wilkins was on his knees and firing his carbine. Schulte was moving, somehow still alive after the awful fall, trying to extricate himself from under the downed cycle.

An old man in a Volkssturm greatcoat staggered toward him and raised a brick in his hand. Muller fired, struck the man in the shoulder, fired again. The ghoul spun, half his head gone.

He shifted aim at the woman.

“Yohann! Help!”

A teenaged couple knelt beside Schulte and reached for him with bare arms turned blue by death and cold. Muller shot them both in the head.

When he turned back, the woman was there, beautiful face still plastered with that awful frozen smile.

She thrust the bayonet into his guts, which exploded in pain.

He screamed as he hit the ground.

Blood crashed in his ears as he lay on his back in the bloodied snow. Schulte was yelling at him. Wilkins was still shooting, roaring something that sounded like, Waho Mohammad! He didn’t care about any of it. The entire world had suddenly filled with waves of horrific pain.

A draugr stepped into his view on his left.

A boy in a Hitler Youth uniform.

He remembered wearing one just like it when he was a kid.

“Nein,” he whispered.

The woman dropped the rifle and entered his view on his right.

His hands pawed the snow for his Luger. His fingers brushed it, locked on.

He raised it and fired.

The gun clicked empty.

Not even a round left for himself.

Smiling, they reached for him.

CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO

HELL RIDE

Gefreiter Steiner didn’t have breath or energy to scream.

He staggered through a snow drift blanketing rubble torn from a bombed-out building near the Opera House. He gripped his MG42 in one hand and a bloody entrenching tool in the other.

He thought he was losing his mind. That he’d wake up in a hospital, far from the front, with a metal plate in his skull from a brain operation. The doctors would tell him the bad news that Ivan had broken the line, and he’d laugh and say, Is that it, Herr Doctor? That’s the worst news? The Russians are coming?

Steiner had lost his squad. Watched the Führer’s bodyguard swarm over his platoon, feasting. Hacked over a dozen skulls in his pell-mell flight from the slaughter. And saw Hitler himself turned into a raving ghoul, reminding him nobody was running his country.

He reached the street, its snow stomped into something like rock by thousands of marching feet. The footprints led south, toward the airport.

A terrible vista greeted him. Allied bombings and plague battles had stripped downtown Berlin into an alien landscape of skeletal buildings, single walls, and delicate structures.

This wasn’t just Berlin. It was Germany, and, soon, the entire planet. Though dead, the Führer might still carry through on his promise to conquer the world, though there’d be nobody in it but the living dead.

The only thing that might stop them was the evil little bug in the steel canister looped around his neck.

“Wake up,” he muttered. “Wake up, wake up.”

What he was experiencing was something far more horrific than a sense of humor could cure.

A stroke of luck—a bicycle half buried in a wind-sculpted snow drift stacked against a blasted apartment building. He headed over to it, staggering like a draugr himself.

Dream or no dream, he had to reach the British at the airport. For all he knew, he was the only Fallschirmjäger left. Until he woke up, he had to play along.

A large figure spilled out of the doorway to tumble in the snow. The matron righted herself, still gripping a rolling pin.

“Pay your bill,” she snarled.

“You’re not real,” Steiner shouted in her face.

He lunged and swung his spade. The tool’s edge bit into her neck, half-severing her head, which flopped onto her shoulder. He struggled to tug it out.

The entrenching tool ripped free in his hand as the rolling pin crashed against his helmet. Steiner bit his tongue and saw stars.

Fueled by rage, he finally found the energy to scream, letting loose every obscenity he knew. The head finally tore free under his frantic blows and rolled across the ground. The ghoul’s mouth continued to open and close until it came to a stop like a wind-up toy.

Steiner punted it across the road. “Not real!”

A headache bloomed in his battered skull. He returned to the bicycle, which at first glance seemed to be in a condition suitable for riding.

As he laid hold of it, something big thrashed under the snow. Steiner caught a glimpse of grasping blackened fingers and the stumps of legs. Gibbering, he reached for his spade and hacked at the snow until it became bloody and the thing stopped moving.

“Danke, mein herr.”

Steiner righted it and climbed on. He flung his bloody entrenching tool away in revulsion and propped his machine-gun on the handlebars.

“Look out, everybody. I’m a Macaroni tank.”

Steiner started pedaling toward the sound of the guns. The compacted snow made the road suitable for riding, though keeping his balance with his MG on the slippery road sucked even more of his limited energy. He winced at the ruts, which made his headache even worse.

The bicycle sped down Dresdener, eating up meters. After crossing the Landwehr Canal, the ghouls began to thicken.

If he swerved too hard, the slick road would send him into a crashing tumble.

He braced his machine-gun and fired a burst. The rounds struck a ghoul in the chest and knocked it to the ground, where it immediately struggled to rise.

By the time it did, Steiner had already zipped past.

He fired again, adjusted his course, and then again, working his way down the street through the moaning draugr. His arms already ached from the effort of firing like this and keeping the bicycle stable against the recoil.

He braked to a skidding halt.

“Now would be a good time to wake up,” Steiner said, laughing and crying at the same time.

Ahead, the road swarmed with draugr.

The ghouls were laying siege to Tempelhof Airport. The Luftwaffe had fortified it during the bombings and the plague, surrounding the airfield with sandbag walls topped with barbed wire. The Red Devils had stormed the airport, overwhelmed the defenders, and taken over these defenses. Steiner could see the British paratroopers in the watchtowers, shooting into the ghouls when they pressed against the walls in too great a number.

There was no way he could make it to the up-armored three-ton truck serving as the airport’s gate.

The Red Devils would have to help.

Trusting British paratroopers with his life. That put the apple in the strudel in all the insanity of this mission.

Moans behind him. The draugr he’d passed were catching up and looking hungry. He couldn’t go back now even if he wanted. He was going in.

Steiner took out his flare pistol, inserted one of the fat rounds, and shot it into the air. Then he started pedaling, gaining speed, feeling the freezing wind in his laughing face.

He was going to make it to the airport with the Overman serum or get eaten alive.

Either way, he was waking up from this nightmare.

The machine-gun bucked in his hand, clearing a path he sailed through at an alarming speed. If he lost control now, he was done.

The Red Devils signaled him from the watchtowers, but he couldn’t spare a second to see what they wanted. The throngs of milling ghouls grew larger with each passing second. One by one, they turned with delighted smiles toward his MG’s ripping sound. The creatures growled words that blended into an eerie murmur, as if the draugr were all a single entity praying to a dark god.

Steiner was going to ride full speed right into the thick of them, and there was nothing he could do to stop.

The three-ton rolled out of the way—

“Waho Mohammad!” came the Red Devils’ strange battle cry.

A bolt of fire shot into the crowd, turning ghouls into shrieking human torches. A paratrooper with a flamethrower emerged, followed by two more. They blasted the throng with arcing sheets of flame.

Steiner ducked his head and rode straight into this fiery hell.

The draugr were all around, trembling as they screamed in fiery torment, radiating heat like a furnace.

Then they were gone, and the freezing cold returned.

Steiner laughed at the surprised faces of the Red Devils on the other side of the gate as he burst through, streaming sparks and smoke from his smoldering jacket.

Then a paratrooper tackled him, hurling him off his bike to land hard in the snow. Other Brits gathered around to pack snow against his burning uniform. His raw face began to sting.

“Get this bloody Kraut on his feet,” a man snapped.

Hands raised him up and held him fast. Steiner stood on wobbly feet, grateful for their support. His jacket was still smoking as he sketched a salute. “Gefreiter Steiner reporting, Herr Hauptmann.”

“What are you doing here? Where is your unit?”

“I have it.”

The officer fixed him with a fierce glare. “You have the Overman serum.”

Steiner tapped the thermos dangling from his neck. “Ja. Here.”

The Brit’s stiff upper lip broke into a smile. “Lieutenant Clarke!”

Another officer rushed over and stomped his feet as he saluted. “Sah!”

“Inform Colonel Westall we have the serum.”

“Sah!”

“Then kindly ask the jockeys to warm up their planes. We’re going home.”

The paratroopers let up a ragged cheer and dragged Steiner past some big flak guns toward one of the hangars, where they set him on the cold floor with some blankets. Somebody gave him a steel cup of hot tea, and then they left him alone.

Reeking of smoke and his face still stinging and flushed, he sipped the tea and watched the RAF crews ready their big transport planes. He was a hero now, which made sense in this insane world but not in any other.

Setting down his cup, he curled up and went to sleep, hoping that when he awoke, he’d be back in the real world.

CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE

THE SIGNAL

Sergeant Wilkins emptied his carbine into the draugr falling upon Muller. The German maid shrugged off the bullets and knelt next to the wounded soldier.

She ran her talons lovingly along his cheek before leaning in with her mouth yawning open as far as it would go.

He rapidly popped his last ten-round magazine into the ammo well and chambered a round—

The woman’s head burst like a crushed grape. The body followed, keeling over into the splattered snow.

Wilkins looked around. He hadn’t fired. The German sniper hadn’t either.

More crashing gunfire brought down the rest of the ghouls.

He scanned the ruined houses for his saviors.

“Coming out!” somebody called.

A squad of paratroopers in red berets emerged from the nearby trees with smoking Stens.

A wiry para wearing sergeant’s stripes crouched in front of him. “I’m Sergeant Bayley. Who the devil are you, and what are you doing here?”

“Sergeant Wilkins,” he rasped.

“You’re one of Colonel Adams’ commandos, aren’t you?”

Wilkins nodded. “You arrived in the nick of time.”

“We were in the neighborhood and heard the motorcycle and shooting,” Bayley said. “That got our attention. When we heard, ‘Waho Mohammad,’ we made a dash for it.”

Wilkins grinned. Anytime, anywhere a paratrooper heard the war cry of the airborne, they came running. This time, it had saved his life.

Bayley tilted his head at the Germans lying on the road. “And what about these men? Fallschirmjäger?”

“That man there has a sample of the Overman serum. We need to get him to the airfield. Can you help?”

The paras already were. One poured sulfa onto Muller’s gut wound and taped a compress over it. Another helped Schulte sit up and offered him a canteen.

“That’s why we’re out here on recon patrol,” Bayley told him. “With all the gunfire going on around the city, we were starting to wonder if any of the poor sods would make it. They’re nails, Sergeant.”

The slang was short for, ‘tough as nails.’ In this case, tough as Red Devils, a nod of respect for a worthy adversary.

“They are,” Wilkins agreed. Those that were still alive, anyway. If they were nails, the draugr were the hammer.

Just as he’d be Lieutenant Reiser’s, if he ever met that bastard again.

No need to tell Sergeant Bayley about the German officer’s attempted murder. Relations between the British, Americans, and Germans were complicated enough already, their alliance fragile. Wilkins would harbor his grudge until later, if there was a later. For now, he had to complete his mission.

“Can you walk?” Bayley said. “Your leg’s a mess, mate.”

Wilkins grit his teeth at the prospect. “I could use some assistance, if you don’t mind.”

The paratroopers hauled him and the Germans to their feet. Bayley led the way with his Sten, followed by a cheerful Welshman who supported Wilkins as he hobbled along. Another two of the men hauled the groaning Muller between them. Schulte and the rest of the squad brought up the rear, the sniper stumbling and looking pale.

“Hang in there, Yohann,” Wilkins said, wincing at every step that sent pain ripping through his calf. “You can make it.”

At the sound of a Red Devil speaking German to Fallschirmjäger as if they were comrades, the Welshman shot him a sidelong glance. “War makes strange bedfellows, eh?”

Wilkins could only chuckle. “It certainly does, mate.”

A series of flares popped into the air over the nearby rooftops.

“That’s the signal,” Bayley said. “The battalion’s moving out.”

Wilkins chewed his lip. Either somebody else had made it through with the serum, or command was writing off the operation. “We’d best make haste.”

He still had his documents to deliver. They might be vital.

“Don’t you worry, Sergeant,” said the Welshman. “They’re not leaving without me.”

As they cleared the ruins of the residential district, the sandbagged walls of Tempelhof Airport came into view. Bayley halted his motley squad and produced an animal call. The Red Devils answered.

They moved out again, passing through a camouflaged gap in the wall. Then they were on the airfield. Big flak guns aimed at the gray sky. Hangars, one of them crushed by bombs. Fuel lorries and the bodies of Luftwaffe who’d held the airport to the last. The Skytrooper planes lay stacked on the runways, ready to take off. Platoons were assembling in front of them with their gear. Luftwaffe prisoners filed onto one of the planes, hands in the air.

“The Yanks already bugged out after taking mass casualties,” the Welshman said, ever cheerful even as he shared this disheartening news. “Their op was a total botch job. Dropped right on top of a herd of the buggers. Their airfield wasn’t fortified like ours. They just couldn’t hold it, the poor bleedin’ bastards.”

Minutes later, Wilkins sat on the ground wrapped in a blanket and drinking hot tea while a medic fussed over his leg. Only now did the stress of his ordeal catch up to him, giving him a trembling fit.

He’d used up quite a few of his nine lives today.

Captain Wesley questioned him at length about his operation and its results. It was a long story.

“And then I shot Hitler in the face,” he said with a grin.

“Very good,” Wesley sniffed. “I think I’ve got the gist of it, Sergeant. You can tell me the rest later. We’ll be moving out momentarily.”

Wilkins went on grinning after the captain left. Of course, the man wouldn’t believe he’d taken out der Führer himself. It was a story nobody would really believe except maybe Colonel Adams and of course Jocelyn.

No matter. He knew he’d done it.

He’d just wanted to hear himself say the words aloud.

No matter how chuffed he was, in the big scheme, he knew, it didn’t matter. Revenge was sweet, but in this case, it didn’t change the game. The draugr had no leader. They didn’t fight for ideology or resources or territory. They fought for its own sake because that’s what they were programmed to do.

Programmed by the Nazis. By Hitler’s order.

Yes, revenge was sweet.

Thunder to the north, the rolling roar of a pitched battle commencing.

“Captain!” he called after Wesley.

The officer turned. “Yes, Sergeant? What is it? We’re quite busy.”

“That’s the Germans shooting. They’re in action.”

“Yes. What of it?”

“They’re alive. The planes should stand down until they get here, eh?”

Captain Wesley snorted with amusement. “Carry on, Sergeant.”

Wilkins gaped at the officer’s back as he strode off across the tarmac. The battalion had the serum. They were leaving. They would not spare a man nor even a single bomb or bullet from an escort plane, which were needed at the Meuse.

As for the Fallschirmjäger, they would have to fend for themselves.

Those men were home, right smack in the middle of the mess their leaders had created, and they could clean it up.

One could even say there was a bit of justice to it.

Wilkins looked over at Muller shivering in his blankets. Schulte was mopping sweat from the boy’s forehead. Beyond them, Steiner sat huddled in his charred jacket, a vacant smile plastered on his face. They’d sacrificed everything to get the serum here. The rest of the regiment out there, they were sacrificing right now.

No, leaving them behind wasn’t justice. That was old thinking. There were no sides anymore, only humans fighting to survive against a rising tide of undead. The Red Devils wouldn’t leave their countrymen to die, nor the Americans. They should treat the Germans the same. If they didn’t, they’d never truly be allies.

Telling that to the likes of Captain Wesley would be a wasted effort. As with his tale about shooting Hitler, the man simply wouldn’t believe it.

A squad of paras arrived to hustle them onto their designated transport.

Orders were orders. They were leaving Berlin.

CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR

BATTLE CIRCLE

The Belle-Alliance-Platz was a circular treed plaza named after the Battle of La Belle Alliance, what the Prussians called the Battle of Waterloo. Large derelict tenements overlooked the 100-meter-wide plaza, some of them heavily damaged by bombs, one of them smoking from a dying fire.

Three major avenues fed into the plaza from the north. Another road wrapped around the buildings’ southern side. That made four entrances and exits, all of which the Fallschirmjäger barricaded with furniture plundered from apartments. Overall, it wasn’t a bad defensive position for the regiment to regroup and hole up until Eagle Company arrived with the serum.

Oberfeldwebel Wolff looked around and wondered how quickly they could move out. He’d only arrived minutes ago, but the sporadic gunfire had become a constant chatter at the entry roads. He was here with the Overman serum safe in its canister looped over his shoulder; the regiment should leave now while it could.

He did a quick count and estimated the 3FJR only had around 200 men left. They faced a hard fight getting to the airport.

Some of the men wore bandages. They were wounded. Worse, bitten. As good as a death sentence. Their ammunition had been taken away. They carried spades and bayonets. Before they became ghouls, they were resolved to die fighting for their comrades.

Leutnant Reiser returned glowing. “The oberst is very pleased with us, Herr Wolff.”

As long as he had the serum, the regiment could accomplish its mission. “That is good, Herr Leutnant.”

“Very pleased. You understand what this means.”

“Verstanden, Herr Leutnant.” Even now, the lieutenant was gunning for an Iron Cross, though medals no longer meant anything.

“Ja, we are moving out now to the airport. You will have your own honor guard.” A special squad that would protect him. “As a hero of the Reich.”

“Jawohl, Herr Leutnant.”

The paratroopers packed up their gear and formed up for the march. Snow fell in big flakes. They fluttered like moths onto Wolff’s uniform and left gray smudges. It wasn’t snow. It was ash from some distant fire. The ash of the Reich.

There was no more Reich, only the Fallschirmjäger. Only his duty.

He added, “Any word from Eagle, Herr Leutnant?”

“Nein,” Reiser said, still strangely cheerful. “We will hope for the best but assume they did not survive.”

Wolff had lost half his squad in the pell-mell flight from the Reichstag. More good men he’d trained and mothered and led to their deaths.

“Maybe they didn’t have any Englishman to put out as bait,” he said.

The lieutenant cackled. “Herr Wilkins is a hero of the Reich as well, in his own way.”

Wolff glowered. “Sometimes, Herr Leutnant, you really are a pig.”

He instantly regretted saying it, especially with Beck, Weber, Braun, and Engel within earshot. As a paratrooper, his training placed supreme value on obedience and respect for superior officers.

Reiser only chuckled. “And you are too sentimental, like an old woman. If the company is dead, they died for a good cause. Look around you. We can stop this nightmare and rebuild the German nation. There is no greater cause to die for.”

Wolff could think of one, which was dying for the men who fought at his side, this type of self-sacrifice being the only noble act left in this war. But the point was taken. Eagle had died for something, not just a hill or a crossing.

They’d died to save the human race.

He was just tired of it all. The war’s endless degradation, waste, and horrors. A part of him longed for his own warrior’s death. His own self-sacrifice.

“There isn’t a greater cause,” he agreed as the first of the planes hummed overhead.

The paratroopers looked up as the Skytroopers reached for the sky. The giant winged beasts climbed the air, gaining altitude as they headed northwest.

Back to the North Sea. Back to the United Kingdom.

One by one, the paratroopers lowered their gaze to the ground. The Americans had already evacuated. Now the British were leaving.

The Fallschirmjäger weren’t going anywhere.

“They’re coming back for us, right, Herr Oberfeldwebel?” Beck said. “Right?”

Wolff spat and said nothing. The English, it seemed, themselves weren’t above cruel pragmatism.

The paratroopers buzzed with this realization. Officers hurried to the regimental headquarters for information and orders. The buzz rose to shouts of anger and panic.

“Betrayed,” Reiser snarled. His hand twitched near the Luger in its holster, but there was nobody to shoot this time, nobody to punish.

“That means Steiner or Muller made it,” Wolff said. “Or one of the other squads carrying the serum. Somebody in our platoon survived.”

No greater cause, he wanted to tell the lieutenant. Now it’s your turn to die for it. Expendable, used up, and thrown away like so many others since this war began.

He looked around at the paratroopers. The wave of anger and panic that rippled through the regiment’s survivors had spent itself. The men’s faces hardened. They were on their own, but it wasn’t the first time.

And Wolff’s cause still existed. It was right here, with these men.

“I expected this all along,” Weber said. “It’s all a global plot—”

“Silence!” Reiser fumed. “There is nothing we can do except wait for the oberst to issue new orders.”

The gunfire at the barricades intensified. There was nobody else in the entire city for the draugr to fight. The separate actions by the Allied invasion force had drawn the ghouls to different flashpoints, and now they were consolidating.

Here, at the Platz.

“We will hold,” Reiser said. “We’ll butcher the lot of them and take the city.”

The riflemen grinned at their lieutenant’s pluck. Wolff nodded dutifully, thought he knew the truth. They’d be dead by the end of the day.

Pluck they had. What they didn’t have was enough ammunition.

The splashes of gunfire at the barricades escalated to a steady rolling thunder. Through the plaza’s bare trees, Wolff spotted a special weapons platoon setting up KURZ 81-mm mortars. The first shells whumped out of their tubes.

More shooting at the rear. They were now surrounded. The battle had become what the soldiers called a kessel. A cauldron battle. Encirclement. Like at Stalingrad.

The survivors of Eagle Company tensed as the shooting went on. The gunfire slackened as units replaced others on the line.

Soon, Wolff thought. Either they’ll stop coming, or we’ll run out of bullets.

“Permission to go to the front,” he said.

“Go,” Reiser said with disgust.

Wolff wasn’t a hero of the Reich anymore. He dropped the canister of Overman serum on the ground and made his way through the milling paratroopers to reach the nearest barricade. Fallschirmjäger sat on the ground writing farewell letters, sharing their provisions, enjoying a final Ami cigarette before they took their turn on the line. An entire platoon passed bottles they’d plundered, singing the Horst Wessel like their lives depended on it.

The fighting at the barricade was intense and deafening. The paratroopers crouched behind their stacks of household furniture, pouring lead into the lurching hordes that filled the avenue.

And beyond them came the red banners, eagles and the hooked crosses of swastikas. The SS were coming. Hitler’s bodyguard. Past the shambling throng, they marched in neat formation in their black uniforms, rank after rank bristling with bayonets, grunting their chant.

Sie, sie, sie—

No, he realized, it wasn’t sie they were chanting, the word for you.

It was sieg.

Victory.

Taking his time, Wolff found a place on the line behind a beautiful old writing desk and propped his FG42’s bipod on it. The draugr continued their inexorable advance, dying by the dozen but steadily gaining ground. A mortar round landed in their midst, sending bodies cartwheeling through the air.

The most unnerving thing about them was they didn’t know fear.

That and their blazing white eyes.

He lined up his first shot using the barrel’s iron sights and squeezed the trigger. The semi-automatic rifle fired a single round that obliterated a ghoul’s face.

Wolff fired again, again. One by one, he and his comrades thinned the draugr ranks, only to face another eager wave.

The SS were close now.

“SIEG! SIEG! SIEG! SIEG!”

They broke into a run as they charged under their eagles and swastikas. The front ranks went down. The rest swarmed over the barricades.

“Fall back!” an officer howled.

Wolff stepped back, FG42 barking at his shoulder as he drained the twenty-round magazine. He popped in a fresh mag and kept retreating, firing as he went.

Behind him, tenement windows burst along the plaza. Hundreds of draugr poured out of them like maggots boiling from wounds. They were burrowing through the buildings to spill out into the plaza. Soldiers and civilians, old and young, men and women and children with glowing white eyes.

All of them consumed by rage and hungry.

Officers screamed orders to fall back. Wolff retreated, still firing, while the platoons formed up in a battle circle at the center of the plaza. Out of ammunition, many paratroopers had already fixed bayonets.

Wolff jogged to his squad, where Reiser stood fuming at the coming horde. “Now what, Herr Leutnant?”

“Now we die for nothing,” the lieutenant snarled.

On the other side of the battle circle, the Fallschirmjäger fought hand to hand.

Not for nothing, Wolff thought as the last plane roared overhead, returning to England. If he died today, he’d die knowing he did it to save the world.

Atone for what Germany had done to it.

And for the men next to him.

Officers barked commands at their men. The orders passed along the line. The regiment would strike south and fight their way out of the kessel.

“Gehen,” Reiser shrieked. “Los, los, los!”

“Glück ab!” Wolff roared and charged with the rest.

CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE

HOME

Filthy and frozen to the bone, Sergeant Wilkins hobbled across the tarmac on his crutches until he reached the base’s administrative offices.

Colonel Adams’ orderly greeted him at reception. “The colonel will be with you in just a moment, Sergeant. Care for a cup of char?”

Wilkins blinked. “Char?”

The orderly looked at him with a pleasant expression. “Or would you rather take some time to get cleaned up?”

“I’ll take some char,” Wilkins said.

“Have a seat.”

The sergeant lowered himself into one of the waiting chairs with a pained grunt. A clock ticked on the wall, which only accentuated the grating silence. He studied the small reception room for threats.

He jumped as the door opened and the orderly came in with a steaming mug.

“Here you are, Sergeant,” the kid said. “Nice and hot.”

Wilkins nodded and drank. The thick tea’s heat filled his chest. Instead of sharpening his senses, however, the hot drink lulled him into a mental drift.

Then he was back on the snow-packed street, running for his life from a mob of bloodthirsty ghouls—

He started awake, spilling some of the scalding tea on his lap.

The inner office door swung open to reveal Colonel Adams. “You’d better get in here, Sergeant.”

Wilkins struggled to regain his feet.

“Leave the tea,” Adams added. “I suspect you could use something stronger.”

He hobbled into the colonel’s office and again underwent the painful process of lowering himself into the chair facing the drab RAF desk.

Colonel Adams poured stiff drinks and handed him one. “To your successful mission, Sergeant.”

The brandy went down like fire. “Thank you, sir. We certainly paid for it.”

“You lost good men.”

“We also left the Germans to die.”

The colonel fixed him with an icy stare. “That concerns you, does it?”

Wilkins remembered sitting near the doorway of the Skytrooper transport plane as it bucked its way to altitude. A front-row seat to what would surely be the destruction of the remaining Fallschirmjäger in Berlin.

The Germans had formed a battle circle north of Tempelhof Airport. On the west side of the circle, the draugr had gotten close enough to fight hand to hand. The entire formation broke south. The soldiers rushed toward safety, shedding a delaying rearguard that was overrun and destroyed.

Even then, Wilkins thought they might make it. They were withdrawing in good order, showing the excellent discipline one expected of elite light infantry. The soldiers poured fire and dumped their stick grenades to buy space.

Go, you buggers, he’d thought. You can do it.

The plane had banked and cut off his view, leaving him only with a bare hope the Fallschirmjäger would survive.

Then he’d glimpsed the draugr host.

A massive horde coming from the south. These were the undead that had bloodied the Americans and driven them out of Berlin.

Wilkins had suddenly found himself grateful he couldn’t see the rest.

Still, sitting in Colonel Adams’ warm office drinking his brandy, he had to wonder if the Red Devils could have done more.

“We won’t win if we don’t stop fighting the last war, sir,” he said.

“Sergeant, I’m afraid I must place some unpleasant facts on the table. One is we would have left our own in Berlin if it meant getting the Overman serum and those documents you hauled back even a single minute sooner.”

Wilkins frowned in disbelief. “Sir—!”

“The ghouls broke the line at the Meuse, Sergeant. While you were gone. That’s the second part.”

He sagged. “Christ.”

“The Americans are dropping into northern France to stop them. The same men who got mauled in Berlin volunteered to go straight back out. We sent them. We had nobody else. Do you understand, Sergeant?”

In a week, the undead would be feasting on Paris.

The horrors of his mission, the loss of his team, his wounding by the harsh lieutenant, the justice of killing Adolf Hitler—none of it mattered. If the world survived, historians would care, but right now, the past was pointless.

The only thing that mattered now was the next hour.

“I suppose you’ll be sending the Red Devils back out, sir,” he said.

“We will. They go tomorrow.”

“Right,” said Wilkins and grunted as he stood. “I’ll get myself sorted for it.”

“Sit down, Sergeant,” Adams protested. “You’re excused from duty.”

“With all respect, sir, you’re not keeping me from this party. You need every shooter you’ve got. If we don’t stop the bloody draugr from reaching Paris, we’ll lose all of Europe. We’ll lose it all.”

Europe would become a vast sea of the undead, and all the men who’d fought and died in Berlin would have died for nothing.

He hoped Jocelyn would understand. And forgive him.

“Well,” Colonel Adams said with a hint of amusement, “then you’d better get some rest and have that leg tended. I’ll be glad to have you with me.”

“With you, sir?”

“Everybody’s going, Sergeant. Any man who can shoot a gun. We’ve taken so many losses, all airborne will now operate as a single unit under American command. One way or the other, this is it. The final battle.”

“I hope the eggheads do their part, sir.”

“We’ve got our best minds on it already. They’ll crack it.”

“Until then…”

“Until then, we’ll do ours.”

CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX

TOTAL WAR

Jäger Muller lay a clinic bed wondering how he’d gotten here.

In full kit and with his scoped K98 slung over his shoulder, Schulte smiled down at him. “You’re at Martlesham Heath, kid. You made it.”

Muller touched his chest, though he knew the Overman serum wasn’t there. He was in a bed, wearing pajamas, his guts throbbing with a nagging dull ache.

It all came back to him. The beautiful smiling maid caressing his stubbled cheek with her nails. Her mouth opening wider than he thought possible, revealing teeth clotted with rotting meat.

Her head exploding on the snow, followed by an endless pilgrimage through purgatory that ended with him lying moaning on the deck of a plane.

“Mama,” he said.

He’d gone back for her, hadn’t he?

He’d stayed on the motorcycle, resolved to help Schulte deliver the Overman serum. He was going to go find his family after.

Now he never would.

“Rest,” the sniper said. “Enjoy the morphine and the nurses. I’ll see you and your impressive scar when I get back.”

Muller looked around the room. The clinic and its beds full of wounded soldiers swam in his eyes. He tried to speak but had difficulty forming words.

“Where… going?”

“It’s back to the front for me, kid. Paris.” The sniper shrugged. “The life of a German soldier, eh? We always seem to win big until we lose it all. Who knows, maybe we’ll get lucky this time.”

“That bad?”

“The draugr broke the line at the Meuse. The Allies are throwing everything they have at it. In Germany, Leipzig is under siege. The Wehrmacht formed a new government in Munich and is trying to form a southern front. Dresden went dark. Don’t tell Steiner about that. It’s bad enough for him as it is.”

“He’s…?”

“Alive, ja. And more dachshaden than ever. They let him keep his machine-gun.” The sniper ruefully shook his head. “They’re desperate.”

“Anybody else…?”

“Nein. As far as I know, we’re all that’s left of the 3FJR.”

“Jesus.”

“Ja. Keep calling him. We need all the help we can get. Speaking of which, here comes Steiner.”

The machine-gunner strode into the clinic toting his MG42. “Mules led by lions, Erich.” He looked down at Muller. “How are you, Yohann?”

The soldier looked ghastly, his face red and raw, his jacket charred black in spots. But he was grinning. Dachshaden.

“Wish I was going with you,” Muller said.

“You’re crazy,” said Steiner.

“Heroes usually are,” Schulte observed. “You and Steiner both. Thanks to you bringing back the Overman serum, Allied scientists are now working on a way to kill the draugr. Maybe produce a vaccine for the rest of us.”

So maybe it all meant something. Muller hoped it did. It had to.

He raised his hand. “Glück ab, comrades.”

Schulte smiled and clasped it. “Glück ab, jäger.”

He liked that, being called jäger.

Steiner clasped it next. “Glück ab. Get better soon, Yohann. We’ll need you when we return to Berlin.”

The men tramped out of the room, returning to this new, horrific, total war which could only be won through absolute victory.

Muller hoped Steiner was right. They’d win, and he’d go back to Berlin to help put Germany to rights. A better Germany, a strong Germany, a righteous Germany. A Germany of art and freedom and peace.

Until then, his war was over. He’d be staying here until his wounds healed.

The rest, meanwhile, would be going to the front.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Craig DiLouie is an author of popular thriller, apocalyptic/horror, and sci-fi/fantasy fiction.

In hundreds of reviews, Craig’s novels have been praised for their strong characters, action, and gritty realism. Each book promises an exciting experience with people you’ll care about in a world that feels real.

These works have been nominated for major literary awards such as the Bram Stoker Award and Audie Award, translated into multiple languages, and optioned for film. He is a member of the Horror Writers Association, International Thriller Writers, and Imaginative Fiction Writers Association.

Learn more about Craig’s writing at www.CraigDiLouie.com. Sign up for Craig’s mailing list to be the first to learn about his new releases here.

Copyright

THE FRONT

Episode 3: Berlin or Bust

©2018 by Craig DiLouie

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means including information storage and retrieval systems, without permission in writing from the author. The only exception is by a reviewer, who may quote short excerpts in a review.

This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

Cover designed by Eloise Knapp Design.

Published by ZING Communications, Inc.

www.CraigDiLouie.com

Click here to sign up for Craig’s mailing list and be the first to find out about his new works!

Content

Craig DiLouie with David Moody and Timothy W. Long
THE FRONT
EPISODE 3: BERLIN OR BUST

FALLSCHIMJÄGER RANKS

PROLOGUE NIGHTMARE

CHAPTER ONE WORK FOR VICTORY

CHAPTER TWO ORDERS

CHAPTER THREE AIRFIELD

CHAPTER FOUR THE MEUSE

CHAPTER FIVE ENGLAND

CHAPTER SIX THE DRAUGR

CHAPTER SEVEN TRAINING

CHAPTER EIGHT BLAME

CHAPTER NINE MISSION

CHAPTER TEN INSURANCE

CHAPTER ELEVEN BERLIN OR BUST

CHAPTER TWELVE DISORIENTED

CHAPTER THIRTEEN ASSEMBLY

CHAPTER FOURTEEN TIERGARTEN

CHAPTER FIFTEEN GRUNEWALD

CHAPTER SIXTEEN REICHSAUTOBAHN

CHAPTER SEVENTEEN THE OBJECTIVE

CHAPTER EIGHTEEN BIVOUAC

CHAPTER NINETEEN LIONS AND DEVILS

CHAPTER TWENTY REICHSTAG

CHAPTER TWENTY RUN

CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE ESCAPE

CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO HELL RIDE

CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE THE SIGNAL

CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR BATTLE CIRCLE

CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE HOME

CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX TOTAL WAR

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Copyright