Fox On The Rhine Read Free Page B

were low, trained pilots were scarce, and the creeping carpet of Slavs kept advancing, like a race of army ants, or perhaps cockroaches. Kill a hundred, and a thousand more crawl out from under rocks.
    That was what his fellow pilots, his officer, and especially his maintenance people kept arguing, until his towering fits of rage shut them up. He could see in their eyes they were afraid of him--and rightly so--but their opinions were secretly unchanged. In his mind, that made them effectively Soviet agents and saboteurs, and he would cheerfully have stood them all up against a wall and shot them dead with his own pistol.
    His mechanic, Willi, had approached him, trembling. The anger on Krueger’s face was obvious, and when Krueger was angry, no one but Willi would approach him. “Hauptmann--I’m sorry to tell you, but your wingman won’t be flying today.”
    His glare was enough to stop Willi in his tracks. “It’s spare parts--like always--I just can’t get enough to keep all the planes in the air. The colonel says you’re not going up today.”
    The inner flame rose within Krueger. “Not going up?” he said with deceptive quiet.
    “The colonel says... not without a wingman...” Willi stammered.
    The back of Krueger’s hand slashed across the mechanic’s face, leaving an angry welt where his ring hit flesh. He turned and strode to his plane. Knowing better than to argue, the young mechanic hurried behind him, starting the preflight ritual. There would be no excuse for Krueger’s plane not to fly.
    Krueger was still angry about the failure. The colonel, the mechanics--they thought they had a good excuse, but they were wrong. There was no excuse. First, Krueger knew better. He was an engineer, and a damned good one--and an even better fighter pilot. He knew what was possible. And second, he was German. He was a member of the master race, and so were the others in his Gruppe. The thought that any number of Slav bastards or their crummy American-made airplanes could stop the German knights of the skies was simply, finally, absolutely unacceptable. But his fellows were weak. He could see it in their eyes. They were defeatist, and if they did not change their attitude, they should be shot.
    The führer himself once said, “If the German people despair, they will deserve no better than they get. If they despair, I will not be sorry for them if God lets them down.” He’d written similar statements in Mein Kampf , a book Krueger had read so many times he’d virtually memorized it. The German people through their führer had been given a chance to fulfill their destiny, but if they did not grasp it, they were already doomed.
    Krueger loved to fly and he loved to kill, and nothing would work out the day’s frustrations like some dead and bleeding Slavs. His anger had dissipated as the ground fell away, and finally there was just himself and his machine, alone in the sky and vigilant on the hunt. And it was not long before the hunter found his game.
    Banking his Messerschmidt Bf-109G through a lazy circle, he glared at the long column of Soviet T-34 tanks extending almost to the far horizon. He sat up high in the cockpit, unlike most of his fellow pilots, who crouched low in case of a stray bullet or piece of flak. He wanted to see, and he wanted the world to understand that he had no fear, not of anything the Reich’s enemies could throw at him.
    Nazi artillery fired, and a few bursts of flame, far too few to suit him, illuminated the landscape. In past years, he might have expected to see some Stukas dropping bombs with pinpoint accuracy among the crowded vehicles, but the Stukas were gone, along with most of the rest of the Luftwaffe.
    He felt a fiery impulse to strafe the column, to shatter Russian bodies with the machine guns and cannon of his deadly fighter, but it was impractical. Few of his shells would have penetrated the heavy armor of the tanks--and the Soviets’ accurate antiaircraft fire would have