Read Online We Install by Harry Turtledove - Free Book Online Page B

they’ll fly him all the way back to Germany.” Everyone in earshot sighed. Germany seemed more a beautiful memory than a real place that still existed. Reality—mud and blood and rain and fear—left scant room for beautiful memories.
    Sack nervously looked around at the ever-growing crowd. “If they land a salvo of rockets in this place, they’ll kill thousands,” he said.
    â€œWe’ve got our own rocket batteries in the trees east of here, on the far side of the square,” one of the other panzergrenadiers assured him. “They’ve knocked down everything the Reds have thrown so far.”
    Sack nodded and tried not to think about the potentially ominous ring of those last two words. “I notice there aren’t a whole lot of vehicle crews here,” he said. “Did the damned Asiatics take out that many panzers and combat vehicles?”
    â€œNo, that’s not as bad as it seems,” the other panzergrenadier said. He was a little skinny fellow named Lothar Zimmer, and seemed to have been born without nerves. “There’s a big vehicle park north of here, and most of the crews are trying to get their machines serviced. The fellows you see here are just the orphans, the ones who had theirs blown out from under them.”
    â€œThat’s a relief, anyhow. I was beginning to wonder if we had any armor left at all.”
    One thing the Germans knew almost instinctively was how to organize. Without that skill, the campaigns across the vast distances of European Russia would have been impossible to imagine, the more so as the Reds had more machines and far more men than did Germany or even Europe as a whole. Even with it, the tide was flowing west now, not east.
    Still, as he watched Dynamo Stadium fill, Sack had to believe Germany would hold the onrushing Communist hordes out of Europe. Each of the men here was worth two, three, four of his foes, thanks to the combination of discipline and initiative the German army had mastered better than any other. Given a spell to regroup and breathe a little behind the barrier of the Dnieper, they’d surely halt the Reds and keep most of what they’d won in these past bloody two and a half years.
    Yet no sooner had the sight of so many Germans sorting themselves out by unit boosted the lance-corporal’s confidence than whispers began running through that crowd of soldiers. Sack could almost watch them spread by the way the men turned toward each other like so many stalks of wheat bending in the breeze. Where the whispers had passed, silence lay heavy.
    They came piecemeal to the Forty-First Panzergrenadiers , a word here, a word there: balkas (the gullies that crisscrossed the country on both sides of the Dnieper), helicopters, Reds. By now, Sack had had a lot of practice at joining a word here with a word there and making a whole rumor of it. “They’ve crossed the river,” he said. He sounded almost as stunned as Wachtmeister Pfeil had after the shell fragment laid open his leg.
    Another word came: bridgehead. Then another: breakthrough. Lothar Zimmer could paste them together, too. “If they break through here, where do we stop them next?” he said. No one answered him.
    The stadium loudspeakers began to bellow, ordering units to report to concentration points scattered all through Kiev. Chatter stopped as men listened for their own assignments. Eventually, Sack’s came: “Forty-First Panzergrenadiers to vehicle park seventeen, Forty-First Panzergrenadiers to vehicle park seventeen!”
    â€œIs that the one you were talking about?” the lance-corporal asked Lothar Zimmer. The little swarthy fellow nodded. He got to his feet and trudged off. Sack followed, glad to be with someone who knew where he was going.
    What he found when he got to the vehicle park dismayed him. Only a fraction of the division’s panzers, self-propelled guns, and mechanized infantry combat vehicles