Harry Turtledove - In The Presence Of My Enemies

"This charming thought already occurred to me, thanks." Heinrich didn't.

Willi laughed. "So many crazy things have already happened today, I'm just not going to worry any more. One way or another, it'll all work out."

"Maybe it will." By then, Heinrich was past arguing. In fact, he couldn't very well argue, because a hell of a lot of crazy thingshad happened. The wind of their passage whipped around his glasses and made his eyes water. That wind was cool, but not especially clean; it was full of diesel exhaust from the other armored vehicles in this convoy. How many panzers and armored personnel carriers and self-propelled guns (to say nothing of soft-skinned trucks) were trundling around Berlin tonight? Even more to the point, how many different sides were they on? And what would happen when those on one side bumped up against those from another?

Rat-a-tat-tat!The machine gunner squeezed off another exuberant burst. A tracer round drew a hot red line across the night. Nobody returned fire. Heinrich approved of that. Somewhere, though, those bullets would be coming down. Even as falling lumps of lead, they could kill: they'd be falling from a long way up.

Treads growling and grinding, the armored personnel carrier turned left. Heinrich started to laugh. "What's funny?" Willi asked.

"Back where we started from," Heinrich answered. There on the left stood Oberkommando der Wehrmacht headquarters; on the right, across the wide expanse of Adolf Hitler Platz, the Fuhrer 's palace and the vast, looming bulk of the Great Hall. Dead ahead towered the Arch of Triumph, as usual bathed in spotlights. Heinrich would have bet it had sharpshooters atop it. But were they wearing SS black or the Wehrmacht 's mottled Feldgrau?

The armored column of which the personnel carrier was a part turned right, rumbling toward the Fuhrer 's palace. The panzers and APCs had to go slowly and carefully to keep from crushing people under their tracks. Adolf Hitler Platz wasn't jammed sardine-tight, the way the little square in front of Rolf Stolle's residence had been. It would hold more than a million people. At the moment, it held tens, perhaps hundreds, of thousands.

"Wehrmachtor SS?" somebody called nervously.

"Bugger the SS with a pine cone," the machine gunner answered, and fired another burst into the air. "We're thereal soldiers, by God, and if those blackshirted pricks don't know it they'll find out pretty goddamn fast!"

The whoops that came from the crowd said that was what they wanted to hear. But SS men held the Fuhrer 's palace. Sandbagged machine-gun nests outside the entrance were plenty to keep the people at a respectful distance. Panzers and armored personnel carriers laughed at machine guns-though Heinrich, on the outside of the armor plate, wouldn't laugh if they opened up. And if the SS had machine guns here, it probably had antipanzer rockets, too.

Heinrich didn't see any Waffen -SS armor. Maybe Lothar Prutzmann had figured he wouldn't need it here once he'd got hold of Stolle. That only went to show he wasn't as smart as he thought he was.

Or does it show I'm not as smart as I think I am?Heinrich wondered. Would Waffen -SS panzers suddenly charge out of the night, their cleated steel tracks tearing up the pavement like those of the Wehrmacht machines? He shrugged. If the officer in charge of the Wehrmacht armor couldn't anticipate a threat like that, he didn't deserve his shoulder straps.

A blackshirt in front of the entrance stepped forward, his hands conspicuously empty. Try as he would to hold it steady, his voice quavered a little when he asked, "What do you want?"

"Globocnik!" Half a dozen Wehrmacht panzer commanders hurled the acting Fuhrer 's name in his face.

One of them added, "We know he's in there. We saw him come in this afternoon."

The crowd of angry civilians with the Wehrmacht men took up the cry: "Globocnik! Globocnik! We want Globocnik!" In a different tone of voice, those shouts would have warmed any politician's heart. As things were, if Heinrich had been Odilo Globocnik, he would have been looking for a place to hide.

Licking his lips, the SS man said, "You are speaking of the rightful Fuhrer of the Greater German Reich and of the Germanic Empire. He orders you-he commands you-to disperse."

Maybe the panzer commanders answered. If they did, they couldn't make themselves heard even with bullhorns. The crowd's roars drowned them out. "Heinz Buckliger is the rightful Fuhrer!" people shouted, and, "We won't take orders from Globocnik!" and, "Down with the SS!" Heinrich gleefully joined that last chant. He liked the others, but that one hit him where he lived.

"This is nothing but treason!" The SS man had got his nerve back. He sounded angry now, not frightened. "We will not surrender him!"

"Then you're going to be mighty sorry," one of the Wehrmacht panzer commanders said. The crowd bayed agreement.

"So will you, if you try to take him," the SS man answered.

He was used to making people afraid. He was good at it, too. After all, fear was his stock in trade. The German people had had almost eighty years in which to learn to fear the SS. But today, as Heinrich had seen in front of Rolf Stolle's residence, fear was failing. And intimidating men in panzers that carried big guns was a lot harder than scaring civilians who couldn't fight back.

Jeers and curses rained down on the SS man's head. More rained down on Odilo Globocnik's head. Was he listening, there inside the Fuhrer 's palace? With a strange, snarling joy Heinrich had never known before, he hoped so. The SS man, in his own coldblooded way, had style. He clicked his heels. His arm shot out toward the crowd in a Party salute. He spun on his heel, executed an about-face of parade-ground perfection to turn his back on the Wehrmacht soldiers and the people, and marched away to his comrades.

And, to a certain extent, his intimidation worked even against his formidable foes. He might have been-Heinrich thought he was-bluffing when he warned that the SS could make the Wehrmacht sorry. But the panzers' cannons and machine guns waited tensely-waited for they knew not what. A nightjar swooped out of the darkness to snatch one of the moths dancing in the air around the palace lights. The sudden, unexpected streak of motion made men from the SS and the Wehrmacht turn their heads towards it. If it had startled one of them into tightening his finger on a trigger…

Heinrich never knew exactly how long the impasse lasted. Somewhere between half an hour and an hour was his best guess. What broke it was a high, clear sound that pierced both the yells from the crowd and the diesel rumble of the armored fighting vehicles: the sound of one man laughing.

The man was a Wehrmacht panzer commander. Like his fellows, he wore radio headphones. He laughed again, louder this time, and raised a bullhorn to his mouth. "Give it up, you sorry bastards!" he blared. "Prutzmann's blown his brains out. The Putsch is falling down around your ears."

"Liar!" one of the SS men shouted, an odd desperation in his voice-it wasn't I don't believe you but I don't dare believe you.

"You've got your own radios," the Wehrmacht panzer commander answered through the bullhorn. "You can find out for yourselves. Go ahead. I'll wait." He theatrically folded his arms across his chest.

There in the glare of the panzers' lights, an SS radioman did call…whom? Somebody at Prutzmann's headquarters, Heinrich supposed. He could tell when the radioman got his question answered. The fellow suddenly sagged, as if his skeleton had turned to rubber. He spoke to the officer who'd parleyed with the Wehrmacht soldiers. The officer clapped a hand to his forehead in an altogether human gesture of despair: the kind of gesture Heinrich had never imagined seeing from an SS man.

Little by little, the officer pulled himself together. He stepped forward again. "You seem to be right," he called bleakly to the Wehrmacht panzer commander. "What do you want from us?"