Last Orders: The War That Came Early by Harry Turtledove Read Free Book Online

that way. And a T-34 could kill a Panzer IV just as readily, while a Tiger’s thick frontal armor laughed at anything the Russian machine threw at it.
    And then Witt shouted, “Panzer halt!”
    “Halting.” As Adi spoke, he trod hard on the brake.
    At Witt’s orders, the turret traversed to somewhere between two and three o’clock. The gun rose slightly. Theo could just see it move. A shell clanged into the breech. “Fire!” Witt yelled.
    “On the way!” Lothar Eckhardt answered. As he spoke, the big gun roared. Flame leaped from the end of the muzzle, and out to either side of the recoil-reducing muzzle brake.
    Then Theo used another word: “Hit!”
    Flame and smoke burst from a Russian panzer he hadn’t even seen till the big gun spoke. It was more than a kilometer away. When he peered out through the armor glass in his narrow vision slit, he couldn’t tell whether the crew escaped. Part of him hoped so—they were members of his guild, in a manner of speaking. But they’d try again to kill him if they did. Maybe hoping they died fast and without much pain was better.

Summer days over Germany were long, summer nights short. In winter, when things reversed, the RAF and French bombers struck deep inside the country. At this time of year, they couldn’t hope to do that and fly back out of danger before the new dawn showed them to the
Luftwaffe
.
    In summer, then, the raiders concentrated on the western part of the
Reich
. They could drop their bombs on towns like Münster and be landing at their distant bases before the sun came up again.
    As it sank in the northwestern sky this evening, Sarah Bruck apprehensively eyed the stretching shadows and the red-gold lights streaming in through the dining-room window. “Do you think they’ll come tonight?” she asked.
    Her father paused with a forkful of boiled potatoes and turnip greens halfway to his mouth. Samuel Goldman considered the question as gravely as if it touched on the death of Socrates or the assassination of Julius Caesar. He had been a professor of ancient history and classics at the university. Since he was a Jew, that didn’t matter once the Nazis took over. Because he was also a wounded veteran from thelast war, he still found employment: he was a laborer in a work gang that cleared streets of rubble and tore down shattered houses and made repairs after the enemy struck.
    Having considered, he nodded. “
Ja
, I think so. There will be plenty of moonlight to help show them the way.”
    “Samuel!” Hanna Goldman said, as if he’d come out with something filthy. Well, in a way he had.
    “I’m sorry, sweetheart,” he told his wife. “She asked me what I thought. Should I have lied to her? Then, when the air-raid sirens start screaming, she’ll think
My father is a stupid old fool!
, and she’ll hate me.”
    “What happens if the raiders don’t come tonight, though, and everything stays quiet?” Sarah’s mother sounded sure she’d won that one.
    But she hadn’t. Father answered, “She’ll think
My father is a stupid old fool!
—and she’ll love me.”
    They all laughed. The Nazis did everything they could to make life in the
Reich
as miserable for Jews as possible. They might have done a better job of it than any other gang of persecutors in the history of the world. Try as they would, though, they couldn’t wipe out every single happy moment. Some sneaked past in spite of them.
    “If they come,” Sarah said, “maybe they’ll drop some on the
Rathaus
and on the square in front of the cathedral. That would be terrible, wouldn’t it?”
    “Dreadful. Frightful,” Samuel Goldman agreed, his voice full of plummy, pious hypocrisy. When you couldn’t be sure the house wasn’t bugged, you didn’t want to give the authorities any excuse to cause you trouble. They could do it without an excuse, of course, but why make things easy for them?
    A bomb hit on the
Rathaus
in daylight would blow the
Burgomeister
and the Nazi functionaries