Five Past Midnight - James Thayer [86]
He stepped over a bedspring and then pieces of a vase. The Panzer- faust was getting heavier with each step, as it did each night, and was biting into his shoulder, and when the sergeant blew the whistle to fall out for a break, Burmaster slid the damn thing off his shoulder and lay it against the trunk of a tree that had been blown out of the earth by a bomb, and whose roots now grasped at the air like gnarled hands. Quast placed his Panzerfaust next to Burmaster's, and then levered himself down to the cobblestones and leaned back against the tree, sighing heavily.
A few moments passed before Burmaster said, in a low voice, "I'm never going to fire that thing. My Panzerfaust."
"What do you mean?"
"I have lived too long to be blasted apart by a tank, which will surely happen should I engage in any impudent folly with the Panzer- faust. I'll miss my target, and the angry tank crew will turn its full attention on me."
"So what are you going to do?" Quast rubbed his calves.
"I'm going to wait for the first chance I get, then throw up my arms in surrender, and pray our captain doesn't shoot me, and pray the Russians don't shoot me. And I may survive this war yet."
"Maybe the Americans and Canadians and British will get to Berlin first," Quast said. "I've heard the Anglos are nice people, once they calm down some."
"That's the first line of my evening prayer every night. Please, God, I pray, don't let that bastard George Patton's tanks run out of fuel."
The whistle blew, and the guardsmen struggled to their feet, groans and curses rolling up and down the line. Heinz Burmaster grimaced as he placed his weight once again on his farm of blisters.
He turned for his Panzerfaust.
It was gone.
And so was Quast's. Nothing there, against the tree trunk.
"Rolf?" Burmaster asked. He didn't need to say anything more because both guardsmen saw the problem at once: no Panzerfausts where two Panzerfausts should have been, right up against the fallen tree where the guardsmen had left them.
Burmaster circled the tree. Nothing but shards of glass and fractured brick and bronze coffin handles. No Panzerfausts, and that was for sure. He looked over his shoulder at the dark ruins of a funeral home.
Quast drew air through his teeth. "You don't have to worry about the Russians now, because the captain is going to shoot you and me, he sees us without our weapons."
Burmaster picked up a board from the curb. It might have once been part of a coffin. He placed it over his shoulder as if it were his Pan- zerfaust, then he stepped into line, Quast at his elbow. They began again their endless march, following the troops in front of them.
Burmaster said, "The captain has other things to worry about, like figuring out where we all are. He's never even going to notice that our weapons are missing."
Quast picked up a board, shouldered it, and walked beside him. He asked nervously, "You think so, Heinz?"
Burmaster half-closed his eyes, then intoned in a low voice and in cadence with his steps: "Please God, don't let that bastard George Patton's tanks run out of fuel. Please, God, don't let that bastard George Patton's tanks run out of fuel. Please, God ..."
14
ONLY FOR BRIEF seconds when the moon shed itself of clouds could Cray see the entire length of the landing strip. At the west end, hidden under camouflage nets and tree branches, were a bulldozer and a grader, used to repair bomb damage. Cray could not locate a hangar, and he supposed that were such a structure to appear in the middle of the Tiergarten it would be bombed almost instantly. And he could not see a plane, not yet