Udet's Escape

Ernst Udet remembered the first time he’d aimed at another human being.

He’d charged right for the Caudron G.IV, fixing his crosshairs on the crew gondola between the engines, his young blood singing with excitement. He felt the hard trigger under his gloved thumb, prepared to fire –

- and then he saw the Frenchman’s eyes.

It’s eyes that get you. Where the spark of sentience shines in a man – the eyes.

And then the Frenchman nearly put out Udet’s lights for good with a bullet that slashed his cheek and tore his goggles from his face. He’d dove for a cloud with the bullets of the bomber’s backseater chasing him, blood smearing his face, having never fired a shot.

Ernst Udet remembered the first man he’d killed.

Diving from above, he’d rocketed into the 22-ship formation like a ghost, picking out a Farman F.40 in the middle. He came upon her fast, the machine filling his gunsight and with the machine he filled his eyes – the machine. He was here to destroy the machine. From scant yards away he fired with brief, mechanical control, and fire bloomed over the bomber. He dove, below the guns of the bomber’s fellows. The Farman plummeted past him, a flaming comet, and with it, falling to his death alone, the backseat gunner.

Later, he’d thought about it. A lot. But just then, his heart had swelled with triumph.

Udet remembered the first friend he’d lost. And the second, and the seventh. He remembered the day he and Gontermann became the last two men of Jasta 15 still breathing. He remembered the empty, distant echo in Gontermann’s voice.

“The bullets fall from the hand of God ... Sooner or later they will hit us.”

They had never hit Udet. He remembered Gunmeyer’s sturdy Spad, the muzzles of its guns looming wide as Udet hammered his fist uselessly on his own jammed weapons... and the moment of astonishment when Gunmeyer caught God’s bullet in his palm and flew away with a polite wave.

Ernst Udet remembered War.

But Berlin was living it.

Monstrous dreadnaughts drifted through the ember-scorched night sky, raining death in their wake. Tripod-legged machines stalked with unearthly gaits through streets running deep with innocent blood. Unfathomable nightmares from the stars, terrifying and utterly alien, now ruled Berlin.

But they only brought War. And war never changes.

So to had Aeneas hewn his way through a burning city with a desperate band of warriors at his back, even as Udet did now. So to had the Greeks murdered with frenzied madness, as the alien enemy did now. So to had the Trojans torn their own city apart and hurled the pieces upon the enemy, as the Berliners did now.

The invaders were alien, but War was ever familiar.

The small band of people slowed, then stopped as the heavy footfalls of a nightmare engine rattled the rubble on the street. Voices rose in unarticulated, babbling terror. Udet sprang to the sidewalk, driving his boot through a basement window, and seized the closest man, slinging him through the narrow entrance head-first. The others followed, some kicking out windows of their own as Udet struck the laggarts with the muzzle of his submachine gun, driving them into the basement with sheer aggression. Udet himself squirmed into the building mere seconds before the first snaking metallic leg rounded the corner of the block behind them.

The military “men” hardly deserved the title, but the file clerks and cooks were steeled by their duty, and shushed the civilians as Death stalked up the street.

******

The tri-legged machines had the armor of a tank and the nimbleness of a dancer. Long, thick mechanical tentacles glided the fighting compartment over rubble and rooftops and minefields and barbed wire and every other damn thing. An invisible weapon that boiled brick and slagged steel, a heat ray,, armed the dread machine. It was monstrous, elegant, and unstoppable.

Werner Dietrich didn’t give a fuck.

The ‘body’ of the beast occasionally hove into view over the rooftops, then dipped behind the buildings again. At first Werner thought it was taking peeks over the buildings and ducking behind them for cover, like a man behind a parapet. Something in the smooth, unhurried motions belied that, however, and Werner realized it was peering in windows.

Looking for people.

“Here I am, you shit-eating pig-dog,” he whispered under his breath. “Come and find me.”

When Werner was fifteen, he’d learned to hunt wild hens. Their heads would dart up, down, up, down, bobbing and weaving from behind a log or tree... but if you waited long enough, they strolled into the open, exposed and unawares.

As the Machine did now, long strides taking it into the middle of the intersection not a hundred yards distant. It paused for but a moment, perhaps taking its bearings, and Werner took his shot. The huge Flak-18 cannon bucked, the muzzle blast blowing signs off storefronts fifteen feet down the street. The 88mm high-explosive shell slammed into the alien Machine at 2,700 feet-per-second, hurling it into the building behind it, whiplike limbs lifted clean off the ground by the impact.

“PEEK-A-BOO, BITCH!” Werner howled triumphantly. His loader already had another shell in the tray for Krupp’s finest semi-automatic design to pick up. High-Explosive was hardly ideal for engaging armored ground vehicles, so Werner wasn’t surprised when the fighting machine’s whiplike limbs started to extract it from the facade of the old office building.

The Flak-18 thundered again, and this time the shell punched clean through the side of the machine near the joint where the robotic limb met the body. Werner’s loader had prudently dove behind the gun; shrapnel from an 88mm could fly much further then a hundred yards, but Werner didn’t flinch as a hot shard of steel grazed his cheek. “Reload!” he cried, almost growling with frustration until another 88mm shell slammed home into the breech. He fired it into the now-motionless Machine down the street, blowing it asunder.

******

Udet led his band out of the basement and down the street.

They all stared at the smashed ruins of the Machine in wonder; all except Udet. He’d spent his life smashing enemy machines. It was no marvel to him. “Keep moving!” he snarled, pointing with his gun, and they moved. At the corner of the building they’d sheltered in, Udet poked his head out and looked left, down the road the shells had came from.

In the darkness it took him a few seconds to spot it. An older Flak-18 cannon, with the fixed-cross base had somehow been manhandled inside a half-destroyed automotive shop, the cannon’s long snout barely poking past the large rolling doors. Udet gestured sharply to his band, and they followed him down the street towards the position. As they closed, Udet noted motor oil had been splashed haphazardly on the barrel to make crude, but effective urban night camouflage.

A crew of Luftwaffe anti-aircraft gunners cautiously poked their heads out, examining the newcomers. The crew chief raised a hand in weary greeting, then snapped it into a rigid salute when he recognized Udet.

“Good shooting, soldier. Saved our asses,” Udet said. He’d always stressed the importance of marksmanship to his young pilots – winning firing position was useless if you couldn’t use it, after all. “We’re headed for aircraft?. Any word?”

“Lost phones an hour ago, Herr Generaloberst.”

“Before that?”

“Schönefeld said they were being... overwhelmed, and were running.”

“Tempelhof? Gatow?”

“Our men near Tempelhof said one of those flying ship-things came near and they blew the hell out of it, sir.”

Udet nodded grimly. Tempelhof was an aircraft factory as well as a base, and the aliens had received the same warm welcome usually waiting for RAF night bombers. It was also relatively close.

“We’re getting the hell out. What about you?”

The soldier nodded at his cannon. “My fight is here, sir.”

Udet merely nodded, and vanished into the dying city with his small band.


******

They reached Tempelhof alive.

The smashed wrecks of a few tripod machines lay scattered here and there, but there was no sign of a concentrated attack, no pitched battle. The Reichstag had been torn apart by a legion of nightmare killers, but in the rest of the city they seemed to roam at random. Tempelhof was more marred by old English bomb-craters then the new attackers. A weary Luftwaffe gun crew told Udet that civilians were sheltering in the extensive underground tunnels of the airport in droves.

Udet led his refugees into the massive entryway to the terminal, the largest in the world, now empty and silent. Only the unearthly horns of the aliens and the occasional crump of shells exploding sounded in the massive, hollow building.

Slumped against a ticket counter, Udet found Speer, supported by Erich von Manstein, the latter’s sharp uniform soot-stained and torn.

The balding, energetic little Speer Udet remembered had become a somber, pale zombie. His left shoulder was crudely bandaged with a few bloodstained shirts and towels, and his eyes were unfocused.

Udet knelt next to him. “Hitler?”

Albert Speer simply shook his head.

“Himmler?”

He tilted his head in what might’ve been an attempted shrug.

“Göring?”

“He was out hunting,” Manstein said quietly. “I was waiting for him to get back. He wanted to watch the Fuhrer tear into me.”

Two of Udet’s refugees slung Speer between them and hauled him along as the band passed through the terminal onto the sprawling grounds of the airport. Fw-190 fighters and Ju-87 Stukas were assembled and flown out here, but neither would carry fifteen refugees to safety. Udet needed something else, something bigger.

He found it in the third hangar he checked. A Ju-52 transport was parked near a Bf-110 heavy fighter, with a single man hastily detaching a hose from a fuel truck. He recognized Udet instantly and had to fight for words until Udet held up a palm to silence him.

He examined the man’s uniform. “You’re a pilot?”

“I – I haven’t graduated from fli-”

“You’ll do,” Udet said. In truth, they had no choice. “This thing fueled?” The trainee pilot nodded. “Just now, sir.” Udet slung his MP-18 and bounced into the Bf-110s cockpit, groping around for the gripe sheet and log. Fighters only landed at Tempelhof with emergencies. He found the sheet and skimmed it quickly.

“Took off last night to intercept RAF raid,” Udet muttered aloud, “#2 engine baulked, put down at Tempelhof and repaired... earlier tonight.” Thus, still fully armed and mostly fueled. He tossed the log away, marveling. Gods bullets continued to miss, but why, he couldn’t say.

“You,” he said to the trainee. “Taxi out and take-off after me. I’ll cover you.”

“Where are we going?”

“Wherever there’s people left alive to man a radio,” Udet answered. “Get moving.”

From the hangar’s entrance came screaming tires and a laboring engine. Everybody turned as the beastly car thundered and roared its way across the concrete floor, screeching to a halt nearby. What looked like bullet scars and grenade damage had shredded the vehicle, but Udet knew the machine of old; it was custom-modified and well-armored.

Doors opened, and five men in rumpled Fallschirmjäger uniforms swarmed out, MP-40 submachine guns up and ready. One opened the driver’s door.

Hermann Göring, newly-appointed Reichsmarschall, huffed and puffed as he extracted his girth from his specially-modified driver’s seat. His white uniform was marred with blood and soot, and he was sweating profusely. With him he took a battered briefcase, clutching it like the crown jewels as he examined the bystanders.

His eyes brightened when he saw Udet and Manstein, but his face positively transformed when he spotted Speer. He tore open the briefcase with haste, drawing out a single sheet of paper.

“Hitler is dead,” he breathed, and his eyes shone with mad glee. “Hitler is dead,” he repeated, like a hosanna. He brandished the paper in Udet’s face, then Mansteins, then Speer’s, waving it to encourage them to read. “And I am his successor.” Hitler had said as much in open speech to the Reichstag years before, but there it was in official and inconvertible print, singed in Hitler’s own hand.

“I am Fuhrer,” Göring breathed with essay, and the simple joy in his eyes made Udet go cold. Udet and Speer were the first people he’d found worth bragging to, and he hadn’t even waited to be airborne before doing it. “Are either of these planes ready?”

“B-both are ready to fly, Herr Reichsmarschall,” the terrified trainee stuttered.

“The fighter is faster,” Göring said simply. Udet watched his face twist with swift internal calculations. “Udet, you will fly. And we will need a gunner; I am out of practice and Speer is wounded. Dieter,” he said simply, and one of his guards stepped forward.

“The rest?” Udet asked quietly.

“The Junkers,” Göring said dismissively.

Once airborne, there would be no talk of escorting the much-slower Junkers away from the city, or do anything besides flee at full emergency power. Udet had no doubt Dieter was the most stupid and loyal of Göring’s entourage, reliable enough to shoot him in the back of the head and dump him out the hatch without a question. Göring hadn’t touched a flight stick in many years, but if Udet proved inflexible it was always an option. They’d always disliked each other, and Udet had seen enough to know how the Reichsmarschall viewed men like him – tools and pawns, to be used and thrown away as needed.

“Very well,” Udet said quietly.

“You won’t need that anymore, sir,” Dieter said, nodding at Udet’s battered old MP-18. Dieter might not be a thinker, but he wasn’t blind, either. He stepped forward, extending his hand, leveling his MP-40 at Udet’s gut with the other.

Udet snorted, laboriously pulling the sling of his gun over his head. He tossed the weapon at Dietrich contemptuously, and as the man clutched at it one-handed, stepped to one side, drew his revolver and shot him in the heart.

Simultaneous chaos. Udet fired again, his hand guided by the casual skill of muscle memory. Months of picking bottles off fence-rails at the aerodrome as he imagined French faces on them, months of firing pistols at trees as he raced past on motorcycles, determined to steel his coward’s heart to kill the enemy had ingrained in Udet the marksmanship he’d always preached.

He didn’t miss, and another paratrooper took a .38 in the throat. Guards three and four dove to the side, unable to fire immediately without striking Göring. Guard five dove in front of his commander, trying to shove him into the bulletproof car, but a rifle thundered from the crowd of refugees and punched through both of them.

Udet never registered the sounds of the last two men’s MP-40s firing. He squeezed off shot three into one man’s chest. The chill in his body had reached his mind, and he turned and shot the last guard as swiftly and easily as pointing his finger at him, with no more excitement or terror then he’d felt while blowing cans off the aerodrome’s fencerail all those years ago. There was nothing to get excited about. He was already dead. He just had to wait for God to let his bullet fall.

Göring was pawing weakly at his fancy leather holster, trying to get his own .38 out and shoving weakly at the dying man laying atop him. Udet fired his fifth round into the gut-shot paratroopers head.

Blood wicked through Göring’s white uniform where the rifle bullet had taken him in the hip, slowly spreading the stain over his body. “I am the Fhurer!” he screamed in rage and terror. “I am your Fhurer!”

“Reich Master of the Forest and Hunt,” Udet said, repeating one of Göring’s titles. “Of them all, that was absolutely the biggest sack of shit you ever wore.” With mechanical detachment, Udet drew the hammer back on his Smith&Wesson’s final round.

The last thing Göring saw was the cold blue eyes of a true hunter.