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The panzer commander seemed taken aback by the whole business himself. He rode head and shoulders out of the cupola, and couldn't have been as young as he looked-could he? "Be careful!" he shouted over and over again to his unexpected load of passengers. "If you fall off, you'll get squashed!"
He was bound to be right about that. This panzer was second in a long column rolling from Rolf Stolle's residence toward Lothar Prutzma
Prudence? Susa
Not Prutzma
Here and there in the city, she did hear spatters of gunfire, but only a few. The panzer commander heard them, too. "What are you people going to do when we get where we're going?" he asked plaintively.
"Hang the Reichsfuhrer -SS from a lamppost, that's what!" bawled a burly man near Susa
"But we're liable to have to shoot some of those SS bastards, and they're liable to shoot back," the Wehrmacht man said. Whenever the panzer passed under a streetlight, the little silver Totenkopf on his black coveralls glittered for a moment.
"Give us guns!" that burly man said. "We'll shoot 'em ourselves!" Through more cheers, he went on to describe in vivid terms the personal and moral shortcomings of the SS. Then he nodded to Susa
"It doesn't bother me," she said. "They're much worse than that." The man blinked, then gri
SS men had barricaded the grounds around their brooding headquarters. What they'd run up looked much more formidable than the flimsy makeshifts the people of Berlin had erected in front of Rolf Stolle's residence. But there was no swarming mass of people behind these barricades: only Prutzma
The commander of the lead panzer yelled, "You fuckers open up on us and we'll slaughter every goddamn one of you. We'll laugh while we're doing it, too. You shot our boys at the televisor station, and we owe you plenty. You got that?" He ducked down into the turret. The panzer's engine began to race and roar. The commander reemerged to issue a one-word order he surely hadn't learned in any training school: "Charge!"
His panzer thundered forward. It hit a parked truck head-on and hurled it out of the way. Susa
Fear is what they had,Susa
Prutzma
One of the panzer commanders had a bullhorn, probably the same model as the SS panzer man had used outside of Rolf Stolle's residence. "Prutzma
And then we'll kill you,Susa
No answer came from the famous office. The lights were on in there, but closed venetian blinds kept Susa
Susa
The deadline had to be drawing near. The man commanding Susa
"Why not?" said the commander of the lead panzer. "Why the hell not, you SSSchweinehund? Where's Prutzma
"He's dead," the blond Security Police major answered. "He stuck a pistol in his mouth and pulled the trigger. Didn't you hear the bang?"
A frantic tumult of cheering rose from the civilians. Through it, the lead panzer commander used the bullhorn to say, "Show me the body. Till I see the body, I figure this is some sort of scheme to buy time for him to get away." The blond major started to go back into the building. The panzer commander stopped him: "Hold it right there, buddy. If they don't bring Prutzma
"Have it your way," the major said. "You will anyhow." He turned and shouted back into SS headquarters: "Hans-Joachim! Detlef! Bring him out! They want to see him."
Noxious diesel fumes from the idling panzer made Susa
Or so she thought, till two SS men-she supposed they were Hans-Joachim and Detlef-dragged out a corpse. Each had hold of a highly polished boot. The body wore the black dress uniform of a high-ranking SS official. In the glare of the panzers' lights, the blood that ran from the back of the head was shockingly scarlet. Susa
Again, so she thought. But the man who commanded her panzer said only, "It's a fresh corpse, anyhow. They don't drip that way very long." If that wasn't the voice of experience, she'd never heard it.
The commander of the lead panzer got down from his machine and bounded up the stairs to the entrance two at a time so he could get a good look at the body. He stooped beside it, then slowly straightened. With a fine flair for the dramatic, he spread his arms wide and waited till every eye was on him. Then and only then did he shout, "It's Prutzma