“Sure,” Ludwig said. He thought the Czechs had a lot of nerve bumping off Konrad Henlein, too. But he was fretting about how much the Wehrmacht would take, not what it would dish out.

Again, Theo didn’t say a thing. Well, he didn’t have a speaking tube to Fritz. And he’d been wearing his earphones. Rothe wondered why. Radio silence was bound to be tighter than Fritz’s waitress’ works. The only signal that might come was one calling everything off because peace had broken out. The panzer commander didn’t expect that. Nobody else did, either.

Ludwig looked at his watch again. 0400. At this rate, he’d feel as if he’d aged a year before things started happening. He couldn’t even smoke. Somebody out there would skin him alive if he showed a match. And you had to be even more desperate for a butt than he was to light up inside the turret, what with all the ammo in there. Nothing to do but wait and fidget.

As 0600 neared, the sky slowly began to get light. A few minutes before the hour, he thought he heard thunder in the air. Then he realized it was nothing of the sort: it was untold hundreds or thousands of airplane engines, all of them roaring toward Czechoslovakia.

Fritz heard them, too. You’d have to be deaf not to. “Boy, those Czech assholes are really gonna catch it,” he said happily.

“Ja,” Ludwig said, and let it go at that.

Behind them, artillery started bellowing. Red flares leaped into the sky-the go signal! Without waiting for an order, Fritz put the Panzer II in gear and started forward. Other panzers were heading for the border-heading over the border-too. Half-seen German soldiers trotted along with them, clutching Mausers and hunching low to make themselves smaller targets.

A shell burst a couple of hundred meters away. Maybe it was a short round. More likely, it was the goddamn Czechs shooting back. Dirt and a couple of men flew up into the air. Poor bastards, Ludwig thought. He wondered what would happen if a 75 or a 105 hit his panzer. Then he wished he hadn’t.