With thanks to dust on the wind and the rest of the crew for keeping this tradition alive, and to everyone who combats fear with courage, compassion, and creativity.

The kübelwagen coughed, clattered, and growled to a stop in front of the decaying manor house.

Oberstleutnant Axel Matthias shifted the little machine into low gear and shut off the ignition. He stepped out of the weather-beaten vehicle and stretched, looking out over the airfield, which his fighter wing had occupied for just over two weeks. The late summer breeze ruffled the dark hair under his faded navy-gray officer's cap, which he wore low and angled over his broad forehead. He squinted as he picked out the camouflaged Messerschmitt 109s perched on the far side of the grassy field, the crow's feet at the edges of his sharp eyes carving into his skin.

His morning trip to requisition labor from a local prisoner of war camp had proven unsuccessful. First, he had almost lost his hearing from the violin music that had assaulted his ears as soon he entered the Kommandantur. The Kommandant, a wheedling, nervous man with a face like that of an emaciated buzzard (albeit one wearing a monocle), himself responsible for the aural outrage, had apologized profusely, but only after bragging about the tonal complexity of the piece. Then he had apologized more after explaining that Kriegsgefangenen couldn't be compelled to work on defense-related projects, per the Geneva Convention. Then he had offered Matthias a cigar and started reminiscing about his aerial exploits during the Great War. This would have been of great interest to the younger pilot, had it not become rapidly obvious to him that the Kommandant had done precious little true flying of any sort. Matthias had excused himself as quickly as courtesy allowed, preferring the company of his kübelwagen and the German forest roads.

Despite the tedious encounter, Matthias found the little trip a welcome break. He had scarcely had any time to himself since assuming command of the Jagdgeschwader.

For the sake of both security and custom, he should have taken along an enlisted man as his driver, but maintenance was already running on a skeleton crew due to the lack of qualified replacements. He was reluctant to take men away from working on damaged Messerschmitts, vital for national defense, just to drive their commanding officer through the woods. At any rate, he had encountered no one during the drive who might have criticized his choice, save for a harried Leutnant in a very muddy kübelwagen who had asked after directions to the nearest train station.

His adjutant, Leutnant Vollrath von Karajan, came walking up as Matthias stretched his heel on the field car's running board. The young man's boots, buffed to a sheen despite the scarcity of polish, clipped crisply against the crumbling brick of the terrace. "Herr Oberstleutnant, welcome back. You just missed a visitor, sir."

"Hmmpf," Matthias grunted, popping his back. "Anyone important?"

His adjutant hesitated. "Perhaps. Very unusual fellow."

"In what sense of the word?"

"... I think you should speak to Major Stirn about that, sir."

"— accused us of sloppy motor pool maintenance, upbraided half of the men for having their sleeves rolled up, demanded I send Gefreiter Kertz to the Eastern Front for having his tunic unbuttoned, said that the grass was higher than regulation allowed, ordered us to buy goats when I said we didn't have mowers – Bulgarian goats, he was specific – cited us for failing to display a portrait of the Führer, and—" Major Stirn slapped the table, "—derided our squadron logo! Called it degenerate!"

A squadron commander named Bauer snorted. "You mean the graffiti in the Klo doesn't count as a portrait?"

"Verdammt, I told the men to paint over that a week ago!"

Matthias looked at a patch of peeling paint on the wall of his ersatz office through the steeple of fingers supporting his brow ridge and forehead, both of which threatened to split open due to a sudden headache. He pictured the fighter wing's logo, a winking owl holding a mirror. A bit absurd, perhaps, but degenerate? That was going too far.

"You're sure this General ... von Seidelberg, was it, you're sure his papers checked out?"

Major Stirn huffed. "Not just his papers. We called headquarters and got verbal confirmation from this commander, Feldmarschall Kinchmeyer or something, who said he was on an inspection tour of all forward fighter bases. We're to take his orders as gospel."

Matthias kept staring at the wall from the gap between his fingers. The bucolic peace of his morning drive was a distant, rapidly retreating memory. "Goats." He shook his head. "Was this man in his right mind?"

"Oh, I doubt that, but good luck proving anything!" Stirn spat. He tossed up his hands. "Bureaucracy! Without it, we might actually be winning the war!"

Matthias' adjutant cut his eyes at Stirn.

"Major, that is enough," Matthias said warningly.

Specht, the operations officer, sucked his teeth. "You know, come to think of it, the man did have an unusual way of speaking. Little bit of an accent or something."

"Could be combat fatigue. Or a concussion. Or a shallow gene pool. You know the aristocracy," Bauer laughed.

Karajan's glare could have made icicles shiver.

"Mind your tongue, Bauer," Matthias said in the same warning tone.

"Sir."

Matthias sighed and dropped his hands to the desk, an oaken antique only lately cleared of a decade's worth of dust and rat droppings. "Official endorsement or not, no one's going to the East. The grass, however, is too high. It's getting caught in the Messers' wheels. I'm not opposed to goats. Karajan, see what you can do about that."

The young man's high-boned face paled. "Yes, sir."

"Erik, give the airfield a walk-around. Get the men to tidy up. We're closer to Berlin now than we were on the peninsula, so these inspections are going to become more frequent. Let's not give the brass any more excuses to tear down the fighter corps. They'll find enough of their own as it is. And tend to that graffiti."

Stirn picked up his field cap and rammed it on his shock of blond hair, pulling the brim down and to the side. "Jawohl."

"If the rest of you can't find anything to do, talk to Feldwebel Krefft. We're tearing down the stables out back for firewood and a dozen other things besides. It wouldn't hurt any of us to sweat, officers or not."

Sensing that he wanted to be alone, his staff murmured assent and left.

The old sunroom grew quieter without their presence. Matthias could hear the splintering cracks of the stable demolition, the cook banging at the faulty main water line, and somehow, a finch chirruping in the oaks outside.

He picked up a stack of paperwork, leafed through the first few pages, then set it down and crossed his arms, staring out the window. A Kettenkrad towed a Messerschmitt with collapsed landing gear through the field, sending up a cloud of dust. The airplane was close enough that Matthias could see the emblem painted on its rear flank. The little owl winked at him, twirling its mirror.

"Degenerate," he muttered, then shook his head.

Karajan managed to find some goats.

The small flock nibbled at the overgrown grass on the southern end of the airfield, pressing up against the edges of their enclosure. The moveable fence, an ingenious invention of the senior mechanic, had held them securely for the first 15 hours following their delivery by a weary-faced shepherd. Then the goats had experienced the glorious roar of the dawn scramble and escaped in a panic, bleating and running straight down the active runway.

Fighter Wing 23 came very close to having goat stew for lunch that day.

A rapid executive decision reassigned the goats to quarters in the partially deconstructed stables, with hour-long grazing sessions permitted twice a day. Karajan was responsible for the oversight of these operations, and he made no secret of his disdain for the task.

Colonel Matthias knelt and reached a hand through the fence, scratching a milky white nanny on the neck. Inspection of the recruits, he thought with amusement. Provided they didn't ruin his aircraft and thereby injure his men, he welcomed the presence of the skinny animals. There was something peaceful about watching them graze, and peace was in short supply these days.

Karajan stood ramrod straight behind his commanding officer, eyeing the goats with mistrust. He had paid a small fortune from the Jagdgeschwader's purse to acquire them, one he would have rather put towards winter clothing or building maintenance. He currently shared quarters with a draft, a rat, and five other men. At least two of those issues could have been solved with the goat-money.

"So our new recruits meet the general's standards, eh, Karajan?"

He cleared his throat. "Well, they're Austrian, not Bulgarian, but unless the general gets down on his knees and starts talking to them, he's not likely to notice the difference. Not that I put it past him. Sir."

Matthias smiled. "You don't care for livestock, do you, Vollrath?"

"My upbringing didn't encourage close fraternization with barnyard creatures, sir."

"I grew up milking cows every morning before school. It's good to spend time around animals." He patted the nanny and stood up. "They teach you patience."

"Certainly, sir," Karajan said, not sounding particularly convinced.

"Give it time, son." He gave the horizon one of his habitual scans, checking the angle of the sun and the height of the clouds. "Let them finish their breakfast, then get them in before Bauer's patrol takes off. I'll let Major Stirn know that I'm bound for JG 99's airfield. Should be back by tomorrow evening, war and weather permitting. If anything happens while I'm gone, report to him."

"Jawohl," Karajan said, then hesitated. "You're not going alone again, are you, sir?"

"That's the plan."

"It's hardly proper, sir. Or safe."

"Protocol has its place. In Berlin." Matthias winked and pulled on his cap. "And it's a fool who looks for safety in wartime. Take good care of the recruits. I'll see you tomorrow."

Karajan looked as if he wanted to protest, but abstained in favor of a salute and a click of the heels, an impressive achievement in the high grass. Matthias clapped him on the shoulder as he left.

Karajan watched him go, jerking away from the fence when one of the goats began nibbling at his coat.

It was going to be a long hour.

Oberst Pirschow greeted Matthias like a brother.

Though his visit to Jagdgeschwader 99 was ostensibly pure business, an opportunity to discuss joint strategy and supply coordination, the two pilots treated it for what is was: an excuse to drink, reminisce, and escape the present in the company of an equal – one who had been baptized in the same barrage of flak and fire, who knew what it was like to fly a flaming aircraft over a midnight sea, who could be trusted to laugh at the right jokes and pass along the right gossip.

They shared several beers, some speculations on the outcome of the war that could have gotten them both shot, observations on the mind-swamping burden of command, and the best flying stories they each had accumulated since their last meeting, weaving their hands through the air in elegant arcs and lines that recalled the flight of warplanes, honed to the dance of hand and wrist.

Their farewell was steeped in the serious nonchalance of fighting men who knew every meeting could be their last, and Matthias fought a burning in his eyes and throat that persisted well after he had left the gray airfield in his dust.

He was delayed on his return by an encounter with the same harried Leutnant from the week prior, an attaché to an armored division, whose kübelwagen had fallen into a small bomb crater. By the time he towed the machine free (all the while seeking to allay the young man's anxiety by teasing him gently – a pilot pulling one of the Panzer Korps out of a hole in the dirt, who could have guessed?) and accepted Lieutenant Keilwasser's effusive, exhausted thanks, he had lost another half hour of daylight.

He finally pulled into the manor's winding drive as the late summer light was reaching its golden hour, pouring thick as honey through the broad-leaved forest. He heard the goats bleating and pulled to a stop as they trotted across the gravel path. A heavy-browed crewman swatted ineffectually at their ankles with a long stick, herding them towards the stables. I see Karajan has delegated his responsibilities, he thought with a flash of irritation and amusement.

He found the young man waiting for him on the terrace.

Matthias unfolded himself from the kübelwagen, preparing to deliver a reprimand, then stopped short at the expression on his adjutant's face.

"Wait. Don't tell me. Goat stew."

"No, sir. It's General von Seidelberg, sir. He came back."

"— drove around in my kübelwagen for an hour, stripped the gears raw, confiscated all of our cognac, asked Gefreiter Kertz why he wasn't speaking Russian yet, called our camouflage 'aesthetically subpar', nosed through all of Specht's records, misplaced half of them, reprimanded us for painting over the graffiti – excuse me, the folk art – which he said was more aesthetically pleasing than our degenerate mascot, belittled the portrait of Hitler in the foyer, which we spent good drinking money on –"

Specht scratched his neck. "To be fair, we did have it facing the wall."

Bauer grimaced. "The eyes on that thing are creepy."

"– and everything he said this friend of his would nod at, like he was some kind of sage, and all that did was rile him up more!"

Matthias looked up from the lattice of his fingers, where he had been contemplating the void. "Friend? What friend?"

"This foreign dignitary, he called him. I think the man was Turkish."

"Turkish?"

"With all due respect, sir, he was not Turkish," Karajan said flatly.

"He looked Turkish," Bauer interjected.

"I took a course on Near-Eastern Cultures at Heidelberg, and I can assure you, sir, that man was not Turkish."

Stirn tossed up his hands. "I don't know what he was, but he was wearing a fez."

"The Turks don't were fezzes anymore, they're a secular state now!"

"What does that have to do with anything?!"

"Atatürk banned them as a religious symbol during his reforms twenty years ago!"

Matthias stood up, walked to the door, opened it, then did the same with all the windows in the room.

Stirn looked at him in exasperation. "Matthias, what are you doing?"

"I'm letting out all of the carbon monoxide trapped in here. At least that's what I'm assuming has made all of you go insane."

His staff protested to the contrary. Matthias sat down in the dusty armchair and massaged his right eyebrow. "Now. Did he leave a message?"

"Who, Seidelberg or the Turk?"

"He was not—"

"Seidelberg."

"Negative. He spent half an hour giving us a lecture on the aesthetic qualities of endemic fungi (only Karajan could make heads or tails of that), then looked at his watch and tore out of here on two wheels."

Matthias again contemplated the patch of peeling paint on the wall. He wondered, not for the first time, if the entirety of the German High Command was on some kind of hallucinogen. Such as endemic mushrooms.

He steepled his fingers and took a breath. "Field Marshall Rommel once said –"

An oaken creak from the manor house's front door interrupted him. A moment later, the sentry on duty walked into the room and saluted. His craggy face was carefully composed but betrayed rivulets of unease. "Herr Oberstleutnant. There's a Lieutenant Keilwasser from the 179th Panzer to see you, sir."

Matthias' brow furrowed. "Let him in."

The sentry saluted again and left.

Moments later, a tall, pale lieutenant dressed in the gray-green of the regular army lurched through the doorway in a rare disarray. There were great dark circles under his mossy eyes, twigs and branches in his hair, a cut on his cheek, oil on his sleeves, a smoldering hole in his cap, and at least five different colors of mud on his boots. He gathered himself, clicked his heels, and stood straighter than even Frederick the Great could have asked, his arm holding a perfect salute and his square face etched with misery. He was breathing heavily.

The pilots looked at him in shock.

"Leutnant Keilwasser!" Matthias exclaimed. "What happened, son?"

The tall young man just shook his head. Without taking his hand from his brow, he held out an envelope to Matthias. "I'm under orders from Herr General von Seidelberg to deliver this to you personally, sir."

Matthias took the letter as he might have a live grenade, his head spinning. "Seidelberg," he muttered, a sense of dread building in his solar plexus. Not again. "Alright. At ease, lieutenant."

Keilwasser slumped with visible relief. A twig fell out of his hair and landed on the floor next to a clod of mud.

Stirn looked back and forth between the two of them, his face losing its apoplectic redness. "I take it you two have met."

"Fellow journeymen on the road, you could say," Matthias muttered, turning the muddy, sooty letter over in his hands. "When did you run into General von Seidelberg, Leutnant?"

"Shortly after you towed me out of that crater, sir. He overtook me on the way back to the front." His voice rang with exhaustion and a barely controlled Berlin accent.

Matthias stared. "Overtook you? But I passed you coming back, how did… we were on the same road, that doesn't make any sense…"

Keilwasser swallowed. "Sir, in my experiences with this man, nothing he does makes any sense."

"Experiences?"

Keilwasser opened his mouth to explain but Matthias held up a hand. "Never mind, lieutenant. Not right now."

He picked up a tarnished letter opener and sliced the envelope open. "Horrido," he muttered under his breath, then started reading the scrawled script.

Absentee Oberstleutnant Axel Matthias –

I hope that this letter has reached you in a state of adequate health and mental stability, since I was never able to assess such fitness for command in person due to your frequent dalliances across the countryside. I suspect both to be dissatisfactory, but that is beside the point.

Your Jagdgeschwader is operating (I use this word with strong reservations) at an abysmally subpar level. My inspection, aided by the sharp observations of a foreign dignitary, revealed gross inadequacies in the following:

Fuel Storage
Motor Pool Maintenance
Comportment of the Men
Comportment of the Aircraft
Interior Design
Landscaping
Dining Etiquette
Quality of Hospitality Services
Display of Morally Appropriate Artwork
Cultivation of Native Mushrooms
Encouragement of the Martial Spirit
Spontaneous Shouts of a Patriotic Nature
General Aesthetic Considerations

I have been called away on an urgent mission for the Reich concerning classified matters, otherwise I would personally report the shortcomings of your Fighter Wing to Reichsmarschall Göring. Fate has granted you mercy, but I have granted you more. See to it that your men and aircraft are in prime fighting shape before I return, or you will find yourselves assessing the quality of Soviet flak batteries – from the ground.

You are to destroy this letter immediately upon receipt, preferably by personal ingestion or by combustion in the ignition chamber of a DB-605 engine.

Heil Hitler!

General Engelbert Oswald Freiherr von Seidelberg, esq.

P.S. – The staff of your Jagdgeschwader will also be cited for your collective failure to acquire suitable implements for grass control. The goats are obviously Austrian, not Bulgarian. An inferior race.

Matthias pinched the bridge of his nose and dropped the letter, fighting a sudden and pounding headache that rivaled most thunderstorms in intensity. He turned to the window and put his hands on his hips, staring at the sky.

One by one, his staff passed the letter around in a discreet manner, though the visiting lieutenant refused to touch it.

After several minutes, Matthias took a deep breath and turned around again.

"Specht," he said.

"Herr Oberstleutnant."

"Order for communications. They're to radio Berlin and inquire about the background of one General von Seidelberg. Call the Army and the Luftwaffe. Separate inquiries. Demand confirmation of the information from the commanding officer at each station. Take their name, rank, and serial number. If they get touchy, say it's a matter of national defense."

"Jawohl."

Matthias turned to Keilwasser, his face a mask of control. "Did the general say anything else to you, Leutnant?"

"No, sir. Only that I was to deliver the letter to you, personally, on pain of court martial, and report to the general when I did so."

"How? By telephone?"

Keilwasser shook his head. "With the homing pigeon."

"The what?!"

He pointed out the window to his filthy kübelwagen. A gray homing pigeon sat in a cage in the rear seat, being fed a cricket by one of the privates attached to the motor pool.

Bauer came down with a sudden fit of coughing that sounded suspiciously like hysterical laughter.

Matthias controlled his breathing, with difficulty.

"And where was he bound, did he tell you that?"

Do you really want to know, Axel? Matthias thought after the words had left his mouth.

Keilwasser blinked. "He said he had to collect a suitcase full of books from a café in Ceuta."

Matthias stared at him, then put a hand to his forehead. "Ceuta."

"Yes, sir."

"The Spanish city on the northern coast of Africa."

"Correct, sir."

Bauer perked up. "They wear fezzes in northern Africa!"

"That man was not Moroccan. His physiognomy—"

"Aw, save the lecture, Karajan!"

Matthias massaged his temples. What was it Pirschow said? Build the airplane, one piece at a time. Or tear it apart. One piece at a time.

"Leutnant," he said to Keilwasser. "Thank you for the message. You're free to return to your unit. Get yourself something from the kitchen before you leave – and the infirmary, that's where we keep the schnapps. Just leave some for the rest of us. And don't release that pigeon until you're well away from my airfield, or she could end up in a propeller."

Keilwasser clicked his heels, almost tumbling forward. "Danke, Herr Oberstleutnant."

The communications officer stuck his head through the door. "Have any of you seen the keys for communicating with the radio operator in Stuttgart? They've been missing since the general's visit."

Matthias was going to have a bruise on the bridge of his nose before the day was over. "No, Zeitlhofer. Do you have a report on those inquiries I ordered?"

"Not yet," Zeitlhofer said, and blinked owlishly. "Oh, and here's a telegram for you, sir."

Matthias, who suddenly wanted nothing more than to go hide under the camouflage with the Messerschmitts, forced himself to take the folded envelope.

There was a hush in the room as his dark eyes devoured the coded report, brightening with every line.

Then he thrust down the paper. "Report from the front lines! We have four waves of bombers inbound for the rail yards west of Munich, I want all available aircraft scrambled and airborne in thirty minutes! Los!"

Bauer whooped and rushed out into the foyer, followed closely by Specht and Stirn.

Karajan perked up as much as his expression of permanent disdain allowed. He took Keilwasser by the arm and escorted the hapless Panzer attaché out of the room, hoping to deposit him in the kitchen as quickly as possible and thus secure a good vantage point from which to watch the takeoff with his opera glasses.

The siren that signaled the call to scramble began to yowl from the communications hut, sending a shiver down Matthias' spine. He walked to a window and squinted against the light, watching the ground crews rip the camouflaged covers from the 109s.

"Finally," he muttered. "Action."

Colonel Matthias was experienced enough to recognize the bitter irony of taking joy in combat, without being disillusioned enough to totally despair of it. If the Fates allowed it, he would still be the first man on the line, every time. If they allowed it, he would shoot down a thousand airplanes and never kill a man.

He stepped back from the window and looked up at the sky, framed by branches of oak and leaden glass. But that's not the world we live in.

Troubles forgotten, or at least demoted in priority, he made a pretense of arranging the papers on his desk, stuffed Seidelberg's letter deep into a drawer, locked it, then walked outside to watch his squadrons ready themselves for combat.

The throaty snarl of Daimler-Benz engines soon reverberated through the air as the first of the machines taxied to the end of the runway. Others followed in sequence, conducting rapid control checks before queuing for takeoff. Matthias held his cap steady against the acrid blast of propwash as each of them passed, feeling his heart beat faster.

The first airplane, Specht's Yellow Five, roared as her pilot applied the throttle. Standing one hundred meters from the midpoint of the north-south runway, Matthias watched her build speed, faster, faster, her tailwheel and then front wheels lifting from the ground as she took to the skies. Specht climbed and circled, the landing gear glinting as it retracted into the belly of his fighter.

Thirty-five airplanes followed suit. Matthias watched, grinning with each pass, wishing he himself were still a lieutenant cutting winged fury through the heavens, untethered from earth and its morass of complications.

Fifteen minutes after he had first walked outside, the final flight of yellow-nosed fighters roared overhead, leaving the familiar reek of high-octane fuel in their wake.

"Godspeed," their commanding officer murmured. He squinted, crow's feet cutting deep into his young-old face, following the handful of black silhouettes into the light of the western sky. How many of you will come back this time?

He waited until they were out of sight, then walked slowly back into the shambling mansion, slowly through the heavy doors, reluctant to leave the overarching sky with the blood still racing restive through his veins.

He sat down behind the desk with a sigh and picked up a pencil. The requisition forms laid in stacks – gray, flat, and lifeless.

He pictured his men, gloved and suited, wired into their machines, rising to meet the hordes of heavy bombers. They would get the height advantage early, if they could, and dive, again and again, through the armored herds, through the bristling armament. Mustangs would come for them, glinting silver in the sunlight heights, and his pilots would press their throttles to the limit, climbing, climbing, trying to outmaneuver the enemy in an airplane that had been cutting edge five years ago. Five years ago, in another world, where victory was still a thrilling light on the horizon, not an inferno of lies and horror consuming the continent.

He was reliving one of his thousand-odd aerial engagements, doodling on the edge of an ink-stained chart, when the phone rang. He sighed and picked up the receiver.

"Colonel Matthias here," he said with resignation.

The tinny voice of the gate guard answered him. "Colonel, there's a Sturmbannführer here to see you. He says he's investigating suspicious activity in the area."

Matthias lowered his pencil. Tapped it against the desk.

Tracers howled in his memory. Turbulence, the shock of impact.

"Will you speak with him, sir? He's waiting for an answer."

Flat spins. Spirals. Two engine fires. Five bailouts. That Russian over the Black Sea.

Matthias stared down at the papers. And now, this.

He spoke into the telephone. "Wave him through."

He set the apparatus down with a clatter and rubbed his forehead, then his jaw and his neck. Afternoon light slanted in through the windows. The Iron Cross around his throat clicked against its cluster of oak leaves, the weight so familiar it hardly registered.

Fog over Crimea. Ruined earth, color of lead. Trains, and trains, and trains of civilians.

Tires pulled up on the gravel outside.

Matthias sat up and straightened his back. He cast his attention about the room a final time, as if in search of guidance. His gaze landed on the graphite doodle beside his pencil.

"What next?" he sighed.

The owl just winked at him.

Author's Notes:

Oberstleutnant = Lieutenant Colonel
Feldwebel = Sergeant
Gefreiter = Private

Kriegsgefangenen = Prisoners of War

The Klo = German slang for 'the bathroom'.

Kettenkrad = a cross between a tank and a motorcycle, used by the Wehrmacht for towing and off-road travel.

Horrido = the Luftwaffe's equivalent to Tally-ho.

Sturmbannführer = SS rank equivalent to Major

Jagdgeschwader = Fighter Wing or Fighter Group. The former is a more accurate translation, though the size of the unit was closer to that of the English Fighter Group than the Wing. Manpower and strength varied considerably among the Jagdgeschwader, especially in the closing months of the war.

Jagdgeschwader 23 and her staff, as depicted here, are creations of the author.

The men of JG23 will return in The Weathered Wing.