The War That Came Early: West and East Read online

  They grinned and gave him thumbs-up. He made himself smile as he returned the gesture. The pocket battleship was loose in the North Atlantic. With any luck at all, the Royal Navy didn’t know it yet. Commerce raiders had kept England hopping in the last war. These armored cruisers and their eleven-inch guns were supposed to do even better this time around. The idea was that they could outfight anything they couldn’t outrun and outrun anything they couldn’t outfight.

  By all their specs, they could do both those things. They could get the Royal Navy scrambling like eggs. They could disrupt commerce between the USA and England and between South America and England. They could. That didn’t mean Julius Lemp thought much of them. He was a U-boat man from stem to stern, from top to bottom. Couldn’t submarines do the same job as big, fancy surface raiders, do it better, and do it cheaper? Of course they could—if you asked a U-boat man.

  On came the Admiral Scheer. She was a hell of a lot prettier than the cigar-shaped, rust-streaked U-30. Even Lemp had to admit that. She looked like a sword slicing through the waves. But so what? They didn’t pay off on looks, not unless you were a chorus girl.

  His men kept staring at the pocket battleship through their field glasses. “Everything is so clean,” one of them murmured. “Everybody is so clean.” The submarine and its crew were anything but. They wore leather jackets to hide grease stains. They all smelled bad—you couldn’t bathe properly in this cramped steel tube. Face fungus sprouted on their cheeks and chins and lower lips … and on Lemp’s. The only thing that distinguished him from them was the white cloth cover on his officer’s cap.

  More signals flashed from the Admiral Scheer’s lamp. “Captain … will … repair … aboard,” Matti said slowly.

  “I read it,” Lemp answered. “Tell them Aye aye.” The U-boat’s signal lamp clacked again.

  The pocket battleship lowered a motor launch. It chugged across to the U-30. Feeling like a man entering a strange new world, Lemp boarded it. The petty officer in charge of the launch saluted him. He had to remind himself to return the gesture. There was no room for such nonsense in the submarine’s cramped quarters.

  Up on the bridge, Lemp did remember to salute Captain Patzig, the officer commanding the Admiral Scheer, as he should have. The middle-aged four-striper wore decorations from the last war on the chest of his spotless blue tunic. He eyed Lemp as if wondering whether the U-boat skipper would sneak off with silverware from the galley. But his voice was polite enough as he said, “Welcome aboard.”

  “Thank you, sir. You can see a long way from here, can’t you?” Lemp wasn’t used to being up so high.

  Patzig glanced down toward the U-30. He smiled faintly. “We spot the enemy sooner.”

  “Yes, sir.” That reminded Lemp of something else. “Sir, you should know we saw your smoke before we spotted your masts.”

  “You did?” Patzig rumbled ominously, as if warning Lemp to take it back. But Lemp only nodded—it was true. The older man frowned. “Well. I shall have to speak to my engineering officers about that.” By the look on his face, it wouldn’t be a pleasant conversation.

  “What do you want with us, sir?” Lemp asked. “My orders say I am to cooperate with you in all regards.” He didn’t like them, but he had them.

  “We’re both out here for the same reason: to disrupt shipping between England and the Americas,” Patzig said. “We would do better working together than separately.”

  “Sir?” Lemp said, and not another word. Why does this shit always land on my head? he wondered bitterly. But he knew the answer to that, knew it all too well. He got this assignment for the same reason that the U-30 got to test a Schnorkel under combat conditions. The powers that be didn’t love him, and they had their reasons. Untested? Dangerous? Foolhardy? We’ll send out U-30! If anything happens to her, it’s no great loss.

  Captain Patzig didn’t seem to realize he was talking like an idiot. When you commanded a behemoth like this, a U-boat skipper was less than the dirt beneath your feet. “Ja,” he said. “Together. Your torpedoes will be useful in sinking ships we capture.”

  Lemp didn’t explode. Holding himself in wasn’t easy, but he did it. Carefully, he said, “Um, sir, is it not so that your Panzerschiff here also carries torpedoes?”

  He knew damn well it was so. And he managed to embarrass Captain Patzig, at least a little. Color came into the older man’s cheeks, which had been quite pale. “Well, yes,” Patzig admitted, “but you submariners are the experts in their use, after all. With us, they are strictly auxiliary and emergency weapons.”

  And what was that supposed to mean? Had the Admiral Scheer tried to torpedo some luckless freighter and missed? It sounded that way to Lemp. He almost asked Captain Patzig. Had Patzig come aboard his boat, he would have. But surface-navy discipline stifled him here on the pocket battleship’s spotless bridge.

  “You can cruise at fourteen knots and keep station with us, nicht wahr?” Patzig said.

  “Till we run out of fuel, yes,” Lemp answered. “You’ve got much more range than we do.”

  The other skipper waved that aside. “We can refuel you,” he said. And so they could—no doubt about it. The Admiral Scheer’s diesels would gulp where the U-30 sipped, and the surface vessel would carry far more fuel, too. Patzig went on, “In case we encounter the Royal Navy, your presence would also be useful.”

  There he actually made sense. Enemy cruisers or destroyers going after the pocket battleship wouldn’t expect her to have a U-boat tagging along. Lemp did say, “Once you run up to full speed, sir, you’ll leave us behind. We may not be able to do you any good when you need us the most.”

  Patzig waved that aside. “We will do our best to lure the Englishmen straight into your path. The hunting will be good, Lieutenant. Return to your boat and prepare to conform to our movements.”

  No! You’re out of your goddamn mind! No matter how much Lemp wanted to scream in the senior man’s face, the words stuck in his throat. He saluted stiffly. “Zu befehl, mein Herr!” he said. At your command, sir! And it was at Patzig’s command. Lemp wouldn’t have done this on his own for every Reichsmark in Germany—no, not for every dollar in the USA. Military discipline was a strange and wondrous thing. Full of foreboding, he did a smart about-turn and walked away.

  IT WAS … a railroad track. Had Hideki Fujita seen it somewhere in Japan or Manchukuo, he wouldn’t have given it a second glance. The sergeant shook his head. No, that wasn’t quite true. The two iron rails seemed uncommonly far apart. The Russians used a wider gauge than most of the rest of the world. Fujita had heard that was to keep invaders from the west from putting their rolling stock onto Russian tracks. He didn’t know—or much care—whether that was true, but it seemed reasonable to him.

  But watching Japanese engineers tear these tracks out of the ground and throw them into a roaring fire to bend the lengths of rail beyond repair was something else again. Wrecking the Trans-Siberian Railroad meant victory. No more trains would get through to Vladivostok. And, once the Soviet city on the Pacific was cut off and taken, the rest of the Russian Far East would drop into Japan’s hands like a sweet, ripe persimmon.

  The Russians understood that as well as the Japanese did. They’d fought like demons to keep the Kwantung Army from coming this far. Two engineers picked up a Russian corpse that lay on the tracks, one by the feet, the other by the arms. They tossed the body a couple of meters off to one side. The thump it made when it hit the dirt again sounded dreadfully final.

  Fujita walked over to it. Russian boots were very fine—far more supple than Japanese issue. If this luckless fellow was anywhere close to his size … But the dead man wasn’t. He was twenty centimeters taller than Fujita and twenty-five kilos heavier, and had feet to match his size. Large for a Russian, he would have made an enormous Japanese.

  “Shigata ga nai,” Fujita muttered—nothing to be done about it. But it wasn’t as if this fellow were the only dead Russian close by. Oh, no. Fujita and his countrymen had
plenty of corpses to strip.

  And there were plenty of Japanese corpses to dispose of, too. The dead soldiers’ souls would go to Yasukuni Shrine, where Japan would honor them for all eternity. That was a great deal … but somehow it didn’t seem quite enough to Fujita right this minute. Maybe that was simple relief at coming through another fight unhurt. He hoped so. He wanted to give his fallen comrades all the respect they deserved.

  But he didn’t want to join them in death. And the Russians, even though pushed away from their precious railroad, hadn’t given up. Artillery from back in the woods to the northeast started screaming in. Fujita stopped worrying about anyone else’s boots and started worrying about getting blasted out of his. He jumped into the closest foxhole. A dead Russian already lay in there, crumpled like a broken doll. He rolled himself into a ball and hoped the shelling would let up soon.

  It did, but then two or three Polikarpov biplane fighters strafed the Japanese at not much more than treetop height. They looked old-fashioned alongside the Japanese planes that fought them in the air, but they got the job done. One of the engineers who’d chucked the body off the tracks reeled away, clutching at his chest. He slumped to the muddy ground. Fujita feared he wouldn’t get up again.

  Japanese fighters showed up ten minutes after the Russians had zoomed away. Fujita watched them buzz around like angry bees looking for someone to sting. When they didn’t find anybody, they flew away. “Bastards,” he said. What were they good for if they came to the party late?

  Sooner or later, the Reds would run out of gas for their planes and shells for their guns. That was the whole point to cutting the railroad. Sooner or later, yes, but not yet, dammit. Not yet.

  Then Japanese bombers droned past, flying much higher than the fighters had. Fujita cocked his head, listening to the distant thunder of explosions from their bombs. Yes, those came from the general direction from which the Russian guns had been firing. Japanese flyers would presently claim they’d silenced those guns … till the artillery opened up again. Fujita was willing to admit the bomber pilots did try. He wasn’t willing to admit anything more than that.

  He needed to get rid of the dead Russian keeping company with him. The poor devil was just starting to stink, but that problem would get worse in a hurry. Grunting with effort, Fujita wrestled the body out of the hole.

  He was about to drag it downwind when he noticed the dead man’s boots. Damned if they weren’t about his size. He wrestled one off the corpse and tried it on. It fit better than the boots his own country’s quartermasters had given him. And the leather really was glove-flexible. He stripped off the Russian’s other boot and put that on, too. As he walked around in the new pair, a broad smile spread across his face. He could kiss blisters good-bye!

  The dead man didn’t complain. He wasn’t even wearing socks—just strips of cloth wrapped around his feet like puttees. Fujita had seen other Russians who did the same thing. They were welcome to the style, as far as he was concerned. His socks—tabis—were like mittens, with a separate space for his big toe on each foot. When the weather got warm, he could wear sandals with them. He wondered if the weather in Siberia ever got that warm. He wouldn’t bet on it.

  It was warm enough for mosquitoes right now. Siberian mosquitoes were numerous, savage, and large. A Japanese joke said one of them had landed at an airstrip, and groundcrew men pumped a hundred liters of gasoline into it before they realized what it was. Fujita thought it was a joke.

  You didn’t notice the bites when they happened. If you didn’t feel the mosquito walking on your skin, or see it there, the damn thing would fly away happy. You’d feel it later, though—you’d itch for a week. Scratching only made things worse, too.

  Back of the line, Japanese soldiers lit candles of camphor or citronella. You couldn’t do it at the front. The scent, wafting on the wind, told the Russians where you were. They were like animals; they’d take clues a civilized man, a Japanese man, wouldn’t even notice, and they’d use them to kill you.

  An officer’s whistle squealed like an angry shoat. “Advance!” Lieutenant Hanafusa shouted. “We have to push their guns away from the railroad line!”

  Right now? Fujita wondered. A sergeant couldn’t ask something like that out loud, not unless he wanted to get busted back to private—or, more likely, shot for cowardice. You’d disgrace your whole family if you did. Your father wouldn’t be able to hold his head up at work. Your mother couldn’t show her face at the vegetable market any more. Your little sister would never find a husband—or, maybe worse, she’d marry a latrine cleaner.

  All that went through Fujita’s head in less than a heartbeat. And so, instead of asking questions, he scrambled out of his hole, shouted, “My squad—advance!” and ran forward, clutching his rifle in hands whose palms were wet with fear-sweat.

  Into the woods on the far side of the tracks. He wasn’t alone. His squad—and the rest of the company—went in there with him. That made things a little easier. He didn’t know whether misery loved company, but it needed company.

  Were there Russians in the woods? Of course there were. There always were. Their damned machine guns started yammering right away. Cleverly hidden soldiers would let you run past, then shoot you in the back. They died after that, of course, but they didn’t seem to care. They were so indifferent to death, Fujita wondered if they were human.

  He got a flash of something moving, bounding away from the racket of combat as fast as it could. He started to bring his Arisaka up to his shoulder, then checked the motion, his jaw dropping in awe. “Damned if there aren’t,” he said softly.

  “Aren’t what, Sergeant?” asked a soldier at his elbow.

  His cheeks heated; he hadn’t meant to be overheard. “Tora,” he answered. “That was a tiger over there.” He pointed. “I’ve seen a tiger, a live tiger.”

  “You should have killed it,” the other soldier said. “That’d be a hell of a souvenir. A tiger’s skin? I hope so! I wish I’d seen it.” He sounded jealous and wistful.

  But Fujita shook his head. “It was too beautiful. I couldn’t.” He’d seen too much of war, here and in Mongolia. War was ugly, the ugliest thing there was. And war, he was certain, had nothing to do with tigers.

  “HELLO, PEGGY! How are you?” The receptionist at the U.S. embassy in Berlin greeted Peggy Druce with an all-American smile and a harsh Midwestern accent that would have set her teeth on edge back in the States but sounded heavenly here at the heart of the Third Reich.

  “Hello, Lucinda. How’s your daughter these days?” Peggy had been stuck in Berlin so long, she was on a first-name basis with everybody at the embassy and knew everybody’s problems.

  Lucinda’s smile got wider. “She’s much better, thanks. Those new pills, those waddayacallems, sulfas, fixed her up like magic—I just got a letter from her. And her husband finally has a job. He’s riveting in an airplane factory that opened up a coupla miles from where they live.”

  “That does sound good,” Peggy said. An airplane factory opening up in Omaha?—she thought it was Omaha. That sounded strange. Maybe FDR had decided the United States did need to be ready for trouble, just in case. Maybe he’d persuaded Congress that that might be a pretty decent idea. Having met war face-to-face, Peggy thought you had to be a jackass not to see it was a good idea. But when you were talking about Congressmen …

  Lucinda continued, “And Mr. Jenkins is waiting for you. Go right on upstairs to his office.” She chuckled. “Maybe you won’t come around here all the time in a while. Maybe you’ll be on your way home.”

  “Home.” It sounded like a dream to Peggy—a receding dream, one she couldn’t remember so well as she wished she could. She headed for the stairs, trying to drum up optimism inside herself, to believe she wasn’t just going through the motions one more time. It wasn’t easy. Nothing had been easy since German shells started falling on Marianske Lazne.

  CONSTANTINE JENKINS—UNDERSECRETARY: gold-filled Roman-looking letters on a black namep
late on a door. At the moment, it was a closed door. Peggy fumed. It shouldn’t have been. She was right on time, and Lucinda had said the undersecretary was ready. Peggy’d always been one to grab the bull by the horns. She knocked briskly.

  The door opened. Constantine Jenkins looked out at her: mid-thirties, tall, thin, pale, almost handsome “Oh, yes,” he said, his voice low and well-mannered. If he wasn’t a queer, Peggy’d never seen one. “Give me five minutes, please. Something’s come up.”

  Those five minutes stretched to fifteen. Peggy was ready to snarl, maybe to bite. Then the door opened again. Out came a short, trim, graying man with four gold stripes on the sleeves of his uniform. The naval attaché gave her a brusque nod and a murmured “Sorry about that,” then hurried down the corridor.

  “Come on in,” Jenkins said.

  Still a little irked—maybe more than a little—Peggy went on in. “What was that all about?” she snapped.

  “Business I had to take care of,” he answered, which told her exactly nothing. He held out a package of Chesterfields—they came from the States through Sweden and Switzerland, in diplomatic pouches. “Cigarette?”

  “Oh, God, yes!” If anything could fix Peggy’s mood in a hurry, real tobacco could. What you were able to buy in Germany got lousier by the day. She let him light the coffin nail for her—he had exquisite manners. Smooth, flavorful smoke filled her lungs. “Wow!” she said. “You put up with Junos for a while, you forget what the real stuff is like. And Junos are pretty good, at least next to the other German brands.”

  “So I’ve heard,” he said coolly. With those diplomatic pouches, he didn’t have to pollute his lungs with German tobacco, or whatever it was. After he got a Chesterfield of his own going, he asked, “What can I do for you today?”