The War That Came Early: Coup d'Etat Read online

  And they did, the first Ju-87 kicking up dust from the unpaved strip and climbing into the air right on time. Hans-Ulrich pushed back his leather flying glove and the sleeve to his fur-lined flight suit to check his watch and make sure. “Ready, Albert?” he called through the speaking tube.

  “Not me,” Sergeant Dieselhorst answered. “I’m still soaking in the bathtub, and after I get out I’ll go pick flowers so I keep on smelling nice and sweet.”

  Hans-Ulrich snorted. Dieselhorst did deadpan even better than Colonel Steinbrenner. When his Stuka’s turn came, he goosed the throttle. The Ju-87 rattled down the runway, then sedately got airborne. The weight and drag from the underwing gun pods made the ungainly plane even more so.

  “Studenets,” Rudel repeated to the rear gunner, as if they hadn’t gone over it before takeoff.

  “Gesundheit,” Dieselhorst said, so it was going to be one of those missions.

  Messerschmitt Bf-109s clustered around the Stukas. The 109s had plenty of other things to do; dive bombers got escorts only when the Luftwaffe feared the Red Air Force had fighters of its own in the neighborhood. And the Reds did: blunt-nosed, stumpy Polikarpov Po-16 monoplanes. They were a long step slower than the Messerschmitts, but they could have made mincemeat out of the lumbering Ju-87s had the bombers had no friends. As things were, one of them tumbled to the ground, trailing smoke. Two more made halfhearted runs at the Stukas and then peeled off. The rest decided to go somewhere else, to some place where misfortunes like 109s never happened.

  After that, the Stukas worked over the Ivans’ positions in front of Studenets with only ground fire to worry about. That wasn’t negligible, however much Hans-Ulrich wished it were. One Ju-87 took a direct hit from a flak shell and never pulled out of its dive, exploding in a fireball when it hit the ground. You had to ignore such things and do your job.

  Rudel did. He shot up four panzers. A couple of rounds of small-arms fire clanged into the plane, but none of the instruments showed any damage. The panzers were all ordinary Soviet models. He didn’t see any of the KV-1 mastodons that made German panzer men break out in a cold sweat. What you didn’t find, you couldn’t kill.

  Which, given Russian camouflage methods, might or might not mean something. But he’d done what he could. Having done it, he flew off to the west again. Studenets looked as if it would fall soon.

  SULLENLY, THE RED ARMY pulled out of Studenets. The Wehrmacht moved into the town from straight out of the west, the French expeditionary force from the southwest. Luc Harcourt saw a couple of men in khaki uniforms trotting away in the distance. He raised his rifle to his shoulder and fired at them. One of the men ran faster. The other, a smarter fellow, dove behind a battered wall and thus out of sight.

  He wished he still commanded a machine-gun team, as he had when he was still a corporal. But that was beneath a sergeant’s dignity. Dignity or no, a burst from the Hotchkiss and those Ivans wouldn’t have got away.

  If they were Ivans. The range had been long. He might have seen Feldgrau through the sights, not faded Soviet khaki. He wasn’t the only French soldier who thought of the same thing at the same time. With a sly chuckle, one of his men said, “Wouldn’t it have been a shame if those cochons were really Boches instead of Russians?”

  “Oh, but of course, Jacques. That would have been a real pity.” Luc could only have sounded more sardonic had he been Lieutenant Demange. Demange was somewhere not far away; Luc could hear him swearing at somebody in the company.

  Jacques laughed out loud. “A pity you didn’t hit ’em, you mean?”

  “I didn’t say that. You did.” Now Luc did his best to seem severe, though Jacques was right—scragging a couple of Fritzes “by accident” wouldn’t have broken his heart. But he also had his reasons for sounding the way he did: “And watch what falls out of your big, fat gob, all right? The Germans are in town, too, remember, and more of those cocksuckers know French than you’d figure.”

  “I’m not afraid of them.” Jacques was all nineteen-year-old bluster.

  “Then you’re an even bigger con than I give you credit for, and that’s saying something. I sure am,” Luc answered. Jacques’ eyes widened. Luc didn’t care. He’d been through enough to admit fear without fearing to seem a coward. And it wasn’t as if he were lying. Anybody who didn’t fear Germans with weapons in their hands hadn’t seen enough to know which end was up.

  The Boches were in town, too. Like the French, they were cleaning out the last few Red Army holdouts. Mausers banged off to the north. Their reports sounded harsher than those of French MAS-36s. Luc thought so, anyhow. There definitely was a difference, whether it lay in harshness or what.

  And then an MG-34 opened up. That fierce snarl still gave him the willies, even if his country and the Nazis had the same enemy nowadays. The German machine gun fired so much faster than a Hotchkiss—and faster than anything the English or the Russians made—that you couldn’t possibly mistake its malignant roar for anything else. The noise went hand in hand with agony and maiming and limb-sprawled death.

  Jacques was a new conscript. He’d never had to glue himself to the ground like a slug while MG-34 bullets kicked up dry leaves and slammed into tree trunks and spanged off stones, all the while trying to let the air out of his precious, irreplaceable self. He didn’t get how very deadly that German toy was. You dumb, lucky fuck, Luc thought scornfully.

  As the firing around here eased off, Russian civilians started coming up from their cellars and showing themselves. A plump, apple-cheeked babushka in a head scarf smiled, showing a mouthful of startling gold teeth. “Amis!” she said, which startled Luc again. He didn’t care about making friends with her. Her granddaughter, now, if she had one …

  Not all the people emerging from cellars and from under the bed and from wherever the hell else in Studenets were Russians. Some were Jews, the men dark and bearded and hook-nosed in long black coats, the women just as swarthy in scarves of their own and in even longer black dresses.

  The Russians looked relieved to be alive. The Jews looked relieved to be alive and even more relieved to be in a part of town the French had overrun. Like the babushka, they said, “Amis!” And they said “Kameraden!” and much else in Yiddish and in more standard German. Luc understood little of that, but some of the French soldiers here would follow more. As he’d told Luc, many Germans could parler français—and probably just as many Frenchmen could Deutsch sprechen.

  An old Jew with a beard down to the second button of his shirtfront handed Luc a bottle that sloshed. “Here. You take. You like,” he said in broken French. “Me, I have nephew in Paris. He drive taxi.” He mimed steering motions.

  Luc did take the bottle. He did like it, too. He’d expected vodka, potent but next to flavorless. But no. He got plum brandy, fiery and sweet at the same time. He gave Jacques a quick nip, then went looking for Demange. The lieutenant would make him sorry if he didn’t share a prize like this.

  Lieutenant Demange had men going through a warren of little shops for holdouts. They seemed to be flushing out nothing but unarmed Jews. Demange cradled a Soviet PPD submachine gun. It was ugly, but good for killing lots of people in a hurry—quite a bit like the veteran himself. The inevitable Gitane in the corner of his mouth twitched when he saw Luc’s offering. “What have you got there?”

  “Jew with a white beard gave it to me.” Luc held out the bottle.

  Demange took it and drank. A slow smile spread across his skinny, ratlike face. “Heyyy! That’s the straight shit, all right. Let’s hear it for the kike.”

  “Yeah. Let’s hear it,” Luc said, not quite comfortably. He thought there were a couple of Jews among the men Demange commanded. But Demange wasn’t an anti-Semite, or not particularly. The race he despised was the human race.

  He passed the bottle back to Luc, who killed it and tossed it in the rubble. Two stiff knocks of brandy didn’t get him drunk. They did mean he eyed the wreckage that was Studenets with a slightly less jaundiced eye.

>   Demange pointed toward where the center of town ought to be. “Bring a few guys with you. We’d better make contact with the Nazis. Long as everything stays nice and official, the chance for some dumb fucking accident goes down.”

  “Happy day,” Luc said, his enthusiasm distinctly tempered. It wasn’t that Demange was wrong, because he wasn’t. But Luc wanted to pretend France was at war with the Russians, and there weren’t any Germans around for hundreds of kilometers. They’d come closer to killing him than the Ivans ever had, and he’d sure done for his share of them … Muttering, he shambled off to obey.

  He muttered even more when he saw that the Germans in the town square didn’t belong to the Wehrmacht. They came from the Waffen-SS: they wore the SS runes on the right side of their helmets and on the right collar patch of each man’s tunic. They looked like tough assholes; the few times he’d faced Wafen-SS troops, they’d fought like tough assholes, too. He still would rather have shot at them than at the Ivans.

  A few more SS men herded some Jews into the square. One of the Jews might have been brother to the guy who’d given Luc plum brandy. Laughing, an SS sergeant drew his Luger and raised it to the back of the Jew’s head.

  Maybe he just meant to scare the graybeard. Maybe. Luc didn’t wait to find out. He had his rifle pointed at the SS noncom’s belly button in nothing flat. “Halt!” he yelled. He didn’t speak much German, but he had that one down solid.

  Slowly, his mouth dropping open in disbelief, the SS man lowered the pistol. An SS officer spoke in badly accented French: “But this foolishness is. We are allies, n’est-ce pas? And these are only Jews.”

  Other SS men looked as ready to fight their “allies” as Luc was to plug that sergeant. Lieutenant Demange dove behind some shattered masonry. He shouted in German probably as lousy as the SS officer’s French. Then he translated for Luc: “I told ’em I’d give ’em the whole fucking drum of ammo if they didn’t leave the damn Hebes alone.”

  The Waffen-SS officer quivered with outrage. “Tell me your name,” he snarled at Demange. “I shall to your superiors report you.”

  “Fuck off and die,” the lieutenant replied auf Deutsch, not breaking cover. Luc got that fine. Demange said something else in German, then repeated it in French: “You want to report us for stopping a murder, you’ll be at war with every Frenchman in Russia by this time tomorrow.”

  Luc nodded. So did the poilus he’d brought along. The SS man swore in his own language, but he let the Jews go. And nobody reported the confrontation to anybody’s superiors.

  Chapter 9

  The major standing by Alistair Walsh murmured to himself: “ ‘If it were done when ’tis done, then ’twere well it were done quickly.’ ”

  “What’s that, sir?” Walsh kept looking across the street toward what had to be England’s most famous address.

  “That”—the major’s handsome face set in disapproving lines at Walsh’s ignorance, and very likely at his accent, too—“that is Shakespeare. Macbeth, to be precise.” He was the sort who’d set great stock in precision. Yes, the Army needed that kind of man … which didn’t mean the bloke would have a great pack of friends.

  “We ought to move a bit, not let ourselves be seen staring at the place,” Walsh said. He didn’t think he himself was important in the grand scheme of things: not in the other side’s calculations, at any rate. He didn’t know what kind of reports they had about the major. He didn’t even know the man’s name. What you didn’t know, you couldn’t tell, no matter how clever—or cruel—the questioner.

  Absently, the major nodded. “Quite,” he said, and started mooching down the street. Sighing, Walsh went along. The major was bound to be very good at … well, at whatever he was good at. Whatever that might be, it wasn’t acting. He might have drawn more notice with a battery-powered signboard featuring flashing electric lamps. On the other hand, he also might not have.

  Walsh didn’t notice anything out of the ordinary about the guards in front of the famous address. Of course, if the other side was on the job, he wouldn’t. But if the other side were on the job, he wouldn’t have been strolling along with the officer.

  He did some murmuring of his own: “Gunpowder.”

  “Oh, we’ve got better toys than that these days,” the major said.

  “I meant the Gunpowder Plot, sir. Guy Fawkes’ Day.”

  “Well, don’t equivocate, then,” the major snapped. “Say what you mean.”

  “Yes, sir,” Walsh replied with dour precision. Since he was nominally a civilian, he couldn’t salute, even sarcastically, but he had to remind his twitchy arm of that. “What I mean, sir, is that if we bugger this up little tykes a hundred years from now will take lessons about the Second World War Traitors and get browned off because they’ve got to memorize our names.”

  “Little tykes a hundred years from now will take lessons about the Second World War Traitors regardless.” The major spoke with gloomy certainty. “The only question left is which list of names they’ll have to memorize.”

  Walsh grunted. That was much too likely to be true. A nice-looking blonde came up the street past him. Of itself, his head swiveled so he could check her hip action, too. The little things in life went on no matter how grandiose the big things were. A blackbird on a rooftop opened its yellow beak and poured out springtime song. It hopped into the air and flew off, right over Walsh and the major.

  The officer ducked away. Walsh eyed him sympathetically. He must have had a rugged war if a thrush could remind him of a grenade or a shell fragment. The ribbon for the Military Medal on his chest did nothing to argue against that. But then the major said, “Ought to be a bounty on those bloody things. Did you ever try to clean bird shit off your cap visor?”

  “Er—no.” Walsh’s sympathy evaporated.

  “Stinking nuisance,” the major said, before returning to the business at hand: “I’m told you know something of this business. What do you think of our chances for success?”

  Do I know something of this business? Walsh wondered. He’d planned and led attacks on strongpoints in urban settings—no doubt of that. It made him more of an expert than most people, even probably more of an expert than most soldiers. He pursed his lips, weighing what he’d seen. “So long as we do keep the advantage of surprise, chances look tolerably good to me. If they’re waiting for us when we make the attempt …”

  “We’re ruined for fair, then,” the major finished for him, which wasn’t how Walsh would have gone on. Again, though, that didn’t make him wrong.

  A boy on a street corner was waving the Times of London and bawling out the latest war headlines. The British Expeditionary Force and the rest of the Nazis’ allies were advancing deeper into Russia. In Malaya and Burma, the Japanese kept pushing imperial troops back. Even Singapore, said to be the strongest fortress in the world, might come under attack soon.

  “Strange business,” the major said, walking past without buying a paper.

  “How’s that, sir?”

  “Well, the bleeding Japs are supposed to be Hitler’s chums. But we’re supposed to be Hitler’s chums, too, and we’re at war with Japan. And the Russians are Hitler’s deadly enemies, but they’ve already had their war with Japan, so they’re neutral now. And the USA and Japan are fighting, but Russian ships can cross the Pacific free as so many fish, load up on guns in American ports, and haul all that stuff back to Russia to fire it off against the Nazis—and us.”

  When you thought of it like that, it was enough to make your head swim. Walsh found one problem: “How many ships in the Pacific have the Russians got left now that Vladivostok’s fallen?”

  “They have some yet. And there’s a road connection—not a good one, but it’s there—between Magadan and what the Russians still hold of the Trans-Siberian Railway. No, the real question is, how much can they bring in whilst the harbor at Magadan’s not iced up?”

  Walsh had never heard of Magadan. He had no idea where in Siberia it lay, or, for that matter, whe
ther the major was simply inventing it to bolster his argument. The officer ducked into a pub. Walsh followed. A pint of bitter made him stop caring whether Magadan was real.

  Beer, steak-and-kidney pie, more beer … A French estaminet couldn’t hold a candle to a proper pub. Two wars’ worth of experience on the other side of the Channel and years of diligent experimenting in his own country left Walsh as sure of that as made no difference. The major wasn’t the best drinking companion he’d ever had, but also wasn’t the worst.

  It was dark by the time Walsh went back to his little furnished room. London’s lights were on again. With Germany friendly, the need for a blackout disappeared. Sometimes conveniences came at too high a price. Walsh thought so, anyhow. The Prime Minister would have disagreed. Walsh reckoned disagreeing with Sir Horace Wilson sure to put him in the right.

  Because of the beer he’d taken on board, the knock at the door took longer to rouse him than it might have. He lurched off the bed—which doubled as a sofa in daylight hours—ready to give whoever was out there a piece of his mind. But the two somber men in trenchcoats hadn’t the slightest interest in listening to him.

  “You’re Alistair Walsh—is that right?” one of them said.

  “What if I am?” Walsh answered indignantly. “Who wants to know?”

  Both men produced Scotland Yard identity cards. “You’re under arrest,” said the one who did the talking. “Come along with us—quietly, if you please.”

  Ice and fire chased each other along Walsh’s spine. “The devil I will,” he blustered. “Show me your warrant.”