The Big Switch twtce-3 Read online

  “He talked about abandoned property,” Mother added. “What do they give the Jews? One suitcase apiece?”

  “Or maybe just the clothes on their backs,” Father said.

  “How many Jews in Czechoslovakia?” Sarah asked.

  Her mother and father looked at each other. She shrugged. He spread his hands. “Not as many as there are in Poland-that’s all I can tell you for sure,” he said. “The ones there are lucky their government is on the Nazis’ side, or they’d get the same or worse.”

  “Some luck,” Sarah said.

  “It is,” Father insisted. “Poland has millions of Jews-I know that. I’ve never had much use for Ostjuden. Sometimes they seem almost as backward and barbarous to me as they do to Hitler. They’d sooner pray than think, if you know what I mean. But when push comes to shove, they’re my people. The Nazis have said so all along, and they’ve finally convinced me they’re right.”

  “What can we do to help the Czech Jews?” Sarah asked.

  Her father spread his hands again. “Nothing I can think of, not unless you want the SS visiting us again. We can hope the Germans don’t decide to throw us into ghettos, too.” He hesitated. When he spoke again, he sounded surprised at himself: “We can pray they don’t decide to do that. I always thought the Ostjuden prayed too much. Could it be we don’t pray enough?” Hearing that from such a secular man as Father told Sarah more clearly than anything else how much the times had changed. s a Welshman, Alistair Walsh did not have a high opinion of eastern Scotland. The terrain was low and flat and full of Scots. Dundee couldn’t have been duller if it rehearsed. Walsh said so in several pubs. He couldn’t even get into a good fight. Too many of the other soldiers stranded in those parts agreed with him.

  But, all things considered, he could have been worse off. The Germans might have sunk the ship that plucked him out of Namsos. He might not have got out, in which case he would be languishing inside barbed wire in a POW camp. Yes, there were all kinds of interesting and unpleasant possibilities.

  And he was on leave, while the great military bureaucracy tried to figure out what to do with him and his fellow survivors. He tried to pick up barmaids. The Scots girls were pretty, but they seemed depressingly chaste. He hired a bicycle and rode out into the countryside. Going someplace where no one was trying to kill you or even give you orders had its points.

  The only thing better than traveling in a place like this by himself would have been traveling in the company of a friendly young lady. Since he wasn’t having much luck on that score, he went alone. Soldiers he saw too often anyhow. Getting away from them was more fun than going out with them would have been.

  He’d had almost two decades of peacetime service between the wars. A year and a half of the genuine article was enough-no, far more than enough-to make all that seem to belong to another, and very distant, lifetime. The hired bicycle creaked and squeaked under him. He didn’t care. All he heard except for the bike were the wind, an occasional crow’s caw, and the even more occasional rattle of a passing auto. Not many motorcars were on the roads, not with petrol so savagely rationed.

  His ears drank in the quiet. You didn’t realize how badly war abused them till you got away from the racket of gunfire and explosions for a while. He suspected he’d be deaf as a stump when he got older. The prospect bothered him less than it might have. The way things were going, living long enough to grow old and deaf didn’t seem half bad.

  A farmer out in the middle of an emerald field of new-sprouted barley waved to Walsh as he pedaled past. Cautiously-he hadn’t been on a bicycle in a while, and the road was bumpy-the sergeant lifted a hand from the handlebars and waved back.

  He rode on. Another farmer came up the road perched on a wagon pulled by two mismatched horses. Did he have a motorcar he couldn’t drive because he couldn’t get fuel for it? Walsh wouldn’t have been surprised. You made do with what you had. He’d seen as much on the Continent. He wasn’t surprised to see it in Britain, too. This time, he waved first. The farmer gravely returned the courtesy.

  When Walsh first heard the buzz of airplane engines, he thought his ears were ringing because they weren’t used to so much silence all around. Before long, though, he decided the sound was real. Then, for a few seconds, he believed it was coming from an RAF plane. But that wasn’t right, either. The engines sounded a different note, one that made the short hair at the nape of his neck prickle up.

  “Bugger me blind if that’s not a German,” he muttered as he pulled to a stop on the grass at the edge of the road. He peered up at the sky, shielding his eyes against the sun. “What the bleeding hell is Fritz doing here?”

  A bombing raid on Dundee from Norway? A daylight bombing raid? Was Fritz that stupid? Walsh didn’t think so. And the noise in the sky didn’t sound like squadron after squadron of bombers. One plane was up there, no more. Walsh’s ears had been abused, but he was sure of that.

  Then he spotted it. He recognized it right away. German planes mostly had sharper angles than their RAF counterparts. This one was… “A 110!” Walsh had no doubt. He’d been strafed several times by the two-engined fighters roaring along at just above treetop height. This Bf-110 flew quite a bit higher, but its shape was unmistakable.

  He scratched his head. He wasn’t lousy any more-that was something. But why on earth would a lone 110 fly over Scotland? Had some Nazi pilot poured down too much schnapps and taken off on a bet, or full of drunken bravado? That was madness, but so was everything else Walsh could think of.

  Then the madness got even crazier. A parachute popped open. Whoever’d been flying that plane was coming to earth apart from it. Why, in the name of heaven? Walsh didn’t think anything was wrong with the airplane. Even after the fellow inside bailed out, the 110 flew on as if nothing had happened. The engine note never changed. It hadn’t changed before the flyer hit the silk, either.

  Walsh got a crick in his neck. The descending ’chute was almost overhead. Walsh started to duck, imagining himself getting clopped by the German’s boots. But the breeze carried the fellow a few hundred yards into the field through which the road ran.

  Walsh trotted toward him. He’d closed about half the gap before he wondered how smart he was. German pilots commonly carried pistols, while he was unarmed. But he was in his own country, for Christ’s sake. The German would have to be daft to plug him. Of course, the German had to be daft to come here like this in the first place, so what did that prove?

  “Hands up!” Walsh yelled. “Hande hoch!” He spoke little German, but most British soldiers learned that one.

  The flyer had a knife. He used it to cut himself free of the parachute shrouds. The canopy tumbled off across the field. The man slowly got to his feet. He favored one ankle a little. Walsh shouted at him again. With a smile, he let the knife drop to the ground and raised his hands. He was in his mid-forties-very old for a pilot-with bushy black eyebrows and a chin that stuck out. He looked oddly familiar.

  “Do not fear me,” he said in good English. “I come in peace.”

  “In a Messerschmitt-110? Sure you do, mate,” Walsh retorted.

  “I am Rudolf Hess,” the man said.

  And damned if he wasn’t. No wonder he looked familiar. In how many photographs had Walsh seen him at Hitler’s elbow? Half the time, his hand would be upraised in the stupid Nazi salute. To save his hide, Walsh couldn’t remember exactly what Hess’ title was. He was one of the biggest of the Party big shots, though. So what the bleeding hell was he doing in the middle of a Scottish field, still wearing a parachute harness? Walsh asked him, in lieu of standing there with his mouth hanging open like a stupid clot.

  “I am come to confer with your government,” Hess answered, as if it were the most obvious thing in the world. Maybe he saw that Walsh wondered whether he was out of his skull, because he added, “Unofficially, of course.”

  “Oh, of course,” Walsh said. “Confer about what?”

  He guessed Hess would tell him it was none of his da
mned business. But Hess didn’t. “Why, about ways to end this unfortunate war between Germany and England and France, naturlich. ”

  “Naturlich,” Walsh echoed in a hollow voice. “You could start by telling your soldiers to quit trying to kill me.”

  “This I wish to do. We waste our time fighting one another,” Hess said seriously. “Better we should all fight the Russians together. So I feel. So feels the Fuhrer also.”

  All of a sudden, Walsh stopped wondering if Hess was a nutter. The staff sergeant had no idea whether Neville Chamberlain’s government would make a deal like that, or whether France would go along if it did. But the government might. It might. The breeze felt chillier-or did the cold come from inside him? He had to force words out one by one: “I’d better take you back into Dundee.”

  “ Danke schon. This would be good,” Hess said.

  Back they went. It was several miles. They took turns walking and riding slowly on the bicycle. Hess spewed out a million reasons why England and France should turn on the Bolsheviks. At last, Walsh got sick of listening. He said, “Look, pal, I’m only a bloody sergeant. I can’t do anything about it one way or the other.” The German subsided into wounded silence.

  When they got into Dundee, Walsh had a devil of a time convincing his superiors that Rudolf Hess was Rudolf Hess. They were even more certain than he had been that Hess wasn’t about to arrive in Scotland by jumping out of a Bf-110. Then they did believe him, and that might have been worse, because they started having kittens right before his eyes. They whisked Hess away in a swarm of military policemen.

  “You will forget about this,” a captain barked at Walsh. “It never happened. You have no knowledge of it. Do you understand me?”

  “Yes, sir.” Walsh judged that was the only possible answer that would keep him out of a military jail. The bloke who said a little knowledge was a dangerous thing knew what he was talking about. To show he understood what the captain meant, Walsh added, “I won’t tell a soul.”

  “You’d better not.” The captain sent Walsh a hard look, as if wondering whether to jug him like a hare on general principles. Walsh tried to exude innocence: not easy for a man of his age and experience. After a long, long pause, the captain jerked a thumb toward the door. “Get out.” Walsh had never been so happy to obey an order in his life.

  Julius Lemp was used to getting strange orders from his superiors, and even to attracting them. He was still paying for sinking the Athenia. Chances were he’d go on paying for the rest of his career, unless he did something wonderful enough to cancel out the screwup. Offhand, he couldn’t think what that might be. Finding Jesus walking barefoot across the swells of the North Sea might do it. Anything short of that, no.

  When you were in the U-boat business, strange orders were liable to get you killed. (So were ordinary orders; it was that kind of trade. But with strange orders your odds were worse.) If that bothered his superiors in the Kriegsmarine, they went out of their way not to show it.

  And so the U-30 cruised slowly through the chop off the east coast of Scotland. Not very far off the Scottish coast, either: land was clearly visible to the west. One of the ratings on the conning tower with Lemp said, “If they’ve got a 105 on the beach, they can hit us with it. We can hit ’em back with the 88 on deck, too.”

  “I know,” Lemp replied. “But even if they do have a 105 there, chances are they won’t shoot with it. They’re bound to think we’re one of their own U-boats, not a German machine. No German boat would be mad enough to show itself so close to their coast.”

  “Sure, skipper,” the rating said, as if humoring a lunatic. “So what the hell are we doing here?”

  “We are carrying out our orders,” Lemp said, which was literally true. “We are searching for any signs of wreckage or survivors from a Messerschmitt-110 that may or may not have gone into the North Sea in these waters.”

  “Sure,” the rating said again. “But why?”

  “Martin, you never ask that question,” Lemp answered patiently. “Because they told us to, that’s why.”

  Martin only sniffed. The hell of it was, Lemp had a hard time blaming him. He wondered why they were looking for bits and pieces of a Bf-110, too. However much he wondered, he didn’t know. The hard-faced captain back in Kiel hadn’t looked the sort who was much inclined to answer questions. In fact, he’d looked the sort who would bite your head off if you had the nerve to ask any. Sometimes the best thing you could do was salute, go “Zu befehl!”, and get the hell out of there. Lemp had judged that to be one of those times.

  Had he been wrong? If the Royal Navy or the RAF decided the U-30 wasn’t an English U-boat, the enemy owned all the advantages here. Cruising along in broad daylight was all very well. Audace, audace, toujours l’audace, the French said. Well, yes, but when the fellows on the other team trumped all that audacity with depth charges…

  He scanned the gray-green sea. This close to the coast, all sorts of rubbish floated in it. He hadn’t seen anything from a German fighter plane, though. He wondered if some important officer’s son had been flying the 110. That might account for a search like this. He couldn’t think of much else that would.

  One of the things floating in the North Sea was a basket of the kind and size that might have held a baby. Martin said, “Sir, with all this shit around, how are we supposed to recognize stuff from a 110 even if we do come across it?”

  “We’ve got to do the best we can,” Lemp answered, by which he meant he didn’t have the faintest idea.

  Martin, unfortunately, understood him much too well. “Right,” the rating said, and scratched the side of his jaw. Gingery stubble sprouted there. Lemp didn’t shave when he was at sea, either. Like a lot of U-boat men, from the lowliest “lords”-ordinary seamen-to skippers, he trimmed his whiskers when he got back into port.

  “What do they do when we send them the message that we can’t find what they’re looking for?” another rating asked.

  “We don’t send it.” Now Lemp’s voice grew sharp. “We’re ordered to maintain radio silence throughout this cruise. I will make the report orally when we return to Kiel. Have you got that?”

  “Yes, skipper. Sorry,” the rating said. Lemp didn’t usually come down hard on his men, but he had to be sure no one fouled up here. Somebody’s head would roll if the U-30 broke radio silence. He knew whose, too: his.

  Like the rest of the men on the U-boat, he wished he knew what was going on. He didn’t like getting sent out on wild-goose chases. He especially didn’t like it when he had to wear a blindfold while hunting his wild geese.

  All of which had nothing to do with anything. They’d given him his orders. He was following them. If he found no wreckage-or even if he did-he was to return to Kiel after four days of searching. It made no sense, not to him or to the men he commanded. Maybe that was because the officers set over them knew more about what was going on than they did. Or maybe the geese had got uncommonly wild lately.

  The U-boat performed the ordered search. It found nothing from a Bf-110. For that matter, it found nothing from any airplane. Lemp wasn’t sorry to order the boat away from the Scottish coast. He counted himself lucky not to have been spotted. The Royal Navy must not have believed the Kriegsmarine would give any of its boats such an idiotic assignment. Well, he wouldn’t have believed it himself if he hadn’t got stuck with it.

  No English planes happened on the U-30 as it hurried back across the North Sea. The farther Lemp put the British Isles behind him, the happier he grew. He was downright delighted when the boat got back to Kiel. But his pleasure chilled when armed guards on the pier kept anyone but him from going ashore. “We have our orders,” said the chief petty officer in charge of the detachment. That was a sentence unchallengeable in any branch of any military service the world around.

  More sailors with Mausers escorted Lemp to the office where he was to make his report. He wasn’t astonished to find Rear Admiral Donitz there waiting to hear him. Whatever was going on, it was
going on at levels far over his head.

  He came to attention and saluted. “Reporting as ordered, sir. My news is very simple: we saw nothing and found nothing.”

  “Very well,” Donitz said. “That makes it more likely the 110 reached England, then. Scotland, I should say.”

  “Sir, did you want it to do that?” Lemp asked.

  The admiral looked through him. “Don’t worry about it, Lieutenant.” In his mouth, Lemp’s rank might as well not have existed. A word from him, and Lemp’s rank wouldn’t exist.

  “Yes, sir,” Lemp said. “But you can’t wonder if I’m a little curious. Everyone on my boat is a little curious, or more than a little.”

  “It has to do with high policy. You can tell them that much,” Donitz answered. “And you can tell them not to push it, not if they know what’s good for them.” His eyes were gray-blue, and at the moment frigid as the North Sea in February. “The same goes for you.”

  Lemp could take a hint. “I understand, sir,” he said quickly.

  “I doubt that. The scheme surprised me when I heard about it,” Donitz said. “If it works, everything changes. And if it doesn’t, we’ve lost very little.”

  What was that supposed to mean? One more quick look at Donitz’s face discouraged Lemp from asking. He saluted again. Then he asked, “May my men go ashore for liberty now?”

  “After you let them know they’d better keep their mouths shut,” the admiral said. “Anyone who makes a mistake will regret it. Is that clear?”

  “Yes, sir,” Lemp said. Clear as mud, he thought. Maybe events would answer his questions for him one of these days. Or he might spend the rest of his life wondering. You never could tell.

  Chaim Weinberg believe his eyes. Was he really seeing this? Damned if he wasn’t. Half a dozen French tanks clanked up to the stretch of line the Abe Lincoln Battalion was holding outside of Madrid. These weren’t slow, ancient Renaults-leftovers from the last war. They were brand-new Somua S-35s, the best medium tanks the French made. The Spanish Republic had got a few-only a few-in 1938. Chaim didn’t know France had turned any loose since.