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

  The interrogators muttered amongst themselves. Things didn’t seem to be going the way they wanted. One of them gave him another whack. “Talk, damn you!” the bastard bellowed. Blood salty on his tongue, Walsh rattled off his name, former rank, and pay number. The Scotland Yard man glowered. “You aren’t in the Army any more, and you aren’t a prisoner of war, either.”

  “Then give me a solicitor,” Walsh said yet again. He got another slap for his trouble. He also got frogmarched back to his cell. He counted that a victory of sorts. He’d made them change plans.

  Which was worth … what? Anything? They didn’t let him see newspapers, of course. They also didn’t let him listen to the BBC. That they still held him and went on knocking him around argued that Sir Horace Wilson remained Prime Minister, and that England remained allied to Hitler.

  If they decided he was too big a nuisance—or if they decided he didn’t know anything they had to learn—they might just knock him over the head and get rid of his body. They went on and on about traitors, but they were at least as far outside the law as any traitors could be.

  They fed him slop, and precious little of it. He’d eaten more and better in the trenches. He couldn’t think of anything worse to say about prison rations.

  Then one day they opened his cell at an unexpected time. Alarm ran through him even before one of them pointed a service revolver at his head. Any jailbird quickly learns that breaks in routine aren’t intended for his benefit. “Come on, you,” the pistol packer snarled.

  “Where? Why?” Walsh asked.

  “Shut up. Get moving. You waste my time, it’s the last dumb thing you’ll ever do.” The fellow from Scotland Yard seemed to be trying to sound like an American tough guy in the movies. Only his accent spoiled the effect.

  Something rattled outside. If that wasn’t a machine gun, Walsh had never heard one. And if that was a machine gun … Walsh held out his hand. “Here, you’d better give me that,” he said, as if to a little boy. “You don’t want the soldiers to catch you carrying it.”

  “Soldiers? What soldiers? I’m not afraid of no bleeding soldiers.” The copper kept talking tough. The wobble in his voice gave him away. Outside, the machine gun brayed again.

  “You’ll be doing the bleeding any minute now,” Walsh said. “Come on, hand over your toy. What do you think it can do against the kind of firepower the Army’s got, anyway?” Something blew up, a lot closer than the stuttering machine gun. Helpfully, Walsh explained: “That’s a Mills bomb—a hand grenade, if you like. They’re going to get in here. They won’t like it if they catch you with a weapon in your hand.”

  Glumly, the copper handed him the Webley and Scott. Two other Scotland Yard men, moving with slow caution, laid their pistols on the ground. Walsh was tempted to plug each of them in turn after he scooped up the weapons. Not without regret, he refrained.

  Pounding feet announced the arrival of soldiers. No one not in the military stomped with that percussive rhythm. “Over here!” Walsh called. “I’ve got ’em!”

  Some of the men carried rifles with fixed bayonets. One of the bayonets dripped blood. A police official must have made a fatal mistake. At the soldiers’ head was the major with whom Walsh had examined 10 Downing Street. He cradled a Tommy gun as gently as if it were a baby. “Hullo, old man,” he said. “We’re in the driving seat now. First job of this sort in upwards of two hundred and fifty years, but we’ve brought it off.”

  “That’s—” one of the Scotland Yard men began. The Tommy gun’s muzzle swung in his direction. He went pale as skimmed milk. Whatever his detailed opinion was, he kept it to himself. He wasn’t a complete fool, then. Walsh had had his doubts.

  “Elections soon,” the major went on. “We’ll let the people have their say about what we’ve done. If they’re daft enough to want to go along with the Nazis …” He rolled his eyes to show what he thought of that. “But in the meanwhile, our troops in Russia are ordered to hold in place against anyone—anyone at all—who attacks them. We’ll get them out of there quick as we can.”

  “But what if old Adolf goes after them hammer and tongs?” Walsh knew he sounded worried, and well he might—he had more than a few friends fighting in Russia. “They’re hostages to the Fritzes, you might say.”

  “It’s possible, but I don’t believe it’s likely. Hitler would have to be raving mad to do anything like that. He’d be handing Stalin four prime divisions on a silver platter, eh?” the major replied.

  That made perfect sense. Walsh wondered why hearing it didn’t reassure him more. Probably because, when dealing with Hitler, the most perfectly sensible things turned out to be nonsense after all as often as not. Changing the subject looked like a good idea: “Where are Sir Horace and the Cabinet?”

  “They’re safe. None of them tried anything foolish.” The major answered without giving details, which didn’t surprise Walsh.

  The Scotland Yard man who’d handed over his pistol worked up the nerve to ask, “What does the King think of all this?”

  “One of the reasons Edward’s off in Bermuda is, he was too pally by half with Adolf and Musso,” the major said. “As soon as General Wavell brought his Majesty word the government had, ah, changed, King George knighted him on the spot. And Queen Elizabeth, God bless her, kissed him.”

  All the captured coppers seemed to shrink in on themselves. They’d been following orders, and they’d been just as sure they were following the path of righteousness. Almost everyone was. Walsh supposed even Hitler didn’t face the mirror when he shaved each morning and think Today I’ll go out and do something really evil. But if enough others thought that was what he was doing … Well, in that case England got the most abrupt change of government since James II bailed out one jump ahead of the incoming William and Mary. And a good thing, too, he thought, or else they would have hanged me.

  LIEUTENANT COLONEL TOMASHEVSKY looked out at the assembled Soviet flyers in his squadron. “Today we bomb west of Chernigov,” he said. “Our targets are the German and Hungarian troops in the area, not—I repeat, not—the English expeditionary force. The English have seen reason. They are no longer hostile to the workers and peasants of the Soviet Union … which means Hitler’s Fascist hyenas and the jackals who follow them are now hostile to the English.”

  If a quarter of what the Soviet radio and newspapers were saying was true—always an interesting question, as Anastas Mouradian had reason to know—the Nazis were doing their level best to smash the English expeditionary force for presuming to change sides. And, as any Soviet citizen had reason to know, the Nazis’ level best was liable to be entirely too good.

  “Do not—I repeat, do not—bomb English positions,” Tomashevsky went on. “English soldiers are crossing the Soviet lines. They will be repatriated so they can rejoin the struggle against Fascism. English troops will mark their positions with Union Jacks spread out on the ground.”

  All sorts of interesting questions occurred to Stas on account of that. The Union Jacks might ward off Soviet bombers, but they’d surely attract the Luftwaffe. Which worried the English more? And how would those soldiers get back to their homeland? By sea from Murmansk or Arkhangelsk, running the U-boat gantlet? Or would they go down through Persia and take ship there … again, running the U-boat gantlet?

  “Questions?” Tomashevsky asked.

  Stas’ hand went up. Tomashevsky pointed to him. The Armenian didn’t ask any of those questions. He knew he wouldn’t get an answer for them. No, the one he did ask was purely practical: “Excuse me, comrade Colonel, but what do we do if we suspect the Germans are setting out Union Jacks to keep us from bombing them?”

  “Bomb those positions,” the squadron commander answered. “But you’d better be right if you do. Our superiors will not be happy if they hear reports from the English that the Red Air Force attacked them.”

  You’ll end up in the gulag if you bomb Englishmen. Mouradian had no trouble working out the underlying meaning there. By the looks on the
faces of the men around him, neither did they.

  When he and his bomb-aimer went out to their Pe-2, the young Karelian said, “We’ll have to be careful about what we hit.” He wanted to make sure Stas got it.

  “Yes, I figured that out, thanks,” Mouradian answered dryly. Ivan Kulkaanen nodded back. His expression remained serious, and he seemed not the least bit embarrassed. Staying out of the gulag was important business, at least as important as fighting the foreign invaders.

  Sergeant Mechnikov greeted his superiors with, “So it’s back to bombing the Nazis, is it? Well, the bombs don’t care whose heads they fall on.” Plainly, he didn’t care whose heads he dropped them on. And why should he? His work stayed the same no matter who the enemy was.

  One of the crews had FOR STALIN! painted on its Pe-2’s fuselage in big red letters, right behind the Soviet star. Did that make them more likely to be reckoned politically reliable? Or did it just make them more likely to get shot down? If it made both more likely, did the one protect more than the other endangered?

  Soviet life was full of interesting questions.

  The Pe-2 jounced down the unpaved runway and climbed into the air. “A lot more power than the old SB-2,” Stas remarked as he leveled off.

  “Well, I should hope so!” Kulkaanen exclaimed.

  “It was a hot plane once upon a time,” Mouradian said. “One of these days, this beast will be just as obsolete.”

  “Oh, sure,” the bomb-aimer said. “That’s the way things work.” He took it for granted. If his narrow, New Soviet Man–style soul held any room for nostalgia, he wouldn’t be so weak as to show it.

  I’m supposed to be a New Soviet Man, too, Stas thought. For some reason, the indoctrination hadn’t taken with him, the way a smallpox vaccination sometimes didn’t. He wondered what had gone wrong in his case. Maybe it was just that he was an Armenian. He wasn’t so good at swallowing things whole as most Russians were … although plenty of his countrymen were, or at least seemed to be, ideal New Soviet Men and Women.

  A few badly aimed rounds of antiaircraft fire came up at them as they droned southwest. They were still over terrain the Red Army held. Some New Soviet Men down below feared they belonged to the Luftwaffe. That made those nervous gunners New Soviet Idiots, but it happened on almost every mission.

  Sergeant Mechnikov expressed his opinion of the antiaircraft crews through the speaking tube. The Chimp couldn’t have put it better. Mouradian wondered how—and whether—Kuchkov was doing these days.

  What should have been the front was mostly confusion. English troops were crossing the Soviet line. Red Army men were rushing in to take their places and tear a hole in the enemy position. The Germans were doing their damnedest not to let any of that happen.

  Bombs burst among the English positions. Stas looked around, wondering whether some of his squadronmates were dropping too soon. But those bombs didn’t come from Soviet planes. The Luftwaffe had bombers in the neighborhood, too: Mouradian spotted two stacked V’s of Do-17s.

  The Flying Pencils were unmistakable, and not just because of the yellow band the Nazis painted on the fuselages of their Ostfront aircraft. No one else built bombers with such skinny bodies. Even the Germans used that Flying Pencil nickname for their Dorniers.

  No matter how slim the Do-17s were, they didn’t perform much better than the USSR’s obsolescent SB-2s. Stas’ current mount could fly rings around them. The Pe-2 was pretty skinny, too, since it was originally intended as a heavy fighter. And so … Stas swung the Pe-2 into a sharp right turn.

  “What the—?” Kulkaanen exclaimed.

  “I’m going to get after those Germans,” Stas answered.

  A moment later, another startled question came from his radio earphones. He gave the squadron CO the same answer. Several silent seconds followed as Lieutenant Colonel Tomashevsky considered it. At last, he said, “Our mission is to keep the Fascists from harassing the English now that they’ve come to their senses. You’re doing that. Good luck.”

  “Spasibo,” Stas said dryly. He noticed that none of the other pilots was peeling off to attack the Dorniers. That made his own job harder. It also made his Russian comrades as imaginative as so many oysters. He chuckled sourly. Tell me something I didn’t already know, he thought.

  One of the things he did already know was which Flying Pencil he wanted: the last and highest in the second V. That was the fellow least able to protect himself, and also the one whose buddies could help him least.

  The Do-17’s pilot and crew didn’t notice him till he was almost close enough to open up. Only one machine gun at the back of the cockpit would bear on him. He had two forward-firing machine guns, and two 20mm cannon to go with them. As tracers whipped past the Pe-2, he watched chunks fly off the German bomber’s wing. Flame licked, caught, spread. The Dornier went into a spin the pilot hadn’t a prayer of controlling.

  Kulkaanen whooped. “Good shooting!” he yelled.

  “Thanks.” Stas wanted more German planes. But the Flying Pencil he’d attacked must have radioed a warning to its friends before it went down. The rest of the Do-17s dove for the deck as fast as they would go. He might have caught them had he chased them. Then again, 109s might be on the way to give them a hand. A Pe-2 could give a good account of itself against a Messerschmitt, but it wasn’t something you wanted to try unless you had no choice.

  He did have a choice, and made it—he flew back toward the rest of the Soviet bombers. He also had a mission to fulfill. Even though he’d shot down the German plane, he still needed to do that. Orders were, and always would be, orders.

  TO SAY HIDEKI FUJITA was not a happy man was to prove the power of understatement. He’d got demoted to corporal for letting the three Americans escape from Pingfan, and he’d got a hell of a beating besides. Then, when neither Japanese nor Manchukuan patrols managed to stumble across the white men on the loose, he got another beating, this one worse than the first.

  Adding insult to injury—literally—he remained on watch at the Americans’ compound. His superiors left him in no doubt about what would happen to him if any more Yankees got away. That would be the last mistake he was ever allowed to make.

  Self-preservation made him tighten things up even more than was usual at Pingfan. The Americans’ compound ran by the clock, as if it were a factory cranking out Fords. Any prisoner in there who was late for a roll call or a lineup or even slow in bowing to a Japanese guard got pounded on with fists and boots and rifle butts.

  Fujita would have done worse than that to them had the scientist-officers who ran Pingfan not made it plain they needed the Americans in relatively good shape. That disgusted him. He couldn’t even wallop the Yankees as hard as his own people had walloped him—some of his bruises were a long time fading. Where was the fairness in that?

  On the other hand, those scientist-officers didn’t take him inside the enormous walled-off facility that was Pingfan’s beating heart. He didn’t know what happened to the maruta who went in there, not in any detail. He wasn’t interested in finding out, either. And, unless you were a scientist yourself, once you went behind those high walls, you didn’t come out again: not alive, anyhow.

  For a little while, he’d feared he’d infuriated the authorities enough to make them decide to turn him into a maruta. Next to that fate, a couple of beatings didn’t seem so bad.

  The sergeant soon set over him, a bruiser named Toshiyaki Wakamatsu, made him remember all the reasons he’d despised sergeants before becoming one himself. Wakamatsu was loudmouthed and brutal. He fawned on officers but wouldn’t listen to anyone of rank lower than his own.

  Was I like that? Fujita wondered. He hoped not, but feared he might have been. He couldn’t ask the enlisted men from his squad. They’d never give him a straight answer, any more than he would give one to Wakamatsu. Giving straight answers was a most un-Japanese thing to do. You told your superiors what you thought they wanted to hear. If they had any sense, they knew how to interpret what you said
. If they didn’t, their heads swelled up with all the praise you lavished on them.

  Sergeant Wakamatsu had his own way of dealing with the Americans. He couldn’t talk to them, any more than Fujita had been able to. Fujita had learned that some of the Americans knew scraps of Chinese. Senior Private Hayashi spoke Chinese fluently. Fujita said not a word of that to the man now holding down his place. Neither did Hayashi. His silence made the demoted noncom feel good. The clever senior private still felt loyal to him—or at least didn’t want to do the blowhard who’d taken his slot any favors.

  Instead of talking to the Americans, Wakamatsu gestured to show what he wanted. When the prisoners didn’t catch on fast enough to suit him, he clouted them. That helped him less than he’d seemed to think it would.

  “Bakatare! Bakayaro!” he roared at the Yanks. Had he really expected them to cooperate? If he had, he was an idiot himself, even if he called them by that name. Prisoners might have lost their honor simply by letting themselves be captured, but they didn’t go out of their way to help their captors. Anyone with a gram of sense should have been able to see that.

  Since Sergeant Wakamatsu couldn’t … Fujita did his best to stay out of the sergeant’s way. His new superior was setting himself up to crash and burn. Fujita didn’t want to catch fire when Wakamatsu did. He hardly cared if the authorities gave him back his old collar tabs.

  He kept an eye on the American named Herman Szulc. Wakamatsu still hadn’t figured out that Szulc was a leading troublemaker. And Szulc had a buddy, a smaller fellow called Max Weinstein. One look at that fellow and anyone with a suspicious mind would hear alarm bells.

  Weinstein knew some Chinese. Fujita had heard him jabbering with the laborers who did the work around Pingfan that the Japanese didn’t care to do for themselves. Sergeant Wakamatsu must have heard him, too. Did Wakamatsu take any special notice? Fujita was convinced Wakamatsu wouldn’t have noticed his own cock if he didn’t need to piss through it now and then.