Last Orders: The War That Came Early Read online

  He lay in a shell hole in the no-man’s-land between the Republicans’ barbed wire and the stuff the Fascists strung. He had branches and bits of greenery on his helmet and here and there on his uniform. They didn’t block the heat. They weren’t supposed to. They did help break up his outline, to make it harder for Marshal Sanjurjo’s men to spot him out here.

  His antitank rifle also had its long, straight barrel bedecked with leaves and twigs. The damn thing wasn’t much shorter than he was. It weighed a tonne. The French had made it to fire a slug as wide as a man’s thumb through a tank’s armor. It could do that … to any tank made in the 1930s. It was as powerful a rifle as one man could carry and fire. Even with a muzzle brake and a padded stock, it kicked harder than any mule ever born.

  No matter how powerful it was, it couldn’t kill the bigger, heavier modern tanks the war had spawned. To the logical French, if it couldn’t do the job for which it was made, it was useless.

  French logic, though, reached only so far. The antitank rifle fired a very heavy bullet with a very high muzzle velocity. The round flew fast and far and flat. It might not be able to cope with a Panzer IV, but it could knock over a man at a couple of kilometers. It was, in other words, a perfect sniper’s rifle.

  In France, Vaclav had killed German officers who made the fatal mistake of thinking they were too far behind the line to worry about keeping their heads down. When France hopped into Hitler’s arms for a while, she generously allowed the Czechs who fought for their government-in-exile to cross the border into Spain and take service with the Republic. Vaclav brought the antitank rifle with him. By then, he would have killed anybody who tried to take it away from him.

  After a couple of years here, he knew enough Spanish to get fed. He knew enough to get drunk. He knew enough to get laid. He could cuss some, too. He had the essentials, in other words. Anything past the essentials, no. He spoke pretty good German—a lot of Czechs did—which helped him with the men of the International Brigades but not with the Republicans. Most of the Spaniards who could Deutsch sprechen fought on Sanjurjo’s side.

  Like the rest of the Czechs, he’d made himself useful here. He’d actually used the rifle on enemy tanks. Sanjurjo’s men tried sending some old Italian tankettes against the Internationals. They had enough armor to laugh at ordinary small-arms fire. Not at what his overmuscled elephant gun could do, though.

  And he’d killed General Franco with the antitank rifle. Not as good as blowing off Sanjurjo’s jowly head, but the next best thing. He’d got a medal for that, and a wad of pesetas to go with it that gave him one hell of a spree in Madrid.

  Marshal Sanjurjo had an even bigger price on his head than his late general had. If the marshal ever decided to inspect these lines and came within 2,000 meters of wherever the Czech happened to be hiding, Vaclav vowed that he was one dead bigwig.

  Meanwhile … Meanwhile, he waited. He spied on the Nationalists’ lines with a pair of binoculars wrapped in burlap. He’d stuck cardboard above their objective lenses so no untimely reflections would give him away. And he’d taken the same precaution with the objective on the rifle’s telescopic sight.

  Careless snipers had short careers. He wanted to go back to Czechoslovakia after the war ended … if the war ever ended, and if there was any Czechoslovakia to go back to once it did. Dying in France fighting against the Nazis, he would at least have been playing against the first team. Making a mistake that let some Spaniard in a diarrhea-yellow uniform plug him would just be embarrassing.

  No, not just embarrassing. Painful, too.

  Not much was going on now on either side of the line. Here and there, a rifleman would take a shot at somebody in the wrong uniform who was rash enough to put himself on display. Most of the time, the would-be assassin was a crappy shot and missed. His attempted victim would dive for cover.

  Vaclav was anything but a crappy shot. He’d been good when the Czechoslovakian Army drafted him. Plenty of practice in the years since left him a hell of a lot better than good. He could have killed plenty of careless Nationalists at the front line.

  But that would have been like spending a hundred English pounds for a glass of beer. Ordinary privates and noncoms weren’t worth killing with an antitank rifle. If he yielded to temptation and let the air out of one of those bastards, he’d have to find a new hiding place. Shooting twice in a row from the same spot was more dangerous than lighting three on a match. You were telling the enemy right where you were. You were telling him you were stupid enough to stay there, too.

  So he ignored the jerks who stuck their brainless heads up over the parapet for a look around. He scanned farther back, to the places where most of the time you wouldn’t need to worry about getting shot. Nationalist officers wore much fancier uniforms and headgear than the men they led. Killing a colonel might do more for the Republican cause than exterminating a company’s worth of ordinary soldiers.

  For the moment, though, nobody worth shooting was showing himself. So Vaclav brought down the glasses and surveyed the shattered ground ahead of where he lay. Every once in a while, Sanjurjo’s men sneaked out to hunt snipers. He’d blown big holes in a couple of those guys. He was ruthless about keeping himself in one piece.

  And the Spanish Fascists sent snipers of their own out into no-man’s-land. They didn’t have anybody with a monster gun like his. But a good shot with a good rifle could kill a man a kilometer away—not every time, maybe, but often enough to be dangerous. Vaclav knew what the ground was supposed to look like from here. He knew what it was supposed to look like from almost every centimeter in front of the stretch of trench the Czechs held. Knowing such things was like a life-insurance policy. Any little change might—probably would—mark trouble.

  He didn’t see any little changes, though. The heat made everybody move at half speed. Let the sun kill the bastards on the other side, the thought seemed to be. Shooting them was too much trouble for soldiers.

  After a while, it got to be too much trouble for Jezek. He ate brown bread and crumbly Spanish sausage full of fennel. It could give you the runs, but it tasted good. To kill some germs, he washed it down with sharp white wine from the canteen on his belt. He would rather have drunk beer—he was a Czech, all right. But most Spanish beer tasted like piss, and smelled like it, too. Wine was also easier to come by here.

  He wanted a cigarette. He didn’t light one. Smoke could give you away. He wouldn’t get too jittery before he went back inside the barbed wire among his friends and countrymen. He’d puff away once he did.

  Some days went by without his firing a shot. If he didn’t see anything worth firing at, he just stayed where he was till it got dark. Let the Nationalists think they’d finally killed him while they were shelling no-man’s-land. It might make them careless. Then they’d give him better targets.

  What was this? A truck coming up toward the Fascists’ lines. Canvas tied down over hoops covered the rear compartment. When the truck stopped, soldiers got out. A man hopped down from the passenger side of the front seat, too. That and his uniform told Jezek he was an officer.

  Nothing much had happened yet today. So … why not? The officer gestured, getting his men ready to do whatever they were going to do. Vaclav took careful aim. Not much wind. Range about 1,100 meters. You might even do this with a Mauser, though you’d need a little luck as well as skill. Luck never hurt, of course. But with this much gun, skill alone could turn the trick.

  Breathe. Let it out. Bring back the trigger, gently, gently … The antitank rifle thundered. It kicked, not even a little bit gently. The Nationalist officer grabbed his midriff and fell over.

  “Earned my pay today,” Vaclav said. He took out a cigarette to celebrate. He could smoke it now. He wouldn’t be staying here more than another few minutes anyhow.

  To say Lieutenant Commander Julius Lemp didn’t enjoy summer patrol in the North Sea was to beggar the power of language. He wasn’t quite up at the latitudes where the sun never set, but he was plenty far
north to keep it in the sky through most of the hours.

  He and several ratings stayed up on the conning tower, scanning sky and horizon for enemy ships and airplanes. You had to do it all the time. The Royal Navy was looking for the U-30, too, and for all the other boats the Kriegsmarine sent to sea.

  The Royal Navy was looking hard. It had ways to look no one had dreamt of when the war broke out, almost five years ago now. Radar could spot a surfaced U-boat no matter how cunningly its paint job mimicked sea and sky. And, when it dove, English warships hounded it with their pinging hydrophones. Unlike the ones both sides had used in the last war, these really could help a surface ship track—and sink—a submarine.

  Gerhart Beilharz popped out of the hatch like an elongated jack-in-the-box. The engineering officer grinned like a jack-in-the-box, too. He was two meters tall: not the ideal size for a man in a U-boat’s crew. This was the only place on the boat where he didn’t have to worry about gashing his scalp or knocking himself cold if he forgot to duck.

  “You’ve done your two hours, skipper,” he said. “I relieve you.”

  Lemp lowered his Zeiss field glasses and rubbed his eyes. They felt sandy under his knuckles. “I feel like a bug on a plate,” he said. “A black bug on a white plate.”

  Beilharz pointed back to the Schnorkel. The breathing tube—for the diesels, not the men who served them—stuck up like an enormous stovepipe. “Don’t worry about it,” he said. “As long as we’ve got that baby, we can slip under the glazing.”

  He could say Don’t worry about it. The U-boat’s survival wasn’t his responsibility. Lemp had to worry about everything; that was what command entailed. And worry he did: “They can see us under the glazing, too, dammit, or rather hear us with those stinking hydrophones.”

  “We’ve slithered away before,” the tall man said. “We can do it again.”

  “I hope so.” Sighing, Lemp went below—out of the sunshine, out of the fresh air, into a steel cigar dimly lit with orange bulbs and stinking of everything from shit and puke and piss to diesel oil to the reeks of rotting food and dirty socks. However nasty, the odor was also infinitely familiar to him. And well it might have been, since his own fug made up a part of it.

  Only a green curtain shielded his tiny cabin—cot, desk, chair, safe—from the corridor. Still, command’s privilege gave him more privacy and space than anyone else on the boat enjoyed. He logged the events on his latest watch: course, position, observations (none significant), the fact that a radio tube had burnt out and been replaced. His handwriting was tiny and as precise as if an automaton had produced it.

  But as he wrote, he was conscious of all the things he wasn’t saying, all the things he couldn’t say—not unless he wanted some serious attention from the Gestapo and the Sicherheitsdienst and the Abwehr and, no doubt, other organizations of State and Party about which he knew nothing … yet.

  He couldn’t write, for instance, that the U-30 wasn’t such a happy boat as it had been. He didn’t like the way the sailors eyed one another. He didn’t like the way they didn’t come out with what was on their minds. The U-boat service tossed surface-Navy formality over the side. Living in one another’s pockets, the men had no time to waste on such foolishness. They were brothers, brothers in arms.

  Or they should have been. But there was at least one informer on board. And Lemp didn’t know who the polecat was. That worried him worse than anything. Anything this side of the Royal Navy, anyhow.

  The thought had hardly crossed his mind before a rating spoke from the other side of the curtain: “Skipper, they’ve spotted smoke up on the conning tower.”

  “Oh, they have, have they?” Lemp said. “All right. I’ll come.” He stuck his cap back on his head. Like every other U-boat officer in the Kriegsmarine, he’d taken out the stiffening wire so the crown didn’t stick up above his head but flopped onto the patent-leather bill. That crown was white, not navy blue: the sole mark of command he wore.

  His shoes clanked dully on the patterned steel of the ladder rungs leading up out of the submarine. The first whiff of fresh air made him involuntarily breathe deeper. You forgot how foul the inside of a U-boat really was till you escaped the steel tube.

  As he emerged, Gerhart Beilharz pointed north. “Over there, skipper,” he said. “Not a lot of smoke, but some.” He offered his binoculars.

  Lemp scanned with them. “You’re right,” he said as he gave them back. He called down the hatch to the helmsman, who stood near the bottom of the ladder. “Change course to 020. All ahead full.”

  “Course 020. All ahead full. Aye, aye.”

  They swung toward the smudge of smoke in the northern sky. Lemp wanted to get the U-boat out ahead of it if he could. That would let him submerge and give it a closer inspection through the periscope without the other ship’s being likely to spot them in return.

  Meanwhile, he kept his eye on the smudge. Things often happened slowly on the ocean. Ships weren’t airplanes. They needed time to cross the kilometers that separated one from another.

  Actually, he hoped he would spy the unknown ship before he had to submerge. It put out a lot more smoke than the U-30’s diesels did. It rode higher in the water than the U-boat did, too. And he got what he hoped for. Through the powerful, column-mounted binoculars on the conning tower, he got a glimpse of a small, chunky steamboat—not a warship at all.

  Not an obvious warship, anyhow. In the last war, English Q-ships—freighters with hidden heavy guns and gun crews—had surprised and sunk a couple of the Kaiser’s submarines. Their captains made the fatal mistake of thinking anything that looked harmless was bound to be harmless. They’d come close to use a deck gun instead of launching an eel from a distance—and they’d paid for their folly.

  Lemp took no such chances. Maybe the steamer was as harmless as it looked. But if it was, what was it doing out here in the middle of the North Sea? Its course would take it from Scotland to Norway. It might be bringing help for the Norwegian bandits who still did their best to make trouble for the German forces occupying the country.

  He ordered the boat down to Schnorkel depth. It was faster underwater on diesels than with battery power. As the unknown ship approached, he had plenty of time to work up a firing solution. He launched two torpedoes from less than a kilometer away.

  The explosive in one of the eels would have been plenty to blow up the steamer. But the blast that followed a midships hit from one of the eels was far bigger than a torpedo warhead alone could have caused. The U-30 staggered in the water; it felt and sounded as if someone were pounding on the boat with iron rods the size of telegraph poles.

  “Der Herr Gott im Himmel!” Lieutenant Beilharz exclaimed. “What the devil was that?”

  “I don’t exactly know,” Lemp answered. “No, not exactly. But whatever it was, I think the Reich is lucky it never got to Norway.” He peered through the periscope. Nothing was left of the steamship but small bits of flotsam and a hell of a lot of smoke. Somebody in England and Norway would be disappointed, but he wasn’t.

  Shibe Park was a pretty good place to see a ballgame no matter where you sat. With the Philadelphia A’s duking it out with the St. Louis Browns to see who’d have bragging rights to seventh place and who’d mope in the basement, Peggy Druce felt as if she had the grandstand to herself.

  She didn’t quite. A couple of thousand other optimists raised a cheer for Connie Mack’s men. But, though she’d bought a ticket well back in the lower deck, the ushers didn’t fuss when she moved down closer to the action. When you had a small crowd in a big ballpark, nobody worried about such details.

  From right behind the third-base dugout, she could hear the players chattering among themselves. They cheerfully swore at one another and at the umpires. As far as they were concerned, they were by themselves out there. A delicately raised woman might have been shocked—they talked as foully as soldiers. Peggy found herself more amused than anything else. The filthy language held no malice she could find.

>   “Hot dogs! Get your hot dogs!” a vendor shouted. Peggy got herself two. At her request, the man slathered them with mustard and onions. She liked onions. And she was here by herself. If her breath smelled strong, she wouldn’t offend anyone she cared about.

  She got herself a couple of sacks of roasted peanuts, too, and a bottle of beer, and then another bottle of beer. She was good for the long haul, in other words. The game would have been more fun with Herb sitting next to her and complaining about how lousy the Athletics were.

  But Herb wasn’t there. Herb wouldn’t be there. She glanced down at her left hand. Yes, she could still see the pale line on her fourth finger, the line where her wedding ring had shielded the skin from the sun for so long. She didn’t wear a ring on that finger any more, though. Why should she, when she wasn’t married any more? Herb had gone on a trip to Nevada for the government, and he’d Reno-vated her while he was there.

  Now that he was back in Philadelphia, they were both doing their best to be civilized about it. He’d been more than generous in the settlement. She had the house and the Packard. He was living in a flat near his law office and driving a ratty old Hupmobile.

  The war and the long separation it forced on them had killed their marriage as surely as a U-boat’s torpedo killed the luckless sailors aboard a destroyer. Peggy didn’t want to be divorced. But being married hadn’t been a whole lot of fun lately, either.

  The A’s went ahead, 3–2, in the bottom of the fourth. There were a lot of short fly balls. The horsehide didn’t go smack! off the bat, the way Peggy was used to. It made kind of a dull thud instead. The cork that livened up the center of the ball was a strategic national resource these days. She didn’t know what they were using instead. By the way the ball didn’t move, she suspected it was a cheap grade of cement.

  But the Philadelphia cleanup hitter somehow caught one square. He put it over the head of the Brownies’ center fielder. It rolled all the way to the base of the center-field fence. In Shibe Park, that was 468 feet from the plate. The batter wasn’t a gazelle on the bases, but he didn’t need to be. He didn’t even have to slide to score on his inside-the-park homer.