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

  No matter what the King and Queen said, the putsch had horrified many, many Britons. The Army hadn’t shot Sir Horace, the way Walsh was convinced the collaborating polecat deserved. Instead, it put him into what some higher up with an unfortunately bureaucratic turn of phrase called “preventive detention.”

  If only Walsh knew what the detention was supposed to prevent. It didn’t prevent Horace Wilson from getting endless complaints out and seeing them printed in the Times and the other papers that had fawned on him while he was PM. The Army didn’t come down on the papers for printing that self-serving drivel, either. The generals running the country bent over backward to show they didn’t intend to abridge free speech or any other fundamental rights.

  “Meaning no disrespect to you, sir, but it’s bloody ridiculous,” Walsh complained to Ronald Cartland. “The buggers we ousted were more tyrannical than we dare be.”

  Cartland nodded and waved to a barmaid for another whiskey: they sat in the pub near the Houses of Parliament where they’d done so much conspiring. “No great surprise there,” the MP said—no, the captain, because he was back in uniform, too. “No matter how odious Sir Horace’s government was, it was constitutionally legitimate. That meant it could do all sorts of outrageous things and get away with them. Because we are extraconstitutional, we have to be much more scrupulous or everyone will start wailing that we’re worse than Hitler. Ironic, what?”

  “Oh, perhaps a trifle,” Walsh allowed. He smiled at the barmaid. “Let me have another pint, too, would you, dear?” She was young enough to be his daughter, but he was old enough that a girl young enough to be his daughter could look delicious to him.

  Which, sadly, wasn’t the same as saying he was likely to look delicious to her. “Another pint. Okey-doke,” she said in a pseudo-American accent she must have picked up at the cinema. For all the warmth in her voice, he might have been a post—a thirsty post, but a post nonetheless.

  He sighed. He was getting to the age where, if he wanted a young, pretty girl to make him happy, he had to lay silver on the dresser beforehand. That was an even bigger shame than any of the troubles related to the change of government.

  She brought the pint of bitter and went off without a second glance—at him, anyhow. Ronald Cartland, she noticed. Well, he was younger and of higher rank and therefore probably richer—and better-looking. If you were going to complain about every little thing …

  “The real danger of our position is that we’ve damaged all the principles this country’s run on the past two hundred years and more,” Cartland said. “Anyone who tries to overthrow us will have as much right to do so as we did to throw out Sir Horace—which is to say, none.”

  “We may not have had the right, but we had justice, by God,” Walsh said. “If we didn’t, what was I doing in a cell when I’d committed no crime?”

  “You’d plotted treason, old man. And the people with whom you’d plotted it brought it off, too,” Cartland answered with justifiable pride, since he was one of those people.

  “Next interesting question is, what does old Adolf do now that the RAF’s in the air again?” Walsh said.

  “No. The question is, what can he do?” the officer replied. “He’s got the Luftwaffe heavily committed against the Russians. How much can he take away and turn against us?”

  “He could have the Frenchmen do his dirty work for him. They’ve got plenty of planes left at home.” Alistair Walsh had crossed the Channel in two wars to help pull French chestnuts out of the fire. Familiarity with England’s nearest neighbor did not warm to liking or trust.

  Cartland looked horrified. “Daladier would never do that! … I don’t think. We aren’t at war with France. God willing, we never shall be.”

  “We’re at war with the Fritzes. France is on their side in Russia. The froggies don’t look like giving up the fight there. If we’re at war with them and France is on their side …”

  “We aren’t speaking about axioms of geometry. I hope like blazes we aren’t, any road.” Cartland still sounded worried. Maybe the nasty possibility hadn’t crossed his mind. Walsh hoped it had occurred to someone in charge of running England these days.

  He thought of something else. “Is anybody listening to us? We were certain the PM’s people were before we threw out the rascals. Are they still?”

  “No.” This time, Cartland sounded sure. He also sounded more than a little relieved he could sound sure. “We were certain—and we were damned well right. Some changes have been made at Scotland Yard. Yes, indeed, they have. In case it makes you feel any better, the blokes who jugged you and grilled you afterwards have got their walking papers.”

  Draining his pint, Walsh considered that. “As a matter of fact, sir, it does make me feel better. I’d sooner see the buggers behind bars themselves, because they were playing fast and loose with the law, but we were, too, so what the deuce? If they’re scrounging dog-ends from the gutter and cadging pennies off their betters, I’m happy enough, by God.”

  He knew he was stretching things. Bastards like that didn’t have to fall back on begging, no matter how much you wished they would. Not all of their friends in high places had fallen foul of the new regime. The ones who’d kept their noses clean would give the sacked coppers a hand. You never could tell—they might need their services again one day.

  If the new military government looked like losing the war it had restarted, those quiet, powerful men might need the ex-coppers’ services again quite soon.

  That thought came back to Alistair Walsh with painful force two nights later. London’s air-raid sirens began to scream. The blackout had been reimposed, but it was still spotty. Too many folks didn’t care to believe the war had picked up again. The Luftwaffe bombers wouldn’t have had much trouble finding the English capital.

  Walsh stumbled to a Tube station in the more-or-less dark. It was packed with frightened people, and smelled as bad as some trenches he’d known. Up above ground, antiaircraft guns thundered. Searchlights would try to pin enemy planes in their beams for the guns. Tethered barrage balloons would make the Nazis fly high and, with luck, drop inaccurately.

  Drop they did. Big explosions mingled with the guns’ shorter, sharper reports. Once or twice, the ground shook under Walsh as he lay on a straw pallet and tried without much luck to sleep. People around him—not all of them women—squealed. Those hits weren’t close, but he didn’t blame the Londoners for panic and inexperience.

  He went back to his room after the all-clear sounded. Fire engines clanged toward blazes that scarred chunks of the horizon with orange and gold. None of the fires was close, or likely to trouble him. His room had no damage. He promptly fell asleep once more.

  In the morning, the BBC claimed thirty-one German bombers shot down by guns and night fighters. That seemed like a lot to Walsh. But then, his own side wasn’t immune to the attractions of propaganda. Or maybe they were telling the truth. Stranger things had happened … hadn’t they?

  VACLAV JEZEK WAS gloomily certain he would never learn any Spanish. If a man had grown up speaking Czech, the sounds and vocabulary of this new language were too strange to stick on his tongue or in his memory. And finding a Spaniard who knew any Czech made the loaves and fishes seem a minor miracle.

  When he got leave and went into Madrid, he did find some Spaniards who knew a bit of German. His own accent wasn’t perfect—nowhere close. The locals wanted to impose the staccato rhythms of their own speech on the alien tongue. They weren’t used to making noises in the back of the throat, either. Comprehension was always an adventure.

  He could get drinks. The word for wine didn’t change much from one language to another. The Spaniards used some horrible lisping word for beer, though most barkeeps understood Bier. But Spanish beer wasn’t worth drinking, not if you had a Czech’s standards. So he mostly stuck to wine or hard stuff.

  He could get laid, too. Brothels were easy to find and not too expensive. Unlike Czech whores, a lot of girls in the Republic see
med proud of what they did. They even had a union. So another soldier on leave told Vaclav, anyway. He thought that was the funniest thing he’d ever heard, but the International swore up and down it was true. So maybe it was and maybe it wasn’t.

  “They going to strike for a raise in pay?” he asked the other guy.

  “Better working hours, too. And maybe softer mattresses,” the International said. His German was better than Jezek’s. He was a Dutchman named Jan, though, and got pissed off if anybody took him for a German.

  They went on to invent other demands striking prostitutes might make. Those got sillier and lewder the longer they went on. Of course, they drank more and more while they were at it, too. Vaclav wondered if he’d remember any of it when he sobered up.

  The way his head felt the next morning, he wished he didn’t remember his name, let alone last night’s foolishness. Strong coffee—the Spaniards didn’t fool around when they brewed the stuff—and the hair of the dog that bit him helped bring him back to life. Aspirins were hard to come by here, but a bit of brandy took the edge off his headache.

  Jan looked more bedraggled yet. He bore down harder on the brandy and went easy on coffee. After a while, he started reviving, too. “I hurt myself,” he said mournfully.

  “Red wine will do it to you, all right,” Vaclav agreed.

  “Isn’t that the sad and sorry truth?” Jan said.

  Of course, bullets and bombs and shell fragments would also do it to you, and they wouldn’t give you any fun while they did. No wonder Vaclav and so many other soldiers drank and screwed as if there were no tomorrow whenever they got the chance. For too many of them, there would be no tomorrow, and they knew it, whether in the head or, more often, in the belly and the balls.

  Vaclav was anything but thrilled about going back into the line when his leave ended. He was even less thrilled when he got there. Spanish spring packed the punch of Central European summer. The sun blazed down out of a sky a brighter, less washed-out blue than you ever saw in Prague. Dust was everywhere. It even smelled baked. And the stink of dead flesh seemed nastier than he’d ever known before. Meat spoiled in nothing flat in weather like this.

  When Vaclav complained about the reek, Benjamin Halévy said, “You notice it more because you got away from it for a while, you lucky son of a bitch.”

  “Ahh, your mother,” Jezek replied without rancor. “That’s part of it, but I don’t think that’s all. The heat really does make everything smell worse. And how much hotter will it get in the summertime?”

  “We’ll find out,” the Jew said. “The Internationals talk about salt tablets and heatstroke.”

  “Some of that’s probably just bullshit to make us turn green.” Vaclav wished he’d phrased it differently. The way he made it sound, some of what the Internationals said probably wasn’t bullshit. Well, they’d been here longer than he had. Chances were they knew what they were talking about, dammit.

  Shouldering his antitank rifle convinced him the monster had got heavier while he was on leave. He couldn’t blame that on the warm Spanish spring. Pretty soon, though, he got used to listing to the right whenever he slung the rifle on his shoulder.

  He started looking for targets well behind the Nationalists’ lines. He blew the head off some bigwig just getting out of a Mercedes. Remembering what Halévy had said a while earlier, he hoped it was Marshal Sanjurjo, but evidently not. The Republic didn’t claim Sanjurjo’s scalp, and the Nationalists didn’t go into mourning—or hysterics—because they’d lost him.

  They did try to pay back the Czechs and the Internationals. Artillery and mortar fire rained down on their positions. The bastards might have been saying You want to play that way, we’ll make you sorry. In fact, that had to be exactly what they were saying.

  A lot of the artillery rounds were duds, which saved some lives. Vaclav had noticed that a lot of the rounds the Republicans fired were duds, too. Which meant … what? That Spanish munitions factories weren’t everything they might have been? Evidently.

  Vaclav was a careful, thorough sniper. He didn’t let himself fall into routines. He didn’t keep coming back to the same hideouts day after day. Snipers who made stupid mistakes like that didn’t last long. When deciding to go right or left along the line, he’d toss a coin and do what it told him. If he didn’t know what he’d do till he did it, the shitheads trying to slaughter him couldn’t outguess him.

  He potted another Nationalist officer a few days later. It was a hell of a long shot, going on two kilometers. He was proud as hell when he watched the fellow grab at himself and slowly crumple. The Nationalist seemed much closer through the telescopic sight, but not that close.

  Everybody on his own side congratulated him when he reported the kill. Only later, when he drank some Spanish peach brandy with Benjamin Halévy, did he think about what he’d actually done. “Mother of God!” he said. “Everyone thinks I’m the best thing since sausage because I can murder people farther away than the other guys can.”

  The Jew looked at him. His eyes were bottle-green. “You just figured this out?”

  “Nooo.” Vaclav let the word stretch. “But it kind of hit me more than it usually does.”

  “Well, if it makes you feel any better, maybe that was the son of a bitch who ordered the artillery barrage after you nailed the last big shot,” Halévy said. “Even if he wasn’t, he was no friend of ours. You think he’d worry if he’d just shot you?”

  “Who knows? Who knows anything these days?” Vaclav said. Maybe the brandy was hitting him harder than he’d thought it would. Or maybe he was looking at what he really did in the war, something few front-line soldiers could ever be comfortable trying. “This is a fuck of a way to decide who gets to do what.”

  “What would you rather do? Roll the dice?” Halévy said. “Suppose the other guy doesn’t go along with losing? Then what? You bash the asshole over the head with a rock, that’s what.”

  That was what, all right. Force had a brute simplicity nothing else could match. If the other guy was dead, he couldn’t stop you. If he feared you’d kill him, he wouldn’t have the nerve to try to stop you. “How does that make us any better than wildcats and wolverines?” Vaclav asked.

  Halévy reached out and tapped the antitank rifle’s long barrel with the first two fingers of his right hand. “Wildcats and wolverines have to get close to do their dirty work,” he said. “We’re civilized. We can kill from a long way off.”

  “Lucky us.” Vaclav’s voice sounded hollow, even to himself. He picked up the brandy bottle and tilted it back. Sometimes not thinking was better. Nice, civilized brandy took care of that, all right.

  Chapter 13

  Once upon a time, Hans-Ulrich Rudel counted every mission he flew. That didn’t last long. As soon as the German wheel behind Paris failed—as it had in 1914—it became obvious the war would be long. In a long war, you’d keep going till you got killed or till your side finally won, whichever came first. Why keep track of how often you went up, then?

  He and Sergeant Dieselhorst were up again now, hunting Red panzers somewhere west of Smolensk. Down below, shellbursts and fires marked the front and the region west of it, the region through which the Wehrmacht had just advanced. The Russians were brave and determined; that much had been obvious from the start of the campaign against them. What had also been obvious was that neither Soviet soldiers nor—especially—their officers were skilled fighting men.

  The trouble with that was, the Ivans could learn. The longer they stayed in the ring, the more likely they would. And Russia was a big place. Hans-Ulrich had known as much going in—known in his head, anyhow. One glance at a map told you how enormous Russia was. But you had to fly over it, you had to come hundreds of kilometers through it and realize how many more hundreds you still needed to go, you had to see the swarms of foot soldiers and panzers and, well, everything the commissars could throw at you, before you began to feel the enormousness of the place.

  You also had to wonder wh
ether Germany was taking on more than she could handle. The Kaiser’s armies had smashed the Ivans again and again. They’d knocked the Reds out of the war. But they hadn’t conquered Russia, beaten her and occupied her and held her down. Could the Führer’s forces manage that now?

  If we can’t, what are we doing here? What am I doing here? Rudel wondered. But he knew what he was doing: looking for panzers, KV-1s by choice. The Landsers had a devil of a time knocking out those monsters. A strike from the air could do it.

  Hans-Ulrich saw Russian panzers down below. A heartbeat later, he saw a biplane fighter pop out of a cloud and buzz straight at him. If it was a biplane, it just about had to be Russian. Had he entertained any lingering doubts, the muzzle flashes from its twin machine guns would have given him a hint.

  “We’re under attack!” he shouted to Sergeant Dieselhorst, who of course faced the other way. “It’s a Chato!” The name came from the war in Spain, and meant flat-nosed. Chatos were officially obsolescent, which didn’t make this one any less dangerous to him. It was faster than his Stuka, tough, and far more maneuverable. Which meant … It meant he was in trouble, dammit.

  “What are you going to do?” Dieselhorst asked.

  Instead of answering, Hans-Ulrich did it: his right index finger came down hard on the firing button that worked the 37mm guns under the Ju-87’s wings. He’d shot down a French fighter with them, and a Russian job more modern than this one. The Chato was almost on top of him by then. Maybe he’d get lucky one more time.

  And damned if he didn’t. As recoil staggered the Stuka in the sky, one of the armor-piercing rounds smashed into the enemy fighter’s flat nose—the front of the engine cowling. It probably plowed all the way through the engine, and maybe through the pilot, too. Instantly a mass of flame, the Chato tumbled toward the ground.