The War That Came Early: Coup d'Etat Page 3

  And he went to France again, this time as a staff sergeant rather than a raw private, when things heated up once more in 1938. Regardless of rank, he knew—he’d had it proved to him—he wasn’t bulletproof. He’d fought in Belgium, and then in France as the Allied armies fell back under the weight of the new German assault. Once they managed to keep the Nazis from sweeping around behind Paris and winning the campaign fast—Wilhelm’s old pipe dream, even if Hitler came equipped with a different mustache—he got shipped off to Norway as part of the Anglo-French expeditionary force that tried to stop the Wehrmacht there.

  “That’s when my trouble really started,” he muttered under his breath. A dumpy woman coming the other way on the London sidewalk gave him a funny look. He didn’t care. It wasn’t as if he were wrong.

  The Anglo-French force couldn’t stop the Germans. Air power outdid sea power, even if the Royal Navy was Royal. Walsh counted himself lucky for getting out of Namsos before it fell. Plenty of soldiers hadn’t. A Stuka attacked the destroyer that carried him home after sneaking into the harbor under cover of the long northern winter night, but the ship survived to make it back to Dundee.

  He’d been on leave, riding a hired bicycle through the Scottish countryside, when.… That was when his troubles really started. He’d seen, and recognized, a Messerschmitt Bf-110, a long-range German fighter, buzzing along above Scotland. He’d watched somebody bail out and come down in a field not far from the narrow lane he was traveling.

  Why he had to be the one to meet Rudolf Hess and take the Nazi big shot back to the authorities, he’d never worked out. It wasn’t proof of God’s love for him. He was too bloody sure of that. If anything, it was proof the Almighty really and truly had it in for him.

  Because Hess was carrying a proposal from Hitler to Chamberlain and Daladier. The Germans were willing to withdraw from France (though not from the Low Countries or Scandinavia, and certainly not from Czechoslovakia, which was what the war was supposed to be about) in exchange for Anglo-French support of the war in the East, the war Germany and Poland were fighting against Stalin.

  And Chamberlain and Daladier made the deal. Neither of them had wanted to fight the Führer. They’d even gone to Munich to hand him Czechoslovakia on a silver platter. But he wouldn’t take it peacefully, not after a Czech nationalist took a revolver into Germany and plugged Konrad Henlein, the leader of the Germans in the Sudetenland.

  It wasn’t as if Stalin were a nice guy himself. As soon as he saw that Hitler wasn’t sweeping all before him in the West, he demanded a chunk of northeastern Poland from Marshal Smigly-Ridz—a chunk that included the city of Wilno, which not only Poland and the Soviet Union but also Lithuania claimed.

  Proud as any Pole, Smigly-Ridz said no. So Stalin invaded. He did not too well for much too long, but finally outweighed the Poles in the area by enough to be on the point of grabbing Wilno. But before he could, Marshal Smigly-Ridz asked Hitler for help. No one ever had to ask Hitler twice about whether he wanted to fight Bolsheviks. That bought him the two-front war from which the existence of Poland had shielded him up till then, but he didn’t care.

  Chances were Chamberlain and Daladier preferred fighting Bolsheviks to going after the Nazis. Hitler gave them the bait, and they gulped it with greedy jaws. As Hess had bailed out of the Bf-110, the Führer bailed out of his war in the West. With the Low Countries and Denmark and Norway firmly under his thumb, he had England and France on his side once their leaders pulled the big switch. He might be a vicious weasel, but he was a damned clever vicious weasel.

  Some Englishmen couldn’t stomach what their Prime Minister had done. Walsh was one of them, not that anybody cared tuppence about what a staff sergeant thought. But Winston Churchill was another. He hated Hitler and Hess and everything they stood for. He thundered about what an enormous betrayal the big switch was … till he walked in front of a Bentley allegedly driven by a drunk.

  No one but Chamberlain and his claque knew whether Churchill’s untimely demise was an accident or something else altogether. No one knew, but plenty of people suspected. Alistair Walsh, not surprisingly, was one of them. He couldn’t stand the idea of fighting alongside the bastards in Feldgrau and coal-scuttle helmets who’d come so close to killing him so often. And he couldn’t stand the idea of fighting for a government that might well have murdered its most vehement and most eloquent critic.

  They let him resign from the service. He was far from the only man who couldn’t abide the big switch. Plenty of veterans found themselves unable to make it. But, because he’d seen that parachute open up there in Scotland, he’d acquired better political connections than most of the rest. Churchill might be dead, but other, mostly younger, Conservatives still resisted the government’s move. (It wasn’t Chamberlain’s government any more. Chamberlain was dead, of bowel cancer. But Sir Horace Wilson, his successor, was more ruthless than he had been—and even more obsequious to the Nazis.)

  When Walsh casually glanced back over his shoulder, then, he really wasn’t so casual as all that. A nondescript little man was following him, and not disguising it as well as he should have. Someone from Scotland Yard, probably. The police were the government’s hounds. Military Intelligence was split. Some people followed orders no matter what. Others couldn’t stand the notion of being on the same side as the Gestapo.

  Walsh rounded a corner and quickly stepped into a chemist’s shop. As the aproned gentleman behind the counter asked “How may I help you, sir?”, the sergeant peered out through the window set into the shop’s front door.

  Sure enough, the shadow mooched around the corner. Sure enough, he stopped right in front of the chemist’s to try to work out where Walsh had gone. He came to the proper conclusion—just as Walsh threw the door open and almost hit him in the face with it. The shadow showed admirable reflexes in jumping back. The way his right hand darted under his jacket showed he probably had a pistol in a shoulder holster.

  At the moment, Walsh didn’t care. He knew he would later, but he didn’t now. That gave him a startling moral advantage. “Sod off,” he growled. “The more grief your lot gives me, the more trouble I’ll give you. Have you got that?”

  “I’m sure I haven’t the least idea what you mean, sir.” The shadow gave a good game try at innocence.

  Walsh laughed in his face. “My left one,” he jeered. “You tell Sir Horace to leave me alone. Tell him to leave all of my mob alone. We can make him just as sorry as Adolf can—he’d best believe it, too. Tell him plain, do you hear me?”

  He had the satisfaction of watching color drain from the other man’s face. “I don’t speak to the likes of the PM,” the shadow gasped.

  “I’ll wager that’s the truth, any road,” Walsh said brutally. “But you talk to somebody who does talk to him, right?” Without waiting for an answer, he went on, “Tell him it’s still a free country, and it’ll go right on being one, too. We aren’t bloody Fritzes. We don’t put up with his kind of nonsense. Think you can remember that?”

  “Oh, I’ll remember.” The shadow regained spirit. “And I’ll lay you’ll remember, too—only you won’t be so happy about it. The cheek!” He did walk off then, which surprised Walsh. Was someone else following the follower, and Walsh as well?

  If someone was, he wasn’t blatant enough to give himself away. As luck or irony would have it, Walsh hadn’t been going anywhere or intending to meet anyone who would have interested either the shadow or his superiors, up to and including Horace Wilson, in the slightest. He hadn’t tried to tell that to the man he’d confronted. He knew it would have done him no good. England remained nominally free. But its people were starting to learn totalitarian lessons, and one of the first of those was that nobody believed you when you said you were doing something altogether innocent. And the more you insisted on it, the worse off you ended up.

  HANS-ULRICH RUDEL eyed his Ju-87 like a parent looking at a child just out of surgery. The groundcrew men who’d performed the operation seemed proud o
f themselves. “There you go, sir,” said the Luftwaffe corporal who’d bossed the crew. “Now you can take off and land your Stuka no matter how shitty the weather gets.”

  “Well … maybe,” Hans-Ulrich answered. As far as he was concerned, that maintenance sergeant had just showed why he stayed on the ground.

  Not that the fellow didn’t have a point. Putting skis on the Ju-87 in place of wheels let the dive bomber take off and land in conditions it couldn’t normally handle. The Ivans did that kind of thing all the time. If any flyers in the world were used to coping with vicious winters, the men of the Red Air Force were the ones. And Stukas’ fixed undercarriages made the conversion easier than it would have been on planes with retractable landing gear.

  Even so, anybody who tried to take off or land in the middle of one of these screaming blizzards would crash and burn. You did want to be able to see when you were getting airborne or coming down. Mistakes at the beginning or end of a flight wrote off almost as many planes as enemy fighters and flak.

  Sergeant Albert Dieselhorst ambled up. The radioman and rear gunner considered the skis with enthusiasm hidden amazingly well. His gaze traveled from them to the panzer-busting 37mm gun pods mounted under the wings. “Happy day,” he said. “We’ll be even less aerodynamic than we were already.”

  Rudel winced. Those heavy, bulky gun pods did up the drag and make the Ju-87 slower and less maneuverable than it was without them. All the same, the pilot answered, “Take an even strain, Albert. She couldn’t get out of her own way even before they bolted on the skis.”

  “Sir!” The groundcrew corporal sounded hurt. Hans-Ulrich half expected him to clap a hand to his heart like an affronted maiden in a bad melodrama.

  “Hell, he’s right,” Dieselhorst said. “We count more on our armor than on our guns and our speed—ha! there’s a laugh!—to get us through when we’re in a jam.”

  He wore the Iron Cross First Class on his left breast pocket. Rudel wore the Knight’s Cross on a ribbon around his neck. A lowly groundcrew corporal with only the ribbon for the Iron Cross Second Class—a decoration that, in this war, you had to work hard not to win—hooked to a tunic button couldn’t very well argue with either one of them.

  Two days later, the weather was good enough for flying. The Stuka’s big Junkers Jumo engine fired up right away when the groundcrew men cranked it and spun the prop. They had a mechanical starter mounted on a truck chassis, but nothing they did would make the truck motor turn over. Muscle power and bad language sufficed. A minister’s son, Hans-Ulrich rarely swore and almost never drank. If not for that Ritterkreuz and all it said about his nerve, he would have been even more a white crow to his comrades than he already was.

  Snow and the skis smoothed out the dirt airstrip’s bumps and potholes better than the wheels had. But Rudel quickly found Sergeant Dieselhorst had made a shrewd guess. The Ju-87 flew like a garbage truck with wings. If any Russian fighter found him, even one of the obsolete biplanes the Ivans kept flying, he and Albert were in a world of trouble.

  Snowy fields, bare-branched birches with bark almost white as snow, pines and firs and spruces all snow-dappled … The Russian landscape in winter. The sun never climbed far above the southern horizon, not in these latitudes. Because it stayed so low, it cast long shadows. The Reds were better at camouflage than even the thorough Germans dreamt of being, but not for all their ingenuity could they hide shadows. Neither whitewashing them nor draping them with netting did Stalin’s men the least bit of good.

  Hans-Ulrich might not have noticed the Russian panzers moving up to the front. They were well whitewashed, and Soviet soldiers trotted in their wake with whisks made from branches to smooth out their tracks so those didn’t show up from the air. They did a pretty good job of that, too. Rudel might not have seen the tracks. Shadows, though … Shadows he saw.

  He gave Dieselhorst the number of panzers he observed and their approximate position. The radioman with the rear-facing machine-gun mount relayed the news to the Germans on the ground. Hans-Ulrich added, “You can tell them I’m attacking, too.” He tipped the Stuka into a dive.

  Acceleration pressed him against the armored back of his seat. He wondered if the skis would act as small airfoils and change the plane’s performance, but they didn’t seem to. The groundcrew men hadn’t touched the Jericho trumpets mounted in the landing-gear struts. The screaming sirens terrorized the Russian foot soldiers, who ran every which way like ants from a disturbed nest.

  Panzers couldn’t scatter like that—and, inside those clattering hulls, even the wail from the Jericho trumpets took a while to register. The machines quickly swelled from specks to toys to the real thing. Rudel’s finger came down on the firing button. Each 37mm gun bellowed and spat flame.

  Recoil from those monsters slowed the Stuka even better than dive brakes. Hans-Ulrich yanked back hard on the stick. Things went red in front of his eyes as the Ju-87 pulled out of the dive. If you weren’t paying attention, you could fly a dive bomber straight into the ground. Several Germans in the Legion Kondor had done it in Spain. Stukas got autopilots after that, but the men who flew them unanimously hated the gadgets. Hans-Ulrich had had groundcrew men disable his, and he was far from the only pilot who had.

  “You got the bastard!” Sergeant Dieselhorst’s voice through the speaking tube was like sounding brass. “Engine’s on fire, crew’s bailing out.”

  “Good.” Rudel couldn’t see behind him, so he had to rely on the radioman’s reports. Experience in France and here had taught him to aim for the engine compartment. Almost any panzer’s armor was thinnest on the decking there. He manhandled the Stuka into a climbing turn. “Let’s see if we can kill another one, or maybe more than one.”

  The pillar of greasy black smoke rising from the rear of the panzer he’d struck told him it wouldn’t be going anywhere any more. He nodded to himself in somber satisfaction. He’d killed a lot of enemy armor with the big guns. He must have killed a lot of enemy panzer crewmen, too, but he tried not to dwell on that.

  After he’d gained enough altitude, he chose another whitewashed Russian panzer and tipped the Stuka into a new dive. Again, the Jericho trumpets howled. This time, though, they didn’t take the Ivans on the ground by surprise. Hans-Ulrich had a low opinion of Russian brains, but not of Russian balls. The Reds opened up on the Stuka with their small arms. The commander of Rudel’s new target vehicle fired a burst from the turret with a submachine gun.

  All that might have made the Ivans happier, but did them no good. You couldn’t shoot accurately at a dive bomber from the ground—it was going too fast. Even if you got lucky and hit it, the engine and the compartment that housed the two crewmen were armored against rifle-caliber bullets.

  Blam! Blam! The Stuka’s big guns thundered again, at almost the same instant. Hans-Ulrich pulled out of the dive. He brought his fist down on his thigh in triumph when Sergeant Dieselhorst reported that he’d nailed another one. “Aim to go after number three?” Dieselhorst asked.

  “Why not?” Rudel said. “Hardly any Russian panzers carry radios. They won’t call fighters after us.”

  “Some do, so you hope they won’t,” the veteran underofficer replied.

  That was nothing but the truth. Hans-Ulrich didn’t want to meet fighters, not in his ungainly machine. He got more ground fire in this dive than he had before. At least one lucky round clanged into the Stuka, but it did no harm. And when the 37mm guns belched fire once more, they wrecked another Soviet panzer.

  Part of Rudel wanted to go after a fourth Russian machine, but common sense told him that was a bad idea. Sooner or later, fighters blazoned with the red star would show up around here. The best thing he could do was to be somewhere else when they did. He hauled the Stuka’s nose around and flew off to the west.

  IVAN KUCHKOV COUNTED HIMSELF lucky to be alive. He was a short, squat, brawny Russian peasant. The authorities had yanked him off the collective farm where he grew up and put him in the bomb bay of an SB-2 medium b
omber. Short, squat, and brawny were ideal qualifications for a bombardier. Smart wasn’t, and nobody, including Ivan himself, had ever claimed he was.

  He hadn’t tried to keep track of how many missions he’d flown, for instance. He just knew there’d been a lot of them. He also knew that, if you flew a lot of missions against the Nazis, you were waiting for the law of averages to catch up with you.

  And it did. The Tupolev bomber had got hit and caught fire on the way back from a run into German-held Byelorussia. Kuchkov bailed out. He didn’t think either the pilot or the copilot and bomb-aimer made it. He’d flown with Sergei Yaroslavsky ever since they “volunteered” to aid Czechoslovakia against Fascist invaders when the war was new. Unless his brain was totally fucked, he wouldn’t be flying with the lieutenant any more.

  He wasn’t sure he’d be flying at all. Red Army men rescued him and got him away from the Germans after he landed. The first lieutenant commanding the company didn’t want to give him back to the Red Air Force. Lieutenant Pavel Obolensky recognized a hard-nosed son of a bitch when he saw one. Obolensky wanted Kuchkov fighting for him.

  “The air force? Faggots fight in the air force,” the lieutenant declared. “You’re a real man, right? Real men belong in the Red Army!”

  That was nonsense, as Kuchkov had reason to know. “I bet my bombs killed more Fascists than all the fuckers in your cocksucking regiment, sir,” he said. He wasn’t being deliberately disrespectful. He just spoke mat, the obscenity-laced underworld and underground dialect of Russian, as naturally as he breathed. He almost didn’t know how not to swear.

  Luckily for him, Lieutenant Obolensky, like Yaroslavsky, recognized as much and didn’t come down on him on account of his foul mouth. “Maybe they did,” the infantry officer said. “But fuck your mother if we don’t get to watch the cunts die when we nail ’em.” Like most Russians, he could use mat, too, even if he didn’t make a habit of it the way Kuchkov did.