The War That Came Early: West and East Read online

  The only trouble was, officers could get ideas even without enlisted men giving them away. The officers at the front enjoyed those tree bursts no more than did the soldiers they led. A captain in a battalion a few hundred meters away lost his manhood to a shell fragment. Like anybody else, Fujita knew such disasters could happen. Men spoke of them only in whispers, though. Even thinking about that one made Fujita want to cup his hands in front of his crotch. But how much good would that do if your number was up? Wouldn’t you just lose some fingers along with your cock?

  A whole platoon—Fujita only thanked heaven it wasn’t his—went forth to infiltrate the Soviet positions and do something about those damned guns. None of the Japanese soldiers came back. The Russian guns kept flaying the men in the forward positions. Worst of all, nobody seemed much surprised.

  After it became obvious that the platoon was sacrificed on the altar of a god who didn’t care, Superior Private Hayashi came up to Fujita and said, “May I please speak with you, Sergeant-san?” By the way he kept his voice down and looked around after he spoke, he wanted no one overhearing him.

  “Nan desu-ka?” Fujita asked, his own voice carefully neutral.

  “I’ll tell you what it is, Sergeant-san.” Before telling him, Hayashi took a deep breath and licked his lips. Then he charged ahead: “Why do we have donkeys commanding us, Sergeant-san? They must have known a platoon’s worth of infantry couldn’t get near those guns, much less take them out. But they sent them across the line anyhow, so it would look like they were doing something.” Another deep breath. Another charge forward: “It’s murder, Sergeant-san—nothing else but.”

  No wonder he shivered when he finished. He’d just put his life in the palm of Sergeant Fujita’s hand. If Fujita wanted to squeeze it out, all he had to do was report this conversation to any officer. That would be the end of the clever young superior private. Corporal Kawakami would have extinguished him in a heartbeat. Kawakami knew where his rice bowl came from.

  Fujita only sighed. “Before you go on about how they’re big jackasses, tell me what you’d do if you were in charge.”

  “Keep bombing them. At least that has a chance of doing some good,” Hayashi said at once. He must have been brooding about this for a long time. Well, who could blame him? Taking courage because Fujita wasn’t calling him a traitor (or simply beating the devil out of him for saying the wrong thing, as was a sergeant’s privilege), Hayashi hurried on: “And we ought to fortify this line the way the French did with the Maginot Line. We don’t have to go any farther. All we have to do is keep the Russians from opening the railroad to Vladivostok again. Why do we need to waste men the way we’ve been doing?”

  He waited. Sergeant Fujita opened his mouth, then closed it again. He sighed again. “Bugger me with a pine cone if I know, Hayashi. You want to ask questions like that, you should ask an officer who can give you a proper answer.”

  “Please excuse me, Sergeant-san, but no thank you. I don’t think that would be a good idea.” Hayashi shuddered to show how very much he didn’t think that would be a good idea. “They would give me to the Kempeitai, and that would be that. To them, anyone who thinks they’re stupid has to be bad.”

  Thinking about the Kempeitai was plenty to make Sergeant Fujita shudder, too. The secret military police were like mean dogs: all bared teeth and growls. And they would also bite down. They’d bite down hard. They existed to chew up and spit out—or swallow—anyone judged to be a danger to Japan and the Emperor. Foreigner? Japanese? They cared not a sen’s worth.

  And now, because Fujita had listened to Hayashi without immediately bawling for his arrest, he too was complicit. If the Kempeitai came for Hayashi, they’d come for him as well. Maybe not right away, but they would. And once they got their hands on him … In spite of the disgrace, he would almost rather the Russians caught him.

  “Get out of here,” he said roughly. “Shigata ga nai, neh? You can’t do anything at all about it—except make sure your foxhole has as much top cover as you can put on it and still be able to fight. Go on, kid. Scram.” Hayashi went away. All the answerless questions he’d asked lingered in Fujita’s mind like the snow in a long Siberian winter.

  Chapter 19

  Another hotshot on this stretch of the line. Willi Dernen saw the need. The son of a bitch with the monster rifle on the other side was still killing people at ranges that stretched to almost two kilometers. He’d sure put paid to the last fellow the Wehrmacht sent against him. Willi was one of the men who’d brought in Sergeant Fegelein’s body under cover of darkness. The late sergeant had very little head left north of the bridge of the nose. Willi’d seen a lot of dreadful wounds. He was damn glad he hadn’t seen this one by daylight.

  Oberfeldwebel Marcus Puttkamer was younger than his late, lightly lamented predecessor had been. He took the guy on the other side seriously. Well, Willi took anybody who carried an antipanzer rifle seriously. Using that thing to kill people was like using a U-boat’s torpedo to sink a canoe … which didn’t mean it wouldn’t work. Oh, no. It worked fine.

  Puttkamer set about slaughtering any officers and men he could reach with his own Mauser. It bore about the same relation to Willi’s rifle as a thoroughbred did to a cart horse. Still … “How come you don’t use one of those big mothers, too?” Willi asked.

  A lot of senior noncoms thought they were gods. (So did some junior noncoms—Arno Baatz, for instance.) But Puttkamer seemed like a human being, as Fegelein had before him. He drank beer or wine when he came off duty. He played skat—not too well, either. He laughed at dirty jokes, and told some of his own.

  Now he said, “I like the piece I’ve got. He may have a little more range, but I’ve got more accuracy. This baby’s made to special tolerances. It’s tighter than a five-hundred-mark whore’s pussy. I’ve got special ammo, too. If I can see it, I can hit it—you’d best believe I can.”

  “I’m not arguing,” Willi answered. Puttkamer had a sharpshooter’s arrogance, all right. Well, if you weren’t self-confident, you had no business going into his line of work.

  Willi wondered how Wolfgang Storch was doing in a French POW camp. He hoped his buddy’d made it into a camp, that the froggies hadn’t just knocked him over the head. Either way, though, he was bound to be better off than if the SS bastards started gnawing at his liver.

  “Matter of fact,” the Oberfeldwebel went on, “I hit the fucker square in the helmet. Only thing wrong was, he didn’t have his head in it. He had it on a stick—in the scope, I watched it spin. Oh, he’s cute, all right, but not cute enough.”

  “Does he think you think he’s dead?” Willi inquired.

  “I hope so, but I don’t believe it. He’s no dope,” Puttkamer replied. Fegelein had said the same thing. The current sniper went on, “I kind of wish I hadn’t rung his bell, too. He was wearing a Czech helmet, and there aren’t that many of them over there. Now he’s bound to have an Adrian, so he’ll look like every other froggy who isn’t a tadpole any more.”

  “Would he get another Czech job to fool you?” Willi asked.

  “Hmm.” The sniper eyed him. Unlike the other sharpshooter, Marcus Puttkamer was dark and not especially big. “You’re pretty cute yourself, aren’t you?”

  “I’m glad you think so, sweetie.” Willi batted his own eyes.

  Puttkamer laughed and made as if to punch him. “Ah, you got me there. Yeah, he might be that cute. Never can tell. One more thing to worry about. Danke schön.”

  “Glad to help,” Willi said.

  “Are you?” Puttkamer’s gaze sharpened. All at once, Willi felt as if a goose were walking over his grave. The Oberfeldwebel had sniper’s eyes after all, even if they were dark. “Feel like being my number two? I could use somebody with his head on straight.”

  “Your decoy, you mean? How many have you gone through? Are any of them still breathing?” Willi tried to keep his tone light, but he was kidding on the square. He knew some of what a sniper’s number two did: drew the enemy sni
per’s fire, so the fellow with the scope-sighted rifle could find his target. That was an honor Willi could do without. He remembered Fegelein’s ruined head, and wished he hadn’t. You wouldn’t stop a round from an antipanzer rifle. Anything made to punch through a couple of centimeters of hardened steel would punch right on through flesh and blood, too.

  “I’m not asking you to stick your head up,” Puttkamer said, reading his mind—but not answering his question. “You can hold a Stahlhelm up on a stick, same as that Czech mother did with his pot. Where’s the risk in that?”

  “Oh, I’m sure it’s there somewhere,” Willi said dryly. A few months of combat were plenty to convince him there was risk in anything that had anything to do with the enemy.

  Marcus Puttkamer laughed again, on a different note this time. “You do have to put some chips in the game if you expect to take any out.”

  “I don’t want to cash in my chips,” Willi retorted.

  “You get up to the front, that can happen any old place,” the sniper said. “Come on, man. Do you want to keep taking orders from—what do you call the asshole?—from Awful Arno, that’s it? And he is, too.”

  If anything could pump Willi up about the prospect of serving as a sniper’s assistant, getting out from under Corporal Baatz’s thumb did the trick. “Where do I sign up?” he asked, suddenly champing at the bit.

  One more laugh from Puttkamer. “Leave it to me. I’ll talk the guy into it.” He sounded altogether matter-of-fact. Willi suspected he would have sounded the same way had he said I’ll plug the guy if he gives me any grief. And if Awful Arno did give him any grief, Puttkamer might threaten to plug him, too. He also might follow through, and Awful Arno would have to be a real jerk not to understand as much. Of course, he was Awful Arno.…

  The corporal came up to Willi the next morning. “The sniper says he wants you for his number two.”

  “That’s right.” Willi nodded.

  “You want to do it?”

  If Willi seemed too eager, Baatz would tell him no on general principles. Long acquaintance made Willi sure of it. So he only shrugged and said, “I don’t mind. It’s something different, anyhow.”

  “Good way to get yourself blown up, you mean.” Awful Arno had also heard the stories about what happened to a sniper’s helper. Puttkamer had seemed sympathetic. Baatz sounded as if he looked forward to Willi’s untimely demise. Chances were he did. Why not? If Willi caught one with his face, it wouldn’t hurt Arno a bit.

  Willi shrugged again. “Can happen to anybody. Those SS guys were just visiting the village. French guns didn’t know—or care. They chewed that one fellow up regardless.”

  Baatz’s fleshy face hardened, or maybe congealed was the better word. “I still say you had something to do with Storch going missing when the SS wanted him.”

  “You can say whatever you want. Talk is cheap.”

  “Funny man.” Awful Arno made as if to spit. “Go on. Hang with Puttkamer—for as long as you last. Won’t be long, I bet, but don’t come crying to me after you get your balls blown off. I’m glad to be rid of you.”

  “Well, we’re even, then.” Willi flipped Baatz an ironic salute and ambled off to find his new master. Looking at it that way made him feel like a hound that had just been sold. Could any hound be as glad to get a new master as he was? He didn’t believe it.

  “Baatz hopes you’ll get killed,” Puttkamer remarked. “What did you do to make him love you so much?”

  “Oh, this and that. Maybe even some of the other thing, too.” Willi didn’t trust the sniper far enough to tell him more than that. If Puttkamer wanted chapter and verse, he could get them from Awful Arno.

  Or maybe he already had. “If you think I love the blackshirts, Dernen, you’d better think twice.”

  “Sure,” Willi said. What was he going to say? Bullshit!? Not likely! “Let’s go get that Czech, huh? He’s what we’ve got to worry about now, right?”

  “Right,” Puttkamer said, and then, “Well, come on. You can see how I do this shit. And you know your stretch of line better than I do. Maybe you’ll show me some stuff I didn’t already spot.”

  They went up and down the line. Willi saw it in ways he never had before. He knew there were places where you had to keep your head down if you wanted to keep it on your shoulders. But he hadn’t worried about the spots from which you could peer across to the enemy’s position and see what the French and the Czechs and the rest of that rabble were up to.

  “You don’t want to do your observing from the same spot twice in a row,” Puttkamer said, like a teacher explaining how to multiply fractions. “Somebody’ll be watching for you to be stupid. No patterns. Never any patterns. Flip a coin and follow it if you have to, to keep from giving them a handle on you. If you don’t know ahead of time what you’ll do next, the other boys can’t, either.”

  “That makes sense,” Willi said. “What will you want me to do? Draw the Czech’s fire, right? Sounds like a good way for my folks to get a wire they don’t want.”

  “The idea is to get him to shoot at you, not to get him to shoot you. There’s a difference, you know,” the sniper answered. “You’ll do the kind of things the Czech did with me—show your helmet without leaving your head in it. Keep an eye peeled for the sun shining off a telescope or binocular lenses. For God’s sake, let me know if you see anything funny. Maybe we’ll get you a sniper’s rifle, too, instead of the worthless piece of shit you’re lugging around now. How’s that sound?”

  “All right, I guess.” Willi’s grin was twisted. “Besides, I’m yours for now. Awful Arno’s washed his hands of me.”

  “That’s good luck, not bad,” Puttkamer said. Willi had to hope he was right.

  SERGEANT HALÉVY SET A HAND on Vaclav Jezek’s shoulder. “You’re not the hunted,” the Jew said. “You’re the hunter. That’s how you’ve got to look at it.”

  “I’m the hunter. Uh-huh. Sure.” If Vaclav sounded distinctly unenthusiastic, the way he sounded reflected the way he felt. And he had his reasons. He picked up the helmet the German sniper had ventilated. “If I’m the hunter, how come he did this to me and I haven’t done a goddamn thing to him?”

  “You weren’t wearing it.” Halévy looked on the bright side of things. He could afford to—the Nazi wasn’t trying to spill his brains out on the bottom of a trench.

  “No shit!” Vaclav said. After a little while wearing a French model brain bucket, he’d got his hands on another Czech pot. This one didn’t fit as well as the older helmet had, but it didn’t have those two neat 7.92mm holes in it, either. He did like it better than the Adrian, which protected less of his head. Of course, nothing protected you from a direct hit by a rifle round. You’d need a helmet as thick as the side of a tank to do that. And you’d need a rhino’s neck muscles to wear it. He did think the Czech model was better than the Adrian for keeping shell fragments from needling through his skull.

  Halévy made a small production out of lighting a cigarette. “Aren’t you happy, though?” he said after a couple of puffs. “Now the French officers are glad you carry that antitank rifle. They aren’t trying to get you to turn it in any more.”

  “Terrific!” Jezek said. “That’s on account of the Fritz is punching their tickets for them, and they want me to make him quit.”

  “Even French officers think they’re entitled to live.” Benjamin Halévy spread his hands, as if to say What can you do? “Poor bastards don’t know any better.”

  Vaclav opened his mouth, then closed it again without saying anything. He had to work that through before he answered. After a moment, he tried again: “Only a Jew would come out with something that knotted-up.”

  “Why, thank you!” Halévy said, without any irony Vaclav could hear. “Maybe I should wave my circumcised cock at the German. Then he’d want to kill me as much as he wants to get you.”

  “I wish I could work out how he thinks,” Jezek said fretfully. “The other Nazi was easier.”

  “He fi
gured he’d get you because he was a German and you weren’t. This guy is better than that, anyway,” Halévy said.

  “He’s a lot better than that, dammit,” Vaclav said. “Half the time, I don’t even think he knows where he’ll shoot from next.”

  “How could he not?”

  “Shit, for all I know he rolls dice or something. One he goes here, three he goes there, six he goes somewhere else. Wherever he goes, he nails people.”

  “You’re doing the same thing to his side,” Halévy said.

  “I know. But I haven’t got a glimpse of him.” Vaclav hardly heard his own reply. Rolling dice … He’d only been running his mouth when he said that. But it sure made sense now that it was out. How could you stalk a man if he had no pattern you could find? You couldn’t. Vaclav had a couple of yellowish ivories in his own pocket. He’d made a little money with them—lost a little, too. Maybe they had uses he hadn’t thought of before.

  He had his favorite places from which to observe the German line, and from which to fire at the Fritzes when he found the chance. Now, knowing the Nazi sniper was on the prowl behind the barbed wire and shell holes separating the two sides, he gave up on those familiar places. He had the feeling that, if he put an eye up to one of his loopholes, a Mauser bullet would greet him an instant later. Maybe he was only being jumpy, but he didn’t believe in taking chances.

  Of course, he was also taking chances in finding new spots from which to watch the enemy. One of the reasons his favorite places were favorites was that they were good places. He could watch the Germans and shoot at the careless ones with little risk to himself. When he went somewhere else, the Nazis had a better chance to spot him and knock him over.

  But—he hoped—the sniper wouldn’t be looking for him in these new spots. He had a dirty green cloth he draped over his telescope so the German wouldn’t notice it, and to keep the lens from flashing in the sun.