The War That Came Early: West and East Read online

  Plenty of Wehrmacht men passed through his field of view. He wished he could kill them all, and more besides. He didn’t shoot at all of them, though, or even at very many. By the nature of things, a sniper had to pick and choose. He wouldn’t last long if he got greedy.

  Some of the Germans had taken to twisting their shoulder straps so they covered up the pips and embroidery that marked higher ranks. Sometimes Vaclav noticed that. When he did, he tried to hit the men who’d got cute. How often he didn’t notice, of course, he couldn’t begin to guess.

  Every so often, he saw Germans scrutinizing the lines the Czechs and French held against them. One of them was simply too brazen for belief. The way he stood head and shoulders above the parados, binoculars in hand, infuriated Vaclav. Did the son of a bitch think nobody would punch his ticket for him? He might as well have mailed out engraved invitations with SHOOT ME! on them.

  Vaclav took care of that for him. The antitank rifle thundered and slammed hard against his right shoulder. As soon as he fired, he ducked, a habit he’d acquired not long after he started sniping. You could see what you did later, and from somewhere else. After you’d taken your shot, you couldn’t change anything anyway.

  A split second after he lowered his head, a bullet cracked through the space where it had been. “Hello!” he said, and didn’t come up again, the way he might have otherwise.

  “Somebody’s laying for you,” Benjamin Halévy remarked.

  “Thanks a bunch. I never would have guessed without you,” Vaclav said. The Jew laughed. Vaclav didn’t. “God damn it to hell, that bastard was just standing there asking for it. I know I got him. Not even the Nazis would waste a man of their own for the sake of killing me … would they?” He heard the doubt in his own voice. Who could guess exactly how ruthless the Germans were?

  “I’ll have a look.” Halévy did, cautiously, from ten meters down the trench. “I don’t find him now.”

  “I wonder who he was. He acted like an officer, and a dumb officer to boot,” Vaclav said. “You wouldn’t see an enlisted man standing there giving that kind of target. The guys who really fight know better.”

  “Maybe he was from the General Staff,” Sergeant Halévy said. “If half of what you hear about them is true, the Nazis with red stripes on their pants don’t know shit about the real world.”

  “Easy to say that,” Jezek answered. “They’re here in France. They’re in Poland. They’re all over Czechoslovakia, fuck ’em up the ass. I don’t see anybody else’s soldiers in Germany. Do you?”

  “Well, no,” Halévy admitted. “But—” Before he could say anything more, German artillery came to thunderous life. He and Vaclav both dove for cover. Were the Fritzes shelling like that to avenge the Dummkopf Vaclav had knocked over? They did things like that. If the Dummkopf was an important Dummkopf, the Czech had accomplished something worth doing. He consoled himself with that—and hoped the Nazis’ vengeance wouldn’t come down on him now.

  WILLI DERNEN EXAMINED what was left of the head from the department-store dummy Oberfeldwebel Puttkamer had kitted out in German helmet and tunic. Even less was left of the dummy’s noggin than of the other sniper’s head. Willi let out a low, respectful whistle. “That piece packs a fuck of a wallop,” he said.

  “What makes you think so, Sherlock Holmes?” Puttkamer enquired. Willi’s ears felt incandescent. The senior noncom went on, “He knows the tricks, damn him. He was down again before I could fire. I’m sure of it.”

  “Too bad,” Willi said.

  “You’d better believe it,” Marcus Puttkamer said. “He’s still out there. He’s still learning. He’s still got his goddamn peashooter, too. I slip up even a little, he’s gonna smash my skull just like the shitass dummy’s.” He considered Willi the way an entomologist considered a beetle before sticking a pin through it. “Or maybe yours.”

  “Thanks a lot, Feld,” Willi said. He’d thought about that possibility before agreeing to become the sniper’s number two, but not too much. Getting out from under Awful Arno counted for more. Well, he’d done that. But everything you got in this world came with a price tag attached. Part of the price here was drawing the notice of a sharpshooter who carried a gun that could kill you out to a couple of thousand meters. Next to that, even Awful Arno seemed … not quite so awful, anyhow. Willi glanced toward the enemy’s lines—but made sure he didn’t raise his head above the parapet to do it. “What do we try now?”

  Puttkamer lit a Gitane. Like Willi, he liked French tobacco better than the hay-and-horseshit smokes the Reich cranked out these days. After a moment’s pause, the Oberfeldwebel offered Willi the pack. With a nod of thanks, Willi took a smoke from it and leaned toward Puttkamer for a light. The first drag made him want to cough. Yeah, this was the real stuff, all right—no ersatz here.

  “I don’t know what to try right this minute,” Puttkamer answered, snorting smoke out his nostrils like a puzzled dragon. “He’s good, sure as hell. Oh, and you’re right—screw me if he wasn’t wearing a Czech helmet again.” His stubbled cheeks hollowed as he inhaled.

  “Wunderbar,” Willi muttered.

  “How about that?” the Oberfeldwebel said with an acid chuckle. “What I’ve got to do is, I’ve got to get him to make a mistake. If I’m there when he does it, he’ll never make another one.”

  “Sounds great, but didn’t you just say he was good?” Willi returned. “So how do you think you can make him screw up?”

  “Best idea I’ve had so far is to keep murdering as many French officers as I can, as far back from the trench as my rifle reaches,” Puttkamer answered matter-of-factly. “That won’t put his wind up—too much to hope for. But if all his superiors start screaming at him to get rid of the horrible Nazi gunslinger … They might make him move too fast and get careless. Or they might not, natürlich. But I think it’s worth a try. If you’ve got a better notion, sing out. Believe me, I’ll listen.”

  Dernen did believe him. Puttkamer wasn’t like Awful Arno, always sure he was right no matter what he said or did. Yeah, there were advantages to getting away from Baatz, sure as hell. “What can I do to help?” Willi asked. He felt like an assistant at a chess tournament. But they wouldn’t take pieces off the board. No, they’d take at least one body.

  “You can help kill them, that’s what. Let’s go get you a proper rifle, one with a scope on it,” Puttkamer said. “That piece of yours … Well, the factories turn out worse, but they sure as hell turn out better, too.”

  Having seen what the sniper could do with his special Mauser, Willi didn’t argue. He was used to his own weapon, but he felt no forsaking-all-others attachment to it. And even if he had, he couldn’t just mount a telescope on it and start picking off French officers a kilometer and a half away. Snipers’ Mausers had a special downturned bolt: the telescope interfered with the travel of an ordinary one.

  The quartermaster sergeant was as snotty as quartermaster sergeants usually were. “You want one for him?” the fellow exclaimed, as if Willi had a girlfriend prettier than the one a proper quartermaster would have issued him.

  “That’s right.” Marcus Puttkamer left it there. Not only was he an Oberfeldwebel himself, he was also a sniper. Who wanted to argue with him? Nobody with any sense, not even a quartermaster sergeant.

  And so Willi got his rifle. “Bolt will take some getting used to,” he said. “I reach for the wrong place.”

  “I did, too. You won’t take as long to get it as you think,” the sniper said. “But do you feel how smooth the action is? Sniper rifles are made the way they’re supposed to be. Now you’d better take care of it. You don’t keep it clean, you don’t keep it greased, I’ll mount a bayonet on it and then I’ll shove it up your ass. Get me?”

  “Jawohl, Feld,” Willi answered. Every sergeant he’d ever served under growled about keeping your weapon clean. Willi was as good about it as anyone, better than most. He could see why it would be especially important for a sniper.

  “I want you to spen
d the rest of the day practicing with the scope,” Puttkamer said. “Don’t look toward the French lines. They’ll see you, and somebody will stop your career before it gets going. Look at our trenches instead. If there’s somebody you wouldn’t mind seeing dead, find out what he looks like with crosshairs on him. But you’re such a sweet guy, you don’t have anybody like that, right?”

  “Oh, sure,” Willi said innocently.

  Puttkamer chuckled. “The other thing is, you have to be able to wait. The better you are at holding still, the more targets you’ll service. And that’s the idea, right?”

  “Right,” Willi said. The veteran didn’t care to talk about killing people. He did it, but he didn’t like to talk about it straight on. That was interesting, in its own way.

  “Practice,” the veteran sniper repeated. “When I think you’re ready, we’ll go out to a hide at night, and you can start potting froggies. Pick ones well back of the line, if you can. They’re more apt to be careless back there, anyhow. And if you do that, they’ll think it was me, and they’ll go buggier than they would if you showed a different style.”

  “I understand. But what I do if I spot the Czech asshole with the antipanzer rifle?” Willi asked.

  “Dispose of him,” Puttkamer said at once. “You think I’ll be mad? You think I’ll be jealous? Not a chance, kid. I’ll get you promoted. I’ll get you a medal. I’ll get you so fucking drunk, you’ll still have a Katzenjammer three days later. That’s our number one piece of business right now—dealing with that son of a bitch. You hear?”

  “I hear.” Willi not only heard, he believed. Awful Arno would have tried his hardest to grab the credit if Willi did anything worth noticing. If Oberfeldwebel Puttkamer wasn’t like that, more power to him.

  Baatz watched and sneered and made rude comments as Willi got used to his new weapon. Willi ignored him for a while. Then, as if by accident, he did get the corporal in the crosshairs. He didn’t have a round chambered. His finger was nowhere near the trigger. Awful Arno found something else to do in a hurry even so.

  After a few days, Puttkamer said, “Well, kid, let’s find out how you do.” After dark, he led Willi out to a shell hole that had a shattered door splayed half across it. “Get under there. Whatever you do, don’t move where they can see you till tomorrow night—and they won’t see you then, either. Wait. When you get a target, service it. Need to know anything else?”

  “Don’t think so,” Willi answered. Puttkamer set a hand on his shoulder, then silently crawled away.

  Willi slithered under the scarred door and went to sleep. When he woke up, the sun had risen behind him. Hidden by shadows, he ate black bread with liver paste on it. He looked through his binoculars. It was getting on toward noon when he spotted a Frenchman in a kepi striding along importantly half a kilometer behind the enemy line.

  Slowly, slowly, he moved the Mauser into position and picked up the Frenchman in the telescopic sight. He made sure nothing was out in the sunlight to give him away. Pierre or Gaston or whoever he was seemed not to have a care in the world. Willi took a deep breath. He let it out. He pulled the trigger—gently, as if with a lover’s caress.

  The Mauser kicked: not too hard, since it was pressed tight against his shoulder. The magnified Frenchman in the sight took another step. Then he fell over. Willi didn’t move. He didn’t shout or whoop or even light a cigarette. All the same, he knew he’d just joined the club.

  That night, two men brought what was left of Marcus Puttkamer back in a shelter half. From the neck up, he pretty much wasn’t there. The bullet that killed him must have caught him right under the chin and blown off most of his head. He looked worse than Sergeant Fegelein had, which wasn’t easy. Willi realized his new club had higher dues than he wanted to pay.

  A STUKA SCREAMED DOWN out of the hazy, gray-blue sky. Staff Sergeant Alistair Walsh fired a couple of shots at it. He knew that was long odds, but he did it anyhow. What did he have to lose?

  Bombs fell from the dive-bomber. It leveled off only a couple of hundred yards above the machine-gun nest it was attacking, then roared away. Sandbags, the gun and tripod, and bodies and pieces of bodies arced through the air.

  “Hell,” Walsh muttered. “Bloody fucking hell. This is where I came in.”

  When the German blow fell in the west the winter before, the Luftwaffe had had things all its own way for a while. In France, it didn’t any more; the RAF and the French were making the Fritzes pay for everything they got there. But that was France. Here in Norway, the deck still seemed stacked in the Nazis’ favor.

  Before the Germans jumped them, the Norwegians hadn’t had much of an air force of their own. They flew Italian Caproni bombers, Dutch Fokker monoplane fighters, and English Gloster Gladiators: biplanes outdated by both Hurricanes and Spitfires. They didn’t fly very many of any of them. The Luftwaffe could reach this part of Norway from newly occupied Denmark, and from airfields captured farther south in the country: Oslo was firmly in German hands.

  More Stukas dove, their sirens wailing like damned souls. More British strongpoints in front of Trondheim went up in smoke and fire. The Stukas flew away. They’d bomb up again, maybe refuel, and pretty soon they’d come back to blow up more of the defenses around the town.

  Somewhere out to sea, there was supposed to be a Royal Navy carrier. The planes that took off from its flight deck might help till England and France could bring in land-based fighters. Then again, they might not. Walsh had seen a Stuka outrun an English Skua. The lumbering German dive bombers couldn’t get out of their own way. What did that say about the poor miserable Skua? Nothing good, surely.

  Jock pointed south. “Are those bloody fucking German tanks?” the Yorkshireman asked.

  Walsh looked, too. Safe enough: no German foot soldiers close yet. How long would that last, though? Not long enough, plainly. “Afraid they are, chum,” the NCO said.

  “Well, what do we do about them?” Jock pressed.

  The ideal answer would have been Turn our own tanks loose on them. Walsh saw no English, French, or Norwegian tanks. He wasn’t sure there were any Norwegian tanks to see. There were a few Bren-gun carriers: tankettes, some people called them. They carried two men and a machine gun, and were well enough armored to keep out rifle bullets. If the other side had no tanks at all, tankettes were world-beaters. If, on the other hand, they ran up against real armor, they were doomed. And those were real tanks coming. Not first-rate real tanks, maybe: Panzer IIs, or perhaps captured Czech models. Anything that mounted a cannon was plenty to put paid to a Bren-gun carrier.

  Thrushes chirped among the tussocks. Fieldfares, wheatears: birds of the far north. One of them plucked a worm from the newly turned dirt in a bomb crater and swallowed it. Walsh laughed in spite of himself. Sure as hell, it was an ill wind that blew no one any good.

  An officer had some field glasses. After staring through them, he said, “Those are Czech T-35s.”

  Wonderful, Walsh thought. Always good to know what’s about to do you in. Before long, he saw that the young lieutenant was right. The Czech machines were bigger than Panzer IIs. Their road wheels were much bigger. And they carried bigger cannon: 37mm against the German tanks’ 20mm guns.

  The men in the Bren-gun carriers had guts. They rattled out ahead of the position the Tommies, poilus, and squareheads were manning. They would stop the German tanks if they could. Trouble was, Walsh knew too damn well they couldn’t. He also knew they knew they couldn’t.

  Somewhere along the line, there were said to be a couple of antitank cannon. Walsh had no idea where they were. They weren’t anywhere close by, so they were unlikely to make any difference in the upcoming fight. His hand shook when he lit a Navy Cut. Nothing was likely to make any difference in the upcoming fight.

  Jock’s thoughts were running on a similarly gloomy track. “We need the bloody fucking cavalry riding in to chase off the bloody fucking Indians, is what we need,” he said.

  “Too right we do,” Walsh agreed. “T
his isn’t what they call a Hollywood ending. Wrong bloody side is winning.”

  For some little while, he paid no attention to the rising buzz in the air. If he noticed it at all, he assumed it came from more Luftwaffe aircraft. But it didn’t. Damned if those weren’t Skuas, winging in from off the ocean. They could carry bombs as well as chasing planes faster than they were. Whatever bad things you could say about the Blackburn Skua—and you could say plenty—it was, by God, faster than a tank.

  Walsh pointed into the sky. “It’s the bloody fucking cavalry!”

  Jock stared. A grin as big as all outdoors slowly plastered itself across his face. “Well, up me arse if it ain’t, Sarge!”

  Doing their best impression of Stukas, the English fighter-bombers dove on the advancing tanks. They dropped their bombs. Then they climbed and dove again; their machine guns chattered as they shot up the Fritzes moving forward with the tanks.

  “That’ll scramble ’em!” Jock said exultantly.

  “It will!” Walsh said. That kind of treatment had scrambled English and French troops often enough—no, too bloody often.

  But the Germans, unlike their Allied counterparts, didn’t stay scrambled long. With what might have passed for majestic deliberation, the Skuas climbed and dove yet again, and then one more time still. That last pass proved one too many. Majestic deliberation turned out to be only a synonym for too goddamn slow.

  Messerschmitts roaring up from the south tore into the Skuas. The English planes streaked back toward the carrier that had launched them. It was, unfortunately, a slow streak, at least by the standards the 109s were used to. Wolves killing sheep could have had no easier time than the German fighters. One Skua after another tumbled out of the sky in smoking, flaming ruin. A couple of parachutes opened, but only a couple. Walsh reminded himself that each English plane carried not one but two highly trained young men.