Two Fronts twtce-5 Read online

  The Nationalists were recklessly brave (so were the Spaniards who fought on the Republican side). This time, their courage only cost them more casualties. They kept coming for a while after more pragmatic troops would have seen the thing was hopeless.

  Some of them got close enough to the Republican trenches to fling grenades into them. A fragment ripped Chaim’s baggy trousers. It didn’t bite his leg, though, for which he thanked the God in Whom good Marxist-Leninists weren’t supposed to believe. He didn’t particularly fear dying in battle. Getting badly hurt … He didn’t know anybody who wasn’t scared of that.

  At last, sullenly, the Nationalists pulled back. Some more of them got shot before they could reach the protection of their own trenches. Out in the space between the lines, the wounded groaned.

  Some of the Abe Lincolns took pot shots at them, as much to shut them up as for any other reason. Part of Chaim thought that was cruel. Part of him hoped somebody would put him out of his misery if he lay there, helpless and suffering, out in no-man’s-land.

  Then one of the Abe Lincolns’ officers said, “Let’s bring in some prisoners and see what we can squeeze out of them. You, you, you, you, and you.” Chaim was the second of those yous, Mike Carroll the third.

  “Thanks a bunch,” Chaim said. You could bitch about an order, but you couldn’t disobey one.

  Out he went, keeping his belly on the ground like a serpent. Finding Fascists to bring in wasn’t the problem, not this time. Not getting killed bringing them in might be another matter. He’d worry about that when he came to it.

  A Nationalist moaned in the next shell hole. Chaim scrambled down into it. “Aw, fuck,” he said softly. His stomach did a slow lurch. The guy’d been blown almost in half. Why wasn’t he dead? Human beings could be uncommonly hard to kill, yeah, but this was-what was the next step past ridiculous?

  His eyes found Chaim’s. “Por favor, Senor Internacional,” he said clearly.

  Please, Mr. International. He could even be polite about it. Chaim wanted to ask if he was sure, but, given the butchered ruin that he was, there couldn’t be much doubt about that. “Fuck,” Chaim repeated. But he would be doing the guy a favor-there couldn’t be any doubt about that, either.

  Chaim pulled out his bayonet and did what needed doing. Then he crawled off to find some other wounded Nationalist to haul back for questioning.

  Bacon and eggs and white toast with plenty of butter and marmalade. If that wasn’t a breakfast to let you go out and spit in winter’s eye, Peggy Druce had never heard of one. She said as much to her husband as she set the plate in front of him.

  Herb nodded. “You betcha, babe. Of course, the hot coffee doesn’t hurt, either.” The plume that rose from his Chesterfield behind the morning’s Philadelphia Inquirer might have been a smoke signal.

  “Want another cup?” Peggy asked.

  “Sure do.” Herb murmured thanks when Peggy poured it for him. He tucked into his breakfast.

  Peggy sat down and ate, too. “What we’re putting away would feed a family in Germany for a week,” she said. “I don’t know when the last time was they saw white bread or eggs or real coffee.”

  “Breaks my heart.” Herb stubbed out the cigarette and lit another one. “We ought to be at war with Hitler, too, same as we were against the Kaiser.” He tapped the newspaper with a nicotine-stained forefinger. “What I want to know is, how’d it get to be 1942 already? Like a dope, I wrote ‘1941’ on a check yesterday, and I had to void the darn thing.”

  “I’ve done it-not this year yet, but I have,” Peggy said. “It’s a pain in the keester, is what it is.”

  “What really frosts my pumpkin is, I’m supposed to be one of FDR’s hot-shot efficiency experts, right?” Herb laughed at himself. “Here I can’t even remember what year it is, for cryin’ out loud. Some efficiency, huh?”

  “If you don’t tell the people you’re dealing with, they’ll never know,” Peggy said reasonably. “And chances are they’ve all pulled the same rock one time or another.”

  “There you go.” Herb lowered the Inquirer so he could grin at her across the table. “Which one of us is the lawyer? Remind me again.”

  “One of the girls in the dorm room next to mine at Penn State was from Alabama or Mississippi or somewhere like that. She always pronounced it liar.”

  “She knew what was what, all right.” Herb put away the grub as if he were a doughboy shoveling food into his chowlock at a field kitchen in some ruined village in France. He paused to check his wristwatch. “I’m still good.”

  But even as he said that, he sent Peggy a pointed look, so she ate faster, too. “What time does your train head out? A quarter past nine?” she said.

  “That’s right.” He nodded.

  “You’re fine, then,” Peggy said. “Where are you going this time? Was it Kentucky?”

  “Tennessee.”

  “Oh, yeah.” She thumped her forehead with the heel of her hand, annoyed at herself for forgetting. “And who’s mucking things up in Tennessee?” Herb had come back from other trips with amazing stories of waste and corruption and stupidity run amok. Anyone who listened to him for a while would be sure the United States couldn’t possibly win the war-unless everybody else in the world was just as fouled up. Humanity being what it was, that made a pretty fair bet.

  This morning, though, her husband’s face closed down tight, as if he sat at a poker table or in a conference room with the other side’s attorneys. “Sorry, babe, but I can’t talk about that.”

  “What?” Peggy could hardly believe her ears. “I’m your wife, in case you hadn’t noticed. What am I gonna do? Send Hitler a telegram?” She’d spoken to the Fuhrer once, when she was marooned in Berlin. To say she had no desire to repeat the experience proved the power of understatement.

  “I know, I know. But this is heap big secret-and even that’s more than I ought to say about it.”

  “Some of the other stuff you’ve told me about was secret, too.”

  He sighed. “Peggy, I can’t talk, not about this stuff. I can’t even talk about why I can’t talk about it. If they had any way to vacuum out my brains after I finish what I need to do there, they’d use it.”

  She wasn’t going to get any more out of him. She could see as much, even if she couldn’t see why. But if he couldn’t talk about why he couldn’t talk about why things were secret … “Would they hang me for a spy if I asked you for one of those cigarettes?”

  “They’d have to hang me first.” Herb shook the pack till a Chesterfield stuck out. Peggy took it. Herb flicked the wheel on his Zippo. As advertised, a flame shot up the first try.

  Peggy leaned forward to get the cigarette going. She sighed out smoke. “That does go nice with food.”

  “Sure does.” Herb smoked another one, too. Then he went upstairs, and came down with his suitcase. He shrugged into his topcoat. Peggy put on a coat, too. The dishes could wait till she got back from dropping him off. He said, “One thing about rationing gasoline-less traffic these days.”

  “You’ve got that right,” Peggy agreed. Most people’s “A” stickers limited them to four gallons a week. You couldn’t go very far on that-to work and back every day, if you were lucky. The Druces’ Packard got a good deal more fuel; because he was in what the government reckoned an essential occupation, he had one of the rare and coveted “C” stickers.

  It was cold but clear. There wouldn’t, or shouldn’t, be any ice on the roads. Peggy got in on the driver’s side. She’d have to bring the car back. As Herb slid in beside her, he said, “Lucky me. I’ve got myself the best-darn-looking chauffeur in town.”

  “You!” Peggy said fondly.

  The Packard started right away. There went one more worry. Cold weather could do rude things to a battery. If Herb had had to wait till a taxi got here, he really might have missed his train.

  She drove downtown, toward Broad Street Station. When she passed an Esso station, she saw a cop checking ration stickers. Herb noticed,
too. “Some ways, it hardly seems like a free country any more, does it?” he remarked.

  “Oh, it’s not so bad. Trust me-it’s not.” Peggy had seen with her own eyes what things were like in a country that suddenly stopped being free. The grin on that German’s face at Marianske Lazny after the Nazis invaded Czechoslovakia in the fall of 1938 … He’d been cutting off a Jew’s beard with a big pair of shears. If he cut off some cheek or ear at the same time, well, hey, that only made the fun better. He thought so, anyhow, and he had enough rifles and machine guns and tanks on his side that the poor damned Jew had to stand there and take it unless he felt like dying on the spot. She still wondered sometimes what had happened to him.

  “If you say so,” Herb answered, which meant he didn’t think it was worth an argument. He left no doubt where he stood, though: “I don’t have to like it, and I darn well don’t.”

  “Neither do I. Who does?” Peggy said. “But things are worse plenty of other places.”

  She pulled up in front of the station. Herb leaned toward her for a quick good-bye kiss. He got out, pulled his suitcase off the back seat, and lugged it inside. Peggy waited till he disappeared before heading back to the house.

  A long sigh escaped her when she pulled into the driveway. It wasn’t that she worried he’d go looking for some round-heeled waitress or hat-check girl as soon as he got to whatever super-duper-secret place he was inspecting in Tennessee. It wasn’t, dammit. But they’d been apart for two years while she was stuck in Europe, and he’d had himself a little fling while she was gone. She’d had her own-mishap was probably the best word for it-over there, too.

  When things came out, they’d forgiven each other. Peggy meant it when she did it. She was sure Herb was every bit as sincere. But forgiving wasn’t quite the same as forgetting. Their marriage wasn’t the same as it had been before she sailed for the Continent.

  Peggy hadn’t the least desire to go to Nevada and get a quickie divorce. Again, she was sure Herb didn’t want to, either. It didn’t seem like that to her. It was just one more thing the war had wounded. And it was also the reason she fixed herself a stiff highball as soon as she got into the house.

  Chapter 3

  Winter on the Barents Sea. There was a handful of words to chill the heart, however you chose to take them. The wind had knives in it, and seemed to take a running start from the North Pole. Waves slapped the U-30, one after another. The submarine rolled, recovered, and rolled again, over and over.

  All the same, Lieutenant Julius Lemp was happier to have chugged out of Narvik on patrol than he would have been to stay at the Kriegsmarine’s U-boat base in northern Norway any longer. To say his soldiers had worn out their welcome there was to belabor the obvious.

  Port authorities thought his crew were a gang of hooligans. His men thought Narvik was as dull as embalming-about the worst thing a liberty port could be. As usual in such arguments, both sides had a point.

  The southern sky glowed pink. In a little while, the sun would actually creep over the horizon for a little while. They were well past the solstice now, on the way toward the vernal equinox. Old Sol was heading north again. Darkness didn’t reign supreme here all through the day, as it had a little while ago.

  But it wouldn’t stay light very long. England loved this season of the year. This was the time when convoys bound for Murmansk and Arkhangelsk had the best chance of sneaking past German patrol planes and U-boats from Norway. You couldn’t sink or bomb what you couldn’t find. Darkness was the freighter’s friend.

  Another wave, bigger than most, slammed into the U-30 portside. Frigid seawater splashed over the conning tower. Lemp and the ratings up there with him wore oilskins over their peacoats and wide-brimmed waterproof hats strapped under their chins to keep that raw north wind from stealing them. They got wet anyhow. When you got wet in these latitudes, you got cold. No-you got colder.

  “Scheisse!” Lemp said, most sincerely.

  One of the petty officers nodded. “We’ll all end up with pneumonia,” he predicted, his voice gloomy.

  Lemp would have argued, if only he could. The one thing worse than getting splashed up here was going into the drink. You wouldn’t last longer than a few minutes before the sea sucked all the warmth from your body and killed you. People said freezing to death was an easy way to go. Lemp didn’t want to find out for himself if those people were right.

  He tried to clean the salt water off the lenses of his Zeiss binoculars. How were you supposed to look into the distance when everything seemed blurry and smeared? Simple-you couldn’t.

  “In the summer,” the rating said wistfully, “it’s daylight all the time.”

  “And we can see them, and they can see us,” Lemp replied. “Downsides to everything. No sneaking away from the destroyers under cover of night then.”

  Another big wave smacked the U-30. More icy water cascaded over the conning tower. More poured down the hatch, too. As if spawned by the law of equal and opposite reactions, hot language came out of the hatchway. Some of the water would get pumped out of the boat. Some, yes, but not all. Take any U-boat ever made, and she always had water in her bilges. And the water soaked up and redistributed all the manifold stinks that accumulated in a submarine.

  Lemp sighed. Spillage from the heads? Puke? Rotting bits of sausage and tinned herring in mustard sauce? The thick animal fug of a boat full of poorly washed seamen? Diesel exhaust? Lubricating oil? They were all there, along with assorted other sordid but not so easily nameable stenches.

  Pretty soon, the skipper’s watch would end. He’d have to lay below. The air out here was bloody cold, but it was clean and fresh-none cleaner and fresher, in fact. People talked about air like wine. This wasn’t wine: it was more like vodka straight out of the icebox, just as chilly, just as smooth, and just as potent.

  And then he’d go down the hatch, back into the collection of reeks that put your average city rubbish tip to shame. They said you stopped noticing smells once you were stuck in them for a while. They said all kinds of things. Some of them were true. Some were crap. You might not smell the interior of a U-boat so much after a while, but you never had any doubts about where you were, even if you woke up with your eyes still shut.

  Every time the boat came in from a patrol, it got cleaned up along with refueling and taking on fresh eels to shoot at enemy shipping and food both fresh and canned. Thanks to the bilgewater, though, getting rid of the stinks was and always would be a losing fight. The only way to do the trick would be to melt the submarine down to raw steel and start over. Even then, cleanliness would last only until the first clumsy sailor spilled something into the bilges.

  In due course, Gerhart Beilharz emerged from the smelly steel tube. “I relieve you, Skipper,” the engineering officer said. He smiled broadly as he inhaled. “My turn to breathe the good stuff for a while.”

  “Well, so it is. Enjoy it,” Lemp said. “You get to take off your Stahlhelm, too.”

  Beilharz’s grin got wider yet. “I sure do!” He was two meters tall. He didn’t fit well into a U-boat’s cramped confines. Men shorter than he was banged their noggins on overhead pipes and valves and spigots.

  With a sigh, Julius Lemp descended. It was twilight outside, and twilight in the pressure hull as well. The bulbs in here were dim and orange, to help keep light from leaking out when the hatches were open at night. And the smell was … what it was. It didn’t make Lemp’s stomach want to turn over, the way it did with some men.

  “Beast behaving, Paul?” he asked the helmsman.

  “No worries, Skipper,” the senior rating said.

  “Good. That’s what I want to hear,” Lemp said. If Paul wasn’t worried, there was nothing to worry about.

  Lemp’s tiny cabin held-barely-a desk, a steel chair, a cot, and the safe where he stashed codebooks and other secure publications. That made it far and away the roomiest accommodation on the boat. With the canvas curtain pulled shut, he had as much privacy as anyone here could: which i
s to say, not a great deal.

  He filled his fountain pen and wrote in the log. His script was small, even cramped, and very precise. There wasn’t a lot to record: course, speed, fuel consumed. No ships or airplanes sighted, either from his own side or the enemy. No disciplinary problems among his men, either, nor had there been since the patrol began. The crew weren’t rowdies while on the job, and they weren’t especially rowdy in any port even halfway equipped to show off-duty sailors a good time.

  Would any of that matter to his superiors? The U-30’s sailors had torn Narvik to pieces twice now. Things wouldn’t go well for them if they tried it a third time. And they were liable to, as Lemp knew full well.

  He could listen to what went on in the boat without drawing notice to himself: another advantage of the curtain. Even when he couldn’t make out conversations, he could pick up tone. Everything sounded the way it should. If the men were plotting anything, they were doing it out of his earshot-and there weren’t many places out of his earshot in the U-boat.

  After Lieutenant Beilharz came off his watch, he paused outside the tiny cabin and said, “Talk to you for a minute or two, Skipper?”

  “Sure. Come on in,” Lemp answered.

  Beilharz did, ducking under the curtain rod. He had the Stahlhelm on again. Lemp waved for him to sit down on the cot. Had something gone wrong with the Schnorkel? They were surfaced in the gloom, so they didn’t need the gadget now. But when Beilharz spoke in a low voice, what he said had nothing to do with his specialty: “Sir, what do we do when the politics start boiling over again?”

  That wasn’t what Lemp wanted to hear, even if it was a damn good question. Plenty of high-ranking officers couldn’t be happy to watch the Reich pulled into a full-scale war on two fronts. Some of them had already tried more than once to overthrow the Fuhrer. The ones who had were mostly dead now, which might not stop their successors from taking another shot at it.