The Big Switch twtce-3 Read online

  Kossuth studied the Czechs with shrewd, experienced eyes. One eyebrow rose a millimeter or two when he noticed the antitank rifle slung on Jezek’s back. He ambled up to Vaclav. “So, Corporal, do you use that against German panzers?”

  “I have… mein Herr. ” Vaclav wasn’t surprised Kossuth could read Czech rank badges. He spoke the honorific grudgingly, but speak it he did. He added, “It is also an excellent sharpshooting piece.”

  “He’s killed men out to two kilometers with it,” Sergeant Halevy said helpfully.

  The brigadier classified him with a single sharp glance. “Wilkommen,” he said, and then, “ Bienvenu. You will find we already have a good many mouthy Jews among the Internationals.” Then he said what was probably the same thing in French.

  Vaclav wouldn’t have been surprised if Halevy came back in Magyar; the French Jew was a man of parts. But if he knew any of Brigadier Kossuth’s birthspeech, he didn’t let on. He replied in Yiddish-tinged German so Vaclav could understand: “I wouldn’t be a bit surprised, sir. I hope you don’t hold it too much against us.”

  “Not… too much,” Kossuth said slowly. If most Czechs didn’t like Jews, most Hungarians really didn’t like Jews. After a visible pause for thought, the brigadier went on, “The ones I resent are the ones who stayed home. Those who came here have shown they can fight. This is what the struggle demands.”

  “We agree there,” Halevy said. By his tone, there would be plenty of other places where they didn’t. Also by his tone, he wanted Kossuth to know that, even if he was just a sergeant and the other man a brigadier.

  Something sparked in Kossuth’s deep-set eyes. A beat slower than he might have, Vaclav recognized it as amusement. “You are another troublemaker,” Kossuth said. “I might have known.”

  “Would I have come here if I weren’t, sir?” Halevy said, and then, “Would you have come here if you weren’t?” To Vaclav’s amazement, Brigadier Kossuth proved he could laugh out loud. his is the BBC news.” Those plummy tones coming from the radio seemed out of place in a military hospital in Manila. Pete McGill was disgusted with the limeys for coming to terms with Hitler. He would have bet most of the British Marines he’d known and drunk with and sometimes brawled with in Peking and Shanghai were just as disgusted. But he was glad to listen to the BBC any which way. It gave more news and less bullshit than any American station.

  He was also glad he wasn’t the only one in the war who wanted to know what the Beeb had to say. Even Army files could figure out that what happened in the wider world had a lot to do with the way they did business. You didn’t have to be a leatherneck to see that-but it probably helped.

  “Sir Horace Wilson’s government easily defeated a motion of no confidence in the House of Commons yesterday,” the newsreader said. “Only a handful of Tories joined Labour and Liberal MPs in opposing the Prime Minister. Even abstentions were fewer than many had anticipated.”

  That meant England would go on doing what she had been doing: kissing Germany’s ass. Pete muttered something foul. He couldn’t do anything about England’s foreign policy, but he didn’t have to like it. He also didn’t like it when the newsreader went on about the triumphs the British Expeditionary Force in the East was winning. Less bullshit or not, the BBC man said nothing about the fact that the Tommies were fighting side by side with the Wehrmacht and the Waffen-SS. Maybe the radio network had a guilty conscience. If it didn’t, it should have.

  “In other news”-the broadcaster said nyews, where it would have been nooz in Pete’s New York mouth-“the Empire of Japan has recalled its ambassador from Washington in protest over President Roosevelt’s decision to stop sales of petroleum and scrap metal to the Japanese. No talks regarding this delicate issue have yet been scheduled.” That came out sheduled instead of the American skeduled, but again Pete followed with no trouble.

  “Aw, shit,” said an Army corporal with a leg broken in a car crash. “Them Japs is gonna come after us next.”

  By us, Pete didn’t know whether the Army guy meant the United States in general or the men in this military hospital in particular. Either way, the other two-striper was probably right. The Japs had signaled their intentions by making peace with Stalin. If they wanted to pick a fight with the US of A, they wouldn’t have to worry about getting jumped from behind.

  That much had been obvious ever since Japan and Russia started talking about peace. It gave the Russkis their free hand in the west, too. But if the Japanese ambassador was on his way home, things in these parts might start boiling over any day now.

  And that wouldn’t be good for American interests in the Far East. For one thing, the Philippines lay within easy range of the Japanese home islands and of Formosa, which had belonged to the Japs for most of the past fifty years. For another… “Just about all of my buddies are stationed in Peking or Shanghai, one,” Pete said.

  “Tough luck for them,” the Army corporal replied. “But chances are they ain’t a nickel’s worth worse off’n we are right here, know what I mean?”

  “Don’t I wish I didn’t?” Pete said glumly. “They’re talking about letting me out of my cast pretty soon. Maybe they’ll give me shipboard duty. At least then I’ll be able to shoot back at the little slant-eyed pricks.”

  “That’d be good,” the Army guy agreed. “You can make it to the bomb shelter, too, if they do. Me, I gotta lay here and hope the assholes miss me.”

  “Yeah, that’s not a whole lot of fun,” Pete said. “I’ve been thinking the same thing every time they hold an air-raid drill.” He clicked his tongue between his teeth, considering. “If they’re even halfway on the ball, they’ll run a lot more of ’em from here on out.”

  That only drew a derisive snort from the other corporal. “If they’re even halfway on the ball, they don’t get assigned to the Philippines to begin with. Well, except maybe MacArthur, and everybody knows he’s a fuckin’ blowhard.”

  Pete didn’t keep track of Army generals. It sure wasn’t the first time he’d heard people bitch about Douglas MacArthur, though. A lot of guys still hated him for what he’d done breaking up the Bonus Army at the deepest part of the Depression; he’d heard that from other injured men here.

  He did get the cast off his ankle the very next day. He was shocked to see how skinny his leg had got under it. “I want to go back to duty right away,” he blurted.

  “Yeah, and people in hell want mint juleps to drink,” answered the medical technician who’d cut the cast off him. “Just ’cause you want it doesn’t mean you can have it. Get yourself in shape again and see what the brass tells you then.”

  It was good, sensible advice, which didn’t mean Pete liked it. How often does anybody ever like good, sensible advice? The world would be a different, and probably a better, place if more people took it.

  But telling a Marine he needed to get fit was giving advice he was prepared to heed. Pete was already in the habit of exercising till everything screamed. He was used by now to screams from one part of him or another. He’d done the same kind of thing after his arm came out of its sling and cast. “You do heal well,” a physical therapist told him. “Some people might have ended up in a wheelchair from what happened to you.”

  “Some people might have got killed,” Pete growled.

  The therapist blinked. “Well, yes.” He didn’t know about Vera.

  She was another reason Pete pushed himself so hard. While he was working and sweating and hurting, he didn’t think about her so much. He retreated into the gym the way another man might have retreated into the bottle. Sooner or later, though, a drunk sobered up. And, sooner or later, Pete had to quit working out and start listening again to the demons that lived inside his head.

  There were lots of them. Some hated the Japs, not only as enemies of the United States but also as the people who made Chinese terrorists want to blow up places like movie houses. Some of his demons hated the Chinamen who’d blown up the theater and murdered the love of his life. (That they’d ruined h
im, too, was no more than an afterthought.)

  And some of his demons hated his own superiors and the policies and regulations they had to uphold. If Vera hadn’t been a stateless person, everything could have worked out. Pete thought so, anyhow. He and his lady love could have got married and gone back to the States together and done… something or other. Whatever happened afterwards (even if it was only Reno and a quickie divorce-not that Pete imagined any such thing), they wouldn’t have been within thousands of miles of some sticks of dynamite attached to a ticking clock.

  If he could kill lots of Japs, that would make him feel better. Because he understood as much, he pushed his ankle far past the point where a less determined man would have started gulping aspirins and cold beer. That fight wouldn’t wait, and he was bound and determined to be ready for it when it came.

  He couldn’t get at the Chinamen, not any more. Even if he’d gone back to Shanghai, he wouldn’t have known which of the goddamn Chinks to go after. They kept themselves secret from the Japs, which meant they also kept themselves secret from everybody else. So those demons would just have to stay unsated, their blood lust unslaked.

  Consciously, Pete didn’t want to go after Marine Corps higher-ups. But he didn’t see the look on his own face when he eyed officers-especially officious, by-the-book officers, of whom the Corps had no fewer than any other outfit its size.

  Those officers saw the black looks. Officious they might have been, but they weren’t all stupid. Some of them recognized the scowls for… well, for some of what they were, anyhow. One man said to another, “We better get that guy out of here before he goes Asiatic and does something everybody’d be sorry about afterwards. Him, too, not that that would do anybody any good.”

  His friend nodded, but replied, “He’s liable to do it wherever we send him.”

  “Yeah, sure. But it’s not our lookout after that.” The first officer was indeed an officious type.

  He was also an officer with good personnel connections. And so, even though Pete McGill wasn’t quite a hundred percent yet, he found himself released from the military hospital and assigned to the USS Boise, a light cruiser that was one of the heavier vessels of the Far East Fleet. He didn’t complain. On the contrary. He thought somebody had done him a favor.

  Willi Dernen thought he’d learned all about the Wehrmacht greatcoat’s limits the winter before in France. He hadn’t been in Russia long before he discovered his education in such matters was incomplete.

  The biggest difference was, in France you could almost always find somewhere cozy to hole up. Villages clustered thickly. Even if you were stuck in a trench, the line didn’t move much. You could fix up your hole till it was fit to live in. Yeah, it was cold outside. But if you had a fire and a wall to keep off the wind, you could put up with things pretty well.

  It wasn’t like that here. For one thing, the Germans and their allies were still advancing. You couldn’t put down roots, the way Landsers had in France after the big push to sweep around behind Paris fell short. For another, there were far fewer places in which to put down roots. Russian villages were few and far between, and often seemed all but lost amidst the vastness of fields and forests. Willi had never imagined such a wide, wild country. The howls that came from the woods were wolves, not dogs. His skin had prickled up in gooseflesh when he realized that.

  And finally, not to put too fine a point on it, the Wehrmacht -issue greatcoat wasn’t up to the challenge a Russian winter gave it. If you wore one out in the open, with no fire to keep you warm, eventually you’d freeze to death. Or not so eventually, depending on how hard the wind howled down out of the north.

  Willi stole a sheepskin vest from a Russian peasant’s hut that-except for not running around on giant chicken legs-might have come straight out of fairy tales about Baba Yaga. The inside of the hut was filthy. The vest probably carried lice and fleas. Willi didn’t care. He was already lousy and flea-bitten. A little more crawly company? So what? The damn thing was warm. And it fit snugly, and he could wear his greatcoat over it.

  The find made his buddies jealous. “Only thing better would have been a jug of vodka,” Adam Pfaff said. “That’d heat you up from the inside out-and you might even share it.”

  “In your dreams,” Willi said sweetly. They both grinned. Pfaff might not have been with the unit very long, but he was a good guy. He was no combat virgin, either. He knew what needed doing, and he did it without fuss-and without freezing up in a tight spot. Willi was glad to have him at his back, and it worked both ways.

  That vest also made Arno Baatz jealous, though Arno was no buddy of Willi’s and never would be. The corporal kept hinting someone of higher rank-say, someone of corporal’s rank-deserved the sheepskins better than a lowly Gefreiter did. As far as Willi was concerned, Awful Arno could hint till everything turned blue. He still wouldn’t get his grubby mitts on the vest.

  “Find your own,” Willi told him. “If I can do it, anybody can. That’s what you always say, right?”

  Baatz came back with something else he said often, if not all the time. If taken literally, it would have swept Willi to a place too warm for him to need a sheepskin vest any more. Willi grinned at him, too, but more in mockery than in the comradeship he shared with Pfaff.

  “He’s got some nerve,” the other Gefreiter said when Willi told the tale of the corporal’s ponderous hints. “Who does he think he is?”

  “God,” Willi answered. “Or he thinks God would do a better job if only He listened more to Arno Baatz.”

  Pfaff laughed nervously. “You’re kidding, aren’t you?”

  “Don’t I wish!” Willi exclaimed. “That so-and-so’s never been wrong once since the fucking war started. If you don’t believe me, just ask him. Shit, we’d be in Paris if only the Fuhrer listened to old Arno.”

  “I’d take him more seriously if you said we wouldn’t be in Russia if only the Fuhrer had listened to him,” Pfaff said.

  Willi glanced around. No, nobody else could hear them-and a good thing, too. “Nice to know you trust me,” he said dryly.

  “Hey, you’ve already had your fun and games with those blackshirt cocksuckers,” Adam Pfaff answered. He threaded a bit of cloth through his gray rifle’s barrel with a cleaning rod. “You’re not gonna turn me in if I open my mouth and say what everybody can see.”

  “You’re all right, you know that?” Willi lit a papiros looted from the same shack where he’d got the sheepskin vest. The tobacco wasn’t the greatest, and there wasn’t a whole lot of it at the end of the long paper holder. Why the hell did the Ivans make their smokes that way? Any cigarettes, though, were better than none.

  Pfaff examined the cloth after finishing with the pull-through. He nodded to himself. “Yeah, that needed doing, all right,” he muttered. Then he sounded more hopeful: “Let me have one of those, will you?”

  “I’ll let you have it, all right,” Willi said in mock anger. A friend wasn’t just somebody with whom you could speak your mind. A friend was somebody who could bum smokes off you, and who’d let you do the same when you were out. Willi handed Pfaff a papiros.

  “Obliged,” Pfaff said. And so he was. One of these days-probably one of these days soon-he’d pay Willi back.

  Artillery rumbled, not too far behind them. Those were German 105s hitting the Russians up ahead. Before long, the Russians started shooting back. To Willi’s relief, it was counterbattery fire. As long as the gunners went after one another, the infantry could breathe easy-well, easier. When the big guns started tearing up the front line, Landsers didn’t enjoy it so much.

  The Red Army had plenty of cannon, and used them as if they were going out of style. The Ivans also had an abundance of 81mm mortars. Willi particularly hated those. Every platoon of Russian infantry seemed to lug one along. They didn’t have the range of ordinary cannon, but the Reds could drop a couple of bombs into your foxhole and shred you before you even knew they were around.

  “Orders from the regiment!” Arno Baa
tz yelled, as if he were the one who’d issued them. “We advance under cover of the artillery barrage!”

  “Oh, boy,” Adam Pfaff said in hollow tones. “Into the meat grinder one more time.” He managed a raspy chuckle. “Well, we aren’t hamburger yet.”

  “Me, I’m from Breslau,” Willi said, deadpan.

  Pfaff sent him a reproachful look. “When you get your sorry ass shot off, chances are it’ll be somebody from your own side.”

  “Nah, that’s Awful Arno.” Willi chambered a round and scrambled out of his shallow hole. “C’mon-let’s go.”

  German soldiers loped across snow-streaked fields. Willi spotted Corporal Baatz trotting along with everybody else. And Baatz’s eye was also on him, as it was all too often. Willi resisted the impulse to send an obscene gesture Awful Arno’s way. It wasn’t easy, but he did it. Military discipline, he told himself.

  Occasional rifle shots came from the Ivans’ lines a kilometer or so up ahead, but no more, not at first. Then the guys in those scrapes woke up and realized the Germans were serious about this business. A machine gun started spitting out death rattles: industrialized murder at its finest. Willi hit the snowy dirt. He wished he had a white camouflage cape and hood, so he’d be harder to spot.

  He wasn’t the only Landser going down. Shrieks said not everybody was taking cover. Some of the men had been hit. Medics and stretcher-bearers with Red Cross armbands and smocks rushed up to tend the wounded. The Russians shot at them the same way they shot at everybody else. Ivan didn’t play by any of the rules. And if the Reds caught you, it was your hard luck. On the other side of the coin, captured Russians often got short shrift from the Germans who took them prisoner.

  German MG-34s came forward with the assault troops. They spat their own curtain of death at the men ahead. Officers’ whistles screeched. The soldiers got up and advanced once more. The Russians didn’t have much barbed wire in front of their position: only a few halfhearted strands. Getting in among them was easier than it should have been. Some died. Some threw up their hands-most of those were actually allowed to surrender. And some fled to fight again somewhere else later on.