The War That Came Early: Coup d'Etat Read online

  After the filthy jokes ran thin, Chaim said, “Seriously, man, we better push the Fascists back as far as we can. I’ve got the bad feeling this summer won’t be a hell of a lot of fun.”

  “Amazing, Sherlock!” Mike said. “What leads you to this deduction?”

  “Ah, cut the crap. You know as well as I do,” Chaim answered.

  “We aren’t licked yet,” Mike said, which wasn’t a ringing denial.

  Everybody on the Republican side knew what was wrong. As in a sickroom where the patient still seemed strong but was plainly sinking, no one wanted to talk about it. Now that England and France were backing Hitler’s push against Stalin, Republican Spain was definitely the girl they’d left behind. The Republic was lucky to have got those Czechs, and the handful of French Jews who’d come with them. Not many more soldiers would make it over the Pyrenees.

  Not many more supplies would, either. France and England didn’t want to sell to the Republic any more. Stalin did, but he had his own war to worry about and a swarm of enemies between him and Spain. Meanwhile, nobody was stopping the Führer and the Duce from shipping Marshal Sanjurjo all kinds of goodies.

  “Maybe FDR will come through,” Mike said.

  “And rain makes applesauce,” Chaim returned. “I’ll believe that when I see it.”

  America was at war with Japan, not with Germany. Roosevelt hadn’t even tried to get a declaration of war against Germany through Congress. Had he tried, he would have failed. The USA had been selling billions in weapons to the so-called Western democracies … till the big switch. After that, FDR pulled the plug. The munitions makers might have found a market in Spain to take up some of the slack—if the new war against Japan hadn’t got them going full speed ahead again.

  Chaim paused to scratch. Why wasn’t it too cold for bugs in the trenches? Because they lived on nice, warm people—that was why. “Even if we are fucked, we’ve lasted three years longer than anybody thought we could,” he said. “The government was going to take the Internationals out of the line, remember, ’cause we’d done all we could do. Or we thought so, anyway, till Hitler jumped on the Czechs and all of a sudden England and France liked the Republic again.”

  “And now they don’t any more, and we’re fucked again,” Carroll said. “Till the roulette wheel stops on a new square, we are. I wish Hitler would’ve declared war on America. That would have fried his fish for him.”

  “Boy, you got that straight,” Chaim said. “Can you imagine all the shit that’d pour into Spain then?” He imagined it with the dreamy, half-hopeless awe a starving prospector gave to striking the mother lode.

  “In the meantime …” Carroll poked him in the ribs. “In the meantime, you’ve got your little cutie back in town. If she doesn’t give you something to fight for, you’ve got to be dead.”

  Chaim would no more have called La Martellita a little cutie than he would have hung the same handle on a 155mm shell. It wasn’t obvious which was more dangerous, or more explosive. Still, some guys did talk about weapons that way, even if he didn’t. His features softened for a reason different, if related.

  “I’m gonna have a kid. A half-Spanish kid, a kid who’s gonna live here in the country we end up making,” he said softly, his eyes dreamy and far away. “That, now, that gives me somethin’ to fuckin’ fight for.”

  SOME GERMAN PROPAGANDA sheets lay next to the bubbling samovar when Anastas Mouradian walked into the Red Air Force officers’ meeting room. He could tell what they were right away. For one thing, even by Soviet standards, the paper they were printed on was amazingly cheap and cruddy. For another, the font the Nazis had chosen looked like something from before the last war.

  The Armenian bomber pilot wondered why they’d picked something so outdated. Maybe they didn’t have any more modern type. Or maybe, since the alphabet wasn’t their own, they were just style-blind. It wasn’t the alphabet Stas had grown up with, either, but he saw it all the time. Couldn’t Hitler’s clowns have found a defector to fill them in on their own stupidity?

  Most likely, they hadn’t even gone looking. Germans were so convinced of their own superiority, they often didn’t bother asking advice from anyone else. Sometimes they paid for their arrogance, too.

  He picked up one of the sheets. A misspelled word and some bad grammar leaped out at him. The Nazis were trying to persuade non-Russians in the USSR to go over to them. You thought the tiranny of the Tsars was bad. Stalin’s is even worser! the flier said. No, no one would take you seriously if you stuck your foot in your mouth as soon as you opened it.

  A Russian pilot paused at the samovar to pour himself a glass of tea. He chuckled when he saw what Mouradian was looking at. “So, Stas, you going to fly your plane over to a Hitlerite airstrip?” he inquired.

  He was joking. Stas knew that perfectly well. All the same, the Armenian set down the propaganda sheet as if it burned his fingers. “Not me!” he declared, sincerity ringing in his voice. “Only thing I’ll give them is a thousand kilos of high explosive!”

  The trouble with jokes was, you never could tell who was listening to the answers. Stas had no reason to think Boris there belonged to the NKVD or informed on his fellow officers. He had no reason to think that about any of the other flyers sitting down with tea and hard rolls and fatty pork sausages and papirosi, either.

  But he couldn’t afford to joke back with the Russians, because there was always the chance … He didn’t care to see the Lubyanka, the NKVD headquarters in Moscow, from the inside. He didn’t want to go to a labor camp in Turkmenistan or Siberia just on account of a misunderstood joke. He didn’t want to go to a place like that at all, but especially not for such a stupid reason.

  And so, remarking, “This stinking thing wouldn’t even make a good asswipe,” he poured himself a glass of tea, too, and walked away from the table without a backward glance at the propaganda sheet.

  His copilot came in a few minutes later. Ivan Kulkaanen also picked up one of the sheets. After a quick glance, he put it down again. “Fascist bullshit!” he said loudly, and got himself some tea and a roll.

  It was Fascist bullshit—no possible doubt about that. With better propaganda, the Nazis might have had more chance of prying people away from the Soviet regime. Not everyone in the USSR loved it; not even close. If you had to choose between Stalin and his henchmen on the one hand and people who turned out crap like that on the other, though, you turned into a Soviet patriot almost by default.

  Lieutenant Colonel Tomashevsky came in. The squadron commander waved to his men, telling them not to bother to jump up and salute. Discipline in the Soviet armed forces had tightened up since the war started. Leaders had discovered that, while a revolutionary military sounded good, a hierarchical one performed better. They’d found the same thing in Spain. They’d rediscovered it after the French Revolution. No doubt Spartacus, that Soviet hero, had had to learn the lesson, too.

  After snagging tea and breakfast, Tomashevsky said, “Looks like we’ll fly today, Comrades.” He sat down. By the way he shoveled sausage into his chowlock, action didn’t leave him too nervous to eat. Anastas Mouradian felt the same way. He wanted some ballast in there when he went up. Some people worked differently. They’d puke or get the runs if they went into combat with a full stomach. They weren’t cowards. They just came equipped with anxious insides.

  “What’s our target, Comrade Colonel?” someone asked.

  “There’s an enemy concentration east of Vitebsk,” Tomashevsky said. “Mostly Englishmen and the French, Intelligence says.” His lip curled in fine contempt. “If they want to play these games, we have to show them the price. And if we smash them up before they get to the front, that’s one thing less for the Red Army to worry about.”

  Groundcrew men were bombing up the Pe-2s and making sure their machine guns had full belts when Mouradian and Kulkaanen went to their plane. Some of the bombs had slogans chalked on the casings: For Stalin! and Death to Fascists! and the like. The only way the ene
my would find out about one of those was if the bomb proved a dud. But the groundcrews did that kind of thing all the time. It made them happy and didn’t hurt anything, so why not?

  Fyodor Mechnikov profanely directed bomb stowage. The blocky sergeant reminded Stas a lot of Ivan Kuchkov, with whom he’d served before getting promoted away. He wasn’t quite so hairy or quite so ugly, and he didn’t have quite such a foul mouth, but he came close on all three counts.

  “We’ll give ’em hell, right?” he said to Stas.

  The Armenian nodded gravely. “That isn’t borscht we’re dropping on them.”

  “Borscht.” The bombardier didn’t need long to decide what he thought of that. “You’re weird … sir.”

  “It could be,” Mouradian agreed. “It probably is, in fact. But as long as I get the plane there and back, as long as we deliver the load, what difference does it make?”

  “When you put it that way, not fucking much,” Mechnikov allowed.

  Flying the Pe-2 was a pleasure. It had so much speed and maneuverability, people called it the fighting bomber. Of course, they’d said the same thing about the SB-2, the plane Stas had learned on, only a few years earlier. The state of the art had passed the SB-2 by. One of these days, the Pe-2 would also grow obsolescent. But it hadn’t happened yet.

  “If we’re gong after the English and French, we won’t have to worry so much about 109s, will we?” Kulkaanen asked as they reached cruising altitude.

  “I hope not,” Stas said sincerely. Calling a Pe-2 a fighting bomber meant it had a chance against a Messerschmitt. A good chance? Well, no. From what he’d heard, English fighters were about as good as the 109, French machines not quite. Neither country had swarms of them in these parts, the way the Nazis did.

  The squadron droned on toward the west. A few antiaircraft guns fired at them as they crossed the front. Russian? German? Both? No one got hit, so it didn’t matter. Somewhere down there in the snow …

  “Approaching the target.” Tomashevsky’s voice echoed in Stas’ earphones. The pilot wondered how he could tell. Then he saw fairly well camouflaged tents below—and antiaircraft fire abruptly picked up.

  “Let ’em go, Fedya!” he called to the bombardier through the speaking tube.

  Away they went. All at once, the bomber grew nimbler. It needed to, for English Hurricanes—Mouradian thought they were Hurricanes—tore into the formation less than a minute after the Pe-2s turned for home. Tracers scored deadly, fiery lines across the sky. Two bombers spun earthward, one after the other. A Hurricane went down, too, flames licking back from the dead engine toward the cockpit.

  Stas didn’t see a parachute open there. He didn’t look very hard, either. He was too busy throwing his plane around the sky, trying to keep any Hurricanes from getting on his tail. Mechnikov fired a burst from the belly machine gun. No answering storm of lead tore into the Pe-2, so maybe he scared off the enemy. Or maybe he was shooting at nothing. Stas didn’t care. As long as he got away, he didn’t care about anything else.

  Chapter 4

  Julius Lemp swept the horizon with his Zeiss binoculars. Ratings up on the U-30’s conning tower scanned all segments of the sky. The Baltic was a damned narrow sea. You had to stay alert every second you were on the surface. Trouble would land on top of you with both feet if you didn’t.

  Estonia lay to the south, Finland to the north. Under Marshal Mannerheim, Finland was neutral or even friendly to the Reich. Estonia would have liked to be. Stalin didn’t give the little country the choice. The Reds still resented losing the Baltic states when the Russian Empire fell apart. (They resented losing Finland, too, but they weren’t in such a good position to do anything about that.)

  When the Soviet Union sneezed, Estonia came down with the sniffles. When Stalin said Do something!, his little neighbor did it. Otherwise, especially in troubled times like these, the Red Army would march in.

  As a matter of fact, the Red Army—and the Red Air Force and Red Navy—had marched in. That was why Lemp cast an especially wary eye toward the south. But things could have been worse. Estonia still remained independent in name. Stalin had promised that his forces would leave once the emergency was over. Even an idiot knew Stalin’s pledges were worth their weight in gold, but at least he’d bothered to make this one.

  Lithuania was as much a German sphere as Estonia was a Russian. Hitler had reannexed Memel, and the Lithuanians seemed pathetically eager to cede it to him. He might have grabbed the whole country if they hadn’t. Like Stalin, he swore up and down that the Wehrmacht would pull out after he’d won the war. Lemp chuckled nastily. Once a guy got it in, he always promised he’d pull out.

  “What’s funny, Skipper?” one of the ratings asked. The field glasses never left his eyes; his steady scan of the sky never faltered. Lemp told him. He laughed.

  So did the rest of the sailors up there. “You used that line, too, did you?” another one said.

  “Who, me?” Lemp answered in a voice brimming with innocence. More goatish laughter erupted. Aboard the Kriegsmarine’s surface ships, Prussian discipline was alive and thriving. Everything was bright metal and fresh paint and sharp trouser creases and smooth shaves and “Zu befehl, mein Herr!”

  U-boats weren’t like that. By the nature of things, they couldn’t be. No one wasted precious fresh water on shaving. Like his men, Lemp wore a scraggly growth of face fungus. His uniform was as grimy and smelly as theirs were. The only thing that distinguished his from theirs was the white cover on his service cap; theirs were all navy blue. He’d taken the stiffening wire out of the crown, as every U-boat skipper did: one more silent swipe at spit and polish.

  The sun glinted off the sea to the south and threw dazzling reflections into his face. It stood higher in the sky than it had in the depths of winter—not that anybody who had to sail the Baltic in that season saw it very often. But the wind still blew down from the north—straight off the North Pole, by the feel of it. Despite a heavy peacoat and quilted trousers, Lemp shivered.

  One of the ratings stiffened. He pointed southeast. “Smoke on the horizon!”

  Lemp’s binoculars swung that way. Yes, the dark smudge was there—low and hard to make out, but there, sure as hell. And smoke, in these waters, could come only from a Russian ship. “Good job, Anton. I’ll see it goes into your file,” the skipper said. Then he called down the hatch to the exec, who had the helm: “Change course to 135. All ahead full. Anton spied the smoke.”

  “Changing course to 135, Skipper.” Klaus Hammerstein’s voice floated up from below. He was a good officer. He’d get promoted away from the U-30 into a boat of his own before too long. When he was the Old Man himself, he could let more of his good nature show. He’d have an exec to do the dirty work for him then, instead of his doing it for someone else. Lemp heard him call the setting change back to the engine room. The U-boat’s diesels throbbed harder. The Type VIIA could make sixteen knots on the surface. That would be plenty to run down a freighter. If Anton had found an enemy warship …

  I’ll worry about that later, Lemp told himself. He did not hold the Red Navy in high regard. Yes, the Ivans were brave. But he’d spent most of the time since the war started facing off against the Royal Navy out in the North Sea and the Atlantic. Those were the best surface sailors in the world. Better than their opposite numbers in the Kriegsmarine? He nodded to himself. They were the men from whom the Germans—and everybody else—tried to learn their craft. Set against competition like that, the Russians didn’t come close to measuring up.

  He went to the big, pier-mounted binoculars on the conning tower. They had a narrow field of view, but more magnification and far more light grasp than the ones he and the ratings wore on straps around their necks. And now he wasn’t scanning for things that might be there. Something was, and he knew just where to look for it.

  Distant waves leaped toward him. So did that smoke smudge, not quite so low on the horizon now as the U-boat hurried toward it. Before long, he got what he was w
aiting for: both the U-30 and the enemy ship rose on swells at the same time. He didn’t get to study that lean shark shape for very long, but he didn’t need long, either.

  “Destroyer,” he said crisply.

  He glanced at his own boat’s exhaust. There wasn’t that much to see. Diesels ran cleaner than turbines, and his engines were smaller than the ones powering the Soviet ship. An outstanding lookout might spot his smoke or, now, the U-boat’s silhouette against the sky. But how many outstanding lookouts did the Red Navy boast? Not many. And not many German officers were better equipped to judge that than he was.

  So he waited, and waited, and waited some more as the gap closed. Only when he figured any halfway-awake fellow with binoculars was liable to see the U-30 did he order the ratings below. As usual, he was the last man off the conning tower. As he dogged the hatch behind him, he ordered, “Take her down to Schnorkel depth and raise the periscope.”

  “Schnorkel depth. Aye aye,” Hammerstein said. The snort let the diesels breathe under water. It gave the boat better performance than she had on her electric motors … as long as she didn’t dive deep. The Dutch had invented the gadget, but more and more German U-boats used it these days.

  Also, of course, the Schnorkel’s stovepipe tube and the skinnier one that housed the periscope were a lot harder to spot than the U-30’s hull would have been. Lemp peered through the ’scope and tried to work out the destroyer’s speed, course, and distance.

  “Have we got a shot?” the exec asked.

  “I … think so,” Lemp said slowly. “They have no idea we’re around. They’re strolling along at eight knots, tops.” That was about a quarter of the destroyer’s full speed. “We’re within four kilometers now. We can close some more, too.”

  He fed the course and speed information to Hammerstein, who had a kind of glorified slide rule that helped him calculate the torpedo settings. Regulations said the skipper’s Zentrale was to be closed off from the rest of the boat. Like most skippers, Lemp ignored that reg. Easier just to call orders forward than to shout through the voice tube.