Two Fronts twtce-5 Page 6

  The Panzer III clattered across the snowy landscape. Ostketten-wide tracks made for the mud and snow in these parts-helped it keep going. Even with Ostketten, it couldn’t match a T-34’s cross-country performance.

  Other panzers advanced alongside Theo’s. Landsers accompanied them on foot and in armored personnel carriers. Those were nice machines. They took infantry to where it needed to fight and kept it from getting killed on the way … unless, of course, something really nasty happened, which it always could. The personnel carriers also let infantry keep up with the panzers, always a problem. They would have done even better had the Reich had more of them.

  Everything would have been better had the Reich had more of it. Sitting up here, Theo could see out. He missed his iron nest in the Panzer II. Seeing out, he was forcibly reminded how vast this country was. It made even the Wehrmacht seem undersized and overstretched. You overran villages and towns. You shelled and machine-gunned the Ivans who tried to stop you. You went on. And what lay ahead? Always more villages and towns. Always more Ivans, too.

  Somewhere up ahead here-probably not very far up ahead, either-more Russians waited. Theo cherished every moment of peace and relative quiet. He knew how precious such moments were.

  Hermann Witt’s voice came out of the speaking tube from the turret: “Panzer halt!”

  “Halting,” Adi said, and hit the brakes. “What’s up?” he added. “I don’t see anything.”

  Peering through his vision slits, Theo didn’t see anything, either. It didn’t prove much, not when he had little chance of seeing things while restricted by the slits. Like any good panzer commander, Sergeant Witt rode with head and shoulders out of the turret when bullets weren’t flying, and sometimes even when they were. Somebody in the panzer needed a good view of the wider world.

  “I’m not quite sure,” Witt answered. “But take a look over about two o’clock. Something’s not right there.” As if to underscore the words, he traversed the turret, presumably toward two o’clock. Through the rumble of the idling engine, Theo heard him tell Lothar Eckhardt, “Give it a round of HE there.”

  Theo still didn’t see anything funny. “One round of HE,” the gunner agreed. The main armament bellowed. Inside the panzer, the noise wasn’t too bad. The cartridge case clattered down onto the bottom of the fighting compartment. The harsh, familiar stink of smokeless powder made Theo cough.

  The 37mm shell burst in what seemed no more than the middle of a snowdrift-till it came in. Then everything happened at once. How many Russians, how many panzers, had sheltered behind that tall, concealing drift? They all boiled out now, and they were spoiling for a fight.

  “Get moving, Adi!” Hermann Witt yelled.

  Adi was already gunning the Panzer III. He knew as well as Witt that you didn’t want to be a sitting duck for a T-34. (Theo didn’t want to be anywhere within a hundred kilometers of a T-34, but that was a different story.) The Soviet panzer’s big drawback was that the commander also served as gunner-the French made the same mistake. That left the poor bastard as busy as a one-armed paper hanger with hives. Most Russians weren’t good shots, either.

  But T-34s carried 76mm cannon. If a round hit you, it was going to kill you. You didn’t want to give those overworked, poorly trained sons of bitches a good shot at you.

  A rifle bullet spanged off the panzer. The Russian infantry could shoot from now till doomsday without hurting it, but they were trouble for the Landsers with the German armor. Theo sprayed fire from his MG-34. He wasn’t aiming at anyone in particular. As long as he made the Red Army men dive into the snow, he’d be happy. If he did let the air out of one or two of them, he’d be overjoyed.

  “Panzer halt!” Witt ordered. Even as Adi Stoss braked, the panzer commander spoke to the loader: “Armor-piercing this time.”

  “AP. Right,” Kurt Poske said, and slammed a shell with a black tip into the breech.

  No more than a second and a half later, Eckhardt fired. Everybody in the Panzer III screamed “Hit!” at the same time. But the AP round glanced off the T-34’s cleverly sloped armor. It didn’t get through. And the enemy monster’s Big Bertha of a gun swung toward them.

  This time, Adi goosed the panzer without waiting for orders. Maybe that threw the Ivan’s aim off just enough. Theo got to watch that big gun belch flame and smoke. He braced himself, as if bracing would do any good. He didn’t know where the enemy round hit. He did know it didn’t slam through the Panzer III’s frontal armor-or through him. As long as he knew that, nothing else mattered.

  “Panzer halt!” Hermann Witt ordered again. Adi swore, but obeyed. The 37mm roared twice in quick succession. The first round bounced off like the one before it. The second buried itself almost to the drive bands, but didn’t get through. “Forward!” Witt yelled again.

  Forward Adi went. When would Ivan take another shot at them? Yes, he had to do it all himself, but … An AP round from some other German panzer got through his side armor. His ammunition store went up, blowing an enormous, perfect smoke ring out the turret hatch.

  Adi let out a war whoop. He sounded like an Indian himself, even if that was what German soldiers called their foes. Then he said, “It’s nice to have friends.”

  “Ja,” Theo agreed, and said not another word. A raised eyebrow and a small tilt of the head did his talking for him.

  Even in the gloomy confines of the panzer, he could watch Adi redden. The driver would never have a lot of friends, and would of necessity trust the ones he did have with his life. Every panzer man did that to a degree, of course, but Adi’s degree was bigger than most. “You know what I mean,” he muttered.

  Theo nodded. He didn’t need to spend any speech on that. He peered through the machine gun’s sight. It didn’t look as if any of the Russian panzer crew had managed to bail out. He knew a moment’s sympathy for the poor damned Ivans, though he would have done his best to cut them down had they escaped. He’d had to flee two wrecked panzers, and all he’d lost on account of it was half a finger off his left hand. That was luck, too, nothing else but.

  Chapter 4

  Sarah Bruck was out shopping when the air-raid sirens in Munster began to wail. It was late afternoon, with clouds overhead and the light already leaking out of the sky. Jews couldn’t go out any earlier. They had to wait till all the Aryans had picked over what little there was to buy.

  All the same, she cocked her head to one side in surprise. Enemy bombers hadn’t come over Munster by day before, even if this wasn’t much in the way of daylight. She thought it was a drill till she heard the deep throb of airplane engines overhead. People around her started running.

  She would have run, too, had she had anywhere to go. Behind her, someone yelled, “Head for the shelter, you Dummkopf!” in a loud, authoritative voice.

  Her hair was a light brown, almost but not quite blond. She didn’t look particularly Jewish. When she whirled, she saw a policeman pointing with his nightstick.

  He opened his mouth to shout again. Then he saw the yellow six-pointed star on her shabby coat. “Oh,” he said, and dashed for the nearest shelter himself.

  “Scheisse,” Sarah muttered. Jews weren’t allowed in air-raid shelters. Those were reserved for citizens of the Reich, and Jews were at best grudgingly permitted residents. Here, she was like the dead atheist: all dressed up with nowhere to go.

  She wasn’t an atheist, though she wondered why not more and more with each miserable passing day. She wished she weren’t so far from her husband’s family’s bakery. But the grocery store across the street from them had taken a bomb, so she had to go far afield for cabbage and beets to eat along with the bread the Brucks turned out.

  Atheist or not, though, she was liable to end up dead. Bombs whistled down. She ran into the closest shop. It sold sewing accessories. Right this minute, it was empty but for her. The Aryans who ran it were down in a cellar somewhere. She couldn’t join them. She lay down behind the counter, hoping it would give her a little shelter from bomb fragme
nts. She didn’t need to worry about flying glass. The plate glass in the window out front was gone, replaced by wood and cardboard. A thief could break in any time-not that there was much to steal inside.

  Bombs started bursting. Munster lay close to the border with France. Sarah supposed French planes would have an easy time getting here now that their homeland was at war with Germany once more.

  It was a strange business. Sarah had better reason to hate the Reich than she did with England or France. She wished something horrible would happen to Hitler, and she hardly cared what. But Hitler was safe-she presumed he was safe-in Berlin, and his enemies were liable to kill her here. It hardly seemed fair.

  Crump! Crump! The ground shook. Antiaircraft guns hammered, though they had to be firing by ear, not by eye. The ground shook again, seriously this time, at an explosion bigger than any mere bomb. Maybe a Messerschmitt up there had shot down a bomber, and its whole load went up when it smashed to earth.

  She couldn’t root for some German fighter pilot. But she also couldn’t cheer for flyers raining death and destruction on her city. Instead of rooting or cheering for anyone, she huddled there and hoped she’d stay alive.

  Back at the bakery, Isidor and his father and mother would be doing the same thing. So would her mother, at the house where she and her brother had grown up. Her father-once a professor of classics and ancient history at the university, now a surprisingly proud member of a labor gang-would have scrambled for whatever shelter he could find, the same way she had. If he weren’t a wounded veteran from the last war, he wouldn’t have been even so fortunate as he was.

  When this war started, Samuel Goldman had tried to rejoin the Wehrmacht even if he did limp, even if he was a Jew. So had young, athletic Saul, a footballer of professional quality-again, even if he was a Jew. The recruiters wouldn’t take either of them; the law forbade it.

  Saul wound up in the Wehrmacht anyhow. He’d somehow managed to get false papers while on the run after smashing in his sadistic laborgang boss’ head with a shovel. Sarah thought that was a fine joke on the Nazis. And even if Saul was fighting the Russians in the East, he had to be safer than he would be in the Reich.

  The air raid didn’t last long-no more than fifteen minutes. Sarah wouldn’t have wanted to linger above a well-defended city during the day, either. The French or English bombers buzzed away to the west. Sarah climbed to her feet and dusted herself off.

  She scurried out of the shop ahead of the all clear. To her relief, she got away before the owner emerged from a bomb shelter. Someone seeing a Jew coming out was all too likely to assume she’d gone in to steal while the place was deserted. People did that during air raids. A Jew, of course, would never get the benefit of the doubt.

  No point going after groceries now. Along with the burbling wail of the all-clear signal, fire-engine bells clanged. Smoke rose in half a dozen places. Hearing the fire engines’ motors-hearing any motors-seemed odd. Fire engines, an ambulance, doctors’ cars: those were the only civilian vehicles still on the streets.

  Sarah dithered for a moment. She was closer to the house where she’d grown up than she was to the bakery. Should she go make sure her mother was all right? She didn’t see any smoke coming up from that direction. That made her decide to go back to her husband and his folks. She’d check on her own parents later.

  An electric tram rattled past. Sarah kept walking, though it was going her way. In its wisdom and mercy, the Reich had declared public transport verboten to Jews.

  The tram stopped short. A bomb had burst in the middle of the street. The Aryan passengers would have to hoof it just like her. The crater was five meters wide and at least two deep. Water from a burst main rapidly turned it into a pond. The blast had blown out the fronts of several shops. A gray-haired man in a leather apron stood on the battered sidewalk in front of his ruined place of business. What would he do now? By the way his head shook like a metronome, he hadn’t the least idea.

  On Sarah went. A fire crew sprayed water on a burning building. Perhaps thanks to the smashed main, they didn’t have much water to spray. All they could do was try to keep the flames from spreading. They swore fierce, guttural oaths. Sarah admired the splendid profanity.

  She’d thought of the ambulance a few minutes earlier. Its bell clanged on a note different from the fire engines’. A big splash of red against a wall said somebody hadn’t made it to any kind of shelter before the bombs fell. Whoever he was, he was unlikely to need an ambulance now-or ever again. Except for the blood, there was no sign of whoever’d got in the way of that bomb.

  No smoke rose from the bakery. All the same, Sarah stopped short when she rounded the last corner. There was another new pond in the street right in front of the place, with water slopping out and pouring down the uncratered pavement. And the building … The building had fallen in on itself.

  “No,” Sarah whispered, as if God could or would run the film of the world in reverse till this unhappened.

  People were already attacking the wreckage with spades and with their bare hands. Not all of them were Jews, either. Germans could be decent. You just couldn’t count on them to act like that. Sarah ran forward to do what she could.

  A man with a white mustache gaped at her. “You’re not in there,” he said foolishly.

  “I was shopping.” Absurdly, Sarah felt guilty because she wasn’t buried by bricks and beams.

  “Lucky you.” The man with the mustache lived half a block down. Right this minute, she couldn’t remember his name to save her life. She had bigger things to worry about. She dug through the wreckage like a badger.

  “Here’s one of them,” another old man said. After a moment, with rough kindness, he added, “Well, he never would’ve known what hit him, anyway, poor bastard.”

  That had to be David Bruck. Except, as the rescuers pulled the body free of the rubble, it wasn’t. It was Isidor. Someone draped a cloth over him, but not before Sarah saw how the left side of his head was all smashed in. The man who’d found him was right. That would have killed him right away.

  Sarah made a half-choked noise, then started to cry. Within a couple of minutes, the would-be rescuers also found David and Deborah Bruck. They were dead, too. “It’s a shame, girlie,” the man with the white mustache said, offering Sarah a none-too-clean handkerchief so she could blow her nose. “They might’ve been Yids, but they were nice folks.” A Jew in Germany was unlikely to win a better epitaph.

  “What’ll she do now?” a woman asked, and then aimed the question right at her: “What’ll you do now, dearie?”

  “I don’t know.” Sarah was just getting used to being a wife. Now, all of a sudden, she found herself a widow. “I don’t have any idea. What can I do?” It was Hitler’s war, and he wouldn’t let Jews fight in it. It reached out and killed them just the same.

  Sergeant Hideki Fujita swaggered through the streets of Myitkyina. He was in town on a pass, and drunk as a lord. There were things a member of Unit 113 wasn’t allowed to talk about, no matter how drunk he got. That didn’t worry Fujita. It hadn’t worried him before he poured down a big skinful of the local rotgut, either. Germ warfare wasn’t the kind of thing you wanted to sit down and gab about, not if you were in your right mind it wasn’t.

  Sooner or later, he’d queue up at an enlisted men’s brothel and get the lead out of his pencil. That was an important reason to come into town, after all. But he wasn’t ready yet. He had more drinking to do first.

  He wasn’t the only Japanese soldier wandering the Burmese town: nowhere close. He kept an eye out for his countrymen. No matter how drunk he got, there was no excuse for not saluting an officer. No excuse. Ever. If you didn’t show proper respect, you’d catch hell. In the Japanese Army, that was as much a law of nature as sunrise every morning.

  He kept an eye on the Burmese, too. They looked like a pack of damned foreigners. They were a pack of damned foreigners. They were too skinny. They were browner than Japanese-not a lot, but enough to notice.
Their features were softer than those of his countrymen. Their language sounded like barking dogs to him. It was even uglier than Chinese.

  And he had other reasons for keeping an eye on them. Japan was running Burma at the moment because she’d chased out England, which had been running the place till the Japanese arrived. Some Burmese kissed their new overlords’ feet, glad the white men were on the run. Others, though … Well, some slaves would always stay loyal to their old masters.

  For the English still lingered in India, not far enough to the west. And they did their best to aid the Chinese bandits who went on struggling against the Japanese drive to shake some order into their miserable country.

  That was why Unit 113 was in business. Cholera and the plague had broken out in Yunnan Province. Thousands, maybe tens of thousands, had died on account of the diseases. Let the English try to bring materiel into China from India. What good would it do them if the Chinese who were supposed to unload the guns and munitions were dead or sick or fled to escape pestilence? Not much.

  A faded mug of beer on a sign outside a tavern made Fujita walk in. The place had started life as an imitation-no doubt a wretched imitation-of an English pub. It was dark and gloomy inside. The furniture was heavier than anything a Japanese would have made. There was a dartboard on the wall. Behind the bar hung a portrait of the Emperor of Japan in military uniform. Fujita would have bet everything he owned (not much at the moment, but even so) a picture of the King of England had hung there till Myitkyina suddenly changed ownership.

  The bartender was Burmese. He’d learned enough of Japanese customs to bow to Fujita as the sergeant approached. Fujita nodded back, superior to inferior. “Biru,” he said gruffly.

  “Hai.” The man behind the bar bowed again. He set a bottle of beer and a pint mug-another survival of the vanished English-in front of Fujita. Then he pointed to a price list the noncom hadn’t noticed. It was written in Japanese, and was bound to be as new as the photo of Hirohito.