The War That Came Early: Coup d'Etat Page 8

  Ivan Kuchkov soon found out things in the Red Army were different. Political officers here took the job of indoctrinating the men seriously. They preached Communism the way priests preached religion. And, like priests, they thought what they were doing was important.

  They also expected everybody else to think it was important. When a politruk started gabbing, he expected all the soldiers within range of his yappy voice to pay close attention. Ivan soon mastered the art of seeming to listen while his mind roamed free. He didn’t take long to realize he wasn’t the only one.

  Lieutenant Vasiliev went on and on about the benefits of Party membership. The most important one for most Red Army men was that their families were sure to get word if they fell on the field. Unlike the Nazis, Soviet soldiers wore no identity disks. The government kept only loose track of them; they were interchangeable, expendable parts. But Communist Party members were part of the elite. They mattered to the state, so it monitored them more closely than ordinary fighters.

  That might have been a selling point for most soldiers, but not for Ivan. His mother was dead. He couldn’t stand his brother or sister. And if he ever saw his old man again, he’d smack him in the snoot to pay him back for all the beatings he’d dished out when Ivan was a kid. Or he’d try, anyhow. His father was a sneaky weasel, and might get in the first lick himself.

  So all that recruiting crap went in one ear and out the other. But sometimes Vasiliev went on about other stuff, too. One morning after breakfast—black bread, sausage, and tea, plus whatever the soldiers could scrounge from the countryside—he gathered the company together in the woods and spoke in portentous tones: “Romania has declared war against the Rodina.”

  Back when the war was new, Kuchkov’s SB-2 had flown across Romanian airspace so Soviet “volunteers” could reach Czechoslovakia to fight the Fascists. That aid wasn’t enough. They’d had to get the hell out of there again a month later. But they’d tried, which was more than anybody else could say. Now …

  Now the politruk went on, “Marshal Antonescu shows he always was a Fascist at heart. He thinks the Nazis and their lackeys are a better bet than the USSR. But our heroic soldiers, our brave workers and peasants, will show him what a big mistake he has made. This widens the war. Now it stretches from the Baltic to the Black Sea. Have the Nazis got enough men for such an enormous fight? No! Can Romania hope to fight the Red Army by herself? No again! We will push forward through her and tear into the Hitlerites’ soft underbelly!”

  He waited for applause. He got some. The men had learned he shut up sooner if they cheered. “Fuck the Romanians!” Ivan called. “Bugger ’em with a pine cone!” He took the Germans seriously. They were too good at their trade for anything less. But the Romanians? They had to be worse humpties than the Poles. The Poles, at least, were brave. Nobody’d ever said that about the Romanians.

  Lieutenant Vasiliev beamed at him. “There’s the Soviet fighting spirit! Are you a Party member, Sergeant?”

  “No, Comrade Lieutenant.” Kuchkov wished he’d kept his big mouth shut. You didn’t want to draw their notice. They’d dump garbage on your head if you did.

  “Would you like me to begin your paperwork for you? It’s easy enough to arrange.”

  “However you please, Comrade Lieutenant.” Ivan wanted to become a Communist almost as much as he wanted to shit through his ears. But you couldn’t just tell the sons of bitches no. Then you’d go on a list. People who landed on those lists had bad things happen to them.

  “You’re Kuchkov, right? Yes, of course you are.” Vasiliev had the politician’s knack for matching names and faces. Well, most of the time; with a self-deprecating chuckle, he added, “Please remind me of your name and patronymic.”

  “Ivan Ivanovich, sir.”

  “Can’t get much plainer than that, can you?” The politruk smiled as he wrote it down. “Me, I’m Arsen Feofanovich, so I’m at the other end of things.” Kuchkov nodded. Both Vasiliev and his father had uncommon first names, all right. But the lieutenant made a mistake if he thought Kuchkov might care.

  The Germans started shelling the forest where the company sheltered. Digging proper foxholes in ground frozen stone hard was a bitch. And the Nazis had come up with an evil trick (one the Red Army also used, though Ivan didn’t worry about that): they set their fuses to maximum sensitivity, so most shells went off as soon as they touched branches overhead. Then the bursts sprayed sharp fragments of hot metal down on the men huddled below.

  It was Ivan’s first real time under shellfire. He couldn’t shoot back, any more than he could when his bomber drew the unwelcome attention of antiaircraft guns. All he could do was stay low and try to dig himself in, though his entrenching tool took only pathetic little bites of dirt.

  Something hissed in the snow a few centimeters from his hand: a shard of brass that could have skewered him as easily as not. “Fuck your mothers!” he yelled, though of course the Nazis serving those distant 105s couldn’t hear him. “I hope your dicks rot off!”

  He also hoped one of those nasty fragments would wound Lieutenant Vasiliev. He didn’t want Vasiliev dead, just hurt enough to forget about putting him up for Party membership. If the politruk spent a few weeks in the hospital and then got sent to a different unit, that would do fine.

  Other soldiers swore, too, to let out their fear. And wounded men shrieked and wailed. The unhurt soldiers closest to them did what they could to relieve their comrades’ agony. Too often, that wasn’t much. Slapping a wound dressing on a leg ripped from knee to crotch was sending a baby boy to do a man’s job.

  Ivan wondered whether the Germans would follow up the shelling with an infantry attack. Russians laughed at Winter Fritz, yeah. Propaganda posters showed scrawny, shivering Nazi soldiers with icicles dangling from the ends of their long, pointed noses. That didn’t match what Kuchkov had seen. Yes, wide-tracked Russian tanks had the edge on German machines in the snow. The German foot soldiers around here seemed to know what they were doing, though. Some of their gear was improvised or stolen from the locals, but it wasn’t bad.

  And yes, sentries shouted in alarm. Submachine guns stuttered out death. Far more Red Army soldiers carried them than any other nation’s troops. They didn’t have a rifle’s range, true, or a rifle’s stopping power. But they were cheap and easy to make, and they spat a lot of lead. Inside a couple of hundred meters, a company of men with submachine guns would massacre a company of riflemen.

  The Germans, by contrast, made sure almost every squad included a light machine gun. That was another way to get firepower in carload lots. German MG-34s were far more portable than their Soviet equivalents. Ivan hadn’t been a foot soldier long, but he already hated them.

  Snatching up his own PPD, he ran for the edge of the woods. Shells kept falling, but you did what you had to do. The artillery might get him. If the Nazis made it in among the trees, he was a dead man for sure.

  As soon as he saw figures in whitewashed coal-scuttle helmets running toward him, he threw himself down behind a tree and started shooting. The Nazis were pros. They flattened out. Most of them had snow smocks or bedsheets for camouflage, though a few wore only their field-gray greatcoats and stood out like lumps of coal.

  Two Germans served an MG-34. Ivan burned through most of his big drum magazine before he took them out, but he made damn sure he did. Without that monster supporting them, the Fritzes lost enthusiasm for the attack across open ground. Sullenly, in good order, they drew back. Ivan’s sigh of relief filled the air in front of him with fog. His number wasn’t up … this time.

  Chapter 5

  Benjamin Halévy had all the answers. He was a Frenchman and a Jew, so he sure thought he did, anyhow. “Marshal Sanjurjo inspects the Madrid front every so often,” he said. “The Nationalists still don’t realize everything your elephant gun can do. Put a round through his giblets at a kilometer and a half and watch the assholes on the other side thrash like a chicken after it gets one in the neck from the farmer’s wife.
”

  “You make it sound so easy.” Vaclav Jezek eyed his cigarette with distaste. Spanish tobacco was even harsher than French. Every drag sandpapered his throat. The only thing worse would be no tobacco at all. This was a misfortune. That would be a catastrophe.

  “You’ve done it before,” Halévy said. “You just have to be in the right place at the right time, that’s all.”

  “You make it sound so easy,” Jezek repeated, even more dryly than before. Like so many things, sniping had to look simple to people who didn’t do it. The positioning, the concealment, the waiting, the shot … Everything had to go perfectly, or you wasted a bullet. More likely, you never got your shot off. Or else some canny bastard on the other side, somebody who was better or luckier than you were at that particular moment, blew out the side of your head.

  “Well, think about it,” the Jew told him. “I’m starting to get connections, and sometimes they hear things from the other side. If you punch Sanjurjo’s ticket, the Republic will pin so many medals on you, you’ll look like a Fascist general.”

  “I think I’d rather get laid,” Vaclav said. Halévy laughed. Vaclav sent him a sour stare. “And how are you getting connections? You don’t speak Spanish.”

  “No, but if people here speak any foreign language, they speak French.” Halévy made it sound natural and easy.

  It probably was, for him. Vaclav grunted, pinched out the cigarette’s coal, and stowed the little butt in a tobacco pouch. Waste not, want not. A Jew would land on his feet anywhere—even in Spain, evidently.

  Somebody on the other side fired a rifle. The bullet whined high over the Republican line. It would come down somewhere, but long odds it would hurt anybody when it did. A lot of shots fired in war were like that. You wanted to get the other guys, but you didn’t want them to get you. So you fired without sticking your head up to see what you were doing. You made them keep their heads down, anyway.

  More often than not, the Czechs and Internationals holding this stretch of the line would have ignored such a wild round. But guys here must have been jumpy, because two rifles in quick succession answered the Fascist shot.

  That spooked Sanjurjo’s men. Vaclav couldn’t imagine what they were thinking. That the veterans on the other side would swarm out of the trenches and charge them? They had to be nuts to believe anything like that.

  Nuts or not, more of them fired back. Bullets started snapping past, much closer to the trenches. You didn’t want to stick your head up over the parapet, or you’d stop one with your nose. Halévy chambered a round in his rifle. “I didn’t much want a firefight, but …” He shrugged. War wasn’t about what you wanted. It was about what you got stuck with.

  Along with the antitank rifle, Vaclav carried a pistol to defend himself at close range. The big piece was no good for work like that. Neither weapon was much use in a fight like this. Machine guns on both sides started yammering. Vaclav realized what a long way from home he was. But he didn’t want to be back in Prague, not with the Nazis’ swastika flying over it.

  Mortar bombs whispered when they came down. The first couple burst a few bays over from the sniper and the Jewish sergeant. Vaclav had dug a bombproof into the forward edge of the trench, with some help from Halévy. They’d reinforced it with bits and pieces of wood scavenged here, there, and everywhere. Both men dove into it now.

  If a mortar round burst right behind them, even the bombproof wouldn’t help. Vaclav wished such thoughts wouldn’t cross his mind. They just made this business even more horrible than it would be otherwise.

  “What if they try to rush us?” Halévy yelled through the din.

  “What if they do?” Vaclav returned. “The machine guns will slaughter them, that’s what.” The machine guns had heavily protected nests. Even a direct hit from a mortar bomb might not take one out. An ordinary soldier who got up on the firing step, though, was asking to get murdered.

  Before the war started, Jezek had figured Jews for cowards. He’d got over that. The ones in the Czechoslovakian army hated Hitler even more than Czechs did, which was saying something. They made up a disproportionate number of the men who served under the government-in-exile. And Benjamin Halévy held up his end of the bargain as well as anyone could want.

  Vaclav still didn’t like Jews. He saw no reason why he should. But he wasn’t dumb enough to disbelieve what he saw with his own eyes. Jews weren’t yellow, or no more yellow than anybody else.

  Little by little, the firefight ebbed. There was no particular reason for that, any more than there had been for its start. Combat wasn’t always rational. Not even a goddamn German General Staff officer with a volume of Clausewitz under his arm could deny that.

  Wounded men moaned or shrieked, depending on how badly they were hurt. Off in the distance, the same sounds rose from the Nationalists’ positions. Suffering had a universal language.

  Stretcher-bearers hustled wounded Republican fighters to aid stations behind the lines. If the men got there alive, they had a pretty good chance to stay that way. To his surprise, Vaclav had discovered that they knew far more about giving blood transfusions in the field here than they had in either Czechoslovakia or France.

  He crawled out of the bombproof and dusted himself off. The stink of shit hung in the air. Maybe it came from men killed on the spot, maybe from men scared past endurance. He’d fouled himself a time or two. He wasn’t proud of it—who would be? But he wasn’t anywhere near so ashamed as he had been when it happened. He wasn’t the only one it had happened to—nowhere near, in fact. It was just one of those things.

  Sergeant Halévy came out, too. “Such fun,” he said.

  “Fun,” Vaclav echoed in a hollow voice. “Right.”

  “If Sanjurjo were watching the football game right now—” Halévy said.

  “Then what?” Vaclav broke in. “I’d have to spot him. I’d have to know he was there to spot in the first place. He’d have to be somewhere the rifle could reach. I’d have to be somewhere I could shoot from. And I’d have to hit him when I did. Snipers never talk about all the times they miss, you know. So why don’t you give it a rest, huh?”

  “All right,” Halévy said. “But Sanjurjo does come right up to the front line to see what’s going on. Whatever else you can say about the miserable fat turd, he’s no coward.”

  “Oh, joy,” Jezek answered. Men who hadn’t seen action always figured the miserable turds on the other side wouldn’t show courage. But he’d seen that the Nazis were as brave as Czechs or Frenchmen or Tommies. No one here in Spain had ever accused the Nationalists of lacking balls. Brains, yes, but brains weren’t the same thing. Not even close.

  “I’m just telling you it’s not impossible you’ll get a shot at him, that’s all.” Halévy wouldn’t leave it alone.

  “And I’m just telling you it’s not impossible monkeys’ll fly out my ass next time I fart, but I’m not gonna wait around till they do,” Jezek retorted irritably.

  He couldn’t faze the Jew. “With all the singe we’ve both eaten, it wouldn’t surprise me one damn bit,” Halévy said. Singe was what the French called the tinned beef they got from Argentina. It meant monkey meat. Vaclav had never eaten real monkey, so he couldn’t say how much singe tasted like it. He was sure nobody in his right mind would eat the stuff if he didn’t have to.

  He did say, “That Spam the Americans ship over is a hell of a lot better.”

  “You’re right.” Halévy grinned and made as if to lick his chops. “It sure is.”

  “It’s pork,” Vaclav reminded him, not without malice.

  “You’re right,” Halévy agreed once more. “It sure is.” Vaclav thought that over, then shrugged. He wasn’t a perfect Christian. Why should he expect the French sergeant to make a perfect Jew?

  SURABAYA, on the north coast of Java, was even hotter and muggier than Manila. Pete McGill hadn’t dreamt any place could be, hell included, but there you were. And here he was, with the Boise, thanking the Lord the Japs hadn’t sunk the
light cruiser before she got here.

  Joe Orsatti had an answer for the weather. Joe Orsatti, Pete was discovering, had an answer for everything. Sometimes he had a good one; sometimes he was full of crap. But the other Marine always liked to hear himself talk.

  “We’re on the other side of the Equator now,” he said. “So it’s summer here, not winter. No wonder it’s so fucking sticky.”

  “We aren’t more than a long piss on the other side of the Equator,” Pete pointed out. “Looks to me like it’d be this way all the fuckin’ time here.”

  “Maybe that’s what makes the local wogs so jumpy,” Orsatti said. “Shit, if I had to live in a steam bath the goddamn year around, you can bet your sorry ass I’d be mean, too.”

  “Who says you aren’t?” Pete thought that was one of Joe’s crappy answers.

  The Javanese didn’t look a whole lot different from Filipinos, at least to American eyes. They were small and slight and brown. When they talked among themselves, their jibber-jabber sounded pretty much the same as the Filipinos’, too.

  But a lot of Filipinos knew English, and some of the ones who didn’t knew Spanish instead. If a Javanese spoke any European language, he spoke Dutch. And, to Pete’s way of thinking, that was a big part of the problem right there.

  When the United States took the Philippines from Spain, it was with the notion that eventually the islands would turn into a country of their own. (That was how Pete had heard it, anyway. Americans tended to forget they’d fought a nasty little war against Filipinos who wanted a country of their own right away.)

  Holland, by contrast, didn’t want to turn the Dutch East Indies loose. As long as Dutch forces in the Indies were strong enough to squash revolts, the locals put up with being ruled by a little country halfway around the world. They might not like it, but they put up with it.

  Now, suddenly, all that was tottering. The Japs were on the way. They weren’t white men. They were little and kind of brown themselves. They’d made the Boise bail out of Manila Bay like a cat running from a big, mean dog. They had troops on the ground in the Philippines now. And they were heading this way, because they were desperately hungry for the oil and tin and rubber the Dutch East Indies and British Malaya had in such abundance.