Two Fronts twtce-5 Page 8

  Jules opened his mouth. Then he closed it again. That was the smartest thing he could have done.

  The freighter wallowed away from the pier. It took its place in a convoy. Royal Navy destroyers and corvettes served as escort vessels. Seeing them cheered Demange up-a little. On the water, the English had some idea of what they were doing. He certainly preferred them as escorts to ships from the Red Fleet. At least he could be pretty sure their skippers weren’t blind drunk.

  Out into the Barents the convoy went. It zigzagged till night finally fell. As soon as darkness descended, all the ships hightailed it west at the best speed of the slowest freighter. Demange would have been content to leave that sorry con behind to shift for itself … unless, of course, it happened to be the miserable tub that was carrying him.

  In these latitudes and at this season, daybreak came all too soon. The ships stopped hightailing and started sedately zigzagging once more. Demange peered out at the gray-green water. He’d yell if he saw a periscope-which would probably help just enough to let him go down yelling.

  He saw nothing but ocean and a few scudding seabirds. No Flying Pencils or broad-winged Heinkels droned overhead to bomb the convoy. No Stukas roared down on the ships with sirens screaming like the end of the world.

  A few days later, he did see something he’d never seen before: a coastline that a sailor told him belonged to Scotland. He’d fought alongside Tommies in two wars, but that was his first glimpse of the British Isles. It made him think he likely would make it back to France. And the Germans, having missed this fine chance to kill him, would get more shots at it.

  Chapter 5

  Hans-Ulrich Rudel lay beside Sofia in the narrow bed in her cramped little flat in Bialystok. “I don’t know how often I’ll be able to come back,” he said sorrowfully, running his hand along the velvety skin of her flank. “Rumor is, they’re going to send us to the West again.”

  If his half-Jewish mistress was spying for the Russians, he’d just handed her enough to get himself shot at sunrise. “That’s a shame,” she said, with an exquisite shrug. “I’ll miss you-some.” Like a scorpion, she always had a sting in her tail.

  “I’ll miss you a lot,” Hans-Ulrich said. “I love you, you know.”

  “You think you do,” Sofia answered. “But that’s only because I let you get lucky. You’ll get over it as soon as you find somebody else.”

  He shook his head and kissed his way down from under her chin to the tip of her left breast. She arched her back and purred. “It’s not like that. You know it isn’t,” he insisted between kisses. “If things were different …”

  “If things were different-if I lived in Byelorussia, say, instead of Poland-you would have dropped bombs on my head instead of trying to pick me up.” As usual, Sofia reveled in being difficult. “And if you didn’t blow me up for being a Communist, you would have shot me for being a Jew.”

  “I never shot anybody for being a Jew,” Rudel said, which was technically true but made him out to be less of a good National Socialist than he was. “If things were different …”

  She interrupted him again. This time, she didn’t use any words, which didn’t mean she was ineffective. As Hans-Ulrich had discovered before, the difference between being blown and blown up was altogether delightful. “My God!” he gasped when she finished. “I don’t think I can see any more.”

  “Oh, no?” she retorted. “Then how come you were watching?”

  “A blind man would watch when you did that,” he said. “Himmeldonnerwetter, a dead man would.”

  “I’ve got a picture of that,” Sofia said, mocking him the way she so often did.

  “When we go-if you go-I’ll miss you more than I know how to tell you,” Hans-Ulrich said once more. “You’re wonderful. I’ve never known anybody like you.”

  “You should have started fooling around with Mischlings sooner, then.” No, Sofia couldn’t quit jabbing, even when she was way ahead on points.

  “I don’t care what you are. I care who you are.” While Rudel said it, it was true.

  By the way Sofia’s eyebrow quirked, she understood that better than he did. “Well, it’s a story,” she replied after a brief pause. Then she squeaked, but not in anger, because Hans-Ulrich was doing unto her as he’d been done by. She seemed to enjoy it quite as much as he had. When he finished, she nodded lazily and said, “I will miss you-some.”

  “I’m glad-I suppose,” he answered, as gruffly as he could. But his expression must have given him away, because Sofia started to laugh. He went on, “I don’t know for sure we’ll be transferred. It just looks that way, with France sticking a knife in our back.”

  “Germany never did anything to anybody, of course,” Sofia said.

  “Aber naturlich,” Hans-Ulrich agreed. She fired a sharp look at him, then caught herself and laughed some more.

  He hated getting back on the train and heading into Russia. He also hated changing trains at what had been the border between Poland and the USSR. The wider Russian gauge was deliberately designed to keep Germany from using her own rolling stock and locomotives inside Soviet territory. All the way back in the days of the Tsars, the Russians had worried about invaders from the west. That worry hadn’t gone away because the hammer and sickle replaced the old Russian tricolor.

  When he got back to the airstrip, Colonel Steinbrenner greeted him with, “Have a good time on your furlough?”

  “Yes, sir,” Hans-Ulrich answered-that one was easy enough.

  The squadron commander leered at him. “I hope you didn’t do anything I wouldn’t enjoy.”

  “Well, I don’t know about that, Colonel,” Hans-Ulrich said blandly. “I’ve never been in bed with you.”

  Whoops rose from the flyers and groundcrew men who heard that. Colonel Steinbrenner blinked. “You’re right,” he admitted. “There’s something I probably wouldn’t enjoy.”

  Getting back to business, Rudel asked, “What are our orders, sir? What’s the latest news?”

  “So far, all the talk about going back to the Siegfried Line is just that-talk,” Steinbrenner answered. “But I wouldn’t be surprised if it turns out to be real. The French are at war with us again.”

  “Treacherous pigdogs!” Hans-Ulrich said. “Anyone who counts on a Frenchman for anything is setting himself up to be sorry.”

  “And this surprises you because …?” Steinbrenner said. “The only good thing about it is that, for the time being, anyhow, it’s the same kind of war in the West it was while we went in and gave the Czechs what they had coming to them.”

  Rudel had no trouble figuring out what that meant: “The froggies don’t have the nerve to go toe-to-toe with us.”

  “Count your blessings that they don’t,” Colonel Steinbrenner replied. “Two fronts going full blast would cause us problems.”

  He was old enough to remember the last war, when fighting on two fronts had proved more than Germany could manage. Hans-Ulrich wasn’t, so he could say, “We were stabbed in the back at the end,” and mean it.

  “That’s what they say,” Steinbrenner-agreed? By they, he couldn’t mean anyone but the officials of the current government. Was he criticizing National Socialism and the Fuhrer? After the first attempted coup against Hitler, the SS had taken away the previous squadron commander, Colonel Greim. Greim hadn’t been loyal enough to suit the powers that be. Colonel Steinbrenner, by contrast, didn’t land in trouble with the authorities. He hadn’t up till now, anyhow.

  Not wanting to get into deeper political waters-not even wanting to get his political toes wet-Hans-Ulrich changed the subject in a hurry: “So we’re still flying against the Russians, then?”

  Steinbrenner nodded. “Till they tell us to do something else, that’s what we’re doing, all right.” Some of the leer came back to his face. “Breaks your heart, doesn’t it, staying someplace where you don’t have any trouble getting back to dear old Bialystok?”

  “I’ve heard ideas I liked less-I will say that.” Rudel
cocked his head to one side. Those were aircraft engines, off in the distance. A moment later, he realized they didn’t belong to Luftwaffe planes. “The Russians are still flying against us, too!” he exclaimed, and ran for the closest zigzagging slit trench.

  Steinbrenner and the rest of the men who’d greeted him on his return ran along with him. The flak guns around the airstrip started banging away even before he leaped down into the trench. He wished he wore a Stahlhelm instead of his officer’s soft cap. Shrapnel falling from several thousand meters could smash in your skull as readily as a rifle bullet.

  Russian bombs could punch your ticket for you, too. Down they whistled, and exploded with flat, harsh crumps. The Ivans’ Pe-2s were good bombers. They carried as big a load as any German plane, and were faster even than Ju-88s, the newest and speediest medium bombers the Luftwaffe boasted. They could fly rings around Stukas, but all kinds of planes could do that. Speed wasn’t what kept the Ju-87 in business. Being able to put bombs on top of a fifty-pfennig piece was.

  The Pe-2s couldn’t do that. They dropped theirs pretty much at random, then flew off to the east at full throttle before Bf-109s could tear into them. The raid couldn’t have lasted more than fifteen minutes. Rudel stuck his head up over the lip of the trench. A Ju-87 burned inside its revetment, smoke rising high into the gray sky. A couple of big bombs, probably 500kg jobs, had cratered the runway. The flak didn’t seem to have shot down any enemy planes.

  Colonel Steinbrenner also surveyed the damage. He delivered his verdict: “Well, we fly against the Russians as soon as we fix things up around here.”

  “Yes, sir,” Hans-Ulrich said. That was exactly how it looked to him, too.

  Pete McGill hadn’t known what they’d do with him once the Ranger got back to Hawaii. If they wanted him to stay aboard the carrier, he’d do that. Carriers took the fight to Japan. Or if they wanted him to splash up out of the Pacific and take some island away from Hirohito’s slanty-eyed bastards, he wouldn’t complain. The only thing that would have pissed him off was a training billet on the U.S. mainland. He wanted to go after the Japs himself, not teach other guys how to do it the right way.

  He turned out not to need to worry about that. He stayed with the Ranger. Maybe Rob Cullum put in a good word for him. Maybe they just figured, okay, he was there, he had plenty of shipboard experience, and he knew how to jerk five-inch shells. Why complicate things?

  Because it’s the Navy? a sly voice in the back of his head suggested. To the peacetime Navy, Marines were an unmitigated nuisance. Once the guns started going off, leathernecks turned into a slightly mitigated nuisance. They were still a pain to have to cart around aboard ships, but they did have some minor uses: taking islands away from the nasty buggers who occupied them and who refused to get shelled or bombed into extinction, for instance.

  Marines thought swabbies were boring. Sailors were convinced Marines stood in the muscle line twice and didn’t bother waiting for brains. Marines figured they carried an extra couple of inches where an extra couple of inches mattered most. If you had to stand in line twice to get those, hey, what better cause was there?

  Meanwhile, along with squabbling with each other (and with the Army, which both agreed was beneath contempt), the Navy and the Corps had to fight the Japs. Going toe-to-toe with them in the Pacific and knocking them flat hadn’t worked out the way the admirals wanted. Now the main idea was to keep Tojo’s monkeys from landing in Hawaii. If the USA had to fight the war from the West Coast, all of a sudden it looked a lot harder to win.

  Screened by destroyers and light cruisers, Ranger steamed back and forth west of the islands, her combat air patrol alert to anything the Imperial Navy might try to pull. Pete hoped like hell the flyboys were alert, anyhow. When the Japs got the drop on you, it could mess you up but good. He’d found that out in Manila, and several times since.

  Little by little, his longing for lost Vera faded, as did the pain from the physical injuries he’d got when Chinese terrorists bombed that Shanghai movie theater. His shoulder and his leg would probably always tell him when rain was on the way. And his heart would always ache when he thought about his Russian sweetheart. But, in the homely, cliched phrase, life did go on.

  He felt less and less guilt when he visited the whores on Hotel Street in Honolulu. He couldn’t bring Vera back. If he could have, he would have, and lived happily and faithfully ever after, too-he was sure of that. Being sure of it didn’t make it true, of course-one more thing he didn’t have to dwell on.

  Vera was gone, though. He hadn’t even seen her into the ground. He’d been too badly hurt himself. He had to do something with those extra couple of inches. And he did, as often as liberty and the state of his wallet would let him. He felt terrible the first few times. After that, he just felt good, which was, after all, the point of lying down with a woman in the first place.

  Those were interludes, though. Most of his time passed aboard the Ranger. He’d never served on a carrier before. His duties stayed the same: the Ranger’s five-inch guns were no different from the ones the Boise had mounted. The ship itself? That was a different story.

  Boise’s first order of business had been to steam and to shoot. Ranger’s was to get airplanes where they needed to go. They did the fighting for her. If her own guns went off, it was a sure sign something had hit the fan somewhere.

  As Rob Cullum dryly put it, “You notice they gave ’em to us. They figured we’d get into some shit now and again.”

  “Think so, do you?” Pete answered, deadpan. The other sergeant grinned and thumped him on the back. It hurt, but Pete didn’t care. It was a sign he was fitting in, and he wanted nothing more.

  Being a portable airstrip made Ranger a special kind of seagoing beast. The vast, echoing space of the hangar deck under the flight deck amazed Pete. That it was usually echoing with the snarl of power tools and with Navy mechanics’ inventive bad language as they worked on fighters, dive-bombers, and torpedo planes mattered little. The space was what got to him.

  Carrying all those planes meant carrying thousands of gallons of the high-octane gasoline they burned along with the ship’s own fuel oil. Fire at sea was any sailing man’s worst nightmare. Fire at sea aboard an aircraft carrier … “We’re nothing but a torch with a flight deck, are we?” Pete said when he got around to thinking about that.

  “Oh, I wouldn’t say so,” Sergeant Cullum answered after a few seconds’ consideration.

  “No, huh? What would you call us, then?” Pete challenged.

  “More like a furnace with a flight deck,” the other Marine answered. “We’d burn a hell of a lot hotter than some lousy torch.” It was Pete’s turn to consider, but not for long. He nodded. Cullum was right.

  No surprise, then, that the Ranger ran more firefighting drills than any other ship Pete had known. No surprise, either, that her sailors and Marines took them more seriously than he was used to. They did their share of goofing off and then some, but not about that.

  And no surprise that they were cynical anyhow. “Basically, we better not catch on fire,” Cullum said. “Once we go up, odds are we’re fucked.”

  “That’s about what I thought,” Pete said. “I was hoping you’d tell me I was wrong.”

  “Oh, you’re wrong about all kinds of shit,” Cullum answered easily. “But not about that.”

  “Japs must know, huh? I mean, their carriers gotta work the same way.” Having already been aboard one warship bombed and sunk from the air, imagining more dive-bombers and torpedo planes going after the Ranger made Pete feel as if a goose were walking over his grave-probably a goose with a radial engine and with meatballs on its wings.

  The twist to Rob Cullum’s mouth said he understood the touch of those heavy webbed feet-or were they tires slamming down on a flight deck? “They may suspect,” he agreed. “Yeah, they just may. How many of our flattops did they sink when we slugged it out west of here?”

  “Too many.” Pete couldn’t remember the exact number. All
of them but Ranger, was what it amounted to. He did his damnedest to look on the bright side of things: “When the shipyards really get rolling, we’ll build ’em faster’n the Japs can hope to sink ’em. What we’ve gotta do is stand the gaff in the meantime.”

  Cullum saluted him as if he’d sprouted stars on his shoulders. No, fat gold stripes on his sleeves, for the other sergeant said, “Thank you, Admiral King. Now that you’ve got all our troubles wrapped up with a pretty pink ribbon around ’em, you should write FDR a nice letter and let him know how he needs to be running the goddamn war.”

  “Ah, fuck off,” Pete replied without heat. When guys didn’t chin about women or gambling or sports or the crappy chow in the galley, strategy often reared its ugly head. “Tell me this, man. Suppose I was in charge.”

  “We’d be really screwed,” Cullum said at once.

  “Odds are,” Pete admitted, which made his buddy blink. He went on, “But how could we be screwed any worse’n we already are?”

  That did make Cullum stop and think. “Well,” he said at last, “in the big fight the slanties might’ve sunk Ranger, too. Then we wouldn’t have any carriers operating out of Pearl at all. Past that, though, it couldn’t hardly be fubar’d any worse than it is right now.”

  “See?” Pete said triumphantly.

  “Hey, a stopped clock is right twice a day. That puts it one up on you,” Cullum said. Pete flipped him off. Slowly, without any fuss, they drifted back to work.

  Spring was in the air outside of Madrid. All things considered, Vaclav Jezek could have done without it. The bitter cold of winter in central Spain-a nasty surprise, that-kept down the stink of unburied and badly buried bodies, of which there were always far too many. It also fought the reek of latrine trenches, and of the waste that never got as far as the latrine trenches.