The War That Came Early: West and East (14 page)

Not even the guy who knew stuff had an automatic good answer for that one. Cautiously, Luc asked, “Why do you think she’s messing around?” Some guys worried themselves sick over nothing.

And some guys didn’t. “Marie’s always been a flirt,” Boucher said. “And we kind of had a fight before I had to go into the army.”

That didn’t sound so good. Luc spread his hands. “Don’t know what to tell you except this: if she is messing around on you, she wasn’t worth having to begin with.”

“Easy for you to say! I love her!” Denis Boucher seemed as hot and bothered as a little round-faced guy could get.

“Well, if she’s there for you when you get home, everything’s great. And if she’s not, you’ve got the rest of your life to pick up the pieces and find somebody else,” Luc said. Sergeant Demange would have told the kid
to shut the fuck up and soldier, which was also good advice. Luc wasn’t so hardened. He also didn’t point out that Denis was liable not to get home, or to come back so torn up that neither Marie nor anyone else in skirts was likely to want anything to do with him. No matter how true that was, it wasn’t helpful.

True it was. The Germans might not have any tanks in the neighborhood of Beauvais any more, but they’d left behind plenty of artillery. It started working over the French lines in the middle of the night. It had them ranged to the centimeter, or so it seemed to Luc as he cowered in his hole. Nothing you could do about artillery fire but pray it didn’t chop you up.

The barrage stopped as abruptly as it started. Wounded
poilus
shrieked. You could follow them by their screams as aid men took them to the rear. Luc grasped his rifle and stared wildly into the night, waiting for the fuckers with the coal-scuttle helmets to sweep down on the French trenches. Machine guns spat strip after strip of ammunition at the German lines to make the
Boches
think twice.

Maybe they’d already thought twice. They didn’t come out of their foxholes and trenches. After a while, swearing and yawning, Luc curled up like a tired old dog and tried to sleep. No sooner had he closed his eyes, or so it seemed, than the artillery started up again.

It went on like that for the next several days: random shelling at all hours of the night and day. It wasn’t anything like the usual methodical pattern of German fire. Maybe the regular German artillery commander had gone off with the tanks and left his halfwitted nephew in charge. If so, Junior was a damn pest.

And Denis Boucher went missing one morning. Luc glumly reported that to Sergeant Demange. “Maybe a German 105 blew him to kingdom come,” he said. “But maybe he scooted off to see what was going on with his precious Marie.”

“Well, if he did, he’s not our worry any more,” Demange said. “Let the military police get all hot and bothered about him. And if he does make it back to the mangy bitch, I hope she gives him the clap.” The milk of human kindness ran thin and curdled in Demange’s veins.

In Luc’s, too, at the moment. He yawned till his jaw cracked like a
knuckle. “I hope the
Boches’
artillery lets up during the day. I’ve got to grab some sleep.”

“You get tired enough, you can sleep through a barrage. I did it myself, back in ’18,” Demange said.

“I believe you. I aim to try,” Luc said. Maybe the generals should have sent armor surging forward to drive the invader from
la belle France
. Luc couldn’t get excited about that, not right now. He went back to his hole and snuggled down in it. By now he was so used to sleeping on the ground, he’d decided mattresses were overrated. Exhaustion clouted him over the head with a padded blackjack. An hour and a half later, the German artillery started up again. Luc never knew it.

AS HE ALWAYS DID
while he was atop the U-30’s conning tower, Julius Lemp scanned. The sun was going down, far in the northwest. At this latitude and this season, it would rise again in the northeast in a very few hours. It wouldn’t stay dark long, and it wouldn’t get very dark; the sun wouldn’t sink far enough below the horizon for that.

This stretch of North Atlantic between Iceland and Norway should have been deadly dangerous for a surfaced U-boat, then. And it would have been, had any Royal Navy ships been close enough to spot the U-30. The submarine lay almost two hundred kilometers north of the Faeroe Islands. The English had to figure no one in his right mind would care to visit this lonely stretch of sea.

Lemp thought the English had a point. You could die of boredom before you saw a freighter plowing across these waters. Even if you did, it would be flying a Danish or Swedish or Norwegian flag: a neutral, and so not a legitimate target. Lemp had already sunk one neutral. What Admiral Dönitz would do to him if he sank another did not bear thinking about.

Resolutely, then, Lemp didn’t think about it. Or he tried not to. The thought kept making him notice it, like a chunk of gristle wedged between two back teeth. He longed for transcendental floss to make it go away.

The ratings up there with him were also peering through binoculars.
As a wave crest pushed the U-30 up a meter or two, one of them stiffened and pointed. “Smoke, Skipper!” he exclaimed.

“Where away?” Lemp asked, but he was already looking north, following the man’s index finger. He needed to wait for another wave to lift the U-boat before he spied the plume himself. It was in the right quarter, but … He frowned. Diesels were supposed to make less smoke than turbines. That he’d seen this ship’s exhaust before the masts came up over the horizon wasn’t a good sign.

“Is it ours, or does it belong to the limeys?” asked the man who’d first noted the smudge in the sky.

“It had better be ours,” Lemp answered. By the time they got close enough to be sure it wasn’t, a Royal Navy ship would be pounding them to pieces. He waited for the ship itself to come into sight, then spoke to the bosun, who stood behind the signal lamp: “Give ’em the recognition signal, Matti.”

“Aye aye.” Matti Altmark clacked the louvers. Three Morse letters flashed out across the water.

A moment later, three came back. Lemp breathed a sigh of relief. That smoked, too—even heading into June, it was cold up here. You didn’t want to fall into the sea. You’d last only minutes if you did.
“Alles gut,”
Lemp said, noticing the sailors staring anxiously at him. They didn’t know what the answer was supposed to be. Lemp did. “That’s the
Admiral Scheer
, all right.”

They grinned and gave him thumbs-up. He made himself smile as he returned the gesture. The pocket battleship was loose in the North Atlantic. With any luck at all, the Royal Navy didn’t know it yet. Commerce raiders had kept England hopping in the last war. These armored cruisers and their eleven-inch guns were supposed to do even better this time around. The idea was that they could outfight anything they couldn’t outrun and outrun anything they couldn’t outfight.

By all their specs, they could do both those things. They could get the Royal Navy scrambling like eggs. They could disrupt commerce between the USA and England and between South America and England. They could. That didn’t mean Julius Lemp thought much of them. He was a U-boat man from stem to stern, from top to bottom. Couldn’t submarines
do the same job as big, fancy surface raiders, do it better, and do it cheaper? Of course they could—if you asked a U-boat man.

On came the
Admiral Scheer
. She was a hell of a lot prettier than the cigar-shaped, rust-streaked U-30. Even Lemp had to admit that. She looked like a sword slicing through the waves. But so what? They didn’t pay off on looks, not unless you were a chorus girl.

His men kept staring at the pocket battleship through their field glasses. “Everything is so clean,” one of them murmured. “
Everybody
is so clean.” The submarine and its crew were anything but. They wore leather jackets to hide grease stains. They all smelled bad—you couldn’t bathe properly in this cramped steel tube. Face fungus sprouted on their cheeks and chins and lower lips … and on Lemp’s. The only thing that distinguished him from them was the white cloth cover on his officer’s cap.

More signals flashed from the
Admiral Scheer’
s lamp. “Captain … will … repair … aboard,” Matti said slowly.

“I read it,” Lemp answered. “Tell them
Aye aye.”
The U-boat’s signal lamp clacked again.

The pocket battleship lowered a motor launch. It chugged across to the U-30. Feeling like a man entering a strange new world, Lemp boarded it. The petty officer in charge of the launch saluted him. He had to remind himself to return the gesture. There was no room for such nonsense in the submarine’s cramped quarters.

Up on the bridge, Lemp did remember to salute Captain Patzig, the officer commanding the
Admiral Scheer
, as he should have. The middle-aged four-striper wore decorations from the last war on the chest of his spotless blue tunic. He eyed Lemp as if wondering whether the U-boat skipper would sneak off with silverware from the galley. But his voice was polite enough as he said, “Welcome aboard.”

“Thank you, sir. You can see a long way from here, can’t you?” Lemp wasn’t used to being up so high.

Patzig glanced down toward the U-30. He smiled faintly. “We spot the enemy sooner.”

“Yes, sir.” That reminded Lemp of something else. “Sir, you should know we saw your smoke before we spotted your masts.”

“You did?” Patzig rumbled ominously, as if warning Lemp to take it
back. But Lemp only nodded—it was true. The older man frowned. “Well. I shall have to speak to my engineering officers about that.” By the look on his face, it wouldn’t be a pleasant conversation.

“What do you want with us, sir?” Lemp asked. “My orders say I am to cooperate with you in all regards.” He didn’t like them, but he had them.

“We’re both out here for the same reason: to disrupt shipping between England and the Americas,” Patzig said. “We would do better working together than separately.”

“Sir?” Lemp said, and not another word.
Why does this shit always land on my head?
he wondered bitterly. But he knew the answer to that, knew it all too well. He got this assignment for the same reason that the U-30 got to test a
Schnorkel
under combat conditions. The powers that be didn’t love him, and they had their reasons. Untested? Dangerous? Foolhardy? We’ll send out U-30! If anything happens to her, it’s no great loss.

Captain Patzig didn’t seem to realize he was talking like an idiot. When you commanded a behemoth like this, a U-boat skipper was less than the dirt beneath your feet.
“Ja,”
he said. “Together. Your torpedoes will be useful in sinking ships we capture.”

Lemp didn’t explode. Holding himself in wasn’t easy, but he did it. Carefully, he said, “Um, sir, is it not so that your
Panzerschiff
here also carries torpedoes?”

He knew damn well it was so. And he managed to embarrass Captain Patzig, at least a little. Color came into the older man’s cheeks, which had been quite pale. “Well, yes,” Patzig admitted, “but you submariners are the experts in their use, after all. With us, they are strictly auxiliary and emergency weapons.”

And what was
that
supposed to mean? Had the
Admiral Scheer
tried to torpedo some luckless freighter and missed? It sounded that way to Lemp. He almost asked Captain Patzig. Had Patzig come aboard his boat, he would have. But surface-navy discipline stifled him here on the pocket battleship’s spotless bridge.

“You can cruise at fourteen knots and keep station with us,
nicht wahr?”
Patzig said.

“Till we run out of fuel, yes,” Lemp answered. “You’ve got much more range than we do.”

The other skipper waved that aside. “We can refuel you,” he said. And so they could—no doubt about it. The
Admiral Scheer
’s diesels would gulp where the U-30 sipped, and the surface vessel would carry far more fuel, too. Patzig went on, “In case we encounter the Royal Navy, your presence would also be useful.”

There he actually made sense. Enemy cruisers or destroyers going after the pocket battleship wouldn’t expect her to have a U-boat tagging along. Lemp did say, “Once you run up to full speed, sir, you’ll leave us behind. We may not be able to do you any good when you need us the most.”

Patzig waved that aside. “We will do our best to lure the Englishmen straight into your path. The hunting will be good, Lieutenant. Return to your boat and prepare to conform to our movements.”

No! You’re out of your goddamn mind!
No matter how much Lemp wanted to scream in the senior man’s face, the words stuck in his throat. He saluted stiffly.
“Zu befehl, mein Herr!”
he said.
At your command, sir!
And it was at Patzig’s command. Lemp wouldn’t have done this on his own for every Reichsmark in Germany—no, not for every dollar in the USA. Military discipline was a strange and wondrous thing. Full of foreboding, he did a smart about-turn and walked away.

IT WAS …
a railroad track. Had Hideki Fujita seen it somewhere in Japan or Manchukuo, he wouldn’t have given it a second glance. The sergeant shook his head. No, that wasn’t quite true. The two iron rails seemed uncommonly far apart. The Russians used a wider gauge than most of the rest of the world. Fujita had heard that was to keep invaders from the west from putting their rolling stock onto Russian tracks. He didn’t know—or much care—whether that was true, but it seemed reasonable to him.

But watching Japanese engineers tear these tracks out of the ground and throw them into a roaring fire to bend the lengths of rail beyond repair was something else again. Wrecking the Trans-Siberian Railroad meant victory. No more trains would get through to Vladivostok. And, once the Soviet city on the Pacific was cut off and taken, the rest of the Russian Far East would drop into Japan’s hands like a sweet, ripe persimmon.

The Russians understood that as well as the Japanese did. They’d fought like demons to keep the Kwantung Army from coming this far. Two engineers picked up a Russian corpse that lay on the tracks, one by the feet, the other by the arms. They tossed the body a couple of meters off to one side. The thump it made when it hit the dirt again sounded dreadfully final.