The War That Came Early: West and East (16 page)

She poured down champagne during intermission. That let her applaud more than she would have otherwise when the performance ended. The singers aimed their bows at the Party
Bonzen
, not the galleries. They knew who buttered their bread—not that anybody in Germany saw much butter these days.

“So how are we going to find the hotel?” she asked as she and Constantine Jenkins walked out into pitch blackness. Some Germans wore lapel
buttons coated with phosphorescent paint so people wouldn’t bump into them in the dark. She wished she had one.

“Here.” Jenkins also went without. He took her hand, finding it unerringly despite the lack of light. “Stick with me. I’ll get you home.”

Damned if he didn’t. Maybe he was part cat, to see in the dark, or part bloodhound, to sniff his way back. Getting back to the hotel so easily seemed worth celebrating with a drink in the bar. One drink in the bar became two. Two became several. When Peggy went up to the room at last, it seemed the most natural thing in the world that he should go up with her. He was a good deal steadier on his feet than she was on hers.

And when she woke up the next morning with him beside her smiling, she wondered what the hell she’d gone and done. She didn’t wonder long, not when all she had on was her birthday suit. She sure wondered what she’d do next, though.

Chapter 7

D
own roared the Stuka. The sirens in the landing-gear legs screamed. French troops scattered. Hans-Ulrich Rudel saw them through a red haze of acceleration, but see them he did. His thumb came down on the firing button. The forward machine gun hammered. A few of the running Frenchmen fell.

Some of the
poilus
had nerve. They stood there and fired at the Ju-87 as it roared by only a couple of hundred meters over their heads. You couldn’t mistake muzzle flashes for anything else. Most of the time, they missed. The Stuka went mighty fast, and they wouldn’t lead it enough. But all those bullets in the air were dangerous. Ground fire had brought down airplanes—not often, but it had.

Not today. Not this Stuka. It climbed again as Hans-Ulrich yanked back on the stick. “See any fighters?” he asked Albert Dieselhorst.

“None of ours,” answered the noncom in the rear-facing seat. A moment later, he added, “None of theirs, either.”

Theirs were the ones Hans-Ulrich worried about. Stukas were marvelous for shooting up and bombing enemy ground targets. When it
came to air-to-air combat, they were too slow to run and too clumsy to dodge. A lot of good men had died before the
Luftwaffe
decided to admit that.

Although Hans-Ulrich had already been shot down once, he didn’t intend to die like that. Unlike plenty of other cocky, cock-proud pilots, he didn’t intend to be stabbed by a cuckolded husband, either. He aimed to have grandchildren and great-grandchildren gathered around his bed, so he could tell them something interesting and memorable as he went. He was a minister’s son, all right.

He saw French panzers moving toward Clermont. He reported them by radio—that was all he could do. A Stuka had to score a direct hit with a bomb to harm a panzer, and a direct hit on a moving target was easier imagined than done.

On the way back to his airstrip, German flak opened up on him. He was tempted to strafe the idiots who’d started shooting. A Ju-87 was about the most recognizable plane in the world, for God’s sake! Speaking of good men, how many were dead because their own friends murdered them? Too damned many—he knew that.

Even through the speaking tube, Sergeant Dieselhorst’s voice sounded savage: “You ought to go back there and shoot those bastards up!”

“I thought about it,” Rudel answered, “but at least they missed.”

“That just makes them incompetent bastards,” Dieselhorst said.

“Would you rather they’d shot us down?” Hans-Ulrich asked. Dieselhorst didn’t answer, which was probably a good thing.

The landing wasn’t smooth, but a Stuka was built to take it. Rudel went into Colonel Steinbrenner’s tent to report. “We got your news about the panzers,” Steinbrenner said. “Good job. The ground forces are doing what they can to stop the froggies.”

“Danke
, sir,” Hans-Ulrich said. “Stuka pilots ought to be able to do more about panzers from the air. We’re fine against soft-skinned vehicles, but armor …?” He spread his hands, palms up, as if to say it was hopeless.

“I don’t know what to tell you,” the wing commander replied. “Machine guns aren’t heavy enough, and you have to be lucky with bombs. You’d need to mount a cannon or something to do yourself any good.”

By the way he said it, the idea was impossible. The more Rudel thought, the more he figured it wasn’t. “You know, sir, we could do that,” he said, excitement kindling in his voice. “You could mount a 37mm gun under each wing instead of the bomb that usually goes there. You’d need a magazine for the ammo instead of loading it round by round, and you’d want to use electrical firing, not contact fuses from the ground artillery. Once you had those, a Stuka would turn into a panzerbuster like nothing anybody’s ever seen.”

“You’re serious,” Steinbrenner said slowly, staring across the table with folding legs that did duty as his desk.

“Damn right I am, uh, sir.” When Hans-Ulrich swore, he was very serious indeed. “I’d like to talk to the engineers and the armorers, see what they think of the idea.”

“What if they say no?” the wing commander asked.

Hans-Ulrich only shrugged. “How am I worse off?”

Colonel Steinbrenner blinked, then started to laugh. “Well, you’ve got me there. Go ahead—talk to them. See what happens. Maybe they’ll come up with something. Or maybe they’ll tell you you’re out of your tree. Who knows?”

Head full of his grand new idea, Rudel hurried away. The first person he talked to was Sergeant Dieselhorst. The rear gunner and radioman rubbed his chin. “That’d be a nice trick if they can do it,” he said. “Can they?”

“I don’t know,” Hans-Ulrich said. “I sure want to find out, though.”

He interrupted the armorers’ skat game. They heard him out, then looked at one another. “That just might work,” one of them said when he finished. “Mount the breech in a sheet-metal pod so it’s more aerodynamic …”

That hadn’t even occurred to Hans-Ulrich. “Wonderful!” he exclaimed. “Could you fellows rig up a gun like that?”

They looked at one another again. The fellow who’d spoken before—his name was Lothar—said, “Well, sir, that’s not gonna be so easy. We’re
Luftwaffe
guys, you know? How do we get our hands on a couple of infantry cannon?”

“Oh.” That hadn’t occurred to Hans-Ulrich, either. He wondered why not. Probably because he was so hot for the idea, he ignored problems. Other people didn’t, though. He supposed that was good. Well, most of him did. Every once in a while, you wanted things to be easy.

“Talk to the engineers, sir,” Lothar said. “They’ve got more pull than we do. If anybody can get hold of that kind of shit—uh, stuff—they’re the guys.”

So Rudel talked to the engineers. They visited forward airstrips every so often: they wanted to find out how the Stukas were doing in combat so they could get ideas for improving the planes the factories would turn out next month or next year. (A few weeks earlier, Hans-Ulrich wouldn’t have believed that the war could still be going on next year. Now, however much he regretted it, he realized anything was possible.)

They heard him out. When he started, they listened with glazed eyes and fixed smiles, the way an adult might listen to an eight-year-old talking about how he intended to fly to the moon on an eagle’s back. But he watched them come to life as he talked. When he finished, one of them said, “I will be damned. We could probably do that. And it sounds like it’d work if we did.”

“It does,” another engineer said. He might have been announcing miracles.

“You don’t need to sound so surprised,” Hans-Ulrich said sharply.

“Lieutenant, we hear schemes like this wherever we go. Well, not like this, but schemes.” The second engineer corrected himself. “Most of them are crap, nothing else but. Somebody has a harebrained notion, and he doesn’t see it’s harebrained ’cause he’s harebrained himself. And so he tries to ram it down our throats.”

“And he gets pissed off when we tell him all the reasons it won’t work,” the first engineer added. “I mean really pissed off. A rear gunner took a swing at me when I told him we couldn’t give a Stuka an electronic rangefinder—they’re too big and too heavy for an airplane to carry. One of these days, maybe, but not yet.”

“An electronic rangefinder?” Hans-Ulrich asked, intrigued in spite of himself.

“You don’t know about those?” the engineer said. Rudel shook his head. The man looked—relieved? “In that case, forget I said anything. The fewer people who do know, the better.”

Hans-Ulrich started to complain, then decided not to. Plenty of projects were secret. If the Frenchmen shot up his plane the next time he went out, and they made him bail out and captured him, the less he could tell them, the better off the
Reich
would be. The engineer was dead right about that. Hans-Ulrich did say, “But you think my idea
is
practical?”

“Hell with me if I don’t,” the man answered. Hans-Ulrich frowned; he didn’t like other people’s casual profanity. The engineer didn’t care what he thought. The fellow went on, “The ammunition may get a little interesting, but that’s the only hitch I see.”

“We could adapt the firing mechanism from the 109’s 20mm cannon,” his colleague said.

“Hmm. Maybe we could,” the other man said. Their technical colloquy made as little sense to Hans-Ulrich as if they’d suddenly started spouting Hindustani. But he understood the key point. They thought the panzer-busting gun would work, and they thought it was worth working on. He wondered how long they would need to come up with a prototype.

And he wondered if they would let him try it out.

“COME ON
, damn you.” Joaquin Delgadillo gestured with his rifle. “Get moving. If you were just a stinking Spanish traitor, by God, I’d shoot you right here.”

The International sitting in the dirt glared at him.
He
wouldn’t hold a rifle any time soon; a bullet had smashed his right hand. Blood soaked into the dirty bandage covering the wound. “What will you do to me instead?” he asked. Some kind of thick Central European accent clotted his Castilian. It wasn’t German. Joaquin had heard German accents often enough to recognize them. But he couldn’t have told a Czech from a Hungarian or a Pole.

“They’ll want to question you,” he answered.

“To torture me, you mean,” the Red said.

Delgadillo shrugged. “Not my problem. If you don’t start walking right now, I
will
shoot you. And I’ll laugh at you while you die, too.”

“Your leaders are fooling you. No matter what you think you’re fighting for, you won’t get it if that fat slob of a Sanjurjo wins,” the International said. “All you’ll get is—uh, are—tyranny and misery.”

He came very close to dying then. Joaquin nearly shot him; the main thing that kept him from pulling the trigger was the thought that the Red’s smashed hand made a good start on torture by itself. The interrogators could just knock it around a little, and the International would sing like a little yellow bird from the Canaries.

If the fellow hadn’t got up when Delgadillo jerked the rifle again, he would have plugged him, and that would have been that. But the International did. He stumbled off toward the Nationalists’ rear, Joaquin close enough behind him to fire if he tried anything cute. A wounded right hand? So what? He might be a lefty. You never could tell, especially with the Reds.

A bullet cracked past, a couple of meters over their heads. They both bent their knees to get farther away from it. “So you genuflect in that church, do you?” Joaquin said.

“Not many who don’t,” the International answered. “I want to live. Go ahead—call me a fool.”

“If you wanted to live, you should have stayed away from Spain,” Joaquin said. “This isn’t your fight.”

“Freedom is everybody’s fight, or it ought to be,” the Central European said. “If you don’t have freedom, what are you? The
jefe’
s donkey, that’s what, with a load on your back and somebody walking beside you beating you with a stick.”

That scream in the air was no ordinary bullet.
“¡Abajo!”
Delgadillo yelled as he hit the dirt.

The International flattened out, too. He yowled like a wildcat when he banged the wounded hand, but he didn’t pop up again, the way a lot of men would have. The shell—it had to be a 155—burst less than a hundred meters away. Fragments whined viciously overhead. The Nationalists weren’t going to take Madrid away from the Republic, not like this
they weren’t. In fact, the Republicans and their foreign friends had pushed Marshal Sanjurjo’s men out of the university at the northwestern edge of town. It was embarrassing, to say nothing of infuriating.

Which only made the International luckier still that Joaquin hadn’t shot him out of hand. Sergeant Carrasquel would have told him he was wasteful if he had. That was another good reason to hold back. No one in his right mind wanted a sergeant giving him a hard time.