The War That Came Early: Coup d'Etat (26 page)

The direction from which enemy fire came told him which way to crawl. The grass smelled all green and growing. A rich
scent rose from the black earth, too. Willi might be a city boy, but his nose said the Ivans were missing a bet by not raising wheat or beets or
something
right here.

Then that nose of his almost ran into the snub nose of a Red Army soldier crawling through the grass toward the German positions. Both men yelped in horror. Neither had had the slightest idea the other was there till the sea of
grass parted and they nearly banged heads.

Willi tried to aim his Mauser at the Russian. The Ivan had a rifle, too, but jerked his hand away from it as if it were red-hot.
“Kamerad!”
he bleated, and
“Freund!”
After that, he gabbled out a stream of Russian, of which Willi understood not a word.

He could have murdered the Red Army man in cold blood. He had no doubt Awful Arno would have plugged
the Ivan without a second thought, or even a first one. But the guy was trying to surrender. Willi supposed he was, anyhow. The Russian didn’t say boo when Willi grabbed his rifle. Then Willi frisked him—he didn’t want to send the guy on his way and end up catching a grenade. Like the English, the Russians used round bombs. They held less explosive than a German potato-masher, but you could throw
them farther. Willi confiscated the three on the Ivan’s belt, and his sheathed bayonet, too.

He found the soldier’s identity book. It had a photograph of the guy and a bunch of writing in an alphabet that was just squiggles to Willi. He handed it back to the Ivan. Why not? It wasn’t any use to
him
. He jerked his thumb toward the southwest, the direction from which the German advance was coming.

The Russian gave forth with what Willi guessed were thanks. He was pretty sure
spasibo
meant
danke
, anyhow. “Go on,” Willi said roughly,
hoping he hadn’t missed any lethal hardware—or that, if he had, the dirty, scared-looking, sorry son of a bitch in khaki wasn’t inclined to use it.

Off Ivan went. What happened to him afterwards, Willi never knew. He cared very little. The guy didn’t double
back on him or have a spare grenade Willi’d missed. That, Willi cared about. He crawled on. The
Landsers
behind the line could send the Russian to a POW camp. Or they could shoot him, if they decided they’d sooner do that. It wasn’t Willi’s worry. The Red Army men still ahead were.

OUT THROUGH
the Kiel Canal. The abrupt change in the U-30’s motion would have told Julius Lemp when they got out
into open water even if he’d been below. But he was up on the U-boat’s conning tower. As soon as the North Sea waves started slapping the boat, she began rolling in the way he’d found so familiar for so long.

One of the ratings up there with him didn’t take the new motion for granted like the skipper. “Fuck me,” the sailor said, gulping. “I’d forgotten how rough it gets out on the open sea.”

“If you’ve got to puke, Hans, don’t puke into the wind,” Lemp advised. “The idea is to get rid of what ails you, not to wear it.”

“Right.” Hans gulped again.

“If you can’t keep scanning, I’ll send you below with a bucket and call up somebody who can,” Lemp said. “Now that England’s turned her coat, we’ve got to worry about the Royal Navy and the RAF again. They aren’t half-assed like the Russians.
Give them even a piece of a chance and they’ll sink us.”

“I’ll stay, Skipper,” Hans said quickly. Lemp would have said the same thing in his unhappy place. Up here, the fresh air fought seasickness. Down inside the reeking pressure hull, the boat’s rolling would have a potent, pungent ally.

All the same, Lemp knew he would have to watch Hans as well as the horizon. He hadn’t been joking. Anyone
inefficient up here would have to go. You might get away with taking chances against the sloppy Slavs. Against the English? A good thing everyone had a will on file.

Diesels thrumming through the soles of Lemp’s shoes, the U-30
made fifteen knots on a course a little west of due north. The boat would round Norway’s southwestern bulge and then follow the country’s coastline farther north and east.
Too many Tommies on the
Ostfront
had made their way through Soviet lines. The easiest, fastest way to bring them back to England would be to ship them out of Arkhangelsk or Murmansk.

The
Führer
didn’t want them to come home—and who could blame him? Sooner or later, probably sooner, they’d get back into the war against the
Reich
. Better to send the freighters or liners carrying them to the bottom.
Then Germany wouldn’t need to worry about them any more.

“Perfidious Albion,” Lemp muttered. His breath smoked. Spring might be here, but the North Sea was damned if it wanted to admit it.

“What’s that, Skipper?” Hans asked.

“Nothing. Just swearing at the damned limeys.”

“They’re a pain, all right,” the rating agreed.

“How’s your insides?”

“Not
too
bad, as long as I don’t think about ’em.
Maybe I’ll cuss England out, too.”

Somebody—whether it was Hans or not, Lemp didn’t know—gave back a meal inside the hull before they put in at Namsos on their way north. That made the stink in there worse, but not by so much as an outsider might have expected. It wasn’t the first time somebody’d heaved in the boat, and an overturned bucket meant the nasty stuff had got into the bilgewater. Once
that happened, a stench would stay with the U-30 as long as the boat lasted.

The
Kriegsmarine
had started to fit Namsos out as a U-boat base after the town fell. Then, with the war against England and France suddenly forgotten, the work was forgotten, too. Now the war—or part of it, anyway—was on again, and so was the work.

Namsos probably hadn’t been an exciting place before the
Wehrmacht
took
it away from its defenders. It was a real mess now. German crews with torches went about carving up the English warships and freighters that had gone down in shallow water trying to resupply and evacuate the town. The steel would be useful; whatever could be salvaged intact, even more so.

Namsos itself could have used cutting up and salvaging, too. Bombing
and artillery meant hardly a building
didn’t have a chunk or two bitten out of it. Lemp saw only a few Norwegians. Most of them looked sullen. If they were delighted to have come under German occupation, they hid it very well.

Two or three men wore the uniform of the
Nasjonal Samling
, the Norwegian equivalent of the German NSDAP. The head of the NS, a former officer named Vidkun Quisling, helped the Germans govern Norway. The only
problem was that his party, unlike the Nazis, enjoyed next to no popular support. German bodyguards accompanied the NS men walking through the harbor.

The head of the base, a
Kapitän zur See
named Waldemar Böhme, was blunt when he discussed the issue with Lemp as fresh food went into the U-30. “Anybody who doesn’t belong to the NS figures anybody who does is a traitor,” Böhme said gloomily. “And
nobody belongs to the NS.”

Lemp glanced toward one of the uniformed Norwegians. It wasn’t quite a German uniform, but it was in the same general style. “He does,” the U-boat skipper remarked.

“There are a handful of them,” Böhme agreed. “It would almost be easier if there weren’t any. Then we wouldn’t have to waste our own men keeping the rest of the Norwegians from murdering these … people.”
Had he known Lemp better, he might have called the NS officials worse. But you never could tell who might report you. Staying innocuous was safer.

“Quisling must have
some
support,” Lemp said.

“Some, ja.” Böhme still sounded glum. “The
Nasjonal Samling
got less than two percent of the vote in 1936, down from a hair over two percent in 1933. And as soon as the fighting started here, half their
members—more than half—bailed out and picked up rifles and tried to shoot us.”

Shrewdly, Lemp said, “But now that the fighting’s over and we won, going along with us will look like a good idea to some people.”

“That has happened—a little,” Böhme admitted. “Most of the squareheads would still sooner spit on us, though.”

“As long as we can get on with the war, what difference does it make?” Lemp
said.

“With England back in it, who knows?” Captain Böhme seemed determined to look at the cloud, not the silver lining. “Now the Norwegians won’t have to be Reds to have somebody who’ll help give us trouble.”

“I’m sure you’ll manage, sir,” Lemp said, by which he meant
I’m damn glad it’s your worry and none of mine
. The wry quirk of one of Böhme’s bushy gray eyebrows meant he understood that
all too well.

Narvik, north of the Arctic Circle, was a smaller, even more battered base than Namsos. Because it was so inaccessible except by sea, it had stayed in Allied hands longer than the country farther south. Without the warm waters of the Gulf Stream, the place would have been uninhabitable. And without the last gasps of the current from the far southwest, Murmansk and Arkhangelsk would
have stayed frozen up the year around, and Lemp’s mission would have had no point.

But up toward the Barents Sea the U-30 went. It wasn’t summer yet, but daylight stretched and stretched in these latitudes. Lemp had heard about the white nights of St. Petersburg—Leningrad, these days. He was ten degrees of latitude north of St. Petersburg now. The sun set in the far, far northwest and soon rose
again in the far, far northeast. While it ducked below the horizon, twilight never got dark enough to show any but the brightest stars.

That meant the U-30’s crew had to stay alert around the clock. A rating might spot a troopship at any hour of the day or suppositious night. On the other hand, an English plane, or a Russian one, might come across the U-boat at any time.

Or nothing might happen.
No matter how long it stayed light, the ocean was vast. Troopships full of Tommies might slip past unseen. For all Lemp knew, there
were
no troopships full of Tommies. The
Kriegsmarine
brass had plenty of bright ideas that didn’t pan out.

A whale spouted a couple of hundred meters to port. The great beast wasn’t that much smaller than the U-boat. Lemp watched it with awe from the conning tower.
It paid the U-30 no heed. That suited Lemp fine. A collision with a whale would be like a truck hitting an elephant on the
Autobahn
—except the truck wouldn’t sink afterwards.

He cruised his assigned area, awaiting new orders from Berlin—or even from Namsos. In due course, new orders came. Once decoded,
they read,
Continue current assignment
. Lemp was anything but thrilled—as if his superiors
cared. Continue he did.

LUC HARCOURT HAD JUST
got a fire going on the floor of a half-wrecked peasant hut when a private stuck his head through a hole in the wall and said, “Excuse me, Sergeant, but could I please talk to you for a little while?”

Sighing, Luc asked, “What d’you want, Charles?” Whatever it was, it would be trouble. Whenever a private asked that question in that tone of voice,
it had to be trouble. Maybe Charles’ father was desperately ill, and he wanted compassionate leave. Right now, of course. Maybe his girlfriend was two-timing him, and he needed a shoulder to cry on or permission to go back to France and whale the stuffing out of the loose, stupid bitch. Or maybe …

“What are we doing here, Sergeant?” Charles couldn’t have been more than nineteen. His voice still
cracked sometimes. He was trying to grow a mustache, but only looked as if he had dirt on his upper lip.

After hacking the top off a ration tin with his bayonet, Luc heated monkey meat over the flames. “What do you mean, what are we doing here? Do I look like a priest, to answer a question like that?”

He sounded even more like Sergeant—now Lieutenant—Demange than he realized. Almost everything
he knew about soldiering, and about dealing with inferiors in the army, he’d learned from the veteran. Demange’s sarcasm had rubbed off on him, too.

Charles flushed. “I don’t mean it like that, Sergeant. I mean, what are we doing here in Russia? The Englishmen packed it in. Why can’t we?”

As far as Luc was concerned, that was a damn good question. He gave the only reply he could: “When Daladier
wants us to quit, we will. Till then, you’d better fight. You think the Ivans won’t cut your dick off, you’d better think again.”

“It isn’t fair,” Charles whined.

“Since when is life fair?” Yes, Luc sounded like Demange.

“You can joke all you want,” Charles said, which, since Luc was a sergeant, was true enough. “But we’re liable to get killed for no reason at all, and that isn’t funny.” His
nostrils twitched as if he were an angry rabbit.

As a matter of fact, he was wrong. Luc had seen both enemies and friends die in ways idiotically ridiculous enough to make him laugh like a jackass. Anyone who’d been up at the front for a while could say the same thing. Most of the laughter sprang from relief that you were still alive to giggle.

But that wasn’t the point. The savory aroma—if
you got hungry enough—of sizzling bully beef distracted Luc, but he answered, “I don’t know what you want me to do about it. If you think I’m going to cross over to the Russians’ lines, you’re even crazier than I give you credit for.”

“They put out all those safe-conducts.” Charles displayed one. Sure as hell, it promised that the bearer would be treated well if he deserted.

“It’s written in
good French—better than the ones the
Boches
used to throw around,” Luc said. “But so what?”

“See? You call them
Boches
, too! And now they’re on our side—I mean, we’re on theirs—even though we still hate them and even though we almost started shooting at them on account of what they did to those Jews.” Charles’ nostrils quivered some more. “Wouldn’t you rather fight against them than for them?
Five gets you ten they’re still doing that horrible shit to Jews, only in places where we can’t catch ’em at it.”

He was no Jew himself; Luc was sure of that. And Luc hadn’t thought he was a Red, either. As a matter of fact, Luc still didn’t think so. But the question was a lot harder to deal with when Charles put it that way. Slowly, Luc said, “The Russians aren’t nice people, either. Don’t
forget that for a minute. So many Russians and Ukrainians and whatnot wouldn’t fall all over themselves to help the fucking Nazis if they liked Stalin. Right?”