Two Fronts (43 page)

“That’s ‘Knock off the horseplay, you two sergeants,’ ” Pete said. Cullum nodded. The petty-officer type looked disgusted. He couldn’t beat them over the head with his rank, because they had about as much as he did.

The line snaked forward. It looked to Pete as if every enlisted man at Pearl Harbor was in it. Officers had their own queue, which would be a lot shorter. Civilian employees at the base would get their turn tomorrow. Pete wouldn’t have minded letting them go first.

A pretty blond secretary in a thin cotton blouse and a silk skirt that showed off shapely legs walked by. She carried half a dozen manila folders. Eyeballs clicked as leathernecks and swabbies gave her the once-over. A few wolf whistles rang out. She ignored them with the air of someone who had a lot of practice ignoring such things.

“I’d like to stick her,” Cullum said, “and not in the arm, neither.”

“Amen,” Pete agreed reverently. “That’s table-quality pussy, all right.”

In due course, he and Cullum advanced into the mess hall. Instead of cooks slinging powdered eggs and vulcanized bacon, doctors stood there with needles gleaming in the electric light. The single line divided into several. Each doc stood by a little cloth-draped privacy area. “Ahh, shit,” Cullum said. “We are gonna get it in the ass.”

“Looks that way.” Pete agreed again, this time with a mournful nod.

As a matter of fact, he got a shot in each arm and one in his left lower cheek. “You may be kinda sore the next few days,” said the doc who injected him. “Don’t worry about that, or about some swelling. It’s all normal.”

“Happy day … sir,” Pete said. Doctors were officers; some of them got pissy if you didn’t give them formal respect. “What the devil’s going on, anyway, if you’re stabbing everybody like this?”

“I’m afraid I’m not authorized to release that information,” the medico said with a sniff.

“Well, what happens if I swell up like a poisoned pup and die?” Pete hoped that was a waddayacallit—a hypothetical question. He’d got the hypo part, in triplicate.

Whatever you called it, it didn’t faze the doctor one damn bit. “What happens then? I’ll tell you what, Sergeant. Your next of kin sue Uncle Sam for every nickel he’s got, that’s what. And Uncle Sam throws his lawyers at their lawyers, and it all grinds through the courts till, oh, 1953. Then they settle for five dollars and sixty-nine cents, which is about what you’re actually worth. Only your folks have to split it with the shysters, so they end up screwed after all. Oh, and you’re still dead, in case you were wondering.”

Pete shuffled away, defeated. The middle-aged man in the white coat was armored in a cynicism that made his own seem made of Kleenex. And his folks wouldn’t even sue the government. They were too busy trying to make ends meet with their lousy little Bronx candy store.

“I bet I know how come we got punctured like that,” Cullum said when they got together under the warm sun again.

“I’m all ears,” Pete said. “Looks crazy as shit, but I hear real good.”

“Funny guy—funny like a chancre,” the other sergeant said with a snort. “My guess is, they’re sticking us for everything this side of housemaid’s knee on account of they’re gonna ship us to some crappy tropical island crawling with mosquitoes and leeches and Japs.”

That made more sense than Pete wished it did. “How come they can’t vaccinate you for machine-gun bullets? I wouldn’t bitch about that shot … not too much, anyhow.”

“Amen!” Cullum said. “Amen like the spooks sing it in Father Divine’s church. Machine guns are no fun at all, not unless you’re on the trigger end.”

“You got that right. ’Course, even a stopped clock’s right twice a day,” Pete said. Cullum gave him the finger. Pete rubbed his arm. Damned if it wasn’t starting to swell. And, by the way his rear end felt, he’d sit with a list for the next few days.

He needed a little while to realize that Bob Cullum’s idea, no matter how reasonable it sounded at first, didn’t explain why civilian workers at Pearl were getting their shots, too. So were the sailors on the
Ranger
and the other ships in the harbor.
They
wouldn’t be splashing ashore on some steaming beach, looking to blow the head off the first Jap they saw before he could do the same to them. Neither would the Army flyboys at Hickam, but they were meeting the needle, too.

And then Honolulu radio ordered civilians to report to hospitals or clinics or their private doctors for inoculations. “These are purely precautionary measures,” the announcer said. Then he made a liar out of himself: “No shirking will be tolerated, however. Individuals must display valid immunization certificates to acquire rationed goods of any sort. If physicians run short of vaccine, be sure more is coming from the mainland at top priority. But there is no cause for alarm. If symptoms develop, do not delay—report to a physician immediately.”

“Run that past me again?” Pete said when he heard the announcement. Several of the
Ranger
’s other Marine noncoms nodded.

“Symptoms of what?” Cullum asked. The radio man with the unctuous voice didn’t explain. Pete didn’t know about Cullum, but
he
hadn’t really expected that the fellow would.

Fifteen minutes later, the man behind the microphone repeated the order. As far as Pete could tell, he used the identical words this time. Of
course
there was no cause for alarm. Everything was just a precaution. But if symptoms developed, you had to drag your sorry ass to a doctor right away. If you didn’t get your shots like a good little sheep, you wouldn’t eat or drive.

Over the next couple of days, Pete heard the announcement often enough to get really sick of it—and to be able to repeat it in his sleep. None of the people who read it spelled out what the ominous symptoms were. If you came down with them, evidently you’d know.

Then Bob Cullum asked him, “When you were in China, did you ever see the plague?”

“See it? No.” Pete shook his head. “I heard about it, sure—it happens over there. But you don’t want to see it. If you’re close enough to see it, you’re close enough to catch it. Trust me, you don’t wanna do that.” He paused. Slower than it might have, a light bulb went on above his head. “How come? Is
that
what the radio’s jabbering about?”

“That’s what I hear,” Cullum answered.

“Fuck,” Pete said. “I never heard of the plague in Hawaii.”

“Skinny is, the Japs done it some kind of way. That and three or four other kinds of shit. That’s how come they turned us all into pincushions, like.”

“Fuck,” Pete repeated. “This ain’t the kind of war I signed up for, y’know?” Which, as he understood all too well, didn’t mean it wasn’t the kind of war he had.

Motor noises coming out of the east meant trouble. Theo Hossbach knew that as well as any man alive—as well as any German soldier alive in Russia, the only kind of men he cared about. Motor noises coming out of the west, like these right now, weren’t so bad. They were most likely German panzers moving up to the front … unless the Ivans had broken through somewhere else and were swinging around to stick it up this part of the line’s ass.

Theo made as if to swivel his ears toward the sounds, as if he were a cat. He knew guys who could wiggle their ears, but he wasn’t one of them, no matter how he tried. He did listen as hard as he could. After half a minute or so, he relaxed fractionally. Beside him, Adi Stoss blew out a stream of cigarette smoke and nodded. He seemed easier, too.

“Gasoline engines,” he said.

“
Ja
,” Theo agreed. The diesels that powered T-34s sounded different. He would have had a hard time explaining the difference to someone who didn’t already hear it, but it was there, all right.

Adi kept listening. So did Theo. What else was there to do, standing here in the middle of Russian nowhere—which had to be the most expansive nowhere in the world—next to a Panzer III that wasn’t running right this minute? And, even if those were gasoline engines …

“They sound funny,” Adi said. A moment later, he amended that: “They sound
big
.”

“
Ja
,” Theo repeated. He was less annoyed saying the same thing twice than he would have been if he’d had to come up with something new. He was also suspicious, as any cat or veteran would be at meeting something new. An unfamiliar gasoline engine was liable to belong to a Soviet machine, not one that sprang from the
Reich
’s factories.

The same unpleasant thought must have crossed Adi’s mind. He jerked a thumb toward the driver’s position. “Think I ought to hop in?” Crewmen on other panzers were asking one another the same question. Some of them weren’t asking—they were jumping in and firing up their chariots.

But Theo shook his head. He grudged another word: “Wait.”

Adi laughed harshly. “I may as well. Anything that sounds as nasty as that’d squash a Panzer III like a bug.” Now Theo nodded; again, they’d thought along with each other. Adi pointed down the rutted dirt track that led west: eventually, to something resembling civilization. “Here they come!”

Theo squinted, trying to make out the lines of the approaching machines. They advanced in line. He took that as a good sign. Ivans would have spread out so they weren’t firing right past—or maybe into—one another.

“They look like ours … I think,” Adi said slowly. “But sweet jumping Jesus! They’re fucking enormous!”

“
Ja
,” Theo said once more, concurring with both judgments at the same time. The panzers—there were half a dozen of them—did have a slab-sided, Germanic look. Russian machines used sloped armor much more: it helped deflect or defeat enemy fire. The Russian scheme was better; anyone who faced a T-34 would say the same thing, assuming he survived the encounter. But you didn’t need to be an engineer to tell the two design philosophies apart at a glance.

As for enormous … At first, Theo thought he was looking at some of the new Panzer IVs, the ones with the long-barreled 75s. He needed only that glance, though, and his ears, to be sure he was wrong. These beasts dwarfed Panzer IVs. They dwarfed every German panzer he’d ever seen up till now. About the only panzer they didn’t dwarf was the monstrous Russian KV-1.

Closer and closer they came. They had the black German cross on their turrets, not the Ivans’ red star. Of course, if the Russians were pulling some kind of stunt, they wouldn’t forget a detail like that. But Theo didn’t believe it. These
were
German panzers. They just weren’t German panzers he recognized.
Details, details
, he thought giddily.

Adi let out a low, awe-filled whistle. “Fry me for a pork chop if they don’t have 88s in their turrets. I told you they ought to do that!”

Theo whistled, too, on a nearly identical note. The 88 was the only German gun that could certainly make a T-34 say uncle. But a big, clumsy towed antipanzer cannon had trouble getting to the right place at the right time. When Russian roads were bad—which was to say, almost always—they had trouble getting anywhere.

“That guy in the long-snouted Panzer IV said something big was in the works,” Adi went on. “Boy, he wasn’t kidding. These critters are
huge
!”

Panzer crewmen from Theo’s company ran toward the new machines. They might have run toward a troupe of strippers with more eagerness. But then again, they might not have. Women were wonderful fun, no doubt about it. They reminded you why you were alive. But these panzers would help keep you that way. Which counted for more?

Theo found himself running, too. Adi loped along beside him. The driver could have outrun him—Adi could outrun just about anybody—but didn’t bother. “What do you call these babies?” he shouted to the man standing head and shoulders out of the cupola on the closest panzer’s tremendous turret.

“
Panzerkampfwagen
Mark V,” replied the fellow in the big machine. Theo wanted to throw a clod of dirt at him. What a bloodless answer! Mark I, Mark II, Mark III, Mark IV—yes, of course, Mark V. But something better was surely called for, wasn’t it? Grinning, the newcomer went on, “The other name is Tiger.”

“All right!” Adi pumped a fist in the air. Theo didn’t; that wasn’t his style. But he came closer than he usually did. Tiger! There was a name to conjure with! When a Tiger bit you, you stayed bit.

Someone else asked, “How far out can you hit with that gun?”

“Past two kilometers,” the panzer crewman—probably the commander, since he used the cupola—answered confidently. “And what we can hit, we can kill.”

There, Theo believed him. Jealousy stabbed the radioman: pure sea-green envy. He wasn’t sure his Panzer III’s 37mm gun could even reach out 2,000 meters. If it could, he wasn’t sure it would knock over a man, much less an enemy panzer. Life wasn’t fair.

Adi found a new question: “How many more of those beauties are coming after you?”

“More?” The Tiger crewman sounded offended. “What do you want, egg in your beer? We’re here. We’ll do for the Ivans. You think a T-34 can beat a panzer like this?”

“Um, the Ivans have a lot of ’em,” Adi said. The guy in the Tiger waved that aside. Theo wondered whether he’d ever fought Russians before. If he hadn’t, he was about to get an education. Yes, half a dozen of these brutes could turn a lot of T-34s to scrap metal. But the Red Army
had
a lot of T-34s. It had a hell of a lot of them, as a matter of fact. Sooner or later, they’d get lucky against the Tigers. They were bound to. Then what?