Last Orders: The War That Came Early (13 page)

“Mind the claws,” Gordon McAllister rumbled. Like a lot of what he did say, that seemed very much to the point.

“Will it get through a Tiger’s armor?” Walsh asked with interest. A PIAT wouldn’t pierce the monster German tank from the front. Neither would anything else in the English or French armory. Too many brave tank crews and antitank gunners had found that out the hard way.

“It’s supposed to.” Jack Scholes didn’t sound entirely convinced, either. Walsh couldn’t blame him. No one who’d seen a Tiger in action had an easy time believing anything could stop it.

“So you and Gordo are trained up on this beast, are you?” the staff sergeant asked.

McAllister’s long-jawed head bobbed up and down. “It’s dead easy,” Scholes said. “Gordo shoves the round in till it clicks, like. ’E stands so I don’t singe ’is whiskers when I shoot. I fire it off. Then I duck, on account of the Fritzes’ll shoot at where I was.”

“Think so, do you?” Walsh’s tone was dry. If that thing with fins was a rocket, it would leave the tube trailing fire. Yes, something like that might draw a German’s interest. But something that let a foot soldier take out a tank from a couple of hundred yards away would draw any Tommy’s interest, and never mind the chances he took using it.

Walsh wondered whether the Germans already knew about the new tank-buster from America. Maybe some other English or French units had used them. Or maybe some of the Belgians had blabbed. This part of Belgium was full of French-speaking Walloons. Some of them liked the Nazis even if they did speak French, dammit.

Two mornings later, they were ordered forward for a reconnaissance in force against the German positions. Scholes carried the bazooka. McAllister lugged the sack of rounds. Walsh wondered what would happen if a rifle bullet hit one of those rockets. He didn’t wonder long. They’d bury Gordo in the proverbial jam tin, that was what.

An MG-42 started buzzing away ahead of them. The Tommies hit the dirt. That horrible thing spat out so many bullets, one of them was
bound to punch your ticket if you stayed on your feet. Walsh peered through bushes. There it was, muzzle flashes winking malevolently. Sure as hell, it sat in a concrete emplacement, safe against anything but a direct hit from an artillery shell. Or … a bazooka round?

“See the bugger, Jack?” Walsh called, not lifting his head far from the dirt. “Can you hit it from where you’re at?”

“I’ll give it a go,” Scholes answered. Then he said something Walsh couldn’t make out, probably to Gordo.

There was a roaring
whoosh!
and, yes, a blast of fire. The forward end of the tube had a screen of wire mesh sticking out around it to keep the rocket motor from roasting the man who launched it. A moment later, the round slammed into the machine-gun nest. There was another blast then, a bigger one. The MG-42 abruptly fell silent.

“Cor!” Scholes said. “Bastard really works, don’t it?”

“It’ll give Fritz something to think about, all right,” Walsh agreed.

What the Germans thought soon became plain enough. They thought they needed to eliminate anybody who carried something that could smash up a hardened machine-gun position. In their jackboots, Walsh would have thought the same thing. They didn’t seem to have any more machine guns close by, but they raked the ground with fire from rifles and Schmeissers.

Then another machine gun did speak up: one mounted in the turret of a Panzer IV. A moment later, the tank’s bow gun started shooting, too. This time, Walsh didn’t shout for Scholes. If the kid from the East End of London couldn’t figure out what needed doing … he had to be hurt or dead. In which case, Gordon McAllister would take hold of the bazooka … unless he was hurt or dead, too.

Before Walsh could worry about what he’d do in that case, the bazooka belched fire and went
whoosh!
again. The rocket flew from it and slammed into the Panzer IV’s turret. A fraction of a second later, the German tank brewed up as spectacularly as any Walsh had ever seen. He would have shot the tankmen in their black coveralls had any of them made it out through a hatch, but none did.

The burning tank set the bushes by it on fire, too. The blaze flushed a few more Fritzes out of their holes. Walsh cheerfully banged away at them with his Sten gun. It was long range for a machine pistol, but he
didn’t care. Hitler’s lads had something brand new to give them nightmares when they curled up under their blankets. And wasn’t
that
nice?

Arno Baatz paused at the western edge of a field of growing grain. He thought the grain was barley, not wheat, but he wasn’t sure—he was a city man. He was sure it was a damn sorry field of whatever the hell it was. It had been badly tended ever since it was planted, and not long before this panzers and halftracks had run through it and knocked half of it flat. Crows pecked at the unripe heads of grain the armored fighting vehicles had threshed.

He cared about that no more than he cared about whether it was wheat or barley. He stuck his thumb in his mouth and thrust it up over his head to gauge the wind. Adam Pfaff laughed at him. “Since when did you turn Red Indian?” Pfaff asked.

“Oh, shut up,” Baatz said. “Shut up unless you know a better way to tell which direction it’s from, I mean.” He waited. Pfaff kept quiet, so Arno assumed he didn’t know any better way. As a matter of fact, he’d already assumed that. He nodded importantly. “It’s coming out of the west. That’s what we need.”

“Jawohl,”
Pfaff muttered, perhaps sarcastically, perhaps not.

Baatz didn’t gig him the way he would have most of the time; the
Unteroffizier
had other things on his mind. Puffing out his chest, he called to the troops of his squad, who stood with him, lined up along the edge of the grainfield: “Get your torches ready, men!”

“It’s not motherfucking close-order drill,” Pfaff said. Baatz ignored him again; he was treating it as if it were. And the
Obergefreiter
had his torch—a stick with a lump of tallow and straw at one end—ready along with everybody else.

“Light your torches!” Arno Baatz commanded. He loved giving orders. He started his torch with a flint-and-steel lighter. Some of the
Landsers
had ones like it. Others used matches to get theirs burning. Baatz bellowed again: “Swing your torches over your heads!”

They did, all of them counterclockwise. The flames in the tallow swelled; black smoke trailed the circling torches. It would have been pretty on a practice field. But this wasn’t practice. This was war.

“Throw your torches!” Baatz yelled. The soldiers obeyed, as if they were flinging potato-masher grenades. They didn’t get that kind of distance with the torches, but they didn’t need to.

Down fell the flaming lumps of tallow and straw, in amongst the growing grain—and, better yet, in amongst the dying, yellowing strips of grain the armored vehicles’ tracks had crushed. Each torch started a little fire. The fires grew and spread through the field, pushed on by the wind Baatz had successfully identified. Smoke climbed into the sky. The crows flew away, screeching with fear.

“Well, all right! The Reds won’t march through that any time soon,” Baatz said, inflating his chest again. “And when they do try it, we can put a machine gun in those woods over there and shoot them down like the mad hounds they are.” He pointed to the trees that overlooked the burning field.

Then he scowled at
Obergefreiter
Pfaff, waiting for him to come out with some crack along the lines of
When are you getting your field marshal’s baton?
He would have jumped all over Pfaff for that. Talk of a field marshal’s baton was all the more galling to a man who couldn’t even get promoted to
Feldwebel
. But the senior private just said, “The Ivans won’t be able to eat that grain, either.”

The grain wasn’t that close to ripeness. Baatz grunted and nodded even so. The Russians would eat it anyway if they happened to be hungry. They ate bugs and slugs and newts and mushrooms and ferns and anything else they could get their hands on. The Red Army didn’t give its men any more in the way of rations than it could help. Munitions, yes. Food? The Ivans were on their own for that. They foraged like wild animals. The resemblance didn’t always end there, either.

So, scorched earth. If the
Wehrmacht
had to fall back, the Russians wouldn’t be able to do much with the land they advanced through. It made perfect military sense to Baatz. It might not have if the Red Army were retreating through Germany and burning and wrecking as it did, but that never once crossed his mind. The Red Army in the
Vaterland
? Unimaginable!

“Come on, boys,” he said, his sense of self-importance restored. “We’ve got another ten kilometers to go before we make it to our rest line.”

Predictably, the men groaned. They didn’t like wearing out their boots marching. Baatz didn’t like it himself; he was a heavyset fellow. But he had his orders. Give him orders and he’d carry them out. He’d make sure everybody to whom he gave orders carried them out, too.

Slyly, Adam Pfaff said, “If we fall back ten kilometers every day, how many days till we’re retreating through Berlin? It’s like a problem in a math book, isn’t it?”

“It’s no such thing!” Baatz sounded furious, and he was. “We’re just shortening our front and getting into more defensible positions. That’s the only thing we’re doing—the
only
thing, you hear me?”

He hoped Pfaff would argue with him.
Miserable barracks lawyer
, Baatz thought. But arguing here would come within millimeters of defeatism, and defeatism was a capital crime.

Instead of arguing, Pfaff just kept marching along. He left Baatz’s words hanging in the air, all by themselves. Somehow, that worked better than any fancy hairsplitting might have.

When they got back to the rest line, they found themselves only a couple of hundred meters from a field kitchen. “Goulash cannon!” Pfaff said happily. There, Baatz wasn’t inclined to quarrel. Seeing the pipe sticking up from the wheeled cart with the stove and boiler made him happy, too. He wouldn’t have to fill his belly with hard crackers smeared with butter from a tinfoil tube or dried fruit or any of the other delicacies he carried on his person.

He brought his mess tin over to the field kitchen. The boiler was full of stew, with turnips and carrots and onions and chicken and duck and whatever else the cooks could scrounge, all done together … done and done and done, till the chicken tasted like onions and the carrots tasted like duck and everything tasted like everything else. It wasn’t anything he would have made for himself or ordered in an eatery. It was wonderful all the same. When you’d been marching all day, anything that plugged up the hole in your belly was wonderful.

Adam Pfaff cleaned out his mess kit after making what was in it disappear. When he came back from the nearby creek, he stretched out on the ground at full length and lit a cigarette. Blowing a long stream of smoke up into the sky, he said, “I got a pretty decent supper
in me. Nobody’s trying to kill me right this minute. Life’s not so bad, you know?”

“No, not so bad,” Baatz said. “Now if they’d set up a brothel anywhere around here …”

“That’d be nice,” Pfaff agreed. “But I’ll tell you—if they let me sleep till noon tomorrow, I’d like that just about as much. I’ve got to be a year and a half behind on shuteye since they conscripted me.” He yawned till something in his jaw cracked like a knuckle.

When you watched someone else yawn, you wanted to yawn yourself. Baatz yielded to temptation before he even thought he might fight it. Then he wagged a finger at Pfaff. “You rotten pigdog, you! Now you’ve gone and reminded me how tired I am, too. Noon? I could curl up in a cave somewhere and sleep till spring like a bear.”

“Wouldn’t that be great?” Pfaff said.

They both woke before sunup. The Russians were shelling the snot out of the German line somewhere not far enough north of where they were. Ivan hadn’t tried a summer advance before this year, but he had his tail up now. Baatz and Pfaff and the rest of the
Landsers
filled their mess tins from the goulash cannon one more time and emptied them as fast as they could. Then they started tramping west again. Pfaff said nothing more of math problems. Arno Baatz thought about them anyhow.

The Japanese Navy had flown more G4Ms in to Midway. They replaced the bombers destroyed by American air raids. Revetments protected a plane against blast and fragments. Nothing protected it when a bomb burst right on top of it. All you could do was get rid of the wreckage so you could use the revetment again.

Hideki Fujita didn’t like seeing what a bomb could do to an airplane. It made him think about what an antiaircraft shell could do, or a burst of heavy machine-gun bullets from an American fighter.

He didn’t want to think about such things, but he didn’t have much choice. If more G4Ms had come here, they’d come to be used. Before long, the Japanese would likely be dropping more germ weapons over
Oahu. That meant he would have to climb into one of those bombers and do some of the dropping. He’d chosen such things when he volunteered to come to Midway.

G4Ms had enormous range. They could fly from here to Oahu and back. As far as bombers went, they were fast. That was the good news. The bad news was, they were nowhere near so fast as the latest fighters. And, to get that great range, they were as light as possible, which meant they were flimsy. They caught fire easily, too. If you got intercepted, if you got hit, you would die. It was about that simple.

Fujita marveled that no bomb had smashed the bacteriological-warfare unit’s little tent compound. That was luck, nothing else but. Some
kami
watched over rats and fleas and test tubes and the men who tended them.

Whether it was a good
kami
or one of the other kind, he wasn’t so sure any more. A few days later, sweating like a pig in his flying togs’ fur and leather, he climbed into a G4M’s bomb bay and hooked himself to the oxygen line. The engines thundered to life. The plane bounced down the poorly repaired runway and lumbered up into the air.

Off to the west, in the direction of the Home Islands, the sun sank toward the Pacific. It soon set. The G4M droned on through the darkness. America and Japan raided each other’s bases at night. The quarter moon spread sparkles of light across the blue-black water.