Last Orders: The War That Came Early (3 page)

Nothing much had happened yet today. So … why not? The officer gestured, getting his men ready to do whatever they were going to do. Vaclav took careful aim. Not much wind. Range about 1,100 meters. You might even do this with a Mauser, though you’d need a little luck as well as skill. Luck never hurt, of course. But with this much gun, skill alone could turn the trick.

Breathe. Let it out. Bring back the trigger, gently, gently … The antitank rifle thundered. It kicked, not even a little bit gently. The Nationalist officer grabbed his midriff and fell over.

“Earned my pay today,” Vaclav said. He took out a cigarette to celebrate. He could smoke it now. He wouldn’t be staying here more than another few minutes anyhow.

To say Lieutenant Commander Julius Lemp didn’t enjoy summer patrol in the North Sea was to beggar the power of language. He wasn’t quite up at the latitudes where the sun never set, but he was plenty far north to keep it in the sky through most of the hours.

He and several ratings stayed up on the conning tower, scanning sky and horizon for enemy ships and airplanes. You had to do it all the time. The Royal Navy was looking for the U-30, too, and for all the other boats the
Kriegsmarine
sent to sea.

The Royal Navy was looking hard. It had ways to look no one had dreamt of when the war broke out, almost five years ago now. Radar could spot a surfaced U-boat no matter how cunningly its paint job mimicked sea and sky. And, when it dove, English warships hounded
it with their pinging hydrophones. Unlike the ones both sides had used in the last war, these really could help a surface ship track—and sink—a submarine.

Gerhart Beilharz popped out of the hatch like an elongated jack-in-the-box. The engineering officer grinned like a jack-in-the-box, too. He was two meters tall: not the ideal size for a man in a U-boat’s crew. This was the only place on the boat where he didn’t have to worry about gashing his scalp or knocking himself cold if he forgot to duck.

“You’ve done your two hours, skipper,” he said. “I relieve you.”

Lemp lowered his Zeiss field glasses and rubbed his eyes. They felt sandy under his knuckles. “I feel like a bug on a plate,” he said. “A black bug on a white plate.”

Beilharz pointed back to the
Schnorkel
. The breathing tube—for the diesels, not the men who served them—stuck up like an enormous stovepipe. “Don’t worry about it,” he said. “As long as we’ve got that baby, we can slip under the glazing.”

He could say
Don’t worry about it
. The U-boat’s survival wasn’t his responsibility. Lemp had to worry about everything; that was what command entailed. And worry he did: “They can see us under the glazing, too, dammit, or rather hear us with those stinking hydrophones.”

“We’ve slithered away before,” the tall man said. “We can do it again.”

“I hope so.” Sighing, Lemp went below—out of the sunshine, out of the fresh air, into a steel cigar dimly lit with orange bulbs and stinking of everything from shit and puke and piss to diesel oil to the reeks of rotting food and dirty socks. However nasty, the odor was also infinitely familiar to him. And well it might have been, since his own fug made up a part of it.

Only a green curtain shielded his tiny cabin—cot, desk, chair, safe—from the corridor. Still, command’s privilege gave him more privacy and space than anyone else on the boat enjoyed. He logged the events on his latest watch: course, position, observations (none significant), the fact that a radio tube had burnt out and been replaced. His handwriting was tiny and as precise as if an automaton had produced it.

But as he wrote, he was conscious of all the things he wasn’t saying, all the things he couldn’t say—not unless he wanted some serious attention from the
Gestapo
and the
Sicherheitsdienst
and the
Abwehr
and, no doubt, other organizations of State and Party about which he knew nothing … yet.

He couldn’t write, for instance, that the U-30 wasn’t such a happy boat as it had been. He didn’t like the way the sailors eyed one another. He didn’t like the way they didn’t come out with what was on their minds. The U-boat service tossed surface-Navy formality over the side. Living in one another’s pockets, the men had no time to waste on such foolishness. They were brothers, brothers in arms.

Or they should have been. But there was at least one informer on board. And Lemp didn’t know who the polecat was. That worried him worse than anything. Anything this side of the Royal Navy, anyhow.

The thought had hardly crossed his mind before a rating spoke from the other side of the curtain: “Skipper, they’ve spotted smoke up on the conning tower.”

“Oh, they have, have they?” Lemp said. “All right. I’ll come.” He stuck his cap back on his head. Like every other U-boat officer in the
Kriegsmarine
, he’d taken out the stiffening wire so the crown didn’t stick up above his head but flopped onto the patent-leather bill. That crown was white, not navy blue: the sole mark of command he wore.

His shoes clanked dully on the patterned steel of the ladder rungs leading up out of the submarine. The first whiff of fresh air made him involuntarily breathe deeper. You forgot how foul the inside of a U-boat really was till you escaped the steel tube.

As he emerged, Gerhart Beilharz pointed north. “Over there, skipper,” he said. “Not a lot of smoke, but some.” He offered his binoculars.

Lemp scanned with them. “You’re right,” he said as he gave them back. He called down the hatch to the helmsman, who stood near the bottom of the ladder. “Change course to 020. All ahead full.”

“Course 020. All ahead full. Aye, aye.”

They swung toward the smudge of smoke in the northern sky. Lemp wanted to get the U-boat out ahead of it if he could. That would let him submerge and give it a closer inspection through the periscope without the other ship’s being likely to spot them in return.

Meanwhile, he kept his eye on the smudge. Things often happened slowly on the ocean. Ships weren’t airplanes. They needed time to cross the kilometers that separated one from another.

Actually, he hoped he would spy the unknown ship before he had to submerge. It put out a lot more smoke than the U-30’s diesels did. It rode higher in the water than the U-boat did, too. And he got what he hoped for. Through the powerful, column-mounted binoculars on the conning tower, he got a glimpse of a small, chunky steamboat—not a warship at all.

Not an obvious warship, anyhow. In the last war, English Q-ships—freighters with hidden heavy guns and gun crews—had surprised and sunk a couple of the Kaiser’s submarines. Their captains made the fatal mistake of thinking anything that looked harmless was bound to be harmless. They’d come close to use a deck gun instead of launching an eel from a distance—and they’d paid for their folly.

Lemp took no such chances. Maybe the steamer was as harmless as it looked. But if it was, what was it doing out here in the middle of the North Sea? Its course would take it from Scotland to Norway. It might be bringing help for the Norwegian bandits who still did their best to make trouble for the German forces occupying the country.

He ordered the boat down to
Schnorkel
depth. It was faster underwater on diesels than with battery power. As the unknown ship approached, he had plenty of time to work up a firing solution. He launched two torpedoes from less than a kilometer away.

The explosive in one of the eels would have been plenty to blow up the steamer. But the blast that followed a midships hit from one of the eels was far bigger than a torpedo warhead alone could have caused. The U-30 staggered in the water; it felt and sounded as if someone were pounding on the boat with iron rods the size of telegraph poles.

“Der Herr Gott im Himmel!”
Lieutenant Beilharz exclaimed. “What the devil was that?”

“I don’t exactly know,” Lemp answered. “No, not exactly. But whatever it was, I think the
Reich
is lucky it never got to Norway.” He peered through the periscope. Nothing was left of the steamship but small bits of flotsam and a hell of a lot of smoke. Somebody in England and Norway would be disappointed, but he wasn’t.

Shibe Park was a pretty good place to see a ballgame no matter where you sat. With the Philadelphia A’s duking it out with the St. Louis Browns to see who’d have bragging rights to seventh place and who’d mope in the basement, Peggy Druce felt as if she had the grandstand to herself.

She didn’t quite. A couple of thousand other optimists raised a cheer for Connie Mack’s men. But, though she’d bought a ticket well back in the lower deck, the ushers didn’t fuss when she moved down closer to the action. When you had a small crowd in a big ballpark, nobody worried about such details.

From right behind the third-base dugout, she could hear the players chattering among themselves. They cheerfully swore at one another and at the umpires. As far as they were concerned, they were by themselves out there. A delicately raised woman might have been shocked—they talked as foully as soldiers. Peggy found herself more amused than anything else. The filthy language held no malice she could find.

“Hot dogs! Get your hot dogs!” a vendor shouted. Peggy got herself
two. At her request, the man slathered them with mustard and onions. She liked onions. And she was here by herself. If her breath smelled strong, she wouldn’t offend anyone she cared about.

She got herself a couple of sacks of roasted peanuts, too, and a bottle of beer, and then another bottle of beer. She was good for the long haul, in other words. The game would have been more fun with Herb sitting next to her and complaining about how lousy the Athletics were.

But Herb wasn’t there. Herb wouldn’t be there. She glanced down at her left hand. Yes, she could still see the pale line on her fourth finger, the line where her wedding ring had shielded the skin from the sun for so long. She didn’t wear a ring on that finger any more, though. Why should she, when she wasn’t married any more? Herb had gone on a trip to Nevada for the government, and he’d Reno-vated her while he was there.

Now that he was back in Philadelphia, they were both doing their best to be civilized about it. He’d been more than generous in the settlement. She had the house and the Packard. He was living in a flat near his law office and driving a ratty old Hupmobile.

The war and the long separation it forced on them had killed their marriage as surely as a U-boat’s torpedo killed the luckless sailors aboard a destroyer. Peggy didn’t want to be divorced. But being married hadn’t been a whole lot of fun lately, either.

The A’s went ahead, 3–2, in the bottom of the fourth. There were a lot of short fly balls. The horsehide didn’t go
smack!
off the bat, the way Peggy was used to. It made kind of a dull thud instead. The cork that livened up the center of the ball was a strategic national resource these days. She didn’t know what they were using instead. By the way the ball didn’t move, she suspected it was a cheap grade of cement.

But the Philadelphia cleanup hitter somehow caught one square. He put it over the head of the Brownies’ center fielder. It rolled all the way to the base of the center-field fence. In Shibe Park, that was 468 feet from the plate. The batter wasn’t a gazelle on the bases, but he didn’t need to be. He didn’t even have to slide to score on his inside-the-park homer.

She whooped and hollered and raised a beer bottle high in salute.
A gray-haired man sitting a few seats down from her was cheering, too. They grinned at each other, the way people will when they’re both rooting for the same team. Then he said, “Now let’s see if we can hold on to it.”

“It’s only the Browns,” Peggy answered. “They’re as rotten as we are, or just about. Half their guys are in the Army.” Half the Athletics were, too, but she didn’t dwell on that. She was a fan, not a sportswriter.

In the top of the fifth, the first St. Louis batter took four in a row high and wide and trotted down to first base. The second Brownie up swung at the first pitch and missed. Over in the St. Louis dugout on the first-base side, the manager screamed “Shit!” at the top of his lungs. Everybody in the park must have heard him. In his shoes, Peggy would have said the same thing. If the pitcher was wild, you wanted to make him throw a strike before you started flailing away.

He eyed the runner, went into his stretch, and delivered again. And the Brownie batter swung again. This time, he lofted a lazy pop foul. The third baseman ran toward the stands to see if he could get it. But he ran out of room—it came down in the seats.

It came down, in fact, in the hands of the guy sitting a few seats away from Peggy. He made a smooth two-handed catch, a catch that said he’d played the game a time or three.

“Sign him up!” yelled a leather-lunged fan a bit farther back. Any nice catch in the stands meant you’d hear that. With the goons the A’s had in the outfield, it might not even have been a terrible idea.

The gray-haired man looked as pleased with himself as if he were seven years old. Peggy didn’t blame him. “I’m so jealous,” she said. “I’ve been coming to games since before the turn of the century, and I never once got a foul ball even before they started letting you keep them. This is about as close as I ever came, as a matter of fact.”