Last Orders: The War That Came Early (30 page)

But Theo didn’t wonder for long. Stähler bothered because some people were at the same time rebels and natural-born damn fools. If you offered them half a chance, they
would
give themselves away. The loyalty officer was just doing his job.

“Germany,” Hermann Witt said in wondering tones. “Been a devil of a long time since I last saw Germany.”

“Me, too,” Lothar Eckhardt agreed. The gunner went on, “Not my part of Germany, exactly, but a lot closer to what I’m used to than this Russian garbage is.” He nodded at Adi. “We
are
heading back to your part of Germany, aren’t we?”

“Sounds like it,” Adi answered. “I’m the same as you are, only more so. I haven’t seen the old stomping grounds in a hell of a long time. I wonder if I remember what things look like.” He shrugged broad shoulders. “Doesn’t matter, I guess. We’ll figure out what to shoot at.”

He didn’t say whether that should be rebels or people like Major Stähler. Theo had opinions on that score. No doubt Adi did, too. No doubt everybody in the crew did. Whether all those opinions matched … Well, that was an interesting question, wasn’t it?

“This is Douglas Edwards with the news.” Even coming out of a radio speaker, the newsman’s voice sounded as if he belonged on the stage. Peggy Druce had always thought so. Edwards went on, “President Roosevelt has announced that the Stars and Stripes fly once more over Midway Island.”

Peggy nodded as she spread butter and jam on her toast. The
Inquirer
’s edition yesterday had had a great photo by some wire-service cameraman of a group of Marines stabbing a flagpole with Old Glory flying from it into the sandy soil of what passed for high ground on Midway.

“A few stubborn Jap holdouts still skulk on the little island like sand crabs,” Edwards said solemnly. “They cause casualties every now and then, but cannot hope to change the result of the battle. The Marines hunt them down one by one. Soon no more will be left to hunt. And what comes next for Uncle Sam in the Pacific? I’ll be back with a look at that right after the following important messages.”

If you found yourself in desperate need of cigars or laundry soap and had no idea where to turn, the messages might have seemed important. Otherwise, they just helped the network pay its bills. Douglas Edwards was bound—was more than bound: was paid—to think that important. It didn’t matter a hill of beans, or even a single bean, to Peggy.

When Edwards came back, he delicately suggested that the United States might look to Wake Island next. “Thank you, Field Marshal Model!” Peggy exclaimed. You didn’t need to belong to the German General Staff to figure that one out. Peggy’d done it for herself while the sultry chanteuse sang the praises of White Owls. Wake was now the closest Japanese-held dot on the map to the main Hawaiian islands. It legally belonged to the USA. Once it fell into American hands again, nobody could even dream about dropping any more germ bombs on Honolulu.

In the Atlantic, a German U-boat had fired two torpedoes at a U.S. destroyer. Both missed. The destroyer depth-charged the U-boat, but didn’t sink it. FDR had sent Hitler a stiff protest note. Hitler’d told Roosevelt where he could stick that note. All of which was done diplomatically, of course, but that was what it boiled down to.

On the Eastern Front, the Russians kept moving up and the Germans kept falling back. Marshal Antonescu loudly denied that Romania was thinking about bailing out of the war. Of course, the louder a dictator and his henchmen denied something like that, the truer it was liable to be.

Take Dr. Goebbels, for instance. He was now loudly denying there was any such thing as unrest inside the
Reich
. Douglas Edwards played a recording of Lord Haw-Haw—otherwise an Irishman named William Joyce who’d lived in the States for a while and who could put on a plummy, aristocratic British accent—saying, “The German people stand united behind Adolf Hitler!” Goebbels had also announced that anyone who didn’t stand united behind the
Führer
would stand alone in front of a firing squad.

In Spain, the Nationalists really did seem to be falling to pieces now that Marshal Sanjurjo had bitten the dust. The Republic had regained more ground the past few weeks than in several previous years. Peggy had read
For Whom the Bell Tolls
. It made her admire the Spaniards. It also made her think that the parts of Spain the Republic took from the Nationalists wouldn’t be much happier now than Nationalist-conquered chunks of the Republic had been before. A civil war was a filthy business no matter who wound up on top.

When Edwards started talking about tornadoes in Oklahoma and
Arkansas, Peggy stopped listening. She thought of places like that the way a smart, well-connected Englishwoman would have thought of Scunthorpe, a Frenchwoman would have thought of Périgueux, or a Russian woman would have thought of Irkutsk. She supposed people had to live in such places, but she was mighty glad not to be one of them.

A train wreck in Wisconsin and a strike at an aluminum plant outside of Los Angeles didn’t much interest her, either. She got up and turned the radio to a station that was playing music. She kept it on while she did the breakfast dishes. The jazz was hotter than she usually enjoyed, but she found herself washing the frying pan in time to the sax’s propulsive rhythm.

After the dishes were done, she changed the station again. She didn’t want to be jitterbugging while she swept the floors. Music that made you get up and dance was all very well in its place, but she didn’t think cleaning the house was that place.

Once she got things clean enough to suit her, she paused to smoke a cigarette. American tobacco tasted so much better than the hay and horseshit they had in Europe, it wasn’t even funny. She sometimes wondered why she hadn’t quit while she was stuck over there. Hanging on to the habit with the crap they were stuck with hardly seemed worth it.

But she had, and she was glad of it. For one thing, the Nazis disapproved of women who smoked. They claimed it was unhealthy. The prejudice seemed as irrational to her as their hatred of Jews. Anything they disapproved of, she was all for.

And, for another, what else besides a cigarette gave you the perfect excuse to do nothing for a few minutes? Oh, there were coffee breaks, too, but those weren’t the same. They were bigger. You couldn’t take coffee any old place, the way you could with a cigarette. A lot of the time, you had to go to the trouble of making coffee if you wanted some. A Chesterfield or an Old Gold was always there.

“Unhealthy, my ass,” Peggy muttered as she stubbed out the butt. Now that Herb wasn’t here, she could talk to herself as much as she pleased. No one would think she was crazy. Well, not on account of that, anyhow.

She was thinking about lighting another one when the telephone rang. She answered it. “Hello, Peggy. Ned Altrock here,” said a hearty voice.

“Oh, hello, Ned. How are you?” Peggy said. He was a good-sized wheel in the Pennsylvania Democratic Party. She didn’t know what his precise title was. It amounted to fixer.

“I’m busy,” he replied. “Only a year till the election, you know.”

“Uh-huh,” Peggy said. Till she’d got involved in politics, a year away from an election might as well have been forever. She knew different—she knew better—now. A year was nothing. The wheels had already started spinning behind the scenes. Ned sounded as if he were doing a good many RPMs, all right.

“I hope we can count on you to do your part again this year,” Altrock said. “People still talk about what a tiger you are on the campaign trail.”

“Do they?”

“They sure do. And we can use some more of that, you know,” the fixer said. “The war news isn’t everything we’d want it to be, even if we’ve got Midway back. You can bet the Republicans will try and beat us over the head with it. Anything you can do to make people be sensible, that’d be terrific. Things are liable to get tight this time around.”

By
make people be sensible
, he of course meant
make people do what we want and vote our way
. Peggy said, “Well, why not? It’s not like I don’t have some time on my hands nowadays. You’ll pay the usual expenses, right? Train tickets, hotel bills, food, that kind of stuff?”

“Oh, heck, yes,” Altrock assured her. “Hey, we’ll throw in a stipend, too. I know things are a little tighter for you now.”

That meant he’d heard about the divorce. “Thanks,” Peggy said. Nice to be wanted, even if he was only interested in her for what she could do for FDR.

People who fought on the ground said the Germans were easier to push back than they ever had been. They’d pulled so much out of the Soviet Union to hold off England and France in the West that they didn’t always have enough left to keep the Red Army from going forward.

Anastas Mouradian only wished things were like that in the air war, too. The problem was, the air frontier above the Low Countries was narrow. The
Luftwaffe
had taken some planes out of the USSR to fight over there, but not all that many. Plenty of 109s and 190s still prowled the frigid air over the workers’ and peasants’ paradise.

“It will work out however it works out,” Isa Mogamedov said when Stas muttered about that in the cockpit. With the ground frozen hard, the Pe-2 squadron was back in business. Unfortunately, so were the Messerschmitts and the Focke-Wulfs.

“So it will,” Stas said, and sent the copilot and bomb-aimer a quizzical look. Mogamedov hadn’t quite come out with the Arabic
Inshallah
, but he’d come about as close as a secular New Soviet Man was ever likely to. A Russian probably wouldn’t have noticed anything out of
the ordinary in the reply. Then again, Russians hadn’t spent the past nine hundred or a thousand years living next door to Azeris.

Groundcrew men used a truck-mounted starter—a device borrowed from the Americans—to make the bomber’s engines turn over: first the port, then the starboard. Mouradian studied the instrument panel. Everything looked the way it was supposed to. He waved to the boss sergeant on the airstrip. The noncom waved back.

One after another, the Pe-2s took off. The target today was one of the railroad lines leading west out of Minsk. Stas couldn’t remember hitting targets on the far side of the Byelorussian capital. Not in this phase of the war, anyhow.

He released the brakes and taxied down the dirt runway. The bomber got airborne and climbed over the pale-barked birch trees in the woods past the end of the airstrip. The birches looked as if they’d been whitewashed like the squadron’s planes. Any Nazi fighter pilot would have a hard time spotting the Soviet aircraft against the drifts below them.

As he got closer to the front east of Minsk, more monuments of man’s inhumanity to man made themselves known in spite of the snow. There was a burnt-out tank, with soot spread over whiteness. From this height, he couldn’t tell whose tank it had been. That didn’t matter any more. It was nothing but scrap metal now. Sooner or later, he supposed, the Russians would haul the carcass to a foundry and make something new out of it.

Here was a burning village that had been on the German side of the line for a long time but now found itself in Soviet hands once more. Stas couldn’t see any of the human dramas down there, either, but this scene had played out many times before farther east. Some of the peasants would have cozied up to the Nazis, either because they liked Hitler better than Stalin or just because they thought that was the best way to keep their bellies full and their wives and daughters unraped.

And now they would pay for guessing wrong. Their neighbors would want revenge. The NKVD would want to pay back treason. If the peasants were lucky, they’d go straight into punishment battalions. There, at least, they had a small chance of coming out in one piece. If they weren’t so lucky, they’d go to the gulags instead. Or they’d simply meet a noose or a bullet to the base of the skull.

Their wives and daughters still might get forced. Only the uniforms of the men holding them down would be different.

The squadron didn’t fly over Minsk. The Pe-2s took a dogleg to swing south of the city. The Red Air Force had found out by painful experience that the Fascists had packed the place with antiaircraft guns. German gunners had both skill and enthusiasm. You didn’t want to give them a shot at you if you didn’t have to. For that matter, you didn’t
want
to give them a shot at you even when you did have to.

But skirting the flak guns took the squadron straight into a swarm of marauding FW-190s. Stas hated the new German fighter. A Pe-2 had a fair chance against a 109. Odds when you ran into 190s were worse. They had more speed, heavier guns, and a cockpit that gave their pilots terrific all-around vision. They were Trouble with a capital T.

“Dump the bombs!” Stas shouted into the speaking tube that carried his voice back to the bomb bay.

“I’m fucking doing it,” Fyodor Mechnikov answered. The bomb-bay doors opened. The explosives would come down on somebody, with luck on somebody German. Mouradian wasn’t inclined to be fussy. Designers always claimed that their brainstorms were fighting bombers. They always lied. Fighters were made for just one thing: shooting down other planes. Bombers had to do other things, too, and couldn’t fight back so well.