Last Orders: The War That Came Early (4 page)

He tossed the baseball up and down a couple of times. Then, to her amazement, he tossed it to her. She managed to catch it—not so neatly as he had, but at least it didn’t land on the concrete and roll away. “Enjoy it,” he said. “Give it to your son so he can play with it.”

He could have said
grandson;
she’d admitted she was no spring chicken. But he was too nice. “I don’t have kids,” she said. She’d miscarried
with Herb till her doctor told her she’d be putting herself in danger by trying again. After that, it was French letters and perversions. She wondered what kind of mother she would have made. She’d never get the chance to find out now.

“No?” He raised a busy eyebrow. “Too bad.” He touched the brim of his fedora. “I’m Dave—Dave Hartman.”

Peggy gave her own name. Meanwhile, the Browns’ batter struck out. Their manager gave him more hell when he glumly slammed his bat into the rack in the dugout.

She and Dave kept talking while the game moved forward. She found out he was a master machinist currently between jobs because he had a bad back and the shop he’d been working for didn’t want to give him a chair while everybody else had to stand in front of a lathe.

“Well, to heck with ’em, then,” Peggy said, full of irate sympathy.

“That’s what I told ’em,” he answered. “ ’Course, I might’ve put it a little stronger—yeah, just a little.”

“I sure hope you did.” Peggy nodded emphatically.

By then, he’d slid over till he was only a couple of seats from her so they could talk more readily. When the fellow with the tray of beer bottles came by, Dave held up his hand with two fingers raised. He handed Peggy one of the bottles. “Well, thank you,” she said, and reached over with it. They clinked. They drank. They smiled.

They talked through the rest of the game. She found out he was a widower with two grown sons and a granddaughter. She told him of her own status. He thoughtfully scratched his chin. “A guy who’d toss out a gal like you, he’s gotta be kind of a jerk, you want to know what I think,” he said at last.

Peggy wasn’t used to thinking of Herb as a jerk. He’d always struck her as plenty smart. “I don’t know,” she answered after some thought of her own. “We weren’t in love any more—heaven knows that’s true. We still liked each other okay, but we were just going through the motions.”

“That’s a darn shame,” Dave said.

The A’s won the game, 5–3. When they walked out of the park together, Peggy found herself giving him her phone number. He touched the brim of his hat again and walked toward a bus.

As she walked toward the trolley that would take her home, Peggy was surprised at herself. No, she was astonished at herself. She’d met somebody. She didn’t know what would come of it. She didn’t know if anything would. She didn’t much care, either. The thing was done. She hadn’t even imagined that much. Why should she have? She hadn’t needed to worry about it for more than thirty years. But it could. That was pretty astonishing all by itself.

An air-raid siren howled in the middle of the night. Hans-Ulrich Rudel leaped from his cot, threw on a helmet—he’d been sleeping in his
Luftwaffe
tunic and trousers—grabbed his boots, and ran for the nearest slit trench in his stocking feet.

He jumped down into the trench a few seconds before bombs started falling on this stretch of western Belgium. While the ground shuddered under him, he pulled on first one boot and then the other.

Nights were short at this season of the year. But this airstrip wasn’t far from the front. French bombers could easily come here under cover of darkness. So could the RAF, whether taking off from bases inside France or from across the Channel. He didn’t know whether the enemy flyers were specifically after this Stuka squadron or whether they were doling out presents all over German-occupied territory.

He also didn’t know whether that mattered. Night bombing was the next thing to dropping blind. Sometimes it wasn’t the next thing, but rather the same thing. You flew by dead reckoning, maybe by your navigator’s star sights that might or might not be worth anything. You looked down through the bombsight, and you probably couldn’t see much of anything. You dropped anyhow, hoping for the best, and you got the devil out of there.

One bomb burst was followed a split second later by a much bigger explosion. Cowering in the trench a few meters away from Hans-Ulrich, Sergeant Albert Dieselhorst said, “Somebody got lucky there.”

“If that’s how you want to put it,” Rudel replied.

His radioman and rear gunner chuckled, then abruptly cut it off. “I don’t much care about the bombs or shells or whatever the hell that
was. But I’m afraid some good guys got blown to the devil along with them.”

“I’m afraid of the same thing,” Hans-Ulrich said. “I’m worried about the munitions, too, though. The enemy throws them at us as though he hasn’t got a care in the world. We need to be careful with what we use.”

“That’s—” A far closer bomb interrupted Dieselhorst. For a split second, Rudel feared it would collapse the trench wall on them, even though boards and sticks shored up the dirt. When it became clear that wouldn’t happen, Dieselhorst laughed shakily. “Where was I before I pissed myself?”

He might have been joking. Or he might not. Hans-Ulrich never had fouled his drawers, but he’d come close several times. When you thought you were going to die in the next few seconds, the animal in you could take over. People who’d been through the mill laughed at such things because they knew it could happen to them, too.

As for the other part of the question … “I don’t know where you were going with that. You’d just started whatever it was.”

“Ach, ja.”
Dieselhorst paused for a moment, perhaps to nod. Then the older man went on, “Now I remember. I was starting to say that I’d noticed we needed to watch what we threw at the other side, but I didn’t know you had, too.”

“Well, I have,” Hans-Ulrich replied with a touch of pique. He knew the sergeant thought he was painfully naive. “No matter how it looks to you, I’m not a hundred percent blind.”

“Whatever you say, sir,” Dieselhorst said: agreement that felt like anything but.

The bombers rumbled on to the east. Hans-Ulrich and the other
Luftwaffe
men booted out of sleep tracked them by their engines’ drone, by the thumps from the bombs they kept dropping, and by the Germans’ searchlights and flak barrages. One burning bomber fell out of the sky and split the night with a thunderous blast when it hit the ground.

Twenty minutes later, the enemy bombers came back overhead, now homeward bound. “I hope you all crash when you land, you bastards,”
Dieselhorst said. “That’s what you deserve for waking me up in the middle of the night.”

Hans-Ulrich stared in surprise toward the spot in the dark his voice was coming from. He’d felt that way about the Russians—he didn’t know any German who didn’t. But the English or French flyers were just doing their jobs, the same as he was. In war, your job involved hurting the people on the other side. Hans-Ulrich felt no personal malice when he flew here. He rather hoped the enemy planes would get back safe. He just wanted the bombs they dropped to miss.

Most of them would. In night bombing, you had to lay down a carpet of explosives to do any good at all. Flying the Stuka was a very different business. The dive-bomber was like an artillery piece with wings. He could put a 500-kilo bomb on top of a fifty-pfennig piece—or within a few meters of one, anyhow, which was commonly better than good enough.

He could if enemy fighters didn’t give him grief, anyhow. Even the biplane fighters of the newly hatched war outclassed the Ju-87 in air-to-air combat. Today’s English, French, and Russian machines treated them as snacks—there was no other word for it. If Bf-109s and FW-190s couldn’t protect Stukas from enemy planes, the dive-bombers were doomed.

Logically, that meant scrapping the Stuka and replacing it with something that had a better chance of surviving. Indeed, some FW-190s carried bomb racks these days, so they could do some of the same job as the Ju-87. But the ugly old dive-bombers with the inverted gull wings soldiered on. With the
Reich
under pressure from both east and west,
Reichsmarschall
Göring didn’t want to lay aside any weapon that could hurt the foe.

After a few hours of fitful sleep, Hans-Ulrich gulped ersatz coffee and oatmeal enlivened with bits of ham in the squadron’s field kitchen. A gourmet forced to down such fare would have slit his wrists. Rudel wasn’t so fussy. As long as they fed him enough to fill his belly, he wouldn’t complain.

He also didn’t complain to discover that the bomb which had almost buried him hadn’t cratered any of the airstrip’s runways or planes. It came down near the joining of the north-south and east-west runways.
It made an enormous hole in the ground there, but a work crew with snow shovels cleared the dirt it threw on the runways in an hour or so.

While the
Luftwaffe
troops in undyed cotton drill worksuits got the airstrip ready to operate, groundcrew men hauled the Stukas out of their revetments, fueled them, and bombed them up. Colonel Steinbrenner, the squadron commander, briefed his flyers: “We’re going after two railroad bridges just inside French territory.” He whacked a map with a pointer to show where the bridges were. “Taking them out will help keep the froggies from moving men and matériel into Belgium.”

He didn’t say it would stop the French from doing that. Even Hans-Ulrich, who worked hard not to think about politics, noticed as much. The war wasn’t going the way Germany’d wished it would when it started. She kept on all the same. What else could she do? Admitting defeat was worse. The
Volk
had seen that after the last fight.

Up in the sky, sucking in rubber-tasting oxygenated air, Rudel didn’t have to worry about any of that. He followed the Stukas ahead of him; more followed his plane. As Steinbrenner had promised, Messerschmitts escorted the Ju-87s toward the railway bridges.

French fighters jumped the German planes before they reached their targets. The French aircraft industry started behind the
Reich
’s. After so much war, though, it had almost caught up. As the two sides’ fighters spun through the air in wild fury, the Stukas dove toward the deck and sneaked southwest, in the direction of the bridges.

Hans-Ulrich dropped his bombs from not far above treetop height. As he hauled his pig of a plane around, Sergeant Dieselhorst whooped in the rear-facing back seat: “Frenchies won’t be using that bridge for a while!”

“Good,” Rudel said. An antiaircraft shell burst behind the Stuka. It bucked in the air, but didn’t seem hurt. He gunned it back to Belgium and what should be safety as fast as it would go.

Ivan Kuchkov wasn’t in a penal battalion. The Russian sergeant didn’t care about anything else. The Germans could still kill him, of course.
They’d come too close too many times. The Ukrainian bandits who called themselves nationalists could still do him in, too. Those were the chances you took when you served the Soviet Union.

But his own side wouldn’t just throw him away like a shitty asswipe. Penal battalions got officers and men who’d screwed up badly enough to piss off the guys set over them in a big way. Stavka shuffled them around the long front and threw them in where things were hottest. Clearing a path for the troops behind them was what they were for.

Minefield in front of an entrenched Nazi position? No problem, Comrade Colonel! The boys in the penal battalion will find those mines! They’ll find them with their feet while the German machine gunners shoot down the ones who don’t blow up. Then you won’t waste so many soldiers who might actually be good for something.

German tanks in the neighborhood? No Red Army tanks to drive them off? Don’t worry, Comrade Major General! We’ll hand the lads in the penal battalion magnetic limpet mines. They can run forward and stick them on the Fascists’ side armor! The tanks will be firing at them while they run? So will German foot soldiers? That’s hard luck, all right. But the dumb cunts should have known better than to wind up in a penal battalion to begin with.

If you lived through whatever suicidal mission they sent you on, they gave you back your old rank and put you in an ordinary unit again. You’d wiped away your sin, the way you could in an Orthodox monastery by penance. They did if they felt like it, anyhow. Otherwise, they stuck you in another penal battalion and gave you a new chance to expend yourself. That was how they talked, as if you were a shell casing or a worn-out boot.

One of the sentries in Ivan’s section had shot—had not just shot but killed—the regimental political officer when the stupid
politruk
wouldn’t give him the password. The company CO didn’t dare cover it up, any more than Ivan had when he found out about it. Somebody would blab, and then all their dicks would go on the chopping block.

So the NKVD came down on poor Vitya Ryakhovsky, and on Ivan, and on Lieutenant Obolensky, too. And in the end, the
Chekists
decided sending them to a battalion like that would be more trouble than it was worth—too fucking many forms to fill out if they did.

Ivan neither read nor wrote. If scribbling stuff on a bunch of papers was that big a pain in the ass, he was goddamn glad to be illiterate. (He’d also heard that the Nazis shot Russians they captured who could read and write. He didn’t know for sure that that was true, but it sounded like something the Hitlerites would do. It was one of the few things having to do with Germans that he didn’t need to worry about.)

So here he was, still down in the Ukraine with his old unit. So was Lieutenant Obolensky. So was poor Vitya. Ivan didn’t make the mistake of thinking all was forgiven or forgotten. He knew better. They were watching. They were waiting. As soon as they saw the chance, they’d give him one in the nuts if the Germans hadn’t taken care of the job for them by then.

Maybe, just maybe, the Germans wouldn’t be able to do it. He’d developed a healthy respect for Hitler’s pricks. He’d been fighting them since the war broke out. He’d been a Red Air Force bombardier then. After he bailed out of his burning SB-2, he’d kept fighting on the ground. Nobody could ever say that the Fritzes didn’t know what they were doing. Nobody could ever say the bastards weren’t brave, either. They wouldn’t have been anywhere near so much trouble if they weren’t brave.