The War That Came Early: The Big Switch (58 page)

Luc wished he hadn’t had such thoughts with Red Army 105s crashing down all around him. He wanted to hope he’d go home one day, not to know he’d be stuck in this goddamn Russian icebox forever and a day. What he wanted and what he was likely to get no doubt weren’t even related to each other.

CHAIM WEINBERG HAD
seen Czechs in Spain before. There were more than a few of them in the International Brigades, along with men from just about every other country in Central Europe.
That’s why they call ’em Internationals, smart guy
, he jeered at himself. He admired what he’d seen of them, too. They had the same solid virtues as most Germans, without being such assholes about it. Almost all of them spoke German, and they could make out his Yiddish, so he could talk with them. He approved of talking. Plenty of people said he did it too fucking much.

He’d never seen so many Czech soldiers all at once, though. And
he’d never seen so many who weren’t all solidly Marxist-Leninist, either. But the Popular Front was alive and well in Republican Spain. These Czechs might not be Communists, but nobody could say they weren’t anti-Fascist. They’d hated the Nazis enough to keep shooting at them even after their own country went under.

Chaim rapidly discovered they were damn fine soldiers, too. Nothing they saw outside of Madrid fazed them, not even a little bit. On the contrary: they’d learned their trade in a harder classroom than any Spain offered. One guy used an antitank rifle as a sniper’s piece. That struck Chaim as swatting flies with an anvil, but the Czech was a damn maestro with the brute. Anything that moved, out to a mile away from him, maybe farther, was liable to stop moving very suddenly.

His name was Votslav, or something like that. He looked down his rather blunt nose at Marshal Sanjurjo’s men. “They don’t know much about taking cover, do they?” he said in slow, deliberate
Deutsch
.

“They’re brave. They’re Fascist
pishers
, but they’re brave.” Chaim admired the courage of the Spaniards on both sides. As far as he was concerned, they carried it to, and sometimes past, the point of insanity.

But Votslav, a military pragmatist, only shrugged. “A fat lot of good it does them. They wouldn’t be so easy to kill if they didn’t parade around like a bunch of dumbheads left over from Napoleon’s time.”

It wasn’t the first time Chaim had heard a European talking about Napoleonic tactics when he meant something old and outdated. The guys from the Abe Lincoln Battalion who thought about history (some cared no more about it than Henry Ford did) spoke of the Civil War the same way.

The
other
Civil War
, Chaim reminded himself. A redheaded guy in a new-looking tunic with Czech’s sergeant’s pips came up to them in the trench. He spoke to Votslav in Czech, but Chaim needed no more than the blink of an eye to realize what he was.
“Vos macht a Yid?”
Chaim said.

And the other fellow needed only a moment to size Chaim up. “You’d know the
mamaloshen
, all right,” he said. “Who are you? Where are you from?”

“I’m Chaim Weinberg, out of New York City. You?”

“Benjamin Halévy. Paris. My folks came from Prague, so I grew up with a bunch of different languages. I was liaison for the free Czechs till Daladier decided to turn into Hitler’s
tukhus-lekher
. Now I’m here.” His wave didn’t get higher than the parapet—the Nationalists would have snipers, too. “The
verkakte
Garden of Eden, right?”

“
Verkakte
is right, anyway.” Chaim didn’t need to look around to know how abused the landscape was.

“Go slow,” Votslav said. “I have trouble keeping up when you guys jabber like that. It’s not the German I learned in school.”

“Bet your
putz
it’s not, buddy,” Chaim said, not without pride. Benjamin Halévy chuckled. The real Czech only sighed and scratched his head. Both he and Halévy wore Adrian helmets. They covered less of the head than the ones the Spanish army issued. Chaim liked them better even so. Spanish helmets looked too much like the German
Stahlhelms
they were modeled on. He didn’t like looking like a Nazi storm trooper—no way, nohow. He sometimes did it; he’d seen too many men dead from a piddly little fragment that happened to pierce their skull to want to avoid that if he had any chance at all. Nothing could make him happy about it.

Halévy waved again, this time toward Sanjurjo’s lines. “Jezek’s right—those guys aren’t such hot stuff. We ought to advance and clean ’em out.”

Was I that eager when I first got here?
Chaim supposed he had been. He was still willing. He wouldn’t have stood in this chilly trench if he weren’t. But he doubted he’d ever be eager again. He said, “The French must have been feeding you a lot of raw meat.”

Benjamin Halévy’s crooked smile was all Jew. “Because we’re new here, we think everything’s easy, you mean?”

“Yup.” That was English—of a sort. Halévy and—Jezek, was it?—understood anyhow.

“Maybe this is true. And maybe we have reason for it.” The Czech soldier’s German could be awkward, but it worked. It was a hell of a lot better than Chaim’s Spanish. Jezek explained, “Now that we cannot shoot Nazis any more, we have to make do with people who get into bed with Nazis.”

“People who dance the mattress polka with Nazis,” Halévy amended. Chaim grinned. The Yiddish phrase had more bounce than the polite German, both literally and figuratively.

Thinking about dancing the mattress polka naturally made him think about La Martellita. He’d got what he wanted from her, all right. And he’d also got much more than he’d bargained for when he first jumped on her
shikker
bones. She didn’t want to see an abortionist. Even under the Republic’s liberal laws, they were illegal, which didn’t mean business ever went bad for them, here or anywhere else.

That she didn’t want to find one had surprised Chaim. La Martellita seemed such a perfect Red, somebody who wouldn’t think twice about something like that. Maybe taking the girl out of the Catholic Church was easier than taking the Catholic Church out of the girl. Heaven knew that was true about plenty of Jews who converted to Christianity.

So now things were official. The civil ceremony took a minute and a half—two minutes, tops. He didn’t feel particularly married afterwards. Married or not, he hadn’t been anywhere close to sure his brand-new bride would let him touch her again. That, in fact, was an understatement. He’d wondered if she would plug him as soon as the “I do”s were over. A widow could give a baby a legitimate last name, too.

But no. He really must have pleased her the second time they made love together, when she’d let him touch her after he tenderly battled her hangover. And so he got one night’s worth of honeymoon back at her cramped flat. It would have been just his luck to have a Nationalist air raid interrupt things at some critical moment. But, again, no.

And, again, he worked hard to please her. Despite that second time, when they started as man and wife she looked ready to spit in his eye and tell him he was the lousiest fuck in the history of fucking. Had she kept that attitude after they turned out the lights, he would have begun with three, maybe four, strikes against him.

One more time, though, no. She seemed to decide that, as long as she was going to do this, she might as well do it right. When she did it right, she did it up brown. She was no blushing virgin bride—anything but. Some of the things she did without being asked might have surprised a pro. They sure surprised Chaim, not that he complained.

Afterwards, his heart still thundering, he blurted, “When I can see again, I’ll try to tell you how marvelous that was.”

“You are … as good as I remember,” La Martellita answered—tepid praise compared to his, but better than he’d hoped for. She added, “Get off me now. You’re squashing me flat.”

“Lo siento.”
And Chaim
had been
sorry. He hadn’t wanted to do anything to ruin this. And, some time in the not very indefinite future, he’d looked forward to another round, and then, with luck, one more after that.

Dancing the mattress polka … He smiled, there in the trench. One of these days before too long, he’d get another furlough. And then he’d hurry back to Madrid, hurry back to his new wife. If he had only not quite nine months of marriage ahead of him here, he aimed to make the most of them.

JULIUS LEMP HATED
winter patrols. A U-boat would roll in a spilled glass of water. When the seas were high and the wind howled down from the north, he feared the U-30 would capsize. That wasn’t likely; U-boats were designed for these conditions. But the sour stink of puke never left the boat when she tossed and capered like a badly spooked pony.

He’d hoped things would be better in the Baltic’s close confines than in the North Sea or the wide, wild winter waters of the North Atlantic west of the British Isles. And things were … better. That only illuminated the vast gap between better and good.

Some of the waves the harsh winds stirred up here were big enough to send deluges of frigid seawater down the hatch at the top of the conning tower and into the U-30. Besides drenching the sailors, the water shorted out electrical equipment, gave the pumps a workout, and even threatened the massive batteries that powered the U-boat’s electric motors while she was submerged.

“If we stayed at
Schnorkel
depth, skipper, we wouldn’t have to put up with this,” Gerhard Beilharz said up on the conning tower, water dripping from his oilskin cape and headgear.

“Maybe,” Lemp answered. “But maybe not, too. When we’re running
seas like this, what are the odds a big wave—or a bunch of big waves, one after another—would make the
Schnorkel
’s safety valve shut? And then how long would the diesels take to suck all the fresh air out of the pressure hull? Or, if the valve didn’t work, water would come down the pipe and flood the engines, and then we’d really be screwed.”

A little stiffly, Beilharz said, “That safety valve is plenty reliable.”

“All right,” Lemp said in magnanimous tones. “We wouldn’t get flooded. We’d just have to learn to breathe diesel fumes instead.”

“That … can happen,” the engineering officer admitted. A good thing for him, too: Lemp might have pitched him off the conning tower and down into the pale gray sea had he tried to deny it. Still sounding like a maiden aunt talking about the facts of life, Beilharz went on, “That’s only possible with waves like these. When the water’s calmer, the snort behaves just fine.”

“I know. I know.” Lemp also knew the
Schnorkel
wasn’t the only thing with a slightly unreliable safety valve. Gerhart Beilharz had one, too. Since Lemp didn’t want it to stick and Beilharz to explode, he kept on soothing the tall junior engineering officer: “It’s very valuable most of the time. But you don’t want to use it when the seas run this high.”

That
you
was deliberate. Beilharz had made it plain he
did
want to use the snort now. Lemp made him think twice. At least he
could
think twice, which put him one up on a lot of people Lemp knew … and two up on some. With a sigh, Beilharz said, “When you put it that way, I guess you’re right.”

“Happens to everyone now and again.” If Lemp laughed at himself, he beat other people to the punch.

As usual, the ratings atop the conning tower swept sky and sea with their field glasses. The sky was cloudy, with a low ceiling. The sea’s mountains and chasms changed places without cease. The Ivans were unlikely to come across them till things moderated … which might be tomorrow and might be next spring. But
unlikely
didn’t mean
impossible
. The ratings stayed alert. They were solid men. Lemp didn’t have to get on them to make sure they stayed that way.

Having escaped one Russian plane, he didn’t want another one to run across him. He might not stay lucky twice. The Baltic wasn’t very
deep or very wide, not when you set it alongside the Atlantic, but it had plenty of room to let a U-boat’s crushed hull disappear forever.

And if a Russian destroyer suddenly appeared out of seaspray and mist … In that case, Lemp would take the U-30 down as fast as she could go, and pray the Ivans’ depth charges didn’t peel her open like the key to a tin of sardines.

But the heavens stayed good and gloomy. That made enemy shipping harder to spot at any distance, but it also meant no Red Air Force planes were likely to swoop down on the U-boat. Given the choice, Lemp preferred the low, scudding clouds.

Gerhart Beilharz eyed the sky, too. His thoughts ran down a different track. “How bad will it get in the middle of winter if it’s already like this? Will we be able to operate at all? Or will the whole sea freeze solid?”

“Not the whole sea,” Lemp answered. “That doesn’t even happen up around Murmansk and Archangelsk, and they face on the Arctic Ocean, for heaven’s sake.”

The younger officer nodded, but he didn’t let go. “Oh, sure, Skipper. But they have the Gulf Stream going for them, so warm water flows up to them from the southwest. Without it, they’d probably be icebound all year around, not just in winter.”

“I wish they were. It would make our lives easier.” Lemp gave Beilharz a grudging nod. “Well, fair enough—you’ve got a point. But the Baltic doesn’t freeze all the way across. There will be ice on it some way out from shore, but the Ivans have icebreakers to clear the way for their U-boats when it’s at its worst. We can’t be rid of them so easily, however much I wish we could.”

“Too bad.” Beilharz grinned crookedly.

“Isn’t it just!” Lemp agreed. “Everything would be a lot easier if the enemy acted like a
Dummkopf
all the time.”
Or if the people on our own side weren’t
Dummkopfs
themselves, more often than they ought to be
. He sighed, wondering whether the
Reich
had been wise to get entangled with the Soviet Union. Most of Russia might be undeveloped, but that colossal sweep of red on the map remained intimidating.

Again, Beilharz’s thoughts ran in a different direction: “Now that we’ve patched things up with England, will the Royal Navy come into
the Baltic and give us a hand against Ivan? Battleships, aircraft carriers, more U-boats … We sure could use ’em.”