The War That Came Early: West and East (23 page)

“I
am
down,” Jock answered. So he was—he was flat as a swatted fly. The smell and taste of mud filled Walsh’s mouth and nose. Mud was one of the characteristic smells of war, along with cordite, shit, and rotting meat.

French and English mortars answered the stubby little German guns. The French 75s behind the lines started tearing up the German trenches. Naturally, the Fritzes responded in kind. Both sides pounded away with everything they had.

“Fucking idiots!” Jock said.
Fooking idjits
, it came out, which made it sound all the more idiotic.

Walsh nodded without raising his head. Some bored German lieutenant had probably told the
Feldwebel
heading a machine-gun crew to squeeze off a couple of belts and make the fellows in the far trenches keep their heads down. And the
Feldwebel
, no doubt as bored as the officer, would have answered,
“Zu befehl, mein Herr!”
and told the
Gefreiter
who actually did the work to start shooting. And the
Gefreiter
would have said,
“Jawohl!”
and done as he was told, too.

And then, till somebody got tired of it, both sides would try their best to create hell on earth.

Their best, these days, was much too good. Nobody’d used gas yet, not so far as Walsh knew. That was the only thing from the last war’s menu still missing in this one. Walsh peered out from behind the rubble of what had been some middle-class French family’s house till a few months—perhaps a few weeks—before. He must have looked like a helmeted, submachine-gun-carrying khaki marmot popping out of its hole to make sure no helmeted, rifle-carrying field-gray wildcats were trying to sneak up on it. He didn’t see any Germans scrambling forward. That only further convinced him the Fritzes hadn’t had anything special in mind when they opened up with the MG-34. Just because you weren’t looking for trouble didn’t mean you wouldn’t find any, of course.

While he spotted no enemy soldiers, he did see a skinny gray-and-white cat daintily picking its way through the wreckage where it must have lived till war turned everything inside out. It paused, staring at him with eyes green as verdigris. It still wore a bell on a collar, which couldn’t have made hunting any easier. “Mrrow?” it said, and yawned, showing off needle teeth.

How did you call a cat in French? Walsh had no idea. He did what he would have done back in Blighty: he snapped his fingers, showed the cat his open hand palm-up, and went “Puss, puss, puss!” as persuasively as he could.

“Mrrow?” the cat said again. It might have been more suspicious if it were less hungry. It trotted toward him, stopping just out of reach. Walsh left his hand where it was. The cat stepped forward, sniffed, considered,
and then rubbed against him. It started to purr. He’d passed whatever test it set him.

“Puss, puss, puss!” Walsh said again. He ducked down—he didn’t want to give some sniper in a coal-scuttle helmet time enough to punch his ticket for him. The cat jumped into the hole with him and Jock.

Walsh scratched it behind the ears and under the chin. Purring louder, it stropped itself against his boot. “What’ll you do with the sorry bugger?” asked Jock, he might have suddenly discovered Walsh was addicted to opium, or perhaps to unnatural vice.

“I’ll give it something to eat. It looks like it could use a bite,” the sergeant answered. “After that? Well, who knows? If it wants to stick around for a while, I don’t mind. Why? Have you got something against cats?”

“Don’t much fancy ’em,” Jock said. Then he shrugged. A superior’s vagaries weren’t for the likes of him to question. “However you please, though.”

“Let’s see what it thinks of bully beef.” Walsh opened a tin with his bayonet and put it on the ground in front of the cat.

Jock made a face. “Bugger has to be fuckin’ starving if it’ll stuff itself on that damned monkey meat.”

Walsh smiled.
Monkey meat
was a straight translation of
singe:
what the Frenchies called tinned beef. Walsh wondered whether Jock knew that. He would have bet against it; even English often seemed a foreign language to the Yorkshireman.

As for the cat, it didn’t care what you called the meat. It advanced, sniffed, and fell to without the slightest trace of feline fussiness. As it ate, it purred much louder than it had while Walsh scratched it. The tin held four ounces. By the way the cat emptied it, the beast might have disposed of four pounds of monkey meat just as eagerly.

“It must be hungry,” said Walsh, whose opinion of bully beef was no higher than Jock’s—or anyone else’s.

After it had emptied the tin and got the inside shiny clean, the cat licked its chops. It licked its left front paw and meticulously washed its face. Then it cocked a hind leg in the air and started licking its privates. That deep, contented purr rose once more.

Jock gasped, half scandalized, half giggling. “Bugger me blind!” he said. “If I could do summat like that, damned if I’d go wasting my money on pussy half so often.”

“You don’t think you’re wasting it while you spend it,” Walsh said—it wasn’t as if the same thing hadn’t occurred to him.

“Too right I don’t,” Jock agreed ruefully.

“And I think you just named the creature, too,” the staff sergeant added.

“I did?” Jock blinked. Then he got it, and started to laugh. He squatted and stroked the cat, which accepted the courtesy with regal condescension. “Nice Pussy,” Jock said. Pussy purred.

Chapter 10

H
ans-Ulrich Rudel and Albert Dieselhorst both eyed their Stuka, then turned to each other with identical bemused smiles. No, not quite identical, because Dieselhorst could say something Hans-Ulrich couldn’t. The sergeant not only could, he did: “Well, sir, this was your idea.”

“I know,” Hans-Ulrich answered. When he’d taken it to the armorers and then to the engineers, he’d been convinced it was a good one. So had they. They’d been so convinced, they’d gone ahead and given him exactly what he said he wanted. Now that he saw their handiwork in the flesh, so to speak, he wasn’t so sure he wanted it any more. That said something about life; he also wasn’t sure he wanted to know just what.

“You know what it looks like?” Dieselhorst said.

“Tell me,” Rudel urged. “I didn’t think it looked like anything.”

“Oh, it does.” Sergeant Dieselhorst looked at him the way a hard-bitten sergeant naturally tended to look at a minister’s son. “It looks like our plane’s got a hard-on, that’s what. Two hard-ons, in fact.”

“It—” Rudel started to tell him it looked like no such thing. The words clogged in his throat, because the Stuka
did
look as if it had seen a lady
airplane it fancied. Mounted under the wings, the gun pods they’d fitted had barrels that stuck out almost as far as the prop. Each pod came equipped with a sheet-metal chute for ejecting spent 37mm cartridge cases. Sighing, Hans-Ulrich said, “You’ve got a filthy mind, Albert.”

“Thank you, sir,” Dieselhorst replied, which wasn’t at all what Rudel had wanted to hear.

Since he hadn’t wanted to hear it, he pretended he hadn’t. “Now we get to find out how it flies with all that extra weight. It’ll be a pig in the air—you wait and see.”

Sergeant Dieselhorst nodded, but Rudel’s forebodings didn’t faze him. Again, he wasn’t shy about explaining why: “Not to worry, sir. A Stuka’s already an airpig.”
Luftschwein
wasn’t really a German word, which didn’t mean Hans-Ulrich had any trouble understanding it.

Again, Rudel wanted to tell him he was wrong. Again, he couldn’t, because Dieselhorst wasn’t. Even the biplane Czech Avias had been dangerous to Ju-87s. Over England, the Stuka was nothing but a disaster. Hans-Ulrich knew he’d been lucky to make it back to the Continent from his handful of flights against the United Kingdom. The
Luftwaffe
had to pick targets carefully here in France, or too many dive-bombers wouldn’t come back. For putting bombs right where you needed them, the Stuka couldn’t be beat. For reaching the target and for getting away afterwards … Hans-Ulrich had managed so far—except once. And he and Dieselhorst were over German-held territory when they bailed out. So that didn’t count—not to him, anyhow.

“We won’t be pigs. We’ll be wild boars,” he said. “If this works the way it’s supposed to, no panzer will be safe from us.” He paused as a new thought struck him. “Do you suppose we could use the cannon to shoot down enemy planes, too?”

Dieselhorst gave him a crooked grin. “Don’t know, sir. I’ll tell you one thing, though—we’d only have to hit ’em once, that’s for goddamn sure.”

He was right yet again. The weapons the engineers had chosen for panzerbusting were antiaircraft guns. Their shells were supposed to knock out planes from the ground. No doubt they could knock them out from the air as well … if they hit. As the sergeant suggested, hitting would be the tough part.

Now that Rudel had his guns, he was wild to find out what they could do. No one tried to hold him back. Had his fellow flyers liked him better, they might have tried to restrain him from rushing out with untried weaponry. Nobody said a word. He didn’t even think anyone might have. He didn’t know how unpopular he was, and wouldn’t have cared if he had known. He had his convictions, and the courage thereof.

As soon as he got the redone Stuka airborne, he realized he would need all the courage and conviction he could find. Sergeant Dieselhorst’s prediction that the plane would be an airpig was, if anything, optimistic. The twin cannon and their pods weighed down the Ju-87 and loused up its aerodynamics.

“Keep your eyes peeled, Albert,” Rudel said through the speaking tube.

“Why?” asked the veteran in the rear-facing seat. “We aren’t fast enough to run away, and we can’t maneuver for beans, either. Best chance we’ve got is if the bastards on the other side don’t spot us.”

Yet again, Hans-Ulrich couldn’t argue even if he wished he could. He flew toward Paris. If the froggies and
Englanders
had massed panzers anywhere, they’d done it in front of the French capital. Rudel’s right hand tightened on the stick. Had Paris fallen the way it was supposed to, the fighting might be over by now. Wouldn’t that have knocked France out of the war? And how could England go on without a continental ally?

His hand tightened on the stick again, in a different way this time. Through the palm of his leather glove, he felt the wire that led up to the new firing button the engineers had mounted near the one on the stick that worked the Stuka’s forward machine gun. If panzer-busting Ju-87s ever got manufactured from scratch, the installation would be neater. For now, this would do.

Contemplating purpose-built panzerbusters wasn’t what made him squeeze the stick, though. Even if France went under and England made peace, the war wouldn’t necessarily end. A thousand kilometers off to the east, or however far away it was, things were just starting to boil.

Hans-Ulrich nodded to himself. Russia was the real enemy, all right, Russia and Communism. If only the French and English would see what lay right in front of their noses, they could follow the
Reich
in a crusade against the godless Bolsheviks. Rudel remembered Red rabble-rousers
from the days when he was a boy. They’d spewed their poison, their lies, all through Germany back then. The
Führer’
d taken care of that, but good. If he got half a chance, he’d take care of Russia, too, in spite of the stupid Western democracies.

First things first. Rudel suddenly stiffened in the cockpit.
There
were panzers, and those weren’t German machines. Even from 3,000 meters, the difference in lines was unmistakable. “I’m going down, Albert,” he said. “And I intend to come back up again, too.” He tipped the Stuka into a dive.

“You’d better,” Sergeant Dieselhorst answered. “Fly us into the ground and I’ll be a long time forgiving you.”

“Heh,” Hans-Ulrich said as acceleration shoved him against the padding and armor in the back of his seat. The enemy panzers swelled before his eyes.
English machines, not French
, he thought. He’d decided he wanted to hit them from behind if he could. The armor over the engine compartment would be thinner than anywhere else. If he couldn’t do that, he’d shoot them in the side.

Soon now. It should have been sooner still. Configured as a panzerbuster, the Stuka even dove slower than it had before. His forefinger found the new firing button. He pushed, hard.

That fired one round from each underwing gun. Shooting a pair of 37mm shells from a Ju-87 gave a whole new meaning to dive brakes. The recoil made the plane stagger, and almost seemed to stop it in midair. Machine guns were nothing beside it.

He hauled back on the stick, hard, to bring the Stuka’s nose up again. “How’d we do?” he asked Dieselhorst, who could see where they’d just been.

“You got him!” the rear gunner said enthusiastically. “He’s burning like billy-be-damned! It’s easy—as long as there aren’t any enemy fighters around, anyway.”

“
Ja
.” That reminded Hans-Ulrich to look around once more to make sure he had no unwelcome company. He didn’t see any. Since he didn’t, he gave the dive bomber more throttle and climbed up into the sky. “Let’s do it again.”