Firing short, steady bursts wasn’t easy. He wanted to burn out the MG-34’s barrel so he could kill as many Russians as fast as he could. Discipline held, though. In its own harsh way, Wehrmacht training was a marvel.
So was whatever the Ivans did to their men. Theo was sure he would have run away. The Russians stolidly kept coming … till two Stukas screamed down out of the sky and landed big bombs on them, close enough to the Panzer III to make it try to rear. That did the trick. Not even the Reds could take a dive-bombing in stride. The handful still on their feet—none near the panzer—skedaddled.
Adi laughed shakily. “All in a day’s work,” he said.
“Aber natürlich,” Theo answered.
AFTER REFUELING and resupplying at Narvik, which the Kriegsmarine had quickly fitted out as a bare-bones U-boat base, Julius Lemp took the U-30 back up to the Barents Sea. He understood why the navy wanted to use the little town; it lay pretty close to the Barents Sea itself.
As far as he was concerned, that ended its advantages. The U-boat had got what it needed at Narvik. His men hadn’t. They couldn’t drink and screw and blow off steam there. A U-boat base without a brothel! What was the world coming to? There was a club for sailors, but it seemed a halfhearted affair, with bad, watery beer and not enough of it. No wonder the ratings grumbled when they put to sea again. In their shoes, Lemp would have grumbled, too. He would have grumbled in his own shoes, except a skipper had no one aboard to grumble to.
He intended to take care of that when he got back to the Reich. He didn’t want to put anything in writing, but some of his superiors would get an earful.
The one good thing was, his men were too busy to complain as much as they would have with more time on their hands. Here up past 70° north latitude, the sun stayed above the horizon most of the summer. Perpetual daylight kept everybody hopping all the time. You never knew when you might spot a British convoy bound for Murmansk or Arkhangelsk—or when it might spot you. Prowling Russian seaplanes were another danger. Lemp had met one of those in the Baltic. He didn’t care to repeat the experience.
Topside watches took all the concentration a man had. You couldn’t stretch people out past two hours. With unending daylight to face, ratings who’d never stood a topside watch before got the chance to try it. Lemp got the chance to worry that they might miss something an old hand wouldn’t have. He gulped bicarbonate of soda to soothe an acid stomach, wondering why he’d ever wanted to become a naval officer.
Navigation also got … interesting. The compass deflection was enormous. Accurate sun shoots became vitally important. With no stars in the sky, the sun was the only clue to direction they had. None of the manuals talked about times like this—U-boat men hadn’t needed to worry about them in the last war. That was another discussion Lemp wanted to have with his superiors.
And, even in summer, the ocean was bitterly cold. Without the Gulf Stream, it would have been colder yet. Without the Gulf Stream, Murmansk and Arkhangelsk—and likely Narvik as well—would have been as icebound as Antarctica. Then I wouldn’t have to come up here, Lemp thought. That wouldn’t be so bad.
Black-and-white auks and puffins and murres bobbed on the sea, now and then diving after fish or taking off with small, hard-working wings. They weren’t quite penguins, but they came close enough to satisfy anybody this side of a relentless nitpicker.
The Kriegsmarine sent out a coded message that a convoy had sailed from Aberdeen, bound for one Russian port or the other. Lemp admired the British sailors’ courage and decided his own superiors weren’t the only ones with problems. That convoy would have to face not only U-boats but also land-based planes from Norway. Talk about running the gantlet …
Sure enough, the planes soon found the convoy. Not only did they raid—they also shadowed, relaying its position, its course, its speed. Diesels thrumming through the soles of his shoes, Lemp brought the U-30 southwest to block its path.
He had to be careful. Destroyers or corvettes would be escorting the convoy. On the surface, they could sink him. And he wouldn’t be able to submerge, then come back up later and escape under cover of darkness. Here there was no darkness.
So he made sure he had men who knew what they were doing up on the conning tower when the U-30 neared the advancing convoy. That convoy had already taken damage—he didn’t know how much. U-boats transmitted only when they had to, to keep the enemy from using their signals to work out where they were.
One thing he was sure of: the freighters in the convoy would make more smoke than the U-30 did. He’d find the British ships before they knew he was around. After that was when things would get interesting.
The sun skimmed low above the northern horizon when one of the ratings spotted the smoke from the enemy. Lemp changed course so he could attack with the sun at his back. The harder he could make things for the English, the happier he would be—and the better his chances of doing it again soon.
Up went the Schnorkel’s stovepipe. By now, Lemp took the gadget for granted. More and more of the Kriegsmarine’s U-boats used it these days. It wasn’t a punishment any more. It was a tool of war, one he’d come to rely on.
But the Royal Navy had its own tools of war. Sharp, almost musical pings echoed through the U-30’s hull after the boat went to Schnorkel depth. “What the fuck is that?” Gunter Beilharz asked, reaching under his Stahlhelm to scratch his head.
“They have an echo locater,” Lemp answered. “It’s mentioned in my latest briefing reports. It isn’t perfect, but it’s better than anything they used before.”
Beilharz eyed him in something approaching horror. “They can get range and bearing from the echoes?”
“That’s the idea,” Lemp allowed. “Their toy isn’t everything it ought to be, though.”
“It had better not be,” the Schnorkel officer said. “If they can find us whenever they please, they’ll sit on top of us and drop ash cans till we either cave in or have to come up and fight it out on the surface.”
A U-boat that got into a surface engagement with a warship designed to fight up there was dead meat. Everybody knew it. Lemp would have been happier not to get the reminder. And he would have been much happier if the periscope hadn’t shown him a Royal Navy corvette speeding his way with a bone in her teeth. That damned echo locater did work.
He didn’t want to take on a warship. He could sink her with an eel before she got close enough to hurt him. He could … if he was good enough, and if he was lucky enough, and if he felt like telling the other English warships where he was. Ping! Ping! With that miserable gadget, they already had a pretty good notion.
But then other noises came through the U-30’s steel hull: the unmistakable heavy crump! of a torpedo exploding, and after that the sound of a ship breaking up. That dreadful creaking and crackling made any man who went to sea flinch.
It also made the Royal Navy corvette spin through as tight a turn as she could make and dash back toward the vessels she was shepherding. Half a dozen men inside the U-30 gave forth with various profane variations on What’s going on?
“Well, I don’t know for sure,” Lemp answered, “but unless they’re sinking their own ships I’d say we aren’t the only U-boat in the neighborhood.” An elk struggling through deep snow would draw a pack of wolves. A convoy crossing dangerous waters might draw a pack of submarines.
Another torpedo slammed into a freighter. This ship, by the sound of it, didn’t break up right away. Maybe the sailors would have a chance to make the boats and get picked up. For their sake, Lemp hoped so. The poor devils wouldn’t last long bobbing in the Barents Sea.
Those two hits made the enemy forget all about Lemp’s boat. The escorting warships were hellbent on hunting down the wolf that had already bitten them. With the Schnorkel, getting into range of a fat freighter belching coal smoke was almost unfairly easy. She even obligingly zigzagged to present her flank.
“Torpedo one—los! … Torpedo two—los!” Lemp commanded as soon as he had the shot
lined up. Twin wet whooshes meant the eels were on their way. Both hit. One was a dud; it thunked off the coal-burner’s flank. But the other eel tore a hole in her stern before Lemp really started swearing. She soon began to settle in the water.
By then, Lemp and the helmsman had swung the U-30 toward another target, this one a bit more than a kilometer off. A longish shot, but he launched only one torpedo: he saved the last one in the forward tubes for self-defense. Reloading was a slow, sweaty job, and his boat wouldn’t stay forgotten now that he’d announced himself.
Cheers echoed through the U-boat when the eel struck home. As soon as it did, Lemp pulled away from the convoy. The snort let him go twice as fast underwater as he could have without it. And you had to sense when you shouldn’t get greedy. There would be plenty of other chances—provided he didn’t throw himself away on this one.
HAD CORPORAL HIDEKI FUJITA stood any straighter and stiffer, anyone seeing him would have thought he’d been carved from wood. But would a sculptor have included a saluting mechanism of such mechanical perfection?
“Requesting permission to speak to you, Captain-san!” Fujita said, his voice an emotionless rasp.
Captain Masanori Ikejiri returned the salute. “Hai? Nan desu-ka?” He could have just told Fujita to dry up and blow away. That he asked him what it was instead showed he didn’t despise the very ground on which the demoted noncom walked. That was something, anyway. It was more than most of Fujita’s superiors seemed willing to admit.
“Please excuse me, sir, but I am not useful here now that my bungling has made me lose face.” If Fujita was going to grovel, he’d grovel as hard as he could. No sense to half measures, not here, not now. And he was sure groveling was his only chance to escape this humiliating situation—unless he killed himself, of course. That was always a possibility, but he didn’t want to die, not yet. “Let me serve the Empire somewhere else in some different way. Please, sir, let me go forth with my rifle and kill the Empire’s enemies.”
Ikejiri eyed him. If the captain wasn’t from a noble family, Fujita would have been amazed. He had the air of effortless ease and style plenty of people tried to imitate, but rarely with much luck. You needed to be born to it, to take it for granted, to bring it off as you should.
He also had any Japanese officer’s uncompromising attitude. “If you fail, you must take the consequences,” he said coolly.
“Yes, sir. But here at this place I don’t have much chance to make up for failing,” Fujita replied. “Put me in front of the enemy, Captain-san, and I’ll show the Emperor what I can do.”
“There are more kinds of courage, Corporal, than the one it takes to charge a machine-gun position,” Ikejiri said.
“Captain-san?” All Fujita really heard was his new, reduced rank. Corporal was a grade a man should hold on the way up to something better. Holding it again, on the way down from something better, burned like lye.
“You have to be brave, don’t you, to do your job in spite of any trouble you had?” the captain said. “Yes, other people will know what happened. But your duties here at Pingfan are still important.”
“Sir, I want to kill something!” Fujita blurted desperately. “Even the maruta laugh at me.”
“Hard to be laughed at by a log,” Ikejiri said in musing tones. “Can’t you make them afraid to open their mouths while you’re close enough to hear them?”
“Oh, yes, sir. And I do.” Fujita’s hands folded into reminiscent fists. “But the sons of assfucked whores go on laughing at me behind my back. I know they do.” You couldn’t pound a man into the ground for an amused glint in his eye, even if the man was also a log. American maruta were too scarce and too valuable to let guards smash them around for the fun of it. Some of the bacteriologists’ experiments required subjects in good condition. Prisoners at Pingfan often got plenty to eat because of that, not the starvation rations men base enough to surrender deserved.
“Hmm.” Captain Ikejiri rubbed his chin. “We don’t usually give men back to the ordinary military once they get stationed here. They know too many things that are nobody else’s business.”
“I wouldn’t blab, sir! By the Emperor, I’d never say a word! Not a peep!” Fujita had been proud of knowing things about Japan’s war effort that not many people knew—even if, as a noncom off a farm, he didn’t understand much about the scientific details. Now he would gladly have forgotten everything.
In another army, Ikejiri might have mentioned the risk of his getting captured. To do so here would have been an unbearable insult. The captain knew Fujita would rather die.
Again, he could have just told Fujita to shut up and do as he was told. Fujita had been more than half expecting that. Maybe he would have obeyed. Maybe he would have obeyed for a while and then blown his brains out. Even he wasn’t sure. And if he wasn’t, how could Captain Ikejiri be?
Rubbing his chin again, the officer said, “How would you like to get away from this encampment for a while, Corporal?”
“Doing what, sir?”
“You know we are making weapons here—weapons to use against the Chinese and the Americans and anyone else who stands in the way of the Co-Prosperity Sphere.”
“Oh, yes, sir.” Fujita nodded, remembering the ride deep into the country to test the germ bomb on the Russian maruta. Relief filled him. He’d feared Ikejiri would give him something worthless, something useless, to do. But finding out how to kill Chinese in carload lots sounded important.
“All right, then.” Captain Ikejiri spoke quickly now, with the air of a man who’d come to a decision. “You may do that. We have air bases that deliver special weapons where they are needed. I will transfer you to one of those.”
“Thank you, sir! Oh, thank you!” Fujita said, all but jumping for joy. With any luck at all, the people who served on that air base wouldn’t know what kind of bakayaro he’d been here. One thing sure: he wouldn’t have prisoners laughing at him any more.
“Maybe you shouldn’t thank me just yet.” Masanori Ikejiri’s voice was dry. “You will be going into more danger than you’re likely to face here. Make sure your rifle is clean and well oiled.”
“It is, sir!” Fujita assured him. “All I have to do is throw a few things in my duffel and I’m ready to leave.” He’d been eager to come to Pingfan. Now he was even more eager to get away.
“Don’t get too excited—it won’t happen quite so fast.” The captain’s voice stayed dry. “We have to go through the proper channels, and the paperwork will take a while. But I’ll put in the transfer right away.”
Something in his tone said right away meant as soon as you quit bothering me. For a wonder, Fujita realized as much. He wanted to grab the officer’s hand and kiss it. For another wonder, he had sense enough to see that wouldn’t do him any good. He saluted again—a salute extravagant enough to come out of a movie and to make a drill sergeant snarl curses at him. He figured Captain Ikejiri had earned this one.
The only person he told about the upcoming transfer was Senior Private Hayashi. They’d served together for a long time, and Hayashi had, or at least showed, more sympathy than most soldiers. “Good luck,” he said. “I hope the fellow who takes your slot isn’t too big a chucklehead.”
“Why should you worry?” Fujita said with a wry grin. “After all, you’ve had enough practice putting up with me.”
“You aren’t bad. You’ve never been bad,” Hayashi said. “You beat us when we’d earned it, but not just for the sake of showing us what a big cock you’ve got. What more could a private want from a noncom?” By the way he said it, wanting even that much—or that little—was an exercise in optimism.
And so it was. Back before Fujita got promoted, plenty of brutal corporals and sergeants thumped him for no better reason than that their rank gave them the right. That was how things worked in the Japanese army. Fujita couldn’t imagine things working any other way.
Getting the transfer took longer than he thought it should. Only fear that Captain Ikeji
ri would rescind it if Fujita bothered him kept the corporal from asking what had gone wrong. He made himself wait. He couldn’t think of many tougher things he’d done as a soldier.
At last, the precious form came through. With it came a note that said a truck would take him to Harbin. Once there, he would ride the train and then … well, it got complicated then. He’d end up in Yunnan Province, or maybe in Burma, depending on how things went before he arrived. He couldn’t have found Yunnan on a map to save his life. He wasn’t so sure about Burma, either.
He didn’t care. He could go to the other end of the world for all the difference that made to him. More than half of him hoped he would. If nobody knew him when he finally arrived, wherever that was, wonderful. What more than a fresh start could a man down on his luck hope for?
THEY PINNED the Order of the Red Star on Anastas Mouradian for shooting down a Flying Pencil. He wished winning the medal would have meant more to him. What it did mean boiled down to two things. First, he’d taken a chance and lived through it. And, second, the authorities might cut him a little more slack with the medal than they would have if he hadn’t won it.
Sadly, he understood he couldn’t count on the second one to hold true. If the NKVD decided he was a nuisance, he’d end up in a gulag or dead as fast as the Chekists could arrange it. If they only wondered, the medal might make them give him the benefit of the doubt.
Well, it might.
With the war not going so well, he needed any good-luck charm he could grab. The powers that be in the Soviet Union were like bad-tempered children. When they didn’t get their way, they threw tantrums. Bad-tempered children smashed toys, or maybe dishes. Bad-tempered Soviet commissars and their flunkies smashed people instead.
Mouradian didn’t worry about his own side more than he did about the Germans. Hitler’s minions were actively trying to kill him. The NKVD wasn’t. He didn’t think it was, anyhow.
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