Last Orders: The War That Came Early

by Harry Turtledove

  That might even be true, too. What was wrong with the newsreader, anyway? From what Stas was able to gather, the Americans’ naval war against Japan in the Pacific hadn’t always gone their way. Now, though, they’d taken back that island, Halfway or whatever it was called. They could build ships the way Russia built tanks.

  And if they kept Japan busy at sea, and if China kept swarms of Japanese ground troops tied down, the Hammer and Sickle might yet fly over Vladivostok again. General Secretary Stalin might be able to have his newsreaders boast about bringing another war to a triumphal conclusion without blushing too much while they did it.

  “I flew against the Japanese in the Far East for a while,” Mouradian remarked to Isa Mogamedov.

  The Azeri nodded. “Yes, you’ve said so before. What was it like?”

  “Well, there was the time when I was walking over to see some planes and the officer who’d been in those parts longer warned me to keep an eye open for tigers,” Stas said. That made Mogamedov sit up and take notice, all right. Stas went on, “And it was cold.” He shivered, remembering. “Cold enough to make the worst winter day this side of the Urals seem like springtime.” He did his best to impersonate a Russian: “Cold enough to freeze the Devil’s asshole shut.”

  Mogamedov’s off-key chuckle told him his best wasn’t good enough. “Not eager to go back there, you’re telling me?”

  Stas shrugged. “I serve the Soviet Union! But if the Soviet Union wants me to serve it somewhere warmer, I won’t apply for a transfer to Khabarovsk. Like I said, still tigers in the woods over there, too.”

  “And Japs,” Mogamedov added.

  “Yes. And Japs,” Stas agreed. “But if the Japs kill me, they won’t eat me—or I don’t think they will.” He knew a lot of what he thought he knew about Japan was Soviet propaganda. He wasn’t so sure where, if anywhere, that stopped and something resembling truth started.

  The newsreader began bragging about Stakhanovite shock workers shattering aluminum-production norms. A vodka bottle came by. Stas swigged from it. No, he didn’t usually drink like a Russian, but when you listened to hot air like that, what else were you going to do?

  Poker. Craps. Acey-deucy. Poker. Baseball. Craps. Poker. Chow. Sleep. Poker. Life on Midway.

  Oh, and there was the radio. Some of the Marines there clung to it as a lifeline to the wider world they were no longer allowed to touch for themselves. Most of the time, Pete McGill steered clear of it. As far as he was concerned, it hurt more than it helped.

  So he was one of the last to hear that the USA and Russia had agreed to an alliance against the Japs. When he did hear, he had trouble getting excited about it. “What good does that do us? We’re still fucking stuck here on this shitty sandbox,” he told the poker buddy who gave him the news. After a moment, he tossed a sawbuck into the pot. “Call.”

  The other Marine laid down three eights. Grinning, Pete showed him three tens. The other guy said something about his mother. At another time, in a different place, Pete would have tried to knock his block off, or maybe to murder him. On Midway, nobody had anything to spend money on, so it didn’t seem to be worth much. Insults were devalued the same way. They’d used the ordinary ones so often, everybody ignored them. Ranking someone’s mother over a medium-sized poker hand was like blowing a C-note on a cup of coffee. The Marines did it all the time, and didn’t worry about it.

  After collecting his money, Pete said, “I don’t wanna end up here for the duration. I want to go out and kill Japs, goddammit.”

  “I want to go to Honolulu and screw me the first broad I run into, is what I want,” the other Marine said. “Hell with the Japs. I have paid my dues with those fuckers, and somebody else can take my next turn. You’ll find me singin’ ‘Roll Me Over in the Clover’ with that Hotel Street chippy.”

  “Yeah, I want to get next to a woman, too,” Pete said. “You bet I do. I’ve been here so long, some of you jerks don’t look as ugly as usual.”

  A couple of the leathernecks in the poker game made as if to pull away from him. One fellow lisped, “I hope I’m not one of them, thweetheart.”

  Everybody laughed. “Mighty Joe Young’s sister might go for you, Hank, but I don’t,” Pete said, and they all laughed some more. You could laugh when a guy played at being a queer, or you could punch him. Pete didn’t know any middle ground there. Hank was a natural-born plug-ugly with shoulders as wide as a desk, so laughing seemed a better choice any way you looked at it.

  “Do we really want to play kissy-face with the Reds?” asked the Marine who’d told Pete about the alliance. “Those guys are bad news, nothin’ else but. You kiss them, it’s like kissing a pig.”

  “I don’t care,” Pete said as he anted for the next hand. “As long as Japs end up dead on account of it, that’s all that matters, far as I’m concerned. If I can’t kill ’em myself, I’m happy when somebody else does it for me.”

  “Man,” the other Marine said. “You’ve got it bad, don’t you?”

  “I guess maybe I do,” answered Pete, who knew only too goddamn well he did. “They killed my sweetheart in Shanghai. They messed me up. I’ve been messing them up ever since.”

  They all knew his story. They’d been on Midway by themselves for so long, everybody knew everybody else’s story. Everybody was sick to death of hearing everybody else’s story, in fact. It was like going to a party where the phonograph played the same three records over and over till the neighbors started banging on the walls.

  Pete tossed in his cards. It wasn’t that he couldn’t discard most of them and maybe draw something better. But the odds weren’t great, and better probably wouldn’t wind up good enough. Smarter to throw away and live to profit some other day.

  When the sun sank into the Pacific, he unrolled his sleeping bag on the sand and went to bed there. They were putting the barracks back together. U.S. bombers had done a terrific job of smashing them up. But the weather was fine and mild. The dunes were just about as soft as the kind of mattress you’d get on a military-issue cot or bunk. Why bother, then?

  Little by little, discipline on Midway was corroding. Pete could see it, but he couldn’t see what to do about it. Nothing they did here now mattered, and they couldn’t get off the island to go some place where what they did would count.

  Stuck. Stuck, stuck, stuck.

  The next morning, he ran into the quartermaster sergeant who’d issued him the new helmet he wouldn’t get to use in action. Sure as hell, Vince Lindholm had pitched a hellacious tantrum when he realized he wasn’t going to escape Midway, either. Since then, he’d settled down and turned into an ordinary Joe.

  Pete waved to him. “How the fuck are ya?”

  “I’m fucked, all right,” Lindholm answered. “We all are. We didn’t even get smooched.”

  “No. We all aren’t fucked, and that’s part of how come we’re so fucked up.” Pete realized he should probably have to pay a sin tax on his syntax, but that was how things had come out of his mouth. He went on, “How’s about you requisition some broads for the island? If anybody can get us some pussy, I bet a quartermaster can.”

  “I wish!” By the way Lindholm said it, he really did wish. “The French would do it, or the Germans.”

  “Even the Japs,” Pete said. “I don’t think there were any of those waddayacallems—comfort women, that’s the name they use—on Midway, but they set up whorehouses for their men all over the place.”

  “Any gals who did come here would be trapped on this lousy place as long as we are,” Lindholm reminded him. “You wouldn’t get a hell of a lot of volunteers for that.”

  “You might,” Pete said. “Long as they didn’t play cards or shoot dice, the girls who did come would be millionaires by the time they finally got to leave. And some of ’em might even figure it was their patriotic duty, like, to buck up our morale. I went round and round on this with a doc a while ago, but he was too high-toned, like, to want to try and do anything about it.”

  The quarter
master sergeant eyed him in amused admiration. “Beats me that you didn’t talk him into it, ’cause you’re good, you know? You’re wasted as a Marine. You should be back in the States writing toothpaste commercials.”

  “If I could get back to the States, I wouldn’t care what I was doing,” Pete replied. “When I climbed onto Tern Island from the launch before I flew here, a guy in there with me kissed the pier because he’d been seasick. Put me back in America and I’d lay a big, wet smack on the first ground I touched, too. Bet your ass I would.”

  “So would I,” Lindholm said. “So would everybody here.”

  “So send in whatever paperwork you need for some hookers,” Pete said. “Maybe they’ll send ’em. Even if they tell you no, how are you worse off?”

  The quartermaster sergeant thought that over. Then he started to laugh. “I was going to say, because they’d call me Horny Vincent Lindholm or something like that—the nut who put in an order for dames. But what the hell difference does it make, y’know? Long as I’m stuck on this goddamn island, who cares what they call me?”

  He duly sent in the requisition, for ten blondes, ten brunettes, and ten redheads. It came back rejected in record time, with a stern warning against wasting any more of the War Department’s precious time with facetious requisitions. He had to go all over Midway before he finally found a bookish Marine who knew what facetious meant.

  “They thought I was kidding,” he told Pete. “Kidding! Can you believe it?”

  “Old fools,” Pete said. “They haven’t screwed in so long, they don’t remember what the urge is like.”

  He did. Remember was all he could do, though. He had no idea when or if the old men who ran things would ever let him off Midway. In the meantime, there he stayed, on a sandy speck in the middle of the world’s vastest sea. Forever or twenty minutes longer, whichever came first. That was sure how it looked.

  Julius Lemp stared with something approaching religious adoration at the U-boat tied up alongside one of the piers in Kiel. “Himmeldonnerwetter!” he whispered. “If we’d had a few dozen of these when the war started, we would have swept the Royal Navy out of the North Sea and the Atlantic and starved England into surrendering in about three months.”

  Kapitän zur See Rochus Mauer looked pleased. He was a very senior engineering officer, a man who, in his own words, fought the war with a slashing slide rule. “Yes, the Type XXI is a whole different kind of boat,” he said. “It takes performance to a new level.”

  “I’ll bet it does!” Lemp exclaimed. “The jump between my Type VII and this is about like the one from a Panzer II to a Tiger, isn’t it?”

  “Well, something like that, perhaps.” By the way Captain Mauer purred, Lemp would have bet he’d had a lot to do with the Type XXI’s design.

  If so, he had plenty to be proud of. The new boat’s hull and conning tower were almost perfectly streamlined. The tower had a couple of 30mm gun turrets, one abaft the periscope and the other forward of it, so the boat could shoot at airplanes. Other than that, it was all metal with curves as sweet as a woman’s. No projecting deck gun. No angles anywhere. It would slide through the water like a shark.

  “Tell me again about the performance,” Lemp said, as if he wanted to hear a particularly juicy dirty story once more.

  “Speed on the surface is pretty much what you’re used to—about sixteen knots,” Mauer replied. “But that shape and the extra batteries we’ve loaded into the hull will gave you the same speed underwater. And if you stay below five knots, the enemy’s listening devices won’t be able to hear the engines.”

  “It’s—gorgeous.” Yes, Lemp might have been talking about a leggy chorus girl. He was head over heels, all right.

  And he might get to have his way with a Type XXI, if not this boat then another one coming off the slips. The diesels that drove the U-boat on the surface and charged the batteries breathed through a Schnorkel. Not a single living skipper in the German Navy had more Schnorkel experience than one Julius Lemp. He’d fallen into a pile of shit when he sank the American Athenia by mistake, but now at last he’d grown out of it. And here he was, smelling like a rose.

  “If only we could have had them even a couple of years ago,” he said, longing in his voice.

  “We—the development team—had worked out the proper hull form by then,” Captain Mauer said. “But Dr. Walther had come up with a new hydrogen peroxide–powered engine that would have been wonderful … if only it worked better and didn’t catch fire whenever you looked at it sideways.”

  “That doesn’t sound so good,” Lemp said.

  “That wasn’t so good. A U-boat with one of those engines in it was about as dangerous to itself as it was to the Royal Navy. The development team pointed this out to the powers that be. But Dr. Walther had political connections with people in the government. And so”—Mauer looked disgusted—“we wasted two years on boats with good hulls and death-trap propulsion systems.”

  “I hope we won’t have to put up with that kind of nonsense any more,” Lemp said. Despite the brave words, he couldn’t help glancing up into the sky. The Luftwaffe, the most Nazified service in the Wehrmacht, kept fighting the Salvation Committee along with the SS and some diehard Army and Navy men. Bavaria was still a bloody mess, with Nuremberg and Munich remaining in Nazi hands.

  “It would be nice if we didn’t,” Captain Mauer agreed. He’d worked for Hitler till the Führer got killed—maybe not always happily, but he had. So had an awful lot of other Germans. Lemp wanted to forget that he’d been one of them himself. He wanted to, but he hadn’t managed it yet.

  “I wonder what other little toys we might have had sooner if the Party hadn’t kept pissing in the soup,” he said.

  Mauer started talking about airplane engines—talking with great enthusiasm and more technical knowledge than Lemp would have expected from somebody who specialized in designing U-boats. Lemp wasn’t a bad technical man himself; a skipper had to know how his boat worked. He soon saw that he was outclassed, though. He did gather that the new engines could fly a plane without a propeller, and fly it faster than any prop could manage.

  “A lovely application of engineering and physics—lovely!” Yes, Mauer was an enthusiast, all right. Of course, the other side had its own enthusiasts. Lemp remembered Admiral Dönitz’s worries that sending Type VIIs out to sea was tantamount to murder because the limeys hunted them down so well.

  He also wondered what would have happened had the Bolsheviks, not Germany’s own generals, overthrown Hitler. He guessed Captain Mauer would have gone right on planning new and improved U-boats for the Reds … as long as they didn’t shoot him for being a right-wing reactionary. He was one of those people who didn’t care whom they worked for if they got to work at all.

  And what about you? Lemp asked himself. Could he have taken a U-boat to sea flying the red flag of Communism? If the other choice was that firing squad, he suspected he could have. But he would have noticed more about his new masters than how they helped or hindered what he wanted to do anyhow.

  He hoped he would have.

  How could you know? Once you asked the question, the answer seemed obvious. The only way you could know was by finding out. He hadn’t just been willing to serve under the Nazis. He’d been eager. They promised glory. They promised promotions. They promised victory.

  And if they’d delivered on everything they promised, chances were he’d still be eagerly serving under them to this day. Of course, if Stalin had delivered on everything the Russian Revolution promised, plenty of Soviet citizens wouldn’t have greeted the oncoming Germans with bread and salt and welcomed them as liberators.

  “You know something, sir?” he said to Rochus Mauer, not quite out of the blue.

  “What’s that?” the engineering officer asked.

  “Politics is way too important to be left to politicians. All they ever do is make a hash of it.”

  Captain Mauer smiled. He had a rather foxy face, with bushy eyebrows, a russet m
ustache, and a pointed chin. “I won’t try to tell you you’re wrong, Commander. Politicians do make a hash of things. But do you know what else? Generals who end up running things make a hash of them, too. If you put engineers in charge, we’d only find some different way to foul them up.”

  “What’s the answer, then?” Lemp asked.

  “I haven’t got one,” Mauer said. “I wish I did, but I don’t. We’re people. Making messes is what we do. Love affairs should be great. And they are—till we see someone else we’d rather have. We spoil our children, or else we’re so mean we make them hate us. We lie. We cheat. We steal. Is it any wonder our countries do the same?”

  “When you put it like that, I guess not,” Lemp replied.

  Off in the distance, a machine gun rattled like one of those venomous American snakes. Lemp cocked his head toward the noise, gauging whether it was close enough to mean trouble. A couple of minutes later, a cannon answered. The machine gun fired another burst. The cannon spoke again, and then again. The machine gun stayed quiet after that. Lemp hoped the cannon belonged to the Salvation Committee.

  “If all the men carried automatic rifles, machine guns wouldn’t matter so much,” Captain Mauer said.

  “I understood that rifle rounds are so strong, it’s hard to make an automatic rifle sturdy enough to stay reliable but light enough for a man to carry,” Lemp said.

  “From what I hear, they’ve developed a round halfway between the pistol cartridge a Schmeisser fires and a full-sized rifle round,” Mauer answered. “It does the job. I haven’t seen the weapon yet, but they’re calling it a Sturmgewehr.”

  “An assault rifle?” Lemp echoed. “Well, isn’t that interesting?”

  Aristide Demange sourly eyed the Germans going on about their business in southern Belgium. The truce between the new government in Germany and the Allies was holding. The business the Boches were going about was packing up and getting ready to go home. The matter-of-fact way they went at it suggested they’d been tourists here for the past few years, or possibly men who’d been assigned to work in a foreign land.