“Not then,” Rudel said.
“Why worry about afterwards?” another pilot asked. “Afterwards, the enemy’s liable to smoke us. Don’t you want something fun to remember while you’re going down in flames?” Rudel didn’t answer, and a lot of the good cheer drained out of the gathering. Some questions cut too close to the bone.
Chapter 13
Theo Hossbach, Heinz Naumann, and Adalbert Stoss sat at the north-easternmost corner of Poland. A scrawny chicken roasted above a fire. Naumann reached out to turn the stick on which the bird was spitted. “Well, we’re here,” the panzer commander said morosely. “We did what they brought us to Poland to do. Hot damn!” He gave the chicken another turn.
“Hot damn,” Stoss echoed. Theo, as usual, kept his mouth shut. It wasn’t that he disagreed with his crewmates; he just didn’t feel like talking.
With some help from the Poles, the German panzers had smashed through the Red Army and cut a hell of a lot of Russians in this invaded chunk of Poland off from their homeland. Now German and Polish troops were methodically mopping them up.
That was all very well. It would have been better than all very well if only the Russians hadn’t just poured across the rest of the Polish border. How hard could the Poles fight? If the Russians cut a couple of railroad lines… Theo glanced over at their Panzer II, an angular shadow in the long, slowly deepening northern twilight. In spite of the surprising Soviet panzers, it had come a long way and done a lot of hard fighting without taking much damage in return.
But it ran on gasoline. If the gasoline couldn’t get through, the machine was nothing but nine tonnes of scrap metal. A dead turtle, a shell without legs. And, in that case, Theo and Heinz and Adi were nothing but three foot soldiers. The only problem with that was, they didn’t have rifles and they didn’t have helmets. Well, if you were going to piss and moan about every little thing…
“So what’s going through your thick head now, Theo?” Naumann asked. Like Ludwig Rothe before him, he recognized Theo wouldn’t say much on his own. Unlike the late Ludwig, he kept trying to get answers anyway.
“Gasoline.” Theo doled out a word.
“Now why would you worry about something like that?” Adalbert Stoss said. “It’s not like we need it or anything.”
“Heh,” Naumann said, sounding as laconic as Theo usually did. The panzer commander looked around. There wasn’t much to see, nor would there have been on a sunny noon: a burnt-out farmhouse and a barn (that was where the chicken must have come from), some crops growing out in the fields, and a couple of dead Russians just starting to bloat and stink a hundred meters or so past the barn. Heinz shook his head. “If the world ever needed an enema, you’d plug it in right here, by God.”
Somewhere a couple of kilometers away, a machine gun opened up. All three panzer men leaned toward the noise. “Russian piece,” Stoss said.
“We might have captured it,” Naumann said. And so the Germans might have; you used anything you could get your hands on. Theo had seen that in France. If it could hurt the other guy, you grabbed it, turned it around, and started shooting it at him.
Another machine gun spoke up to answer: an unmistakable German MG-34. “They might have captured it,” Adi Stoss said, grinning.
Heinz didn’t grin back. He made a sour face instead. Theo didn’t like that. The rivalry between driver and panzer commander hadn’t gone away after Adi ducked Heinz in that French creek. Naumann had the rank, and maybe the meanness. But, while he was no weakling, he wasn’t in Stoss’ league for muscle. Theo hoped trouble wouldn’t come of it. He wished he could do something, but had no idea what to do. Working with artillery fuses was nothing next to this.
“We’ll sleep in shifts tonight,” Naumann decreed. “We all sack out at once, we’re liable to wake up with our throats cut.” He glared a challenge at Adi Stoss. Adi only nodded back; what the sergeant said made obvious sense. Heinz muttered to himself. Yes, he wanted an excuse to come down on the driver. If he didn’t find one, chances were he’d go and invent one.
Theo drew the first watch. The panzer crew had long since doused the fire. Blankets would do on a mild summer night, and why advertise where you were? Theo held on to his pistol. If some Russian sneaked inside of thirty meters before trying to pot him with a Mosin-Nagant, he could defend himself with some hope of hitting back. Otherwise… Well, the weight in his hand was comforting, anyhow.
The moon, swelling toward full, spilled pale light from low in the south. Moonshadows stretched long. They looked black as the inside of whatever Satan used in place of a soul. Anything could hide in them, anything at all.
Not that the Russians needed such advantages. They could hide in places where most people wouldn’t even find places. Then they’d wait till you went by and shoot you in the back. They carried next to no food-only ammo and grenades and sometimes vodka. If they wanted to eat, they had to scavenge from the countryside. And they did. Theo’s stomach growled, reminding him of the chunk of chicken in there. But the Reds were the prize chicken thieves.
Here and there, off in the distance, rifle shots and occasional bursts of machine-gun fire marred the night’s stillness. The Russians were supposed to have been cleared out of this stretch of Poland, no matter what was going on farther south. Some of them hadn’t got the word, though. They didn’t fight with a great deal of skill, but they had no quit in them.
In due course, Theo woke Adi Stoss. He jumped back in a hurry, because Adi came awake with a trench knife in his hand. “Oh. It’s you,” the driver said then, and made the knife disappear.
“Me,” Theo agreed.
Adi yawned and sat up. “Anything going on?”
“Nothing close.”
“That’s all that matters,” Stoss said.
“Ja.” Theo hesitated. He thought he had a better chance talking to the driver than to the panzer commander… and Naumann lay a few meters away, snoring like a sawmill. “You ought to take it easy on Heinz. He doesn’t like it when you give him grief.”
“You think I have fun when he rides me?” Stoss returned.
“He’s a sergeant,” Theo said, as if that explained everything. If you’d been in the army for even a little while, it damn well did.
“I don’t care if he’s a fucking field marshal,” Adi answered. “Nobody’s going to call me a kike.”
So that still rankled, did it? Theo didn’t suppose he should have been surprised. “He didn’t mean anything by it,” he said.
“Ha!” One syllable carried a tonne’s weight of disbelief.
Theo gave it up. He didn’t know what else he could do. “Just be careful,” he said.
“Ja, Mutti,” Adi answered indulgently. Yes, Mommy chased Theo under his blanket, as Stoss had no doubt intended it to do.
Dawn came early. Black bread spread with butter from a tinfoil tube and ersatz coffee made a breakfast of sorts. Heinz Naumann, who’d had the last watch, turned to Theo and said, “See if we’ve got any new orders. Or are they just going to have us sit here with our thumbs up our asses?”
“I’ll find out,” Theo said. Climbing back into the panzer felt good. So did putting on the earphones and hooking into the radio net. Like anyone else, Theo enjoyed doing things he was good at, and Wehrmacht training made damn sure he was damn good at using the panzer’s radio set.
When he stuck his head out of the hatch in front of the engine compartment, Heinz barked, “Well?”
“We’re ordered to motor back to the railhead at Molodetschna,” Theo reported. “Further orders when we get there.”
“Himmeldonnerwetter!” Naumann burst out. “Why’d we come all the way up here, then? A round trip to fucking nowhere, with the chance of getting shot or blown up thrown in for a bonus!”
“Gasoline at the railhead?” Stoss put in. “We’ve got enough to get there-I think so, anyhow-but not much more than that.”
“Wunderbar,” Heinz said sourly. “What do we do if we run dry? Hoof it?”
“Se
e if we can get a tow, if we’re close,” Adi answered. “If we can’t… Well, d’you want to stick around?”
“Here? Christ, no!” Heinz said. Theo felt the same way. There were stories about what the Reds did to Germans they caught. Theo didn’t know if those stories were true, and he didn’t want to find out, either. He slid back into the Panzer II. The other crewmen also came aboard. The reliable little Maybach engine fired up right away. Off they went, back in the direction they’d come from.
* * *
The French lieutenant eyed Vaclav Jezek with what might have been sympathy. He gargled something in his own language. Vaclav looked back blankly. He didn’t understand a word. Even if he had, he wouldn’t have let on.
Benjamin Halevy turned French into Czech: “He wants your antitank rifle. They’re obsolete, he says. They don’t penetrate the armor of the latest German tanks.”
“Tell him no,” Vaclav said at once. The heavy weight on his right shoulder, the recoil bruises that never got a chance to heal up, had become a part of him.
More French from the lieutenant. He couldn’t just demand; Vaclav was a foreign ally, not somebody under his direct command. “He wants to know why you’re so enamored of an outmoded weapon.”
“Why I’m so what?” Vaclav scratched his head.
“Why you like it so much.”
“Why didn’t you say so in the first place? Tell him the Germans still have plenty of old tanks and armored cars, and my beast’ll do for them. Tell him I’ve got a decent chance of killing a man from a kilometer and a half away with this baby, too.”
Sergeant Halevy spoke in French. So did the French officer. Halevy translated: “He says it wasn’t intended as a sniper’s rifle.”
“I don’t give a fuck what it was intended for. It works,” Vaclav declared.
He and the lieutenant stared at each other in perfect mutual incomprehension. To the logical Frenchman, that antitank rifle was made to destroy tanks. If it couldn’t do the job for which it was made, it was useless. Vaclav had found it could do other things better than the ordinary rifle he’d carried till he took the big piece from a casualty.
“It will be your responsibility.” The lieutenant sounded grave even when Vaclav couldn’t understand him. After Halevy translated, the French officer seemed more like Pilate washing his hands.
“That’s fine,” Vaclav said at once. What was wrong with these people? He had less trouble understanding Germans. He hated their guts, but at least he could see what made them tick. Something else occurred to him. He rudely pointed at the young lieutenant. “You’re discontinuing these rifles, right?”
“Oui.” The Frenchman couldn’t have been haughtier. “That is what I am trying to explain to you.”
“Yeah, yeah. That means you’re going to shitcan all the rounds that go with it, too, aren’t you?”
Sergeant Halevy raised a gingery eyebrow. “Hey, boy, I see where you’re going.” He translated for the lieutenant yet again.
“Mais certainement,” the French officer replied. Again, to him, if the rounds couldn’t kill tanks, they couldn’t do anything.
Vaclav had a different idea. “Don’t throw ’em out. Give ’em to me. I’ll be the-waddayacallit?-the official obsolete rifle-toter, and I’ll get the guys in my squad to lug what I can’t. They know what this baby can do.” Even if you don’t, asshole. He affectionately patted the antitank rifle’s padded stock. With a bit of luck, he wouldn’t have to quarrel with stuck-up French quartermaster sergeants any more.
With a bit of luck… How much would the nasty little gods in charge of war dole out? Have to wait and see.
“This is most irregular,” the French officer said after the Jew translated one more time.
“Fine. It’s irregular,” Vaclav said. “But if it’s officially irregular…” Maybe that would get through to the lieutenant.
The fellow eyed him. “You go out of your way to be difficult, n’est-ce pas?”
“To the Nazis, sure. Not to anybody else.” Vaclav lied without hesitation. He was difficult with anybody who got in his way. The jerks on your own side would screw you over worse than the enemy if you gave ’em half a chance.
After more back-and-forth between Halevy and the Frenchman, the lieutenant threw his hands in the air and strode off. “He says, have it your own way,” Halevy reported. “He’ll see that you get the ammo. He’ll probably see that you end up ass-deep in it-he’s not real happy with you.”
“I’d rather have too much than not enough,” Jezek said.
He wondered if he meant that when he got two truckloads of wooden crates full of the thumb-sized cartridges the antitank rifle fire. No, he couldn’t very well burden the Czechs in his squad with that load. Each man’s share would have squashed him flat.
That meant dealing with a quartermaster sergeant after all. Fortunately, this wasn’t the guy he’d almost murdered a few months earlier. Benjamin Halevy sweetened up the French noncom, and the fellow seemed amazingly willing to hang on to most of the ammo and issue it as needed.
“What did you say to him?” Vaclav asked.
“I asked him how he’d like to be the official” -Halevy bore down on the word-“keeper of what’s left of the antitank-rifle ammunition. He jumped at the chance.”
Vaclav laughed. “Swell! You know more about dealing with these people than I do, that’s for sure.” He sent the quartermaster sergeant a suspicious stare. “Now, will he turn loose of the stuff when I need it, or will he decide he has to keep it because it’s too important to fire off?”
Halevy spoke more French. The supply sergeant raised his right hand, as if taking an oath. “He says he’ll be good,” the Jew reported. Vaclav decided he’d have to take that-it was as good as he’d get. And if the Frenchman turned out to be lying, threatening to blow a hole in him with the antitank rifle ought to get his attention.
Now that Vaclav had enough ammunition for months if not years, he found that he had little to do with it. The Germans had pulled most of their armor out of this sector. They were digging in for all they were worth; it might have been 1916 over again. The French kept promising offensives, then stopping in their tracks whenever the boys in field-gray shot back at them.
Without tanks and armored cars to shoot at, he started doing just what he’d told the snooty young French lieutenant he’d do: he sniped at the Germans from long range. Behind their lines, the Wehrmacht men moved around pretty freely. They didn’t think anyone could hit them from the Allies’ positions. One careful round at a time, Vaclav taught them they were wrong.
“Congratulations,” Benjamin Halevy told him one day.
“How come?” Jezek asked.
“Prisoners say the Nazis really want the son of a bitch with the elephant gun dead,” Halevy answered.
It was a compliment of sorts, but it was one Vaclav could have lived without. He hoped he could go on living with it. He was a careful sniper. He never fired from the same place twice in a row. He didn’t move from one favorite spot to another. As often as not, he didn’t know whether he’d shift to the left or right till he tossed a coin to tell him. If he couldn’t guess, the Germans wouldn’t be able to, either. He made sure nothing on his ratty uniform shone or sparkled (that was easy enough). He fastened leafy branches to his helmet with a strip of rubber cut from an inner tube to break up its outline.
German bullets started cracking past him more often than they should have even so. Regretfully, he decided the prisoners had known what they were talking about. When one of those bullets knocked a sprig off his helmet camouflage, he realized the Germans had to have a sniper of their own hunting him.
That made for a new kind of game, one he wasn’t even slightly sure he liked. It wasn’t army against army any more. The Germans didn’t think of him as one more interchangeable part in an enormous military machine. They wanted him dead, him in particular. This was personal. He could have done without the honor.
When he complained, Sergeant Halevy said, “All
you have to do is put down the antitank rifle and go back to being an ordinary soldier.”
“I’m killing a lot more Germans than the ordinary soldiers are,” Vaclav said.
“Then you’d better figure they’ll do their goddamnedest to kill you,” Halevy replied.
Vaclav started hunting the German sniper. He found a brass telescope in an abandoned farmhouse (it wasn’t as if the officers on his side would give him field glasses-perish the thought!) and painted it a muddy brown so it wouldn’t betray him. He also had to be careful not to let the sun flash off the objective lens and give him away.
The German was good. Jezek might have known he would be. Well, he wasn’t so bad himself. That he still prowled and hunted proved it. He took shots at other Nazis as he got the chance. Somewhere over there, a German with some kind of fancy rifle of his own was waiting for a mistake. If Vaclav made one, he wouldn’t have to worry about making two-or about anything else ever again.
* * *
Julius Lemp studied his orders. He turned to his executive officer. “Well, Klaus, what do you think of these?”
Klaus Hammerstein blinked. He’d served on the U-30 with Lemp since before the war started, but as a lowly Leutnant zur See till the previous exec got tapped for a command of his own. Now, newly promoted to Oberleutnant zur See, and to second in the chain of command, Hammerstein had to deal with his skipper in a whole new way. “They’re interesting, that’s for sure,” he ventured.
“Interesting. Ja.” There was barely room for two people in Lemp’s curtained-off little excuse for a cabin. You worked with what you had, on the boat and with the crew. “What do these orders make you wonder?” Lemp pressed. If Klaus didn’t have what it took to swing it as the executive officer, they both needed to find out right away.
The kid studied them again. “How many other boats are getting orders just like these right now?” he said after a pause only a little longer than it should have been.
And Lemp nodded, pleased. “There you go! That’s exactly what I’d like to find out.” Naval high command wouldn’t tell him, of course. Anything he didn’t urgently need to know was something he shouldn’t know. What he didn’t know, he couldn’t spill if things went wrong and he got captured.
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