West and East twtce-2

by Harry Turtledove

  “I know that. I potted the stinking pigdog, by God!” Now Jezek sounded proud of himself. And well he might have. The German could have killed him, too. The bastard had been too goddamn good at what he did.

  “Another one,” the Frenchman said. Vaclav hadn’t thought of that. When you’d gone and killed the dragon, you could live happily ever after, couldn’t you? At least for a little while? Maybe not. Evidently not-the captain went on, “Another one, without a doubt. He put one through Colonel Laplace’s head more than half a kilometer behind the line.”

  “Did he?” Vaclav said tonelessly. That was a good shot, all right. A very good shot, if he was using a Mauser. It was a good rifle-a very good infantry rifle, as far as accuracy went. But it was only an infantry rifle, not an elephant gun like the one Vaclav lugged around.

  “He did,” the captain said, in the how dare you question me? tone French officers were so good at using. “And he bagged a captain and two lieutenants as well, these past three days. He likes officers, you see.” He raised an eyebrow at Vaclav. “I daresay he would like you, too. I believe he is here because you have annoyed the Boches to such a degree.” Boches stuck out in the middle of his slow, pause-filled German, but Vaclav couldn’t very well pretend he didn’t get it. The captain’s eyebrow lifted again. “Since you have caused the problem, so to speak, it is up to you to solve it.”

  “Danke sehr, Herr Hauptmann.” Thanks a bunch.

  “Bitte schon.” You’re very welcome. God scorch him black as a potato forgotten in the oven, the captain could be sarcastic, too. “I expect you to deal with the problem… one way or another.” What that meant was unmistakable, too. If Vaclav punctured the new Nazi sniper, that would be all right. And if the German put one through his head at better than half a kilometer, the shitheel would likely be satisfied and go torment some different stretch of the front for a while. That would also content the captain and the people who were telling him what to do. If it was hard luck for one Vaclav Jezek… well, who cared about a lousy Czech corporal who insisted on hanging on to an obsolete rifle?

  With a last nod, the captain loped away. Benjamin Halevy chose that moment to show up. Vaclav unleashed a torrent of the nastiest Czech he knew. Halevy heard him out. (Later, Vaclav wondered whether he would have shown so much patience for the Jew.) When he finally ran down, Halevy said, “Be careful. If they did send a second man after you, he’ll be better than the first one was.”

  “Yes, I worked that out for myself, thanks,” Vaclav said bitterly. “I could do without the honor, you know.”

  “I didn’t do it,” Halevy said. “I didn’t even ask the Frenchman if he spoke German.”

  “Oh, fuck off,” Vaclav snarled. “How was I supposed to know the cocksucker really would?”

  “Chance you take,” the Jewish noncom said. “Maybe he was going to be a scientist or a historian before the army got him.” The trade Vaclav proposed for the captain would not have required any knowledge of German. Benjamin Halevy only laughed.

  Vaclav started hunting again. He didn’t poke his head up at any place he’d used lately. He didn’t know just when this new German hotshot had got here. If the German had any brains, he would have scouted the area before he started sniping. And, while Germans had all kinds of noxious deficiencies, you’d regret it in a hurry if you figured them for stupid.

  He carried an ordinary piece when he did his scouting, not the antitank rifle. He also wore a French Adrian helmet instead of his Czech model. The Czech helmet was of better, thicker steel, but neither mark would keep out a bullet. And not looking like a Czech sniper counted, in case the Nazi with the scope-sighted Mauser happened to notice him.

  The Nazi was doing his job. The French captain came back, complaining in uvular German about two more officers struck down. “Why have you not shot him?” the captain demanded.

  “Because I haven’t seen him yet.” Vaclav made as if to thrust the antitank rifle at the Frenchman. “If you are so hot to kill him, Herr Hauptmann, here is the weapon to do it with.”

  “You are the specialist. It is for you to take care of.” The captain walked away. He might have been an apartment dweller complaining that a plumber hadn’t made his sink quit backing up. Vaclav said something in Czech the captain assuredly wouldn’t understand. He was a military plumber, dammit. Unless the Germans swarmed forward again with tanks, which didn’t look likely, he had to find some other use for his big, ugly gun.

  “Can I do something to help?” Benjamin Halevy asked.

  “Sure. Put on a French major’s uniform and walk around where the asshole can see you,” Vaclav answered. “Only trouble is, you won’t be able to keep at it very long. He knows what he’s doing, damn him.”

  “He’s a German,” Halevy said morosely. “Well, if you get any bright ideas, let me know, all right?”

  “Brightest idea I’ve got is to shack up with a French broad with big jugs and about ten liters of cognac,” Vaclav said. The Jew snorted. After a moment, so did Vaclav. “Well, you asked,” he pointed out.

  “Tell you what,” Halevy said. “Nail that German, and I’ll see that the Frenchmen give you a free one at an officers’ brothel and all you can drink. How’s that?”

  “Better than anything else I’m likely to get,” Jezek answered. Halevy snorted again and clapped him on the back.

  The next morning, still wearing the Adrian helmet, Vaclav put his Czech pot on the end of a stick and held it up above the edge of the trench he was traveling. A shot rang out from the German lines. The helmet rang and spun. Two neat 7.92mm holes pierced it, six or eight centimeters from the top. “Holy Jesus!” Vaclav said. He’d wear the crested French helmet from now on.

  Now-exactly where had that shot come from? And was the German sniper enough of a creature of habit to visit that place again? The last fellow had been, and it cost him. This guy? Time would tell. Vaclav resolved not to check from right here, though.

  One other question crossed his mind. If he’d get himself a throw with a fancy whore and all he could drink for punching the enemy sniper’s ticket, what did the Nazi bastard stand to win by eliminating him?

  * * *

  Heinz Naumann grunted in what might as easily have been satisfaction or annoyance. His bare arms were greasy to the elbow; Theo Hossbach would have rolled up the sleeves on his coveralls to mess around inside the engine compartment, too. The panzer commander held up a wrench in triumph. “There,” he said. “Goddamn carb won’t give us any more trouble.”

  “Till the next time,” Adi Stoss put in.

  Naumann glared. Oh, Lord, they’re going to bite pieces off each other again, Theo thought. Sure as hell, Naumann said, “Yeah, well, I didn’t see you fix it, Herr Doktor Professor Mechanical Genius.”

  “It’s a piece of crap,” Stoss answered. “Nobody’s going to fix it so it stays fixed. We just have to keep the valves clean, and to clean ’em out when they clog up in spite of us.”

  He was right, which made Naumann no happier. Theo wished he could get between them and stop them from rubbing on each other so roughly. But that wasn’t his way. When people locked horns, he didn’t try to separate them. He backed away and watched them in something not far from horror.

  “Well, anyway, the old beast will keep running a while longer,” Heinz said. To Theo’s relief, Adi seemed willing to leave that alone.

  Other panzer crews also tinkered with their machines. If you didn’t tinker with your panzer whenever you could, it would break down when you needed it most. More often than not, you wouldn’t get the chance to tinker with it after that. Somebody would plant you where you’d fallen, with a fence picket to mark the grave. You wouldn’t even get a helmet on top of the picket, the way a dead infantryman would.

  A hooded crow, black and gray, hopped up to Theo, looking for a handout. The birds were beggars, but they weren’t so thieving as their smaller jackdaw cousins. Theo tore off a bit of black bread and tossed it to the crow. The bird seized the prize in its strong bill a
nd flew off toward the closest tree to eat it.

  “Now you’ll have twenty of them scrounging from you,” Heinz said. “Lousy things are as bad as the packs of Jew beggars we get around here. They even dress like ’em.” He laughed at his own wit. He wasn’t so far wrong, either. The Jews who filled a lot of villages in these parts did mostly wear black, with lighter shirts and blouses for relief. Laughing again, Naumann added, “Bills are about the same, too.”

  Theo also laughed, nervously. The way things were these days, you took a chance if you didn’t laugh when somebody made fun of Jews. He got paid to take chances against the Reich’s enemies. Nobody gave him a pfennig to take chances against his own side.

  Adi Stoss chuckled, too. “Where I come from, the crows are black all over,” he said. “They don’t have the gray hoods they grow here.”

  “So they’re niggers instead of kikes, huh?” Heinz said. “Only matters to the lady crows, I guess.”

  “One of these days, Sergeant, you’ll open your mouth so wide, you’ll fall right in,” Stoss said.

  “What’s that supposed to mean?” Naumann tossed the wrench in the air and caught it in his callused hand. “You want to make something of it?”

  That went too far for even Theo to take-the more so since he was sure Adi wouldn’t back down. “Enough, both of you,” the radioman said. Naumann and Stoss both looked at him in surprise, as they did whenever he spoke up. He went on, “Haven’t we got enough to worry about with the Ivans?”

  Neither crewmate answered that. What could you say? Off in the distance, a Russian machine gun stammered out death. Another gun replied a moment later. Theo cocked his head, listening. That one sounded French, which meant it had to belong to the Poles. They made some of their own stuff, but scrounged the rest from whoever was selling on any given Tuesday.

  “Our allies,” Heinz said scornfully, so he’d also figured out to whom the second machine gun belonged.

  “Would you rather fight them along with the Russians?” Stoss asked.

  “What I’d rather, Private, is that you keep your big mouth shut,” Naumann snapped. “So try it, hey?”

  Stoss didn’t say another word, but if that wasn’t murder in his eyes, Theo had never seen it. A panzer crew was supposed to work together. Theory was wonderful. This particular crew had as many clogs and hitches as the much-maligned carburetor.

  The company commander was a bright young first lieutenant named Schmidt. The captain who had been in charge went up in flames with his Panzer II. There wasn’t enough of him left to bury, with or without a helmet over his grave. Schmidt was trying his best to do a good job. He came around every evening, as the captain had before him. “Alles gut?” he asked.

  “Jawohl, Herr Oberleutnant,” Heinz answered. “Carb is working the way it’s supposed to again.” He said nothing about whether the crew was working the way it was supposed to. Maybe he didn’t even worry about it. From his perspective, from a commander’s perspective, Adi might have been no more than a bit of grit in the works. He might have been, but Theo didn’t believe it for a minute.

  “Well, all right,” Schmidt said. “The push southwest goes on tomorrow. If everything works the way it’s supposed to, we’ll link up with more Wehrmacht units in the afternoon. They aren’t far away.”

  “That’s good, sir,” Heinz said. Theo found himself nodding. He saw Adalbert Stoss doing the same thing. They’d wedged their way through the swarming Russians this long. Maybe they wouldn’t have to do it any more. Maybe there’d be a real front again soon. The Red Army wasn’t as good at blitzkrieg as the Wehrmacht. All the same, being on the wrong end of it wasn’t much fun.

  “All right,” Lieutenant Schmidt repeated. “We move at dawn-the sooner we give the Reds one in the teeth, the better for us.” He ambled off to talk to the next panzer’s crew.

  Dawn came later than it would have a month before. Summer was going, autumn on the way. What would winter be like around here? Worse than the last one in the Low Countries and France-Theo was sure of that.

  He ducked down into the back of the panzer with relief. On the move, the crew would talk about business, and that would be that. The radio net was full of traffic. Some of it was in unintelligible Polish and Russian, but most came from the Germans moving south to cut off the Russians who’d moved west to cut off the Germans moving north to cut off the earlier wave of Russians moving west. War could get complicated.

  Down in what was now “independent” Slovakia, more German divisions were on the move, these heading north into Poland. Had they been attacking the Poles, the country would have fallen in a couple of weeks. But the Poles were Germany’s friends… for the moment.

  The first hint Theo had that things weren’t going perfectly was the machine-gun bullets slamming into the Panzer II’s armored side. “Panzer halt!” Heinz shouted. Adi hit the brakes. Heinz traversed the turret and fired a long burst from the machine gun and several rounds from the 20mm cannon. “That’ll shift the Red arselicks,” he said. “Go on now.” The panzer clanked forward again.

  Despite the earphones, Theo heard more gunfire outside. A rifle round smacked the panzer. Theo tensed. Anything bigger than a rifle round would punch right through. He’d bailed out of one burning machine. That was why he had nine and a half fingers now. He didn’t want to find out what he’d be missing if he had to do it again.

  Naumann stuck his head and shoulders out of the turret. Without a decent cupola, you needed to do that every so often if you wanted to know what was going on. French turrets had proper cupolas. So did Panzer IIIs. For that matter, so did the very latest Panzer IIs. But not this one…

  Naumann let out a sound halfway between grunt and groan. He slumped back into the turret. Theo needed no more than a heartbeat to realize he was dead. The twin stinks of blood and shit told the story even before the radioman saw the red-gray ruin that had been the side of the panzer commander’s head.

  He ripped off the earphones and tried to get Naumann’s corpse out of the way so he could serve the cannon and machine gun himself. Like it or not, he had to command the panzer now. “Heinz caught one,” he shouted into the speaking tube up to the driver’s compartment.

  “Scheisse,” Adalbert Stoss said. “Bad?”

  “Dead,” Theo answered succinctly.

  “Well, you’re it, then,” Adi said. “Tell me what to do.”

  “Just keep going for now,” Theo said. Before long, he’d have to stick his head out of the blood-dripping hatch. That was part of what a panzer commander did. Heinz was still bleeding onto the floor of the fighting compartment. That had nothing to do with anything, either.

  Absently, he wondered what the new commander would be like. He also wondered whether they’d ever be able to wash out the inside of the Panzer II. Then he wondered if he’d live long enough to find out about either of the other two. Doing his job was the best way to make the answer to that yes. The best way, sure-but no guarantee.

  Hans-ulrich Rudel soon discovered wearing the Ritterkreuz at his throat changed his life very little. Oh, some jackass reporters from the Propaganda Ministry talked with him about panzer-busting with a Stuka. A photographer snapped his picture with the Knight’s Cross. But that was about it. The reporters and photographer couldn’t very well fly with him. And when he was airborne he had only two concerns: finishing the mission and getting home in one piece.

  “We could take ’em along under the wings,” Sergeant Dieselhorst suggested. “We drop ’em on the frogs or the Tommies, they’ll make bigger booms than a thousand-kilo bomb.”

  In spite of himself, Rudel laughed. “They would, wouldn’t they? They’re nothing but a bunch of blowhards, so of course they’ll be blowup-hards.”

  “Damn straight,” Dieselhorst said. “What I wonder is, how come they aren’t in real uniforms instead of their fancy ones? They’ve got to have connections. Otherwise, they’d need to work for a living like honest people. They’ll go back to Berlin and drink like fish and screw like the
re’s no tomorrow-you wait.”

  “And you’ll stay here and drink like a fish and screw like there’s no tomorrow,” Hans-Ulrich said-with, he hoped, not too much reproof in his voice. He didn’t take his fun that way, but he didn’t want to come down on his rear gunner. Dieselhorst was much more inclined to worry about this world than his hope of the next one.

  The sergeant grinned. “More fun than anything else I can think of. You ought to try it yourself once, so you know what you’re missing the rest of the time.”

  “No, thanks,” Hans-Ulrich said. “I’ll leave you alone if you do the same for me.”

  “Yes, sir,” Dieselhorst said, but then he clucked in mock reproof. “If countries behaved like that, we wouldn’t have any wars any more, and then where would the likes of us wind up?”

  “Flying for a carnival, I suppose, or else Lufthansa,” Rudel answered. “Once I got up into the air, I knew nobody’d be able to keep me on the ground any more. How about you?”

  “I worked in a radio studio. That’s what I told them when I joined up, which is why I look backwards all the time now.” Dieselhorst chuckled as he lit a cigarette. “I didn’t tell ’em I just swept up. They probably would have dropped me on the Frenchies if I had.”

  “I won’t squeal,” Hans-Ulrich promised solemnly.

  The sergeant blew out a cloud of smoke. “Doesn’t matter any more. I actually know what I’m doing by this time.”

  They went up again the next morning. Hans-Ulrich wrenched back hard on the stick to yank the Stuka into the air. Lugging those twin 37mm guns under the wings, it really was a lumbering beast. Well, it wasn’t supposed to dogfight Spitfires (and a good thing, too!). It was supposed to smash up enemy panzers. It could do that… if nobody shot it down on the way.

  Rudel peered from the cockpit, looking for concentrations of French or British armor. When he was diving, he had a fine view. In level flight, trying to peer around the long Junkers Jumo engine was a pain in the posterior. Sergeant Dieselhorst could see a lot more than he could.