That English officer might be, but the periscope gave no sign of it. Without taking his eyes away from the periscope, Lemp asked, “You there, Gerhart?”
“Yes, I’m here,” the Schnorkel expert answered. “What do you need, Skipper?”
“Nothing. I’m just glad we’ve got the snort, that’s all.” Lemp wouldn’t have believed he’d ever say anything like that when the technicians first saddled his boat with the gadget. But… “We can make our approach a lot faster than we could on batteries. When I write up the action report, I’ll log it.”
“I’ve said so all along.” Gerhart Beilharz sounded ready to pop his buttons with pride.
“People say all kinds of things,” Lemp answered dryly. “Sometimes they’re true, and sometimes they’re crap. You have to find out. It’s a good thing we didn’t have to find out the hard way, eh?”
“Er-yes.” That took some of the toploftiness out of the tall engineer.
“Torpedoes ready?” Lemp called into the speaking tube that led to the bow. The boat had an electrically powered intercom, but nothing could go wrong with the tube.
“Yes, Skipper. Four eels loaded and ready to swim.” The answer came back by the same route. It sounded brassy but perfectly comprehensible.
“All right. Won’t be long.” Lemp fed speeds and angles to Klaus Hammerstein. The exec turned them into a firing solution. The camouflaged destroyer swelled in the periscope’s reticulated field of view. She went right on shelling whatever shore target had raised her ire. No sudden evasive moves, no sign she had the faintest idea death and ruin were slipping up on her. Things were supposed to work that way. They seldom did. Every once in a while, though…
He got within a kilometer. He could have have fired at her without Hammerstein’s calculations, but he was glad he had them. The Englishmen went right on with their shore bombardment. Lemp turned the periscope all about, walking in a circle there under the conning tower. No, no one was sneaking up on him.
“Fire one!” he barked. “Fire two!”
Wham!… Wham! The eels shot out of the tubes. Running time to the destroyer was a little more than a minute. Lemp watched the wakes. Both torpedoes ran straight and true. That didn’t happen every time, either. Now… How long before the Englishmen saw what was coming at them? Would they have time enough for evasive action?
As the seconds ticked off, that became less and less likely. The destroyer showed sudden urgent smoke… bare seconds before the first eel slammed into her, just abaft the beam. The second hit a moment later, up near the bow. Over and through the deep rumbles of the explosions, the crew whooped and cheered.
Destroyers weren’t armored. They depended on speed to keep them out of harm’s way. When speed failed, they were hideously vulnerable. The first hit would have been plenty to sink that ship.
“Back’s broken,” Lemp reported, watching the enemy’s death agonies through the periscope. “She won’t stay afloat long.”
“She’s not far from shore. Some of her crew may make it,” Lieutenant Hammerstein said. “Our boys on land can scoop them up when they take Trondheim.”
Lemp didn’t answer. Even in summer, the North Sea was bloody cold. He wouldn’t want to have to swim ashore, with or without a life ring. He didn’t think the destroyer would be able to launch her boats. Those might have given the limey sailors a fighting chance to live. If the exec wanted to imagine he hadn’t just helped kill a couple of hundred men, he could. Lemp knew better.
He spoke to the helmsman: “Give me course 305, Peter. We don’t want to stick around, do we?”
“Folks up top might not be real happy with us if we do,” the petty officer agreed. “Course 305 it is.” He swung the U-boat around to the north and west, away from the Norwegian coast.
“Break out the beer!” somebody yelled. They kept some on board to celebrate sinkings and other notable events. It wouldn’t be cold-the U-boat had no refrigerator-but no one would complain.
Lemp swung the periscope around through 360 degrees again. No hunters. Only ocean and the ever more distant shore. He nodded to himself. “We got away with it,” he said, and the sailors cheered some more. “And England and France won’t get away with trying to take Norway away from us, or with stopping the Swedes from shipping their iron ore to us through Norwegian ports.”
The crew didn’t cheer about that. They weren’t grand strategists. Neither was Lemp, but he had some notion of how important the iron ore was. The Baltic froze in the winter, the North Sea didn’t. If the Swedes were going to keep shipping the stuff when the weather got cold, they’d have to do it through Norwegian ports: through ports the enemy couldn’t interfere with. Well, the Reich was taking care of that, sure enough.
One more check. No, no other Royal Navy ships in the neighborhood. “Yes,” he said. “Break out the beer!” Even inside a cramped, stinking steel tube, life was good.
* * *
“Our mission,” Colonel Borisov announced, “is to bomb Warsaw.”
Most of the pilots and copilots in the squadron just sat there and listened. Some of them nodded, as if in wisdom. Sergei Yaroslavsky sat tight like the rest. The less you showed, the less they could blame you for.
“Any questions before we carry out the mission?” the squadron commander asked.
“Excuse me, Comrade Colonel, but I have one.” Of course that was Anastas Mouradian. He’d never fully mastered the fine art of keeping his mouth shut.
“Well? What is it?” Borisov growled. He never wanted questions.
“Warsaw is the capital of Poland. It is a large city. Are we supposed to bomb some special part of it, or do we let the explosives come down all over?” Mouradian asked.
Borisov glared at him. Yaroslavsky wondered why-it was a perfectly good question. Maybe that was why. “The orders transmitted to me say ‘Warsaw,’” the colonel answered. “They give no more detail. We shall bomb Warsaw-with your gracious permission, of course, Comrade Lieutenant.”
“Oh, it’s all right with me, sir,” Mouradian answered, ignoring Colonel Borisov’s heavy-handed sarcasm. “I just wanted to make sure of what was required of us.”
“What is required of you is to do as you are told,” Borisov said. “Now you have been told. Go do it, all of you.” The meeting broke up immediately after that. There didn’t seem to be anything left to say.
“Well, well,” Mouradian remarked as he and Sergei strode toward their SB-2. The Chimp was already watching the armorers as they bombed up the plane. “Warsaw. How about that?” He sounded bright and cheerful. Maybe that was maskirovka: camouflage. Then again, maybe he’d gone out of his mind.
“As many antiaircraft guns as the Poles can beg, borrow, or steal,” Yaroslavsky said. “All the fighter planes they’ve got that still fly. As many Messerschmitts as the Germans can spare.”
“Now, Sergei, how many times have I told you?-if you’re going to piss and moan about every little thing, you’ll never get anywhere.” The Armenian reached over and patted him on his stubbled cheek, as if he were a little boy fretting about hobgoblins under the bed. Sergei spluttered. What else could he do?
Ivan Kuchkov had already got the word, even if he wasn’t at Borisov’s meeting. “Warsaw, huh?” he said cheerfully. “About fucking time, if you want to know what I think. Time to start hitting those Polish cocksuckers where they live. Then they’ll know better than to dick around with us.”
What would he do without mat? He probably wouldn’t be able to talk at all. Sergei waited till the armorers had finished their work, then climbed into the cockpit. He and Anastas ran through the preflight checklists. The engines fired up right away. He eyed the gauges. Things looked better than usual. They would, he thought darkly. He waited his turn to take off. The SB-2 seemed eager to fly. Would it be so eager to come back to the Motherland? He could only hope.
“One thing,” Mouradian said consolingly as they took their place in the formation. “It’s a big target. Borisov can’t very well gig us for missing.�
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“Well,” Sergei said, “no. He can gig us for getting killed, though.”
“We won’t have to listen to him if he does.” Anastas seemed to think that was good news. He was welcome to his opinion.
The Poles and Germans were still holding the Red Army east of Warsaw. The line wasn’t too different from the one Marshal Pilsudski’s forces had held in the fighting after the Revolution. The stakes were higher now, though. The Soviet Union had already punished Poland then. Poland hadn’t threatened the peasants’ and workers’ paradise any more. Smigly-Ridz’s Poland and Hitler’s Germany now… That was a different story. Hitler’s Germany threatened everything it could reach, and its arms seemed to stretch like octopus tentacles.
Antiaircraft guns fired at them as they crossed the front. A couple of near misses made the bomber bounce in the air. “Some of those guns are ours!” Sergei said angrily. It happened every time. If it was up in the air, a lot of Russians assumed it had to be hostile. “I’d like to bomb the morons screwing around down there!”
“Do you think their replacements would be any smarter?” Mouradian asked. Sergei considered and reluctantly shook his head. The supply of damn fools was always more than equal to the demand. Then Anastas said, “What do you want to bet the Fritzes shoot at their own flyers, too?”
“Huh,” Sergei said in surprise. To Russians, Germans were alarmingly capable: that was what made them so dangerous. It wasn’t so easy to imagine them screwing up like ordinary human beings. But if they were so wonderful, why could you drop Germany into Russia and hardly notice where it hit?
They flew on. Poland was a big place in its own right-too big, at any rate, to have antiaircraft guns everywhere. Once they got beyond the front, things grew quiet again. All the same, Sergei wished for eyes that could see above, below, and behind the SB-2 as well as ahead-and all at the same time. It wasn’t the first time he’d made that wish. You never knew where trouble would come from next.
“Well, one thing: we’ll know when we get to Warsaw,” Mouradian said.
“All the buildings and things underneath us, you mean?” Sergei asked.
“Mm, those, too,” Anastas said. “But I was thinking, that’s when they’ll start shooting at us again.”
“Oh.” After a moment, Sergei nodded. “Yeah, they will, the bastards.”
With a wry chuckle, Mouradian said, “We need to get the Chimp up here. He’d call them something that’d set ’em on fire from four thousand meters up.”
“He would, wouldn’t he?” Sergei agreed. “But don’t let him hear you call him that. He’ll throw you through a door headfirst, and he won’t care that you’re an officer or about what they’ll do to him afterwards.”
“I said it to you, not to him.” And, in fact, Mouradian’s hand had been over the mouthpiece of his speaking tube. In meditative tones, he went on, “I wonder what Ivan’s service jacket looks like. How many times have they busted him down to private for doing things like that? How many times has he made it back to sergeant because he’s brave and strong and even kind of clever when he isn’t breaking heads? If only he didn’t look like a chimp…”
“In that case, he’d get another nickname-Foxface or whatever suited the way he did look,” Sergei answered. “Some people just naturally draw them, and he’s one.”
“Yes, I think so, too. Interesting that you should notice.” Stas eyed him as if wondering what to make of such unexpected perceptiveness. Sergei didn’t know whether to feel proud or nervous under that dark Southern scrutiny.
Then he stopped worrying about it. He had bigger things to worry about: they’d reached Warsaw’s outskirts, and, sure as hell, the Poles were shooting at them from the ground. The formation loosened as all the pilots started jinking. They sped up; they slowed down. They swung left; they swung right. They climbed a little; they descended. The more trouble the Poles-the Germans?-had aiming at them, the more likely they’d make it back to base.
Jinking or not, if your number was up, it was up. A direct hit tore off half an SB-2’s right wing. The stricken bomber tumbled toward the ground. Sergei flew past it before he could see whether any parachutes blossomed. That could have been me, he thought, and shuddered.
There lay the Vistula, shining in the sun. Everything built up on the other side was Warsaw proper. “Ready, Ivan?” Sergei called.
“Bet your stinking pussy,” Kuchkov answered.
“Now!” Sergei said. If they had no orders to aim at anything in particular, he wasn’t about to make a fancy straight bombing run. Why let the gunners get a good shot at him?
As soon as the bombs fell away, he hauled the SB-2’s nose around and gunned it back to the east. A few more shell bursts made the plane buck in the air, but he heard-and felt-no fragments biting. And if enemy fighters were in the air, they were going after other Red Air Force formations.
“One more under our belts,” Anastas Mouradian said.
“Da.” Sergei nodded. Along with rubber and oil and gasoline, he could smell his own fear-and maybe Mouradian’s with it. How could you go on doing this, day after day, month after month? But what they’d do to you if you tried to refuse… Yes, not flying missions was even scarier than flying them.
Chapter 21
Fog shrouded the airstrip in northeastern France. Nobody was going anywhere this morning. Chances were, nobody was going anywhere all day. The idled Luftwaffe flyers did what idled flyers had been doing since the first biplanes took off with pilots carrying pistols and hand grenades: they sat around and shot the shit and passed flasks of applejack and cognac.
Hans-Ulrich Rudel was happy enough to join the bull session. When one of the flasks came to him, he passed it on without drinking. “Danke schon,” said the pilot to his left. “More for the rest of us.”
“Nobody got out any milk for him,” another flyer said.
Everybody in the battered farmhouse that did duty for an officers’ club laughed. But the laughter sounded different from the way it would have not too long before. Then it would have been aimed at him, deadly as the bullets from a Hurricane’s machine guns. Now he was an Oberleutnant with the Ritterkreuz at his throat. His comrades might not love him, but he’d earned their respect.
“Coffee will do,” he said mildly, and got another laugh.
“Coffee’s harder to come by than booze these days. Coffee worth drinking is, anyhow,” said the pilot next to him. “The footwash they issue with our rations…” The other flyer made a horrible face.
“Frenchies don’t have much of the good stuff left these days, either,” another pilot complained. “Or if they do, they’re hiding it better than they used to.”
“I don’t think they’ve got it,” a third flyer said. “We’ve been in France since last year, and here it is, just about autumn come round again. You can only scrounge so much. After that, there’s nothing left to scrounge.”
“There’d be plenty if we’d got into Paris the way we thought we would,” someone else said. Rudel couldn’t see who it was; the farmhouse was twistier than a fighter pilot’s mind. He wouldn’t have been surprised if the French family who’d lived in it before fleeing in the early days of the war had unrolled balls of thread of different colors to guide them as they navigated from one room to another. What was left of the upstairs seemed even worse.
A long silence followed the flyer’s remark. Anything that touched on politics was dangerous these days. Yes, the squadron was a band of brothers. But brothers could turn on one another, too-look what happened to Joseph. Some people feared that the Gestapo got word of any even possibly disloyal remarks. Others-Hans-Ulrich among them-hoped the security service did. He didn’t want to inform on anyone else himself, but he also didn’t want to fly alongside people whose hearts weren’t in the fight.
“We’ll get there yet,” he said.
“Sure we will,” said another voice he couldn’t easily match with a face. “But when, and what will it cost? Will we get to Moscow first?”
Someone else whistled softly. Hans-Ulrich knew the two-front war wasn’t popular with his comrades. Maybe it was even less popular than he’d thought. Again, no one seemed to care to take that particular bull by the horns. At last, the pilot sitting next to Rudel said, “I’d rather have the Poles on our side than against us.”
“They aren’t on our side.” To Hans-Ulrich’s dismay, that was Colonel Steinbrenner. The squadron commander went on, “Right this minute, Stalin scares them worse than the Fuhrer does. There’s a difference. You’d better believe there is, my friends.”
“Jawohl, Herr Oberst,” Rudel said. “But it makes an army of a million men march against the Bolsheviks side by side with us. We ought to get the French and the English to do the same thing-a crusade to rid the world of something that never should have been born.”
A different kind of silence descended on the farmhouse: one rather like the aftermath of a thousand-kilogram bomb. At last, the fellow next to Hans-Ulrich said, “You’ve always been an optimist, haven’t you?”
“When it comes to Germany, of course I have,” he answered proudly.
“We’re all optimists about the Vaterland.” Colonel Steinbrenner spoke as if challenging anyone there to argue with him. When nobody did, he continued, “But there is also a difference between optimism and blind optimism.”
“Are you saying that’s what I show, sir?” Rudel asked.
“No, no. You’re a good German patriot,” Steinbrenner replied. Rudel would have thought hard about reporting him had he said anything else. After all, he’d been brought in here to replace an officer in whom the fires of zeal didn’t burn bright enough-or so the Gestapo had concluded, at any rate.
More high-octane liquor made the rounds. Several separate conversations started in place of the general one. That was safer: nobody could hear everything at once. Lickerish laughter said some of the flyers were talking about women-a topic more dangerous than politics, but in different ways. Hans-Ulrich might be a teetotaler, but he didn’t stay away from the French girls. His father wouldn’t have approved, but he didn’t worry about that. When he was with a girl, he didn’t worry about anything. More precious than rubies, the Bible said, and, as usual, it knew what it was talking about. The Biblical context might be different from the one Hans-Ulrich had in mind, but he didn’t worry about that, either.
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