Two Fronts twtce-5

by Harry Turtledove

  Sometimes you had to take the long way around to get where you wanted to go. Julius Lemp and the U-30 certainly had. Setting out from Wilhelmshaven after a refit more thorough than the U-boat could have got in Namsos, he’d taken it all the way around the British Isles to reach the western end of the Channel. Minefields and nets kept German warships from making direct attacks.

  He had to be careful in these waters. The Royal Navy and the RAF knew that U-boats might come calling. The welcome they laid on was warm but less than friendly. Along with the enemy patrols, there were also nets and minefields on this side of the Channel. That forty-kilometer-wide stretch of water was vital for getting soldiers and supplies from the island to the Continent.

  If a U-boat could slide past the barriers, it might hurt the enemy badly. Plenty of U-boat skippers curled up in their cramped cots each night dreaming of sending a fat troopship to the bottom or of blowing a freighter loaded with munitions halfway to the moon.

  Dreams like that came with a price, as Lemp had better reason to know than most. Even if you did sink an important vessel in the English Channel’s narrow waters, you might not come home again to celebrate. The Royal Navy viciously hunted submarines, and had all the advantage in these parts.

  Or you could make a mistake. Lemp’s mistake, back when the war was new, was the reason he remained a lowly lieutenant more than three years later. Sinking a troopship or a big, fast freighter was splendid. Sinking a liner with Americans aboard when you thought it was a troopship or a big, fast freighter …

  Well, they hadn’t beached him. And if he could get into the Channel, anything he found there would be a legitimate target.

  He ascended to the top of the conning tower. It was night now, with a fat moon, nearly full, in the sky. He wouldn’t want to venture into the Channel surfaced in daylight hours. Going in submerged would be too slow-so he told himself, at any rate. He’d sneak in under cover of darkness, pick his spot, and go down to periscope depth. Then he’d see what came by and what the U-30 could do about it.

  Even though it was dark, ratings with field glasses scanned sea and sky. You never wanted to get taken by surprise, and seven times never in waters like these. The U-boat would be hard to spot, and an enemy ship or plane might take it for one of their own rather than a German vessel, but … you never wanted to be taken by surprise.

  No sooner had that thought crossed his mind than he heard what could only be airplane engines approaching rapidly from the north. The plane didn’t sound very high. “Go below, boys,” Lemp told the ratings. He shouted down the hatch: “Dive!”

  Half a minute was all the U-30 needed to submerge. A good thing, too, because not long after the U-boat went under a bomb burst in the ocean not nearly far enough away. It shook the submarine. A couple of light bulbs popped. A wrench fell off a rack and hit the deck with a clang of iron on iron.

  “Good thing we got under in a hurry,” Gerhart Beilharz said.

  “Ja.” Lemp nodded, not very happily. “That was a damned good night attack, damned good. He really rattled our teeth there.”

  “The moon is bright,” the engineering officer said.

  “Ja,” Lemp repeated, even less happily than before. “As bright as that, though? I don’t think so.”

  “Luck.” Beilharz was always inclined to look on the bright side of things: a useful attitude for a man who nursed along the sometimes-temperamental Schnorkel.

  “Well, I hope so,” the skipper said.

  “What else could it be?”

  “I know for a fact the English have radar, the same as we do,” Lemp answered. “If they’ve found a way to make a set small enough to stuff it inside an airplane …”

  Beilharz looked horrified. “That would be awful!”

  “It would make our lives harder, that’s for sure,” Lemp said.

  “How can we find out?” Beilharz asked.

  “Carefully.” Julius Lemp’s voice was dry. The thought of surfacing and seeing whether they got attacked again had crossed his mind. No sooner had it done so, though, than he torpedoed it. Things were dangerous enough in these waters. Inviting an attack when you didn’t have it might add injury to insult.

  “You want to make our approach at Schnorkel depth, then?” Of course the engineer would plump for his favorite toy.

  Lemp nodded, though. “Yes, I think we’d better. We won’t get where we’re going as fast as I’d like, but we have a better chance of getting there in one piece. And the Channel seems calm enough. We probably won’t have waves tripping the safety valve and making the snort suck all the air out of the boat.” He made a popeyed face, miming what happened to the submariners when the Schnorkel did just that.

  “It doesn’t happen very often … sir.” When Beilharz used military formality, he wanted Lemp to know he was affronted.

  “Once is plenty,” Lemp said. “but the beast does have its uses. I can’t imagine a radar set that could spot a Schnorkel tube.” The engineering officer beamed when he added that. Lemp smiled to himself. You had to know what made your crew tick, all right.

  It was as if the war were new. Ships carried England’s soldiers and everything they needed to fight with over to France. Get into a likely sea lane and you could make them sorry. It would take longer chugging along with only the Schnorkel and periscope surfaced, but once they did it …

  He heard occasional distant pings from enemy ships’ echo-locating systems, but no vessel fired on the U-30 and started an attack run. Overhead, day slowly vanquished night. Lemp could see much farther with the periscope. He could be seen more readily, too. He had to remember that.

  There! That was what he wanted: several freighters waddling across the water, escorted by a sleek destroyer that chivvied them along like a sheep dog guiding a flock of animals too stupid to remember where they were going unless they got some help.

  He stayed on the Schnorkel as long as he could. The diesels gave him that unexpected extra submerged speed. Then, when he feared some alert sailor might spot the tube, he ordered it lowered and proceeded on battery power.

  He fired three eels, one after another. He kept the last one in a forward tube in case he had to use it against the destroyer. The U-30’s bow tried to break the surface as it got lighter after the torpedoes zoomed away. One missed, but the other two struck home: the explosions and the breaking-up noises from the stricken ships came clearly through the hull. The men raised a cheer.

  “Now comes the interesting part,” Lemp said to no one in particular. He turned the boat away from the stricken convoy. Looking back over his shoulder, so to speak, with the periscope, he saw what he knew he’d see: the Royal Navy destroyer rushing up to pay him back. Its pings sounded furious. Maybe that was his imagination, but he didn’t think so.

  The destroyer would expect him to dive deep and sneak away at the pitiful pace the batteries gave. It would rain ash cans down on his head and hope to sink him. But he didn’t feel like enduring another depth charging. “Raise the Schnorkel again,” he ordered. “We’ll get out of here twice as fast as he thinks we can.”

  He caught the ratings glancing at one another as they obeyed. If this worked, he was a genius. If it didn’t, if the Royal Navy ship’s echo-locater located them …

  We can dive deep then, he thought hopefully. In the meantime, that destroyer would be pinging in the wrong place. He was betting his life, and his crewmen’s lives, that it would, anyhow.

  He won the bet. Other Royal Navy ships pinged away, too, but all of them well to the east of U-30. The crewmen wrestled fresh eels into those bow tubes. The “lords”-the most junior sailors-would have more room to sleep tonight, because they bunked in the compartment where reloads were stored. And then the U-boat would go hunting again.

  Chapter 8

  “What the hell have you got there?” Mike Carroll asked, staring at the fat book Chaim Weinberg was reading. “New Hemingway.” Chaim held it up so Mike could see the spine-the cover was long gone. “It’s called For Whom the Bell
Tolls, and it’s about the war here before the fighting started all over everywhere.”

  “How is it?” Mike asked.

  “Pretty damn good. I wish I could get a pretty girl to hop in my sleeping bag as easy as this guy Jordan does, though.”

  “I was up on the Ebro when he was in Madrid,” Mike said. “Hemingway, I mean, not the guy in the book.”

  “I understood you. So was I,” Chaim said. “I know some guys who knew him while he was here, though.”

  “Oh, sure. Me, too.” Carroll nodded. The sun glared down on the trenches. Spring in Spain didn’t last long. It quickly rolled into summer, and summer in central Spain, like summer in central California, was nothing to joke about. Mike went on, “Didn’t Hemingway have that lady war correspondent hopping all over him then? What the hell was her name?”

  “Gellhorn. Martha Gellhorn.” To show how he knew, Chaim flipped back to the very beginning of the book. “It’s dedicated to her. They’re married now, I think.”

  “Yeah, I think you’re right.” Mike nodded again. “Married and living in Cuba or some such place. That’s the nice thing about covering a war when you’re a reporter. You can leave once you’ve got your story, and then write a book while you’re pouring down rum and Coke thousands of miles away.”

  “You got that right. He wrote a good book, though-I will give him that much,” Chaim said. “The stuff about what the Republicans and the Fascists did to each other when the war was breaking out … I’ve talked to enough Spaniards to have a notion of how it was, and what’s in here feels real.”

  “Okay. Give it to me when you’re done with it, then,” Carroll said.

  “Will do. Just so you know, it’s not one of your cheerful-type books. No matter how much screwing this Jordan guy does, no way in hell he’s gonna live to the end of it,” Chaim warned.

  “I’m a big boy, Mommy.” Mike grinned to take away the sting.

  Chaim grinned, too. “Fuck you, big boy.” They both laughed. Chaim wiggled his back so the forward wall of the trench didn’t dig into it in so many places-or at least so the trench wall dug into it in some different places-and went back to plowing through For Whom the Bell Tolls.

  He was about fifty pages from the end when Nationalist howitzers opened up on the stretch of line the Internationals held. The nerve of the bastards! he thought as he huddled in the almost-bombproof he’d scraped in that forward wall. Couldn’t they even let a guy finish his book? He didn’t remember the Czech sniper’s monster rifle going off, so Sanjurjo’s men weren’t taking revenge for some newly fallen alleged hero.

  Or he didn’t think they were. Hemingway had sucked him in deeply enough that he might not have noticed the Czech firing the antitank rifle. The damn thing was hard to ignore, though. Chances were the Nationalists were just being their usual asshole selves.

  More 105s came down. How crazy would it be if an American International in Spain who was reading about an American International in Spain who was going to get killed by the goddamn Nationalists got killed by the goddamn Nationalists while he was reading? Well, not at the exact moment he was reading, but close enough to satisfy even the most dedicated coincidence-sniffer.

  Chaim didn’t want to get killed. Well, Robert Jordan didn’t want to get killed, either, but that wouldn’t do him any good. The god named Hemingway was one merciless son of a bitch. Jordan could screw till the earth moved for him and Maria; his movie wouldn’t have a happy ending even so.

  The earth was moving for Chaim, too, but he couldn’t enjoy it the way Jordan did in the book. The damn shell bursts were making it shake. If one of those shells came down too close, Chaim’s story wouldn’t have a happy ending, either.

  Hey, he thought, I did some fancy fucking in Spain, too. I even have a kid to prove it. La Martellita was nothing like Maria. She was as tough as Pilar, if you could imagine Pilar beautiful. And if you could imagine Pilar beautiful, you could imagine just about anything.

  After forty-five minutes or so, the shelling let up. No, the Nationalists didn’t mean anything in particular by it. They were throwing some hate around-that was all. Chaim had heard an English International give artillery fire that name. God knew it fit. Whenever Chaim said it himself, the people he was talking to always got it.

  Stretcher-bearers carried a moaning wounded man back toward the doctors. Chaim hoped it was one of the Spaniards who filled out the Abe Lincolns’ ranks these days. Not many Americans were left any more. He didn’t want to lose a friend-or even a jerk who spoke English.

  For Whom the Bell Tolls had got dirty and a little crumpled when he dove for cover. He figured Hemingway would approve. From things he’d heard, the writer was a blowhard and drank like a fish, but the man could sure as hell put words on paper.

  Back behind the line, Republican guns came to life. They started repaying the Nationalists for their bad manners. If only they could take out Sanjurjo’s artillery … But they didn’t seem interested in trying. They inflicted the same kind of misery on the enemy’s forward trenches as the Fascists had sent this way.

  Chaim hated artillerymen. He didn’t know a foot soldier who didn’t. He suspected the Roman legionaries had hated the bastards who served the Parthian catapults-and their own as well. How could you not hate someone who could hurt you at a range where you couldn’t hurt him back? There the son of a bitch was, drinking coffee and smoking a cigar, maybe with some cute dancer on his lap, and all he had to do was yank that rope to blow you into the middle of next week. It wasn’t even close to fair. No matter where you were in the world, it had to look the same way.

  When storming parties went forward, enemy machine-gun teams had a tough time surrendering. They dished out too much woe to atone for it by throwing up their hands. Artillerymen were the same way, only doubled and redoubled. The trouble was, storming parties rarely got far enough into the rear to give them what they deserved. That took more artillery, dammit.

  After a while, the Republican gunners decided they’d done what they could for their benighted brethren in the trenches. Their cannon fell silent. Chaim waited to see if the Nationalist 105s would open up again. They didn’t. Maybe they were short on shells, maybe on outrage.

  Either way, he settled down not far from where he’d sat before and went back to the novel. When things were quiet, you savored the moment. Looking back, he’d done more sitting around and waiting than fighting. That might be true, but when he did look back he knew he would remember the moments of terror and the even rarer moments of exaltation far better than he recalled the longer boring stretches.

  When he looked back. If he looked back. If he lived to look back. He’d been in the war a long time, and he hadn’t once got badly hurt. That made him even luckier than a guy who broke the bank at Monte Carlo. The gambler only won money and all the fine cars and champagne and loose, beautiful women it could buy. Chaim won the precious chance to be that guy.

  If he stayed long enough, he’d catch it as surely as Robert Jordan was going to in the story. A shell would come down in the wrong place or he’d make the unwanted acquaintance of a machine-gun bullet or some Fascist would smash in his skull with an entrenching tool in a raid. In the long run, the house always won.

  They’d been on the point of demobilizing the Internationals when the big European war blew up. That would have been his chance to leave with his honor still in one piece. But it hadn’t happened. He was still here-and still reading.

  Robert Jordan blew the bridge. The Republic fucked up the attack he was supposed to blow the bridge for. Sure as hell, he got it. And so did the one halfway decent Nationalist Hemingway stuck in the book. War sucked, all right. Hemingway might be a drunken blowhard, but he sure as hell knew that.

  Colonel Steinbrenner stood under the broad Russian sky, looking at the assembled pilots and radiomen and groundcrew personnel in their black coveralls. He’d climbed up onto a ration crate so they could all see him, too: not much of a podium, but it was what he had.

  Hans-Ulrich
had elbowed his way up toward the front of the squadron. He wanted to hear what the CO had to say. The cynical part of him that had sprung up during the war wondered why. He’d get the same orders no matter what Steinbrenner said now. But, cynical part or not, here he stood. Like Luther, he could do nothing else.

  Steinbrenner raised both hands, almost like a minister offering benediction. The Luftwaffe men in front of him quieted down. A couple of guys who didn’t quiet down fast enough to suit their comrades got elbows in the ribs to encourage them

  “Well, boys, it’s finally gone and happened,” Steinbrenner said. “We are being recalled to the West.”

  A buzz ran through the flyers and groundcrew men. Rage and disappointment warred within Hans-Ulrich: rage that betrayal from England and France was forcing the Reich to shift the squadron away from the vital war against Bolshevism, disappointment that his affair with Sofia was being forcibly ended.

  “When they told me they were transferring us, they warned me, ‘You’d best be careful in the West-you’ll be going up against the hottest new RAF Spitfires and French Dewoitines,’ ” Steinbrenner went on. He raised one eyebrow till it almost disappeared under the patent-leather brim of his officer’s cap. “And I looked at them, and I said, ‘Ja? Und so?’”

  The squadron exploded into laughter. Hans-Ulrich barked as loud as anyone else. Yes, modern RAF and Armee de l’Air fighters could hack Stukas out of the sky with the greatest of ease. But so could the biplane Po-153s the Red Air Force was still flying. The Ju-87 was not made to dogfight, or even to run away. You had to be an optimist to use it where you didn’t have unchallenged air superiority.

  Which meant somebody in the Luftwaffe high command probably was an optimist. There wouldn’t be unchallenged air superiority in the West. The comment Colonel Steinbrenner had got from his superiors made that only too plain. Hans-Ulrich had been shot down once in the West and once here in the East. He and Sergeant Dieselhorst had managed to bail out both times. He supposed they might stay lucky once or twice more.