The War That Came Early: Coup d'Etat

by Harry Turtledove

  Still, he couldn’t help noting that, in a perfect world, he wouldn’t have had to worry about his own side at all. What? This world was imperfect? What a surprise! What a disappointment!

  If this were the perfect world, or even a better world, the Nazis and their parasites wouldn’t be closing in on Smolensk. But they were, despite the Soviet armed forces’ best—certainly most fervent—efforts to stop them. Radio Moscow tried its hardest to deny that. These days, though, Luftwaffe bombers could reach the USSR’s capital. Once, they’d knocked Radio Moscow off the air for several hours. Only once, but Stas didn’t take it for a good sign.

  And, if this were the perfect world, or even a better one, the Soviet move against Romania would have bothered the Fascists more. A blow against their soft underbelly … Only the underbelly turned out not to be so soft. These days, the fighting wasn’t in eastern Romania. It was in the western Ukraine. No doubt because it was, Radio Moscow mentioned it as seldom as possible.

  So Stas relied on things he heard unofficially. You couldn’t always rely on such things. Then again, you couldn’t always rely on Radio Moscow, either, though saying so, or even lifting an eyebrow at the wrong time, could cost you your life. Unofficially, some Ukrainians were greeting the Nazis as liberators, giving them bread and salt and strewing flowers in the path of their armored personnel carriers.

  Unofficially, things in the Ukraine had been very bad before the war. Soviet authorities were bound and determined to liquidate the kulak class. And well they might have been—the richer peasants hadn’t cared to give up their land and flocks and tools and join collective farms. The authorities broke them. Nobody knew how many Ukrainians died—starved or shot—in the collectivization process. Or, if anyone did know, he wasn’t talking.

  If some of the survivors didn’t act like good Soviet citizens now, whose fault was that? Theirs, of course, or it would be if the USSR won. Then they’d look down the barrel of another round of retribution. In the meantime, maybe they were getting some of their own back.

  Stas did wonder how much. He also heard unofficial things about how the Germans behaved in Soviet territory. Some of those things were hard to believe. If the Nazis acted that way in the Ukraine, they’d wear out their welcome in a hurry. Maybe they wouldn’t be so stupid down there.

  Or maybe they would. Stas wouldn’t have been surprised. It wasn’t as if Stalin hadn’t acted like a bloodthirsty monster enforcing his will there.

  The Armenian flyer sighed after he got back to his tent. He was alone there—it was safe enough. As safe as anything could be these days, anyhow. No, when Stalin behaved like a bloodthirsty monster, he wasn’t acting. He was showing what he really was. And so was Hitler.

  Which one made the worse bloodthirsty monster? Stas was damned if he knew. The English had had an affair with Hitler and decided they would rather dance with Stalin. The French, by contrast, stayed in bed with the Nazis. So did the Poles … but they would have slept with Stalin had Hitler jumped them first.

  Stas almost welcomed the next mission. Wasn’t a clean chance of getting killed better than the muddy ocean of doubts that had filled his thoughts lately? He could make himself believe it … right up till the moment when shell fragments slammed into the Pe-2. As soon as that happened, he discovered how much he wanted to live.

  The engines still sounded all right. There was no fire. He gave the instrument panel a quick, frightened once-over. The fuel gauge stayed steady. So did oil pressure. He cautiously tried the controls. All seemed in working order. “Bozhemoi!” he said—with feeling. “I didn’t think we’d be that lucky.”

  Another German antiaircraft shell burst close to the bomber. The Pe-2 staggered in the air, but no more clangs or rattles warned of another hit.

  Ivan Kulkaanen frowned. He fiddled with his earphones. His frown deepened. “Radio’s out,” he reported.

  No one was talking in Stas’ earphones at the moment, either. Was that because no one was talking or because nobody could get through? Mouradian did some fiddling of his own. Then he eyed the set’s dials. He hadn’t done that before—he’d had more urgent things to worry about. Sure enough, every needle lay dead against its peg.

  “Well, it could be worse,” he said. “We can get back without a radio, and they’ll slap in another one or splice the cut wires or do whatever else needs doing.”

  “Sure.” Kulkaanen nodded. “Nobody can order us to do anything stupid now, either.”

  “No one would ever do anything like that.” Virtue overflowing filled Mouradian’s voice. He and the young blond Karelian in the other seat exchanged amused looks. Of course their superiors were always wise and careful. Of course.

  No one would warn them if Messerschmitts attacked the squadron, either. Stas spent the rest of the flight wishing for eyes in the back of his head. Wishing failed to produce them. He got back to the airstrip anyhow, and put the Pe-2 in the hands of the repair crews.

  He hadn’t been down long before the squadron commander summoned him. Saluting, he said, “I serve the Soviet Union!”

  “Do you?” Lieutenant Colonel Tomashevsky growled. “Then why didn’t you move up in the formation when I ordered you to, dammit?”

  “Sir, I never heard that order.” Mouradian explained what had happened, finishing, “You can check with the groundcrew men. They’ll tell you I’m not making any of this up.”

  Tomashevsky eyed him. “I won’t check. But if I ever find out you were lying, you’re dead. No demotions. No camps. No punishment details. Dead.” He spoke without melodrama. Stas might have wished to hear some. That would have left him less than sure the squadron commander meant it. As things were, he had no room for doubt.

  Tomashevsky kept looking at him, waiting for him to say something, willing him to say something. So he did: “Sir, if I ever lie, it won’t be about anything where you can catch me.”

  “I should hope not,” the senior officer said. “You’d have to be stupid to do something like that. Dark-haired men aren’t stupid. They have other things wrong with them, but they aren’t stupid.”

  Russians often lumped Armenians and Georgians and Jews together that way. Stas mildly resented it. So did most Armenians and Georgians and, he supposed, even Jews. With a crooked smile, he answered, “Sir, I didn’t come here to pick your pocket. I came here to blow up Germans.”

  “Always a worthy cause,” Tomashevsky agreed dryly. “But if a pocket walks by begging to be picked, will you hold back?”

  “Maybe not,” Stas admitted. “But then, would you?” For a moment, he feared he’d cut too close to the bone. But the squadron commander laughed and waved him away. Away he went, before Tomashevsky could change his mind.

  Chapter 15

  This was the biggest damn fleet Pete McGill had ever seen. If it wasn’t the biggest damn fleet in the history of the world, that sure wasn’t from lack of effort on the U.S. Navy’s part.

  It stretched from horizon to horizon. Pete was sure it stretched over the horizon. The destroyers and cruisers and battlewagons and carriers stayed well separated from one another to make sure the Japs couldn’t do too much in any one spot.

  That didn’t worry Pete. “If I was that cocksucker Tojo, I’d be shaking in my boots right now,” he declared.

  “Got that right, Ace,” Joe Orsatti agreed. The gun chief waved expansively. “All the firepower we’re bringing to the dance, we won’t just lick the fucking Jap navy. We’ll sink their lousy islands, too.”

  “There you go!” Pete liked the sound of that.

  Planes from the combat air patrol droned overhead. The American fleet hadn’t come far from Oahu yet, but the brass already knew the Japs liked playing with naval air power. The fighters up there were F-4 Wildcats. The Japanese Zero was supposed to be hot shit. It was hot shit; Pete had seen as much in the Philippines. But he had confidence in good old American know-how. If the Wildcat couldn’t mop the floor with the Jap fighter, something was badly wrong somewhere.

  And if the Am
erican fleet couldn’t mop the floor with the Japanese navy, something was badly wrong somewhere, too. Pete didn’t know the details of the attack plan. Such things were not for Marine sergeants to worry about. Like most of the tens of thousands of other men in the fleet, he did grasp the basic idea. They’d steam west till they ran into the slant-eyed sons of bitches steaming east. Then they’d knock the living snot out of them and clear their garrisons off all the Pacific islands they infested. What could be simpler?

  A pair of albatrosses scudded past the Boise. Their wingspan didn’t seem much smaller than a Wildcat’s. Pointing to them, Orsatti asked, “Ever shoot the shit with a guy who was stationed on Midway?”

  “I don’t think so,” Pete answered. “How come?”

  “That’s where the gooney birds lay their eggs, like. When it’s mating season or whatever the hell they call it, there’s thousands of ’em.”

  “Must be something. They’re amazing in the air.”

  Orsatti grinned. “You sure as hell never talked with no Midway Marine. Yeah, the gooneys are great while they’re flying. But you know what? Their landing gear’s shot to shit. They come gliding in, they put down their feet—and they crash land every fuckin’ time. Ass over teakettle like you wouldn’t believe. They’re just lucky they don’t carry avgas, on account of they’d burn like mad bastards if they did.”

  “This isn’t BS?” Pete was wary of getting his leg pulled.

  “Honest to God truth.” The gun chief held up his right hand. “So help me Hannah, it is. Like something out of a Disney cartoon, only it’s the genuine article.”

  “I wouldn’t mind seeing that for myself.” Pete paused, considering. “Well, if seeing it didn’t mean going to Midway. Holy Christ, man—talk about the ass end of nowhere.”

  “There is that,” Orsatti said. “But it’s probably why the gooney birds go ooh-la-la there. I mean, who’s gonna bother ’em? Till we got there, there wasn’t anything to bother ’em.”

  “I guess.” Till that moment, Pete hadn’t worried about where albatrosses went to make whoopee. For all he knew, they checked into hotels like everybody else. But thinking about Midway made him think about other islands, too. “I wish like hell the Japs hadn’t grabbed Wake and Guam.”

  “Guam was gonna catch it. That was in the cards. Look at a map—it’s the meat in a Jap-island sandwich,” Orsatti said. “Wake … Yeah, Wake’s a bitch. They hit it when we were still jumping up and down from the raid on Pearl. So now it’s their forward outpost instead of ours.”

  “Uh-huh. That’s what worries me. You gotta figure the slopes’re flying planes outa there now,” Pete said. “So what happens when they spot us? They let the rest of the Buddhaheads know, right?”

  “Listen to your Uncle Joe,” Orsatti said seriously. “First thing is, the Wildcats aren’t just flying over us. They’re out ahead of us, too. So they may knock down the Jap snoops before any word gets back. But even if they don’t, so what? We want to do for the Japanese navy, right?”

  “Well, sure, when you put it that way,” McGill replied. “Only I don’t like it when they know what we’re up to while we go in blind.”

  “Won’t matter when the shooting starts.” Orsatti spoke with serene confidence.

  If Admiral Kimmel, the man in charge of the American fleet, shared that confidence, he didn’t let it go to his head. Men on the Boise got called to battle stations at all hours of the day and night, and it was bound to be the same on every other ship. Pete’s heart pounded whenever he ran to the gun. Would this be the time it wasn’t a drill? Or this? Or …?

  News crackled out of the intercom: “It is reported that an enemy reconnaissance seaplane has been attacked and shot down. It is not known whether the personnel were able to signal that American aircraft were in the vicinity.”

  If the Japs hadn’t been able to radio a warning … The Pacific was a big place, the biggest place in the whole world. An airplane alone on the ocean was far smaller by comparison than a single mosquito buzzing around an elephant. So many things could go wrong. A plane that didn’t come back wouldn’t necessarily be blamed on enemy action.

  Necessarily. That was an interesting word, wasn’t it?

  Then a Japanese sub fired a torpedo at one of the destroyers out ahead of the fleet. The torpedo missed. The destroyer did its damnedest to sink the submarine. It also failed. But the cat was out of the bag.

  Were American submarines prowling way the hell off to the west? If they spotted the oncoming Japanese fleet, would they send back a warning? Would they try to thin out the herd, so to speak? The answer to the first question was obviously yes. To the second … The fewer warships flying the Rising Sun Pete had to worry about, the happier he’d be.

  First things first, though. The first thing the fleet had to worry about was reclaiming Wake Island. Admiral Kimmel approached the flyspeck on the map by night. His ships ringed it when the sun came up. As soon as the Japs in the garrison spotted them, they opened up with field artillery.

  Big guns answered them. So did dive-bombers flying off the carriers. In spite of all the hell coming down on their heads, the Japanese managed to get a few planes of their own into the air. As Pete had seen in Manila, their dive-bombers looked old-fashioned. Like German Stukas, they had fixed landing gear.

  Also like Stukas, they could be deadly if they got a chance—or even half a chance. One of them swooped down on a heavy cruiser that was in the same task force as the Boise. Curtains of antiaircraft fire rose above the big ship. As far as the enemy pilot was concerned, they might as well not have been there. If something got him, it would get him. He didn’t seem to care one way or the other. And he dropped his bomb from no more than fifty feet above the cruiser’s stacks.

  Something did get him as he roared away just above the waves. His plane cartwheeled into the Pacific. He wouldn’t have had anywhere to land on Wake, anyhow. But he made the Americans pay an enormous price for shooting him down. That bomb must have reached one of the cruiser’s magazines, because the ship’s whole bow blew off. What was left sank hideously fast.

  The Boise hurried over to help pick survivors from the water. There weren’t many. Most of them were hurt. All seemed stunned. “I’m handing Dave a shell, an’ next thing I know he ain’t there no more an’ I’m in the drink,” one guy said, which seemed to sum it up for everybody.

  Clumsy landing barges waddled toward Wake. Jap shells fell among them. One scored a direct hit. Bodies flew through the air as the barge sank. Most of the men were bound to be Marines like Pete. All the same, he wished he were riding in one of those barges. Landing on enemy-held beaches was what leathernecks were for. A sailor could do the job he had now. He could imagine nothing worse to say about it.

  “HEY, HARCOURT! Yeah, I’m talking to you. Get your sorry ass over here.”

  That rasp always made Luc wonder what he’d done wrong now—no, what he’d got caught doing wrong now. It always made him feel he was a private just out of basic, and Sergeant Demange had nabbed him with his hand in the cookie jar. No matter that he was a sergeant himself now, and Demange an officer. The old feeling didn’t go away. Luc didn’t suppose it ever would.

  “What do you need, sir?” Luc almost called Demange Sergeant. It wouldn’t have been the first time. Habit died hard.

  “C’mere, I said, dammit.” The cigarette in the corner of Demange’s mouth twitched as he talked. Luc wondered if he kept that Gitane there even when he got laid. It wouldn’t have surprised the younger man one bit. Demange gestured peremptorily. “Walk with me.”

  “Whatever you want, sweetheart,” Luc said. Demange didn’t rise to the bait. He just stomped away from the French encampment. Luc’s legs were longer, but he had to hustle to keep up. The air smelled of dust. No human habitations lay anywhere near. Luc had never dreamt how vast Russia was. The last Frenchmen who’d got this deep into the country marched with Napoleon. He hoped he’d come out better than they did.

  He still carried his rifle. Deman
ge had one, too, along with an officer’s sidearm. You didn’t want to let the Ivans catch you, no matter how enticing their safe-conducts seemed to jerks. The front was supposed to lie a few kilometers off to the northeast, but one thing you could always count on was Russian infiltrators.

  “What’s up?” Luc asked after a little while.

  “Keep walking,” Demange answered. “I don’t want any of those cons to hear this.” He spat out the latest Gitane’s mortal remains, ground them under his bootheel, and lit a fresh one.

  “Am I in trouble?”

  “No more than any of the rest of us.” Lieutenant Demange paused to blow out a stream of smoke, then hurried on. “Some crazy shit is going on, that’s all, and I want to talk to somebody about it. You’ve got your head on pretty straight, and you don’t run your mouth when you aren’t supposed to.”

  “Gee, thanks.” Luc’s sardonic tone couldn’t hide how pleased he was. He would rather have got that kind of praise from Demange than to have won a medal and brushed cheeks with General Weygand. To Weygand, he would be just another poilu. Demange knew him well enough for his judgment to mean something.

  “Any time, kid.” Demange paused and looked back. No, none of the other French soldiers would overhear them now.

  Off in the distance, artillery rumbled. German guns, Luc thought, recognizing the reports. He was glad those 105s would come down on the Ivans’ heads, not on his. Of course, the Red Army had plenty of artillery of its own, but getting shelled by the Boches still struck him as the definitive experience.

  “So what’s the crazy shit?” He tried to keep his voice as casual as he could.

  “It’s political, that’s what.” Demange couldn’t have sounded more disgusted if he were talking about syphilis. “You’re not one of those crazy Reds, or I wouldn’t say boo to you. But you don’t wish you were wearing a German helmet, either.”

  “I should hope not! Those fuckers are heavy.” Luc had handled them plenty of times, dealing with dead or captured Fritzes. He preferred the lighter Adrian helmet he had on right this minute. But that was beside the point. “What do you mean, political?”