The Jap plane didn’t give a damn about the Boise. It was swooping down on a heavy cruiser. Shells burst all around it, black smoke puffs soiling the clean, moist Pacific air. The pilot ignored everything but his target. He released the bomb and zoomed away bare yards above the ocean. A shell clipped his wing then. His plane broke up as it went into the drink. Fire floating on the sea was the only grave marker he’d ever get.
Too late came the hit. The bomb burst right alongside the American ship. It wasn’t a killing blow. But blast and fragments would do their worst, and their worst was no damn good. The Boise had taken blows like that, and suffered from them yet.
“One fucker won’t be back!” Joe Orsatti shouted. Everybody at the five-inch mount yelled as loud as he could. It was the only way the Marines had a prayer of making themselves heard. Even as things were, Pete might not have understood if he hadn’t read the gun chief’s lips.
“How many more have they got?” he yelled back. Orsatti didn’t answer. By the nature of things, he couldn’t know. Neither could Pete. But that was the question.
All the guys with the fat gold stripes on their sleeves who’d made up the American attack plan seemed to have missed something: the Japs had turned their mid-Pacific islands into unsinkable aircraft carriers. They had sinkable carriers, too; the Americans had sunk one. But no American carriers remained afloat, and the U.S. fleet had yet to see any Japanese naval craft at gun range. (No, that wasn’t quite true. One Jap sub incautiously surfaced near a battleship whose big guns happened to be trained its way. A few seconds later, nothing was left of that sub but paper clips.)
No twilight-of-the-gods super-Jutland here, no matter what the planners—and Pete McGill—had figured this fight would look like. No Joe Louis–Max Schmeling. Instead, the Japs were making like some superfast lightweight. Hank Armstrong on benzedrine, maybe. They jabbed and jabbed and jabbed, and when you tried to hit back they weren’t there. And they wore you down, one punch at a time.
Pete had guessed the big free-for-all would happen somewhere near the Philippines. And it might have, if the U.S. fleet had been able to get that far. But even Guam still lay far to the west. And reaching Guam would be no cure-all; the Stars and Stripes didn’t fly there any more. How many Japanese planes would come up from all their islands and attack the remains of the American force? How long before they’d be more than all the antiaircraft guns aboard the surviving ships could hope to knock down? If the admirals went on being stubborn, that day might come soon.
If it did, Pete probably wouldn’t even get a brief patch of fire on the Pacific to mark where he’d gone down. An oil slick would be about it.
He didn’t want to die. Not yet. He didn’t have nearly enough revenge for Vera. Four red rings circled his five-inch gun’s barrel, each one signifying a plane Orsatti was sure they’d killed. The rings, and the rest of the paint on the barrel, were blistered and scorched from the heat of all the shells that had gone through. It took a hell of a lot of firing to knock a plane out of the sky: way more than anybody’d figured before the war got rolling.
The Boise’s engines picked up. Pete felt the new vibration through the soles of his shoes. The light cruiser swung into a long turn, carving a white wake into blue water. When the turn ended, she was heading east.
“Now hear this!” blared from the loudspeakers. “At the orders of the fleet’s commanding officer, we are withdrawing toward Hawaii. I say again—at the orders of the CO, the fleet is withdrawing from these waters.”
So it wasn’t just the Boise. It was everybody. Everybody who was left, anyway. Pete wasn’t even sure of the current CO’s name; Admiral Kimmel went down with the Arizona when she sank, probably figuring that was easier than having to explain failure back home.
Well, if the new guy was throwing up his hands and hightailing it back toward Pearl, his name was also likely to be mud whoever the hell he was. The Secretary of the Navy and the President would blame him for not blowing the Japs out of the water. After all, if another admiral fell on—or was pushed onto—his sword, less blame would stick to his superiors.
Then again, if the Americans kept pushing forward no matter what, it wouldn’t be long before they had nothing left to push with. Going into this war, everybody’d wondered how sea power stacked up against air power. Now that the returns were in, they didn’t look encouraging for the poor bastards in ships. It had been a running fight between airplanes all the way west across the Pacific. Now that the U.S. Navy was out of carriers, the fleet went on taking it on the chin no matter how much antiaircraft fire the ships threw up.
Pete nervously scanned the sky. Just because the fleet was on the lam, that didn’t mean the Japs would leave it alone. Kick ’em while they’re down was good advice in bar brawls and in war. If the other guy didn’t think he’d almost licked you, he wouldn’t jump on you again any time soon. Now the U.S. Navy was trying to get up off the floor and brush away the sawdust and the spilled beer.
Some of the other ships were still firing—maybe at Japanese planes, maybe at nothing. Around the Boise, it was quiet for the moment. Pete suddenly realized how very stiff and sore and weary he was. “Fuck,” he said.
Orsatti must have read his lips, because he didn’t say it very loud. The gun chief nodded. He looked like hell: unshaven, bags under his eyes, his face thin and drawn. Pete probably looked the same way, but he hadn’t seen himself any time lately. He’d been living on coffee and sandwiches and snatching sleep curled up on the deck next to the gun like a dog since … He couldn’t work out since when. It had been a while now. He knew that.
One of the other guys pulled a crumpled pack of Luckies from his dungarees and gave everybody a cigarette. Pete took his gratefully. The nicotine seemed to help a little with the haze of fatigue that dogged him. “Fuck,” he said again. This time, the rest of the crew nodded in mournful agreement.
“Didn’t never figure we’d get licked,” Orsatti said, speaking slowly and loudly. “Not by the Japs.”
Pete could have said I told you so. He’d known the Emperor’s finest were tougher than most Americans wanted to believe. He kept quiet. Sometimes being right cost more than it was worth.
But then he did say “Fuck” one more time. After another drag on the Lucky—some luck!—he amplified it: “What’s gonna happen to the poor sorry assholes stuck on the islands we took away from the slanties?”
“Maybe we’ll make pickup while we go,” Orsatti said. But he didn’t sound as if his heart was in the words. Pete could see why. If the fleet was doing its goddamnedest to get away from the Japs, would it want to stop for anything? That was asking to get worked over again.
But to leave leathernecks behind to try to hold off Hirohito’s bastards with whatever they happened to have … That was the worst kind of losing proposition. Sweet Jesus, was it ever!
Or was it, really? Wasn’t getting killed trying to take them off and then leaving them stuck for the Japs anyway worse still? An admiral was bound to think so. The admiral in charge of the fleet did think so. Pete was a Marine. For two cents’ change, he would have torn the goddamn admiral’s head off and pissed in the hole.
MARRIED. When Sarah Goldman (no, she was Sarah Bruck now; she had to keep reminding herself she was Sarah Bruck) had thought about being married before she actually was, she hadn’t thought much about what came after she went through the ceremony. Oh, she’d thought about some of it, but you couldn’t do that all the time even when you were newlyweds and very young. She hadn’t thought about what her life would be like after the wedding.
She had expected she would eat better, and she did. The Brucks were bakers, after all. Even if they were Jews, even if the Nazis watched them three times as hard as the Aryan bakers in Münster, they found ways of making flour silently vanish from the official allocation. Some they baked into stuff they ate themselves. They traded the rest with other people who dealt in food. Nobody—nobody below the rank of General-major, anyhow—ate well in the Third Reich. But th
e Brucks did very well for Jews, and better than some Aryans.
Sarah hadn’t expected she would work so much harder. Isidor might have got himself a wife. His mother and father had got themselves a brand-new employee they didn’t have to pay. They made the most of it. She knew next to nothing about baking when she started sharing Isidor’s little room. They set about giving her a crash course.
To be fair, they started her on simple things, as if she were a child. She could tell time, obviously. They could trust her to open the ovens and take out the loaves after half an hour (they could also smear ointment on her hands when she burned herself doing it—it wasn’t as if they’d never got burned).
They could let her mix the various flours that went into war bread. “No, none of them is sawdust,” David Bruck assured her, amusement in his voice.
“Was there any in the last war?” she asked. “People always say there was.”
“There were things nobody talked about. The government issued them to us, and we used them. It was use them or not bake anything.” Isidor’s father no longer sounded or looked amused. “That was … a very hard time.”
“This isn’t?” Sarah’s flour-covered hand reached for but didn’t touch the six-pointed yellow star on her blouse.
David Bruck wore a star, too. He considered. “We were hungrier then, but we were happier, too. People weren’t banging on the tea kettle at us all the time because we were Jews.”
Sarah smiled. Her mother would use that homely phrase for raising a ruckus every now and then. Her father always looked pained when Mother did. It wasn’t the kind of thing Herr Doktor Professor Goldman was used to hearing, his expression said. Herr Doktor Professor Goldman was doing all kinds of things these days that he hadn’t been used to.
And so was Sarah. Besides the burns, unfamiliar work made her arms and shoulders ache. Her feet hurt because she was on them so much. She was tired all the time. She sometimes wondered if this was what she’d signed up for.
It would have been worse if she hadn’t seen that all the Brucks, Isidor included, drove themselves harder than they drove her. That made her feel silly about complaining. But she slept as if someone hit her over the head with a boulder as soon as she lay down.
When she slept. As the hours of darkness got longer, RAF bombers started showing up over Münster more often. There weren’t many of them, and they didn’t drop a lot of bombs, but they wrecked the nights when they appeared.
She and Isidor and his parents would go downstairs and huddle under the counters. It was no better than hiding under the dining-room table had been at her parents’. If a bomb knocked the building down on top of you, you’d get squashed. If one blew out a side wall, it would blow you up, too. The Aryans in the neighborhood, like the Aryans in her old neighborhood, had proper bomb shelters. Verboten for Jews, of course. Jews took their chances.
Isidor took his chances in the blackout darkness. She’d never got felt up during an air raid before. She wanted to laugh and she wanted to belt him, both at the same time. She couldn’t do either, not without giving away what he was up to.
Every couple of weeks, she and Isidor would walk over and see her folks. She enjoyed that more than she wanted to show. The Brucks talked about bakery business and neighborhood gossip and the music on the radio, and that was about it. At her own house, talk ranged all over the world and across thousands of years. She’d thought it would be the same for everybody—till she discovered it wasn’t.
Coming back to such talk felt wonderful. She said so once, while Isidor was using the toilet. Her father’s smile twisted a little. “The Brucks are nice people. They are—don’t get me wrong. But they’re not very curious, so they might not seem very exciting, either.”
“Not very curious!” she echoed, nodding. That was it, all right. That was exactly it. The Brucks knew what they knew, and they didn’t worry about anything else.
Socrates talked about people like that in the Apology. If she tried to tell Isidor so, he would look at her as if she’d suddenly started speaking ancient Greek herself. It wasn’t that knowing all the strange things she knew ever did her much practical good. But it gave her things to think about she wouldn’t have had otherwise. When she was with other people who had the same strange set of mental baggage, it also gave her things to talk about that she wouldn’t have had otherwise.
When she was with the Brucks … A flush from the bathroom said Isidor would be coming out. She put that one on the back burner.
Was this what marriage was about? Giving up part of yourself you hadn’t even been aware you had in exchange for love? She had no doubt that Isidor loved her. She loved him, too. It wasn’t that he made her abandon that part. But he didn’t have its match, so showing it to him seemed pointless.
But he had points of his own. As he sat down beside her, he said, “I heard this one from an Aryan the other day, if you can believe it. Hitler, Goebbels, and Göring are on a plane that crashes. Everybody aboard gets killed. Who is saved?”
Something in the way her father’s mouth twitched told her he already knew the joke. But all he said was, “Nu? Who?” She was glad, because she hadn’t heard it, and she didn’t think her mother had, either.
“The German people,” Isidor answered, and exploded into laughter.
If there were microphones in the house, they were all in trouble. Sarah knew as much. She laughed anyway. So did Mother. “An Aryan told you that?” Father asked Isidor. He was also laughing, even as he went on, “Was he an SS man, seeing if he could land you in trouble because you thought it was funny?”
“No, no.” Isidor shook his head. “Not like that. It was one old guy talking to another one on the street. I heard it walking by.”
“Ach, so.” Samuel Goldman relaxed. “That should be all right, then. Nobody seems happy with the way things are going.”
“ ‘We continue the advance on the important Soviet citadel of Smolensk.’ ” Isidor amazed Sarah. She hadn’t dreamt he could imitate a self-important newsreader so well.
He surprised Sarah’s father, too. Samuel Goldman let out a sudden bray of laughter, then looked at Isidor as if he’d never really seen him before. Maybe he hadn’t. And maybe now he saw some little piece of what Sarah saw in the baker’s son.
Walking back to their little room after the visit, Isidor said, “I like talking with your mother and father. They’re … interesting.”
“Peculiar but fun?” Sarah’s voice was dry.
Isidor kicked a pebble down the sidewalk. “You said that. I didn’t.”
You sure meant it, though, Sarah thought. She cocked her head to one side—a gesture her father might have used—and asked, “Do you think I’m … interesting, too?”
This time, Isidor didn’t hesitate for a second. “Darn right I do!” He was undressing her with his eyes.
“Not like that, Dummkopf,” she said, though the eager stare warmed her. “Like my folks, I mean.”
“Oh.” To him, that seemed less important. But he nodded after a moment. “Yeah, I guess so. You … kind of think lefthanded, if you know what I mean.”
If Sarah hadn’t thought that way, she wouldn’t have. As things were, she batted her eyes at him and murmured, “You say the sweetest things.” If you couldn’t always leave them happy, sometimes confused worked almost as well.
THE IVAN STRUGGLED out of his hole. Blood from a small wound to his ear dripped onto his baggy khaki tunic. He left his rifle behind and kept his hands over his head. “Freund!” he said hopefully. “Kamerad!”
Luc Harcourt’s lip curled in scorn. “You stupid sack of shit, I’m no fucking German,” he answered in his own language.
“Mon Dieu! C’est vrai! Vous-êtes français!” To Luc’s amazement, the Russian—corporal, if he was reading the rank badges the right way—spoke a French as near perfect as made no difference. The fellow went on, “The Boches were in this sector yesterday, and I did not even think to look at your uniform. A thousand apologies, Monsieur. Ten thousa
nd!”
Sure as hell, German tanks had passed through here the day before. The French infantry was helping to clean up the pocket the armor had carved out. “If I was a Boche, odds are you’d be dead right now,” Luc said.
“Vous-avez raison,” the Russian agreed. “Once more, I thank you for your mercy.”
Luc didn’t know how long he’d stay merciful. Prisoners were a pain in the ass. But a prisoner who spoke French as if he were educated at the Sorbonne might be worth something. Intelligence sure wouldn’t have any trouble interrogating him. Luc gestured with his rifle. “Well, c’mon. Get moving.”
“But of course.” The Russian put a hand to the side of his head. Naturally, it came away bloody. “How badly am I hurt?”
“Just an ear. Those always bleed like mad bastards, but it’s only a little wound,” Luc answered with rough sympathy. Then he said, “Hang on. Take off your belt—nice and slow. Don’t do anything stupid. You can hold up your pants with one hand afterwards.”
“Oui, Monsieur.” The Ivan obeyed. The belt had several grenades on it. Only after it lay on the ground and the prisoner had straightened up again did Luc relax—a few millimeters’ worth, anyhow.
“Now get moving,” he told the guy, and the Russian did. After a few steps, he asked, “How come you speak such good French?”
“It is the language of culture—and I am, or I was, a student of French history. Yevgeni Borisovich Novikov, at your service.” The POW made as if to bow, but didn’t follow through.
Culture. Right, Luc thought. The so-called student of French history looked like any other captured Russian: dirty, whiskery, in a baggy tunic and breeches. The splatters of blood from his ear were just accents. (But for the blood and the cut of his uniform, Luc didn’t look much different himself.)
After a few steps, he did ask what was on his mind: “If you’re so educated and everything, how come you’re only a crappy corporal and not an officer?” Why should he worry about offending a prisoner he’d never see again?
The War That Came Early: Coup d'Etat Page 34
