The Russians weren’t blind. They could see that, too. They would fight as hard as they could to protect the Trans-Siberian Railroad. But the Russian heartland lay thousands of kilometers off to the west. Japan lay right across the sea that bore her name. The Amur separated Manchukuo from the USSR, the Yalu divided Chosen—Korea, to old people—from Stalin’s ramshackle Asiatic empire. Logistics, then, were all on Japan’s side.
So the big fight would be there, along the border between Japan’s mainland possessions and Soviet Siberia. This Mongol business was only a sideshow. It would never be anything but a sideshow—that was how it looked to Sergeant Fujita, anyhow.
He sighed. “We’re stuck here, neh?”
“Yes, I think we are.” Captain Hasegawa sent him a shrewd look. “Why? Would you rather be on the Amur?”
“Yes, sir, I would.” Fujita didn’t beat around the bush. “What happens there really means something. This…This is nothing but a bunch of crap. Please excuse me for saying so, sir, but it’s true.”
He waited for a reprimand, or maybe even a slap in the face. You weren’t supposed to complain about your assignment. Oh, you could grouse with your buddies. But to a superior you were supposed to pretend everything was fine. Well, things weren’t fine. And, dammit, the company commander asked. All Fujita did was tell the truth. Of course, sometimes that was the most dangerous thing you could do, even more dangerous than charging a Russian machine-gun nest.
“We do need men here. We can’t let the Russians and Mongols steal what’s ours,” Hasegawa said. “But I admit, I wish I weren’t one of them, too.” He shrugged. “Somebody has to do it, though, and it looks like we’re the ones.”
Sergeant Fujita sighed one more time: a martyr’s sigh. “Yes, sir.”
JOAQUIN DELGADILLO WATCHED ITALIAN TANKS clank toward the front. The crews looked impressive in their black coveralls. Delgadillo didn’t let the stylish uniforms fool him. The Italians looked much less impressive in full retreat, and he’d seen that move more often than he cared to remember.
Mussolini’s soldiers didn’t want to be in Spain. They cared nothing for Marshal Sanjurjo’s war. And they fought like it, too. If the Reds who fought for the Republic didn’t run away, the Italians would.
The Condor Legion, now…The Condor Legion was different. Joaquin Delgadillo didn’t like Germans. He didn’t see how you could. To him, as to any Spaniard with a working set of cojones, Germans were technicians, not warriors. They made no bones about why they’d come to Spain: to learn what they needed to know for the upcoming European war. Now that war wasn’t upcoming. It was here.
But the armored forces and machine-gun units in the Condor Legion had never got a name for cutting and running, the way the Italians had. Maybe courage wasn’t what kept them in the field. Maybe it was just professional self-respect. Whatever it was, you had to admire it. This might not have been the Germans’ fight, but they performed as if it were.
Now the Germans in Spain had the same enemies as the ones back in Germany: Communists, freethinkers, republicans, liberals of every stripe. And they, and the Italians, and Marshal Sanjurjo, were doing everything they could to crush the enemy here before the aid flooding in from France and England let the Red Republic seize the initiative.
Those Italian tanks kept rattling forward. Vinaroz, on the eastern coast, lay a few kilometers to the north. Sanjurjo’s men had already taken the town once, when they cut the Republic in half. Now an enemy drive down from Catalonia, one backed by French armor and aircraft, had recaptured it.
“What do you think?” Delgadillo asked his sergeant. “Can we get it back?”
Miguel Carrasquel shrugged. “That’s what our orders are,” he answered, which meant, We’ll keep trying till we’re all dead, or till the orders change—and don’t expect the orders to change. Carrasquel had bad teeth and was missing half his left ear. His grin, then, looked most unpleasant. “What’s the matter, Prettyboy? Don’t want to get messed up?”
Joaquin didn’t think he was especially handsome. But the sergeant called anybody who hadn’t been wounded Prettyboy. You didn’t want to get mad about it. Carrasquel was a good man with a knife.
Machine-gun bullets spanged off the Italian tanks and tankettes. The commanders in the impressive black coveralls ducked down behind the shelter of their armor. One or two of them waited too long, and got hit before they could. The armored fighting vehicles clattered forward anyhow. Joaquin nodded to himself. He didn’t mind people ducking when the enemy shot at them. He did it himself—who didn’t? As long as you carried on regardless, you earned your pay.
Tanks were magnets for machine-gun fire. He’d seen that before. Fewer bullets fought the Nationalist foot soldiers who loped along with the mechanical monsters. Since Joaquin was one of those soldiers, he approved of that. One bullet hitting you was one too many.
Most of the men up ahead didn’t wear uniforms at all: not what he thought of as uniforms, anyhow. They had on overalls instead, as if they were factory workers. That made them Catalan Communists or anarchists. Up till the war started, they had been factory workers. The ones still alive after two and a half years of fighting knew their business as well as any other veterans.
Clang! That cry of metal against tortured metal wasn’t a machine-gun bullet. That was an AP shell from a cannon striking home. Sure as the devil, a tankette came to an abrupt halt. Smoke and then fire poured from it. Ammunition inside started cooking off. Joaquin didn’t think either Italian got out.
“Tanks!” Somebody pointed ahead. The man’s voice wasn’t panicked, but it wasn’t far removed, either. More often than not, the Nationalists had had tanks and the Republicans hadn’t. With aid flooding over the Pyrenees from France, the miserable Reds were getting more of their own.
These machines were French, all right. By the look of them, they’d been around since the last war. But they had turrets and treads and cannon and enough steel to keep out small-arms fire. If they weren’t exactly swift…well, so what?
One of them fired at an Italian tank. Clang! There was that horrible bell-like sound again. The Italian machine’s armor wasn’t thick enough to hold out an armor-piercing round. Somebody got out of an escape hatch in the turret before the tank brewed up. It didn’t do him much good—a burst from a machine gun cut him down before he’d run ten meters.
Tanks on both sides stopped to fire at foes, then got moving again to make themselves harder to hit. The Italian tankettes kept on moving and shooting. They mounted only machine guns, and weren’t dangerous to real tanks. They could do horrible things to infantry, though.
As the tanks slowed, so did the rest of the Nationalist advance. Joaquin flopped onto his belly behind a pile of rubble that had been a stone barn. Every so often, he rose up enough to fire. Then he crawled somewhere else before squeezing off another round. No sniper would draw an easy bead on him. Veterans learned things like that. The guys who didn’t…didn’t get to be veterans.
Sergeant Carrasquel crouched behind a fence not far away. Delgadillo waited for the sergeant to order him forward again. But the squad leader stayed where he was, firing every now and then. He kept his mouth shut. Maybe he’d decided the attack wouldn’t get much farther no matter what.
Joaquin Delgadillo sure felt that way. The Republicans had been tough even while outnumbered and outgunned. This push, plainly, aimed to take back as much as possible from them while they still were.
It also seemed designed to get a lot of Nationalist soldiers killed. Mortar bombs started whispering down around Joaquin and Sergeant Carrasquel. Both men dug like moles. Joaquin hated mortars. The Republicans had been using a Russian model for a long time. Now they also had French tubes, and those were just as good or maybe even better.
Somebody yowled like a wildcat, which meant a jagged steel fragment had bitten him. Joaquin hoped it was no one he knew. You always hated to hear a buddy get it. That reminded you how easily you might stop something yourself.
“Ave Maria,�
�� Joaquin whispered. As he went through the Hail Mary in Latin, his left hand found the rosary in his tunic pocket. Keep me safe, he thought. Let Marshal Sanjurjo win, but please, God, keep me safe.
THE NORTH SEA IN NOVEMBER was nowhere a skipper wanted to go. It was even less pleasant in a U-boat than it would have been in a larger surface warship. Lieutenant Julius Lemp guided U-30 north and east. He had to get around the British Isles to take up his assigned position in the mid-Atlantic.
He liked everything about his boat except the way it rolled and pitched in the heavy seas. Type VII U-boats made everything that had come before them seem like children’s toys by comparison. They had outstanding range. They could make seventeen knots on the surface and eight submerged, and could go eighteen hours at four knots underwater.
During the last war, the British mined the northern reaches of the North Sea, trying to bottle up the U-boats. With hundreds and hundreds of kilometers between Scotland and Norway, they couldn’t sew things up tight there the way they did in the Channel. But they could make life difficult, and they did.
They were supposed to be trying the same thing this time around. Lemp had orders to sink any minelayers he spotted. Odds against spying any were long: it was a big ocean, and he couldn’t see very much of it, even with the Zeiss binoculars hanging around his neck. But his superiors were thorough. They wouldn’t have got those wide gold stripes on their sleeves if they weren’t.
Gray clouds scudded low overhead, driven by a strong west wind. In clear weather, Lemp would have scanned sky as well as sea with his binoculars. One thing had changed from the last war: airplanes were much more dangerous than they had been. They could carry bigger bombs, and carry them farther. And they all had radio sets, so they could guide enemy warships to a U-boat’s path.
In this weather, though, a plane would have a devil of a time spotting the U-30. Lemp thought a pilot would have to be nuts even to take off, but he also thought pilots were nuts. Maybe it evened out.
About the most interesting thing he saw on his watch was a puffin that landed on the conning tower for a moment. With its plump, dignified body and the big beak in bright crayon colors, the bird looked as if a talented but strange child had drawn it. It also looked confused, as if wondering how this convenient little island had popped up in the middle of the sea. Then it noticed Julius Lemp—and then it was flying away again, as fast as it could.
“I don’t like puffin stew,” Lemp said. The wind blew his words away. Chances were the puffin wouldn’t have believed him anyway. Birds didn’t live to grow old by trusting people.
At 1400 on the dot, Ensign Klaus Hammerstein’s shoes clanged on the iron rungs of the ladder leading up to the top of the conning tower. “I relieve you, sir,” the youngster said formally, and then, “Anything I need to know?”
“Don’t talk to puffins,” Lemp replied, deadpan.
Hammerstein’s left eyebrow—the sardonic one—rose a few millimeters. “Hadn’t really planned to…sir.” He took a deep breath, and his expression cleared. “Nice to get up here, isn’t it?”
“Don’t remind me. I’m going the other way.” With a sigh, Lemp descended into the bowels of the U-30.
When the sun shone brightly, when the sky was blue, when the sea was smooth, you could easily think that coming off watch and going back into the iron coffin that let you do your job was like going from heaven to hell. With winter on its way in the North Sea, the change wasn’t that bad, but it sure wasn’t good.
Bowels…Julius Lemp wished he hadn’t thought of that particular word, because it fit much too well. U-boats filled with every stench in the world; they might have been a distillery for bad smells. High on the list was the reek from the heads. Toilets that worked without putting the boat at risk of flooding were something German engineering was…almost up to. No U-boat had ever been lost because of a malfunctioning head—which didn’t make the toilets a nice place to be around.
Unwashed bodies, musty clothes, and stale food added to the reek. U-boats carried enough drinking water. Water for washing was a luxury they didn’t bother with. Seawater and saltwater soap were supposed to make up the lack. As with the heads, theory ran several lengths in front of performance.
Bilgewater added a swampy smell as old as the sea—as old as boats, anyhow. When you first came down into it, the combination was enough to knock you for a loop. After a while, you stopped smelling it—your brain blanked it out. But when you’d been breathing fresh salt air, the change was like getting a garbage can thrown in your face.
The sailors looked as if they might have been demons from hell, too. The orange light bulbs didn’t help. More to it than those, though. A U-boat skipper couldn’t insist on spit and polish the way officers in ordinary warships did. The men were too cramped together here—and U-boat crewmen were commonly harder cases than sailors in surface ships, too.
A lot of them started beards as soon as they left port. Shaving with saltwater soap was no fun. Even if it were, these guys were a raffish lot. They enjoyed flouting regulations. Lemp couldn’t very well ream them out for it, not when he was sprouting strawberry-blond face fungus himself.
Off-duty men looked up from a game of skat. Nobody jumped to his feet and saluted. If you sprang to attention on a U-boat, you were liable to coldcock yourself on an overhead pipe. In that, U-boats were like panzers: being a shrimp helped.
He hadn’t been below long when a shout floated down from the conning tower: “Ship ho! Ship off the starboard bow!”
That sent him scrambling up the ladder again. He wanted to see the ship for himself. No—he needed to see it for himself. If it was a warship, he would sink it if he could. No German surface units were in these waters. But if it was a freighter…Life got complicated then. Belgium and Holland, Norway and Denmark and Sweden were neutrals. Sinking a freighter bound for one of them could land the Reich in hot water. Freighters shaping a course for England, though, were fair game.
Up into the fresh air again. “Where away, Klaus?” he asked.
“There, sir.” Hammerstein pointed. “A smoke smudge.”
“Ja.” Lemp saw it, too. “We’ll have to get closer, see what it is.” They could do that. The U-30’s diesel engines gave off less smoke than did ships burning fuel oil or coal. And the gray-painted U-boat sat low in the water, making it hard to spot. Julius Lemp called down the hatch: “Change course to 350. I say again—350.”
“Jawohl. Changing course to 350,” the helmsman answered, and the U-30 swung almost due north.
Lemp and Hammerstein both raised their binoculars, waiting for the ship to come up over the horizon. Lemp didn’t forget the rest of the seascape and the sky. You could get caught with your pants down if you concentrated too much on your prey. That was how you turned into prey yourself. Every so often, when the skipper lowered his field glasses for a moment, he looked over at Ensign Hammerstein. The pup hadn’t forgotten to look other places besides dead ahead, either. Good.
“That’s no freighter, sir,” Hammerstein said after a while.
“Damn right it isn’t,” Lemp agreed. The silhouette, while tiny, was too sleek, too well raked, to haul anything so mundane as barley or iron ore. Easier to mistake a thoroughbred for a cart horse than a freighter for a…“Destroyer, I think, or maybe a minelayer.”
“I want one of those!” the ensign said. “The bastards are dangerous.”
“Too right they are,” Lemp replied. Admirals sneered at mines—but admirals didn’t have to face them. Sailors who did had a healthy respect for them. Mines were worse than a nuisance—they were a scourge. And they were an economical scourge, because they murdered ships without endangering the murderers…most of the time. But not today! Lemp set a hand on Hammerstein’s shoulder. “Let’s go below.”
The U-30 stalked the enemy warship at periscope depth. That slowed the approach, but no help for it. If the ship spotted the U-boat, she could get away—or fight back. In a surface action, the U-30 was doomed. Her deck guns were for s
hooting up freighters and shooting down airplanes, not for taking on anything with real weaponry.
“It is a minelayer, by God!” Lemp said. The silhouette matched the one in Jane’s Fighting Ships. How thoughtful of the English to help destroy themselves. The enemy vessel went about her business without the slightest suspicion the U-30 was anywhere in the neighborhood. That was just how Lemp liked it. It might as well have been a training run. He sneaked to within a kilometer.
At his orders, the torpedomen readied three fish in the forward tubes. The enemy ship filled the periscope’s field of view. Fighter pilots from Spain said you had to get close to make sure of a hit. The same held true under the sea.
“First torpedo—los!” Lemp called. Clang! Whoosh! “Second torpedo—los!” Clang! Whoosh “Third torpedo—los!” Clang! Whoosh!
Under two minutes to the target. The minelayer showed sudden, urgent smoke—someone aboard her must have spotted the wakes. But you couldn’t do much, not in that little bit of time. And Lemp had aimed one of the torpedoes on the assumption that the enemy vessel would speed up.
Boom! “Hit!” Lemp shouted exultantly. The U-30’s crew cheered. Then a much bigger Boom! followed. The exploding torpedo must have touched off the mines the enemy ship carried. The minelayer went up in a fireball—and the U-boat might have been under the worst depth-charge attack in the world. It staggered in the water. Light bulbs blew from bow to stern, plunging the boat into darkness. Several leaks started.
With matter-of-fact competence, the crew went to work setting things to rights. Torches flashed on. Sailors began stopping the leaks. Lemp ordered U-30 to the surface. If there were survivors, he’d pick them up. He didn’t expect trouble, anyhow.
And he didn’t get any. Bodies floated in the chilly water. He saw no British sailors still alive. With that stunning blast, he was hardly surprised. A little disappointed, maybe, but not surprised. The minelayer had already gone to the bottom.
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