“Won’t it be wonderful,” Mouradian said in his Armenian-accented Russian, “if we lead the Fascists to our airstrip and they shoot us up after we land?”
“Fucking wonderful,” Sergei half-agreed. His superiors wouldn’t love him for leading the Luftwaffe back to the field. But what could you do? His only other choice was putting down on the first open ground he saw. And if it was rough or muddy—and odds were it would be one or the other if not both—he was asking to go nose-up or dig a prop or a wingtip into the dirt. His superiors wouldn’t love him for that, either.
There was the airstrip. Groundcrew men could get the plane under cover in a hurry. Sergei landed in a hurry, too—as much a controlled crash as a proper descent. His teeth clicked together when the landing gear smacked the ground. He tasted blood—he’d bitten his tongue. Anastas said something flavorful in Armenian that he didn’t translate.
“You all right, Ivan?” Sergei asked the bombardier.
“I’m here, anyway,” Kuchkov answered darkly.
That would do. Right now, anything would. They scrambled out of the plane. The groundcrew men hauled it towards a revetment. They’d drape camouflage netting over it. In minutes, it would be next to impossible to spot from the air. No 109s circled overhead or swooped low. All the same, Sergei decided he could hardly wait for the rasputitsa to kick in full bore.
THE FRONT WAS PARIS. Alistair Walsh would have known as much even if papers didn’t scream it, even if posters weren’t pasted to everything that didn’t try to pick you up. Bomb craters and, now, shell hits from Nazi heavy artillery told their own story. When the 105s started reaching the City of Light, that would be real trouble.
No, Walsh thought. When the Boches drive their tanks down the Champs-Élysées, that’s real trouble. Till it happened, he’d damn well enjoy Paris instead of fighting in it.
Or he hoped he would. This time, he didn’t exactly have leave. His unit had fallen back into the eastern outskirts of town. Maybe they were supposed to be setting up somewhere, getting ready to hold back the next German push. If they were, though, nobody’d bothered to tell him about it.
In a way, that wasn’t so good. It said orders from on high weren’t getting where they needed to go. He would have been more upset were he less surprised. If the Germans kept pushing everybody else back, of course things would go to hell every so often. God only knew they had in 1918.
A lot of Parisians had already run away. On the other hand, a lot of provincials from the north and west had fled into Paris one step ahead of the invaders. You couldn’t be sure whether the face that peered out a window at you belonged to a homeowner or a squatter who’d picked a lock or broken a window. If you were a Tommy, what the hell difference did it make, anyhow?
Plenty of bars stayed open. Most of the men who filled them were soldiers—French, English, or from heaven knew where. Walsh had run into Czechs before. Maybe the hard-drinking fellows who spat incomprehensible consonants at one another were more from that lot. Or maybe they were Yugoslav adventurers or White Russians or…But what the hell difference did that make, either?
One of the poilus had a concertina. When he started playing it, several other Frenchmen sang with more enthusiasm than tune. Walsh knew just enough of the language to recognize a dirty word or two every line. The barmaids pretended to be shocked. Their acting might have been even worse than the soldiers’ singing.
Half a dozen military policemen stormed into the joint. The concertina squalled to a stop. The French MPs started hauling poilus out into the street. Then they grabbed one of the maybe-Czechs. He was in French uniform. He said something to them. It didn’t help—they dragged him toward the door. Then he hit one of them in the face. The Frenchman went down with a groan. His buddy, unperturbed, hauled out a blackjack and coshed the Slav, who also crumpled. He might not have wanted to go wherever they were taking people, but he would.
Walsh’s hand tightened on his mug of piss-sour, piss-thin beer. They wouldn’t haul him off without a fight.
They didn’t haul him off. One of them nodded his way, shrugged Gallically, and said, “Eh bien, Monsieur le Anglais?” He pointed to the flattened MP and soldier, as if to say, Well, what can you do?
“Just leave me alone, that’s all.” Walsh didn’t loosen his grip on the mug. He didn’t want to provoke the military police, but he also didn’t want them taking him anywhere.
By the time they got through, they’d more than half emptied the dive. “Wot’ll it be, mate?” the barman asked Walsh in English he might have picked up from an Australian in the last war.
“Another mug of the same.” For what Walsh felt like spending, the wine would be urine, too, and the whiskey or brandy loaded with enough fusel oil in them to make him wish he were dead come morning.
“Right y’are.” The barman was opening a bottle when Walsh heard the scream of a big shell in the air. Two wars’ worth of reflexes threw him flat on the floor a split second before the shell burst in the street outside.
Plywood covered the plate-glass windows. But how much did that help when a 150—maybe even a 170—blew up far too close? Blast shoved in the plywood—and brought down part of the roof. Fist-sized chunks of jagged metal slammed through wood and glass. Not so many knifelike glass splinters spun through the air as would have without the plywood, but one as long as a pencil buried itself in the side of the bar about three inches in front of Walsh’s nose.
More shells screamed in. He rolled himself into a ball, not that that would do him any good if his luck was out. Maybe it wasn’t. None of the others hit close enough to do the tavern any more harm. After an eternity of ten or fifteen minutes, the bombardment stopped.
Walsh had to make himself unroll. He felt like a sowbug that had just escaped an elephant. As he dazedly picked himself up, he realized not everybody in the little bar had been so lucky. If he wanted that beer, he would have to get it himself. The barman’s blood splashed broken bottles behind the bar. The stink of the spilled potables almost drowned the butcher-shop odor of blood.
Other soldiers were down, too. Walsh did what he could for them, which mostly consisted of pulling tables and chairs off them and using their wound dressings. He hoped he helped a little.
The door had been blasted open. The door, not to put too fine a point on it, had been blasted off its hinges, and lay in the middle of the floor. He stepped over it and out into the street, which now had a crater big enough to hold a horse. It was filling up with water from a broken main.
Staggering away, Walsh realized one thing was absolutely true—and absolutely terrifying. The front was Paris.
• • •
THE FRONT WAS THE USSURI RIVER. Northeastern Manchukuo was about as different from the Mongolian border region as anything Sergeant Hideki Fujita could imagine. Gone were waterless wastes with camels and wild asses running through them. Great forests of pine towered toward the sky here. Rain—and sometimes snow—poured down out of the sky. Japanese soldiers who’d been here longer than Fujita said tigers prowled these woods. He didn’t know about that. He’d seen no sign of them himself. But he wouldn’t have been surprised.
He did know there were Russians on the far side of the Ussuri. That was the same here as it had been 800 kilometers to the west.
Not far east of the Ussuri, the Russians’ Trans-Siberian Railroad ran south toward Vladivostok. If Japan could get astride the railroad, the USSR’s eastern port would fall into Japanese hands like a ripe fruit.
Fujita crouched in a log-roofed dugout artistically camouflaged with dirt and pine boughs and, now, the latest snowfall. He peered across the Ussuri toward the Red Army positions on the far bank. He couldn’t see as much as he would have liked. The other side of the border was as thickly wooded as this one—and the Russians, damn them, were at least as good as his own people at hiding what they were up to.
“What do you see, Sergeant?” Lieutenant Kenji Hanafusa asked.
“Trees, sir. Snow,” Fujita answered. “Not much
else. No tigers. No Russians, either.”
“They’re there,” the lieutenant said.
“Oh, yes, sir,” Fujita agreed. “They’re everywhere. The Mongols would have fallen over years ago if the Russians weren’t propping them up.”
“No, the Russians are really everywhere,” Hanafusa said. “A quarter of the way around the world, they’re fighting the Poles and the Germans. And that’s why we’re here. When things get cooking on this front, they’ll be too busy in the west to do anything about it.”
“Yes, sir,” Fujita said resignedly. Japanese officers always figured enlisted men were hayseeds. The sergeant had figured out why his unit was transferring from the Mongolian border to the northeast as soon as it got the order. He knew what a map looked like. And if he’d never slept in a bed with a frame and legs till he got conscripted…Lieutenant Hanafusa didn’t need to know that.
“As soon as the weather warms up and the snow melts, I think we’ll move,” Hanafusa said.
“Sounds good to me, sir,” Fujita said. You needed as many clothes here in the winter as you did in Mongolia, and that was saying something.
Something buzzed by high overhead: an airplane. “Is that one of ours or one of theirs?” Hanafusa asked.
“Let me see, sir.” Fujita raised the field glasses. The plane was too far off to let him make out whether it bore the Rising Sun or the Soviet red star. But he recognized the outline, and spoke confidently: “It’s one of ours, sir.”
“Well, good,” Hanafusa said. Both sides sent up reconnaissance planes: each wanted to see what the other was up to. Every so often, one side would send up fighters to chase off the spies or shoot them down. Sometimes the other side would send up fighters of its own. Then the men on the ground could watch dogfights and cheer on the planes they thought were theirs.
Sergeant Fujita hoped the Russians would open up with their antiaircraft guns. He didn’t want them hitting the Japanese plane—that was the last thing he had in mind. But if they started shooting at it, his side could see where they’d positioned their guns. That would be worth knowing when the big fight started.
He wasn’t much surprised when the guns stayed silent. The Russians were better at hiding their artillery till they really needed it than he’d imagined anyone could be. If you didn’t think they had any guns nearby, half a dozen batteries were zeroed in on you. If you thought you knew about those half a dozen batteries, four wouldn’t be where you expected them to be and you’d missed another half a dozen. You wouldn’t find out about them, either, not till the Russians needed to show them to you.
He said as much to Lieutenant Hanafusa. Not all of the Kwantung Army had as much experience with the Russians as the men who’d fought them in Mongolia did. These fellows who’d been on the Ussuri or over by the Amur…well, what did they know? Not much, not so far as Fujita could see.
But Hanafusa nodded. “Thank you, Sergeant,” he said. “We’ve seen that ourselves. There have been skirmishes along this frontier, too, you know. Even the Korean Army got into the act—but they had to ask us for help when the Russians turned out to have more than they expected.”
“All right, sir.” Fujita wasn’t sure it was, but what could he say?
He did share Hanafusa’s scorn for the Korean Army. The Kwantung Army was a power unto itself. It dictated policy for Japan as often as Tokyo told it what to do. The Kwantung Army had masterminded and spearheaded the Japanese thrust deep into China. Some people said there were men in the Cabinet back in Japan who didn’t like that and wanted to pull back. If there were, those people were keeping their mouths shut and walking softly. Army officers had assassinated Cabinet ministers before. They could again, and everybody knew it.
The only force that had any chance of restraining the Kwantung Army wasn’t the Cabinet. It was the Navy. Generals here saw the Russians looming over Manchukuo like the bears cartoonists drew them as. The admirals looked across the ocean and babbled about America—and, sometimes, England.
“Can the Americans give us trouble, sir?” Fujita blurted.
“What? Here on the Ussuri?” Lieutenant Hanafusa stared. “Don’t be ridiculous.”
Fujita’s cheeks heated in spite of the chilly wind wailing down from Siberia. “No, sir, I didn’t mean that. I meant, well, anywhere.”
“Oh. I see.” The lieutenant relaxed. “Mm, they won’t jump in and pull the Russians’ chestnuts out of the fire, the way they did in the Russo-Japanese War. I’m sure of that. The Communists don’t have any friends. England and France are fighting Germany, too, but the two wars might as well be one on the moon, the other on the sun. They don’t like Stalin any better than we do, and neither do the Americans.”
“Yes, sir.” That did help ease Fujita’s mind. All the same, he went on, “I’ve talked to some guys who served in Peking. They say the United States doesn’t like what we’re doing in China.”
“Who are these people?” Hanafusa asked softly.
Sergeant Fujita beat a hasty retreat: “I don’t know their names, sir. Just some guys I was talking with waiting in line for comfort women.” That wasn’t exactly true, but Lieutenant Hanafusa would never prove it. You didn’t rat on your friends.
“I see.” The lieutenant had to know it was a lie, but he also had to know he wouldn’t get anything more. His snort sent steam jetting from his nostrils. “Your brothel buddies aren’t too smart—that’s all I’ve got to say. The Americans go right on selling us fuel oil and scrap metal, no matter what’s happening in China. As long as they keep doing that, they don’t much care—right?”
“Oh, yes, sir.” Fujita knew he wasn’t the smartest guy ever born. But he wasn’t dumb enough to get into an argument with an officer. If you were that dumb…He shook his head. He couldn’t imagine anybody that dumb, not in the Japanese Army.
Julius Lemp scowled at U-30. “What the hell have you done to my boat?” he demanded of the engineering officer standing with him on the quay at Kiel.
“It’s a Dutch invention,” that worthy answered. “We captured several of their subs that use it. We’re calling it a snorkel—well, some of the guys who install it call it a snort, but you know how mechanics are.”
“Ugliest goddamn thing I’ve ever seen,” Lemp said. “It looks like the boat’s got a hard-on.”
The engineering officer chuckled. “Well, I’ve never heard that one before.”
He couldn’t appease Lemp so easily. “All you have to do is put it on. I’m the poor son of a bitch who has to take it to sea. Why the hell did you pick on me?”
“I couldn’t say anything about that. I got my orders and I carried them out,” the engineering officer replied. He wasn’t chuckling any more. “If you’ve really got your tits in a wringer about it, go talk to Admiral Dönitz.”
That shut Lemp up with a snap. He’d done more talking with the head of the U-boat force than he ever wanted to, and about less pleasant subjects. Sinking an American liner when the Reich wasn’t at war with the USA would do that to you. German propaganda loudly insisted England had lowered the boom on the Athenia. Lemp and Dönitz both knew better.
And despite all that, it could have been worse. Lemp hadn’t got demoted. He did have that reprimand sitting in his promotion jacket like a big, stinking turd, but nobody’d said a word about putting him on the beach and letting him fill out forms for the rest of the war. A good thing, too, because he wanted nothing more than to go to sea.
But…The Kriegsmarine had its ways of showing it was unhappy with an officer, all right. Loading down his boat with experimental equipment was one of them. You didn’t want a skipper you really cared about to play the guinea pig. Oh, no. In that case, you’d lose somebody you wanted to keep if the—the goddamn snort, that’s what it was—didn’t work as advertised. But if that happened in U-30…
Poor old Lemp, people in the know would say. First the liner and now this. He wasn’t lucky, was he?
Poor old Lemp, poor old Lemp thought. He was stuck with it, all right.
“I don’t need to talk to the admiral,” he mumbled after a long silence.
“No? Good.” The engineering officer paused in the middle of lighting a cigarette. A chilly breeze blew off the Baltic, but it didn’t faze him. He was one of those people who could keep a match alive in any weather with no more than his cupped hands. It was a useful knack for submariners, who had to come up onto the conning tower to smoke. Some guys had it and some didn’t; that was all there was to it. Happily puffing away, the engineering officer went on, “You’ll take two engineers to sea with you this cruise.”
“Wunderbar,” Lemp said. A U-boat needed a second engineer the way a fighter plane needed an extra prop in its tail. The only reason you took one was to train him so he could become the engineer on a new boat his next time out.
Or so Lemp thought, till the engineering officer told him, “Leutnant Beilharz is an expert on using the snorkel.” Lemp would have liked that better if he hadn’t tempered it with, “If anybody is, of course.” Still, maybe it meant the powers that be didn’t actively hope he’d sink. Maybe.
Gerhart Beilharz proved improbably young and improbably enthusiastic. He also proved improbably tall: within a centimeter either way of two meters. Type VII boats—hell, all submarines—were cramped enough if you were short. With all the pipes and conduits running along just above the level of most people’s heads…“You’re asking to get your skull split,” Lemp said.
“I know,” Beilharz said. He pulled an infantryman’s Stahlhelm out of his duffel bag. “I got this from my cousin. He’s somewhere in France right now. I’m pretty good at remembering to duck, but maybe the helmet’ll keep me from knocking my brains out when I forget.”
“That’d be nice,” Lemp agreed dryly. “Try not to smash up the valves and such when you go blundering through the boat, if you don’t mind.”
“Jawohl!” Gerhart Beilharz said—he really was an eager puppy.
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