Last Orders: The War That Came Early (32 page)

Finding the airstrip from which he’d taken off was another adventure. Only dim lamps marked it—anything more would have invited a call from English or French planes. Landing when those lights were all he could see was nothing he’d trained for.

A couple of pilots in the squadron had already had to write off their Stukas. One was still in the hospital with burns and broken bones. Hans-Ulrich got down with no worse than a jolt. Still, this wasn’t a business for the faint of heart.

When he went to the commander’s tent to report on the mission, he was glad to find Colonel Steinbrenner sitting behind his little folding table. Only a paraffin lantern and the colonel’s cigarette coal shed any light on things. They made Steinbrenner’s face look older and wearier than it was.

“Yes, I saw it, too,” the squadron CO said when Hans-Ulrich mentioned the Stuka shot down over Paris. “That was Rolf Wutka and Sergeant Schmidt.”

“Aii!”
Hans-Ulrich said, and covered his eyes with one hand. “I went to flying school with Rolf.” They hadn’t got on that well, then or later, but even so … “I feel like a goose walked over my grave. Not many of us left who’ve been going up since before the war.”

“No, not many,” Steinbrenner agreed. He was one—he’d been doing it longer than Rudel. After a moment, he went on, “Things could be worse, you know. We could be bombing our own cities instead of the enemy’s.”

“Have
Luftwaffe
units started doing that?” Hans-Ulrich asked. He’d always been a man stolidly loyal to those set in authority over him.
Past that, he was about as political as an apricot tree. Even someone like him, though, couldn’t help knowing how restive the
Reich
had got these days.

“If they have, I haven’t heard about it, and I think I would have,” Colonel Steinbrenner said. He might have added more, but stubbed out the cigarette instead. The way he shook his head seemed to tell Hans-Ulrich he’d thought better of whatever it was. Maybe it didn’t matter. Maybe it mattered so much, he didn’t trust Hans-Ulrich with it. Sighing, he went on, “Anything else about your return flight?”

“Only the adventure of landing.” Rudel gave back a lopsided grin. “But you already know about that, don’t you?”

“For a second there, when I was getting my nose up, I wished I were wearing a diaper under my long johns,” Steinbrenner said. “About the only worse thing I can think of would be coming in on an aircraft carrier’s flight deck at night.”

Germany had started building a carrier. When the war broke out, the
Graf Zeppelin
got shelved. All those tonnes of steel went into other things instead. Hans-Ulrich tried to imagine landing on a rolling, pitching deck with only lanterns to guide him in. “You’re right, sir. That would be worse. I didn’t think anything could be,” he said. “Still, I’d like to try it, you know?”

“From most people, that would be bragging. From most people, it’d be
Quatsch
, is what it’d be,” Steinbrenner said. “From you, though, from you I believe it. I remember how you won your
Ritterkreuz
.” Hans-Ulrich touched the medal he wore at his throat. He was the one who’d thought of mounting panzer-busting cannons under a Stuka’s wings. He was the one who’d taken them up and tried them out, too. He shrugged. “I didn’t do it for the Knight’s Cross, sir.”

“I didn’t say you did,” Steinbrenner answered quietly. “That makes it more likely you’d want to fly onto a carrier, though, not less.”

“All I want to do is hit the enemy as hard as I can, however I can, wherever I can,” Rudel said.

“I know that.” Colonel Steinbrenner sighed again. “Life would be simpler if everyone were more like you.” He gestured. “For now, get out of here. Grab some sleep if you’re not too wound up. We’ll go out again tomorrow night as long as the weather’s not too beastly.”

“Zu Befehl, mein Herr!”
Hans-Ulrich said. One advantage to following the soldier’s trade was that you could always find the right answer.

Julius Lemp had taken the U-30 east through the Kiel Canal before. This time, though, he had men on the flak gun on the platform at the back of the conning tower. RAF raiders were growing bolder day by day. Yes, there were antiaircraft guns on both sides of the canal. Yes, a couple of Bf-109s buzzed overhead. Chances were he was worrying too much.

He kept men on the gun even so. If an enemy fighter-bomber did come after his boat here, he couldn’t dive to escape it. The canal wasn’t deep enough. He had to try to fight it off, or at least to make the flyer too anxious to be accurate.

No fighter-bombers roared in out of the west. Lemp relaxed when the U-boat came out into the broader waters of the Baltic. Now he could dive. He could dodge, too. Somehow he was sure that, if he hadn’t manned the gun, the English
would
have strafed him. There was an old joke about snapping your fingers to keep the elephants away. He knew about it. He just didn’t care. A U-boat skipper had better not care about jokes. Suspenders, belt, binder twine, a cummerbund … Whatever could possibly hold up his trousers.

Kiel wasn’t far from the eastern edge of the canal that bore its name. As the U-30 neared the port, Lemp saw smoke from two or three fires rising into the gray, hazy sky. He tugged at his beard in perplexity. “What’s going on there?” he said, pointing to the smoke plumes. “Do you suppose the RAF has started making serious daylight raids?”

Behind him, Gerhart Beilharz shrugged. Before the engineering officer could answer, what sounded like a cannon fired inside the city: once, twice, three times. Another column of smoke started going up. “I think we’re doing it to ourselves, skipper,” Beilharz answered sadly.

“That’s—madness,” Lemp said. But just because it was mad, that didn’t make it any less likely. The uprising that toppled the Kaiser at the end of the last war had started here, when sailors from the High
Seas Fleet mutinied against their officers. A lot of them were Reds, but every one of them was sick of the hopeless, losing fight.

Lemp couldn’t imagine a Bolshevik uprising in Kiel today, or anywhere else in Germany. But millions of people all through the
Grossdeutsches Reich
were sick of this hopeless, losing fight.

When Wilhelm II saw the jig was up, he went into exile in Holland and stayed there quietly for the rest of his life. Of all the things Lemp could imagine Adolf Hitler doing, going quietly into exile stood last on the list. Hitler would hang on to power as long as he could, and then another twenty minutes besides.

Naval infantrymen in
Stahlhelms
on the wharf aimed an antipanzer cannon at the incoming U-boat. The U-30’s deck gun was bigger and more powerful than that door-knocker on rubber tires, but it wouldn’t be the only piece aimed at the boat. It was just the only one the sailors could spot. And for a U-boat, which had no armor, any fight with artillery was a losing fight.

“Nice to see we’re welcome,” Lemp said, his voice frigid with fury.

“Sir, I think we would have got a friendlier hello if we put in at the quays by London Bridge.” Lieutenant Beilharz sounded disgusted, too.

“One good thing, anyhow,” Lemp said. “That damned SD pigdog with the manners of a wall lizard is still back in Wilhelmshaven—or I hope like blazes he is, anyhow.” Beilharz nodded. He’d spent plenty of time listening to his skipper vent his spleen on the subject of the security-mad
Sicherheitsdienst
man.

A petty officer with a megaphone bawled, “Continue your slow approach. Make no sudden, dangerous-looking maneuvers. Your crew will be taken off the boat for interrogation and evaluation before being released for liberty.”

Lemp waved to show he heard. Somebody from the boat would get fed up and tell the interrogators where to head in. He could see that coming like a rash. Then the blackshirts would jug the poor, pissed-off fool, and they’d sneak a spy aboard to take his place … assuming they didn’t already have one or several on the boat (an assumption Lemp didn’t hold).

Unless he felt like making a mutiny, he couldn’t do anything about
this. What the goons who gave that petty officer and more men like him their orders didn’t understand, though, was that such orders were almost an open invitation to making a mutiny. And when it came—oh, not from the U-30, not now, but from somewhere, and soon—the goons would have the gall to act surprised.

Or perhaps they wouldn’t. Those smoke plumes climbing into the sky argued that the nation had already mutinied against the government, regardless of whether the armed forces had.

One of the armed sailors who boarded the U-30 to take off the crew had an accident. All kinds of fittings on the boat stuck out or hung down where a careless man could bang his head on them and knock himself cold. So Lemp assured the excitable ensign who was thinking more along the lines of felonious assault.

Since the ensign couldn’t prove anything, and since Lemp outranked him and was almost old enough to be his father, he calmed down. He had to. Lemp smiled, but only behind the puppy’s back.

His men went off for their grillings. He expected to face the usual board of senior officers himself. They might not quiet down so fast about the poor naval infantryman’s “accident”—they were harder to con than an ensign not dry behind the ears.

Instead, Lemp found himself escorted into the presence of Admiral Karl Dönitz. He saluted less sloppily than he had in years. “Sir!” he said to the commander of the U-boat force.

“At ease, Commander,” Dönitz answered, his voice mild. His cheeks and forehead were broad, his chin narrow and pointed. But for a blade of a nose, he had flattish features. Most of the time, he was among the calmest of men. He tried to use that now, but in spite of himself his voice held a certain edge as he asked, “And how did you like your reception?”

Because Lemp trusted the admiral, he answered honestly: “Sir, I think the Royal Navy would have been friendlier.” It was Beilharz’s line, but it summed up what Lemp thought.

Dönitz’s narrow, gray-blue eyes assessed him. “The Royal Navy would know what you are,” the admiral said. “At the moment, all we have in Germany are suspicions.”

“Yes, sir. I can see that,” Lemp said. “And if you keep showing them this way, plenty of people will decide they should give you something to suspect.”

“Et tu, Brute?”
Dönitz murmured.

Lemp hadn’t trotted out his schoolboy Latin for years. He would have thought he’d forgotten it all, but he understood what that meant, both literally and in the words behind the words. “Sir, if the government is trying to make everyone in the
Reich
hate it, it’s doing a good job,” he said.

“The government is
trying
to win the war.” Dönitz sounded as if he’d had this argument many times before, certainly with others and possibly with himself as well. “If treason springs up, the state has to put it down so the fight against the foreign foe can go forward.”

“If the government makes things so bad that no one wants to fight for it, how can it win against England and France and Russia, sir?” Lemp said.

Admiral Dönitz’s arched nostrils flared. “And you’ve been out at sea on patrol,” he muttered, more to himself than to the man standing in front of his desk. What did he think Lemp might have done had he been ashore all this time? Pulled a grenade off his belt and chucked it into the officers’ club? That was what it sounded like, that or something worse. Dönitz went on, “You need to be careful with that kind of talk, you know.”

“Oh, yes, sir,” Lemp replied. “But if you’re going to report me to Himmler’s bully boys, we’re already ruined past the hope of fixing.” Dönitz waved him out of the office. He felt as if he’d just survived a depth-charging.

Chaim Weinberg heard a man wailing behind a barn. He trotted over to see what was going on. Two Republican soldiers were kicking the farmer here and slamming him with their rifle butts. If nobody stopped them, they were plainly going to beat him to death.

“What’s going on?” Chaim didn’t quite point his rifle at them, but the idea was there.

They scowled at him: a couple of kids, one with a wispy excuse for a mustache. “Who are you?” that kid asked.

“And what business is it of yours?” the other one added.

“I’m an Abe Lincoln, that’s who I am,” Chaim answered. Saint Paul could have sounded no prouder when he said
I am a Roman citizen
. Chaim added, “I’ve been fighting over here since before you punks had hair on your balls. I guess that makes it my business. So, one more time
—¿qué pasó?
”

“We’re punishing this rotten counterrevolutionary,” the soldier with the mustache said. “He was feeding the reactionary forces until we liberated this area.”

“And so? What was he going to do? Tell them no, he couldn’t do
that? Tell them he was a Marxist-Leninist?” Chaim rolled his eyes. “They would have given him what you’re giving him, only they would’ve done it sooner.”

“He did it for years,” the kid with the mustache said, only now with uncertainty in his voice.

“Who was running things here all this time?” Chaim returned. “We only just got here, you know. And you really went and made him love the Republic, didn’t you?”

“¡Viva la República!”
the farmer said, staggering to his feet. He was about fifty. He had a big mouse under one eye. Blood ran down his forehead and face from a scalp wound. More dripped onto his collarless shirt from another.