Last Orders: The War That Came Early (7 page)

Most of the time, Stas would have tried to gain altitude. Now he stayed down on the deck, hoping the German fighters would have a hard time spotting his brown and green plane against the ground below. It must have worked—no Messerschmitt shot him down.

Isa Mogamedov climbed back into the copilot’s seat. “Well, we got through another one—I think.”

“I do, too, now.” Stas allowed himself the luxury of a nod. “Only five thousand to go till peace breaks out.” He laughed, pretending to be joking. So did Mogamedov, pretending to think he was.

A nurse cut off the latest set of bandages that swaddled Chaim Weinberg’s left hand. Dr. Diego Alvarez leaned forward to get a better look.
Chaim didn’t, but then the hand was attached to him. He tried to remember how many times Alvarez had carved him up, working to repair the damage a mortar round did. He tried, but he couldn’t be sure if it was seven or eight.

When the bandages came off, the hand stopped looking like one from Boris Karloff in
The Mummy
and started looking like one from Karloff in
Frankenstein
. It had more scars and sutures and what-have-you than a merely human hand had any business possessing.

But when Chaim said, “It looks good, Doc,” he wasn’t being sarcastic. He counted himself lucky not to be auditioning for Captain Hook in a road company of
Peter Pan
. That mortar bomb had smashed his hand to hell and gone—and had killed his longtime buddy, Mike Carroll. When the other Internationals from the Abe Lincoln Brigade brought Chaim back to the aid station, the surgeon there almost decided to amputate on the spot. Then he remembered Dr. Alvarez, back in Madrid. Alvarez specialized in repairing such wounds.

“How does it feel?” the doctor asked now. His English, though flavored by Castilian Spanish, was more elegant than Chaim’s. A street kid from New York City, Chaim quit school after the tenth grade to go to work. Dr. Alvarez, by contrast, had studied medicine in England. Except for his lisp and the occasional rolled
r
, he sounded like a BBC newsreader.

“Not … too bad,” Chaim answered after a pause to consider. He’d found out more about pain the past few months than he’d ever wanted to know. He’d also found out more about morphine than he’d ever dreamt he’d learn. He was off it now, and hoped he wouldn’t need to go back on.

“Can you move your thumb so the tip touches the tip of your index finger?” Dr. Alvarez asked. He’d concentrated his work on Chaim’s thumb and first two fingers. The other two would never be good for much, no matter what he did. But those—especially the thumb and index finger—were the ones that mattered most.

“Let’s see,” Chaim said. He hadn’t been able to do it yet. That hand was one hell of a mess before the surgeon got to work on it. Christ, it was still a hell of a mess. But it wasn’t—quite—a disaster any more.

Moving his thumb hurt. So did moving his first finger. Too much in there had been repaired too many times for any of it to work smoothly now. But he
could
move both digits. A good Marxist-Leninist, he didn’t believe in miracles. If he had, he would have believed in that one.

Not only did they move, but, after effort that made sweat pop out on his forehead, the tip of his thumb met the tip of his forefinger. “Kiss me, Doc!” he exclaimed. “I did it! Look! I did it!” Those seven or eight operations had finally led to this: a hand that might work half as well as it had before it got smashed.

And damned if Dr. Alvarez didn’t kiss him on both cheeks. Chaim hardly even resented it, though he would have liked it better from the nurse. She wasn’t gorgeous, but she was definitely cuter than the surgeon.

“Now you need to gain strength,” Alvarez said.

“No kidding,” Chaim agreed. He thought he might be able to pick up a dime with his reconstructed thumb and first finger, but a half-dollar would be too much for him.

“You are not my first case of this sort, though I think your injuries are among the most extensive I have succeeded in repairing,” the doctor said. “I have developed a series of exercises that will help your digits approach the power they had before you were wounded.”

“Approach it, huh?” Chaim said. Dr. Alvarez nodded. After a moment, so did Chaim. “Okay, Doc. You level with a guy. I give you credit for that. You never promised anything you didn’t deliver. How long do I have to do these exercises, and how bad will they hurt?” He assumed they would hurt. It was a pretty safe bet. Everything that had happened to his left hand since the mortar bomb whispered down had hurt like hell.

“You will have to do them for several weeks. Your muscles need strengthening. Your tendons need to work more freely. I have done everything I could to assist that process, but time and practice are also necessary.”

“And after that, I go back to the Internationals?” Chaim asked.

Dr. Alvarez looked unhappy. “After we have spent so much time
and effort getting you to this point, it seems a shame to send you back to where you are liable to be wounded again.”

“Doc,” Chaim said, as patiently as he could, “if I hadn’t wanted to take those kind of chances, I never would’ve come to Spain to begin with.”

“I suppose not.” Alvarez sounded unhappy, too. He didn’t want all his hard work gurgling down the drain if Chaim stopped a slug with his face.

“You can take it to the bank I wouldn’t have,” Chaim said. “And you can take it to the bank that there’s a bunch of Sanjurjo’s
putos
who wish I would’ve stayed in the States. You with me so far?”

“Oh, yes,” Alvarez said dryly. What were his politics? He’d never said much about them. He was here in Madrid, on the Republican side of the fence. If he preferred the Nationalists, the only way he could hope to stay alive was to keep his big mouth shut.

Chaim wasn’t about to push him, not when he’d been gifted with an almost-working hand instead of a hook. “When I get as strong as I’m gonna get, will I be able to handle a rifle, or at least a Tommy gun?” he asked.

“I think it is possible,” the surgeon said carefully. “I also think it is on the very edge of what you will be able to do. For your thumb and those two fingers, the exercises will get you back most of your fine motor skills. The hand has had too much damage to be as strong as it was. I’m very sorry, but that seems to be the situation.”

“Well, it gives me something to shoot for.” Chaim grinned crookedly. He was short and squat and not too handsome. That kind of grin suited him, in other words. “Shoot for! Get it, Doc? It’s a joke.”

Dr. Alvarez, by contrast, was slim and elegant. “Amusing,” he said. A slight twitch of one eyebrow delivered his editorial verdict. With a verdict like that, Chaim was lucky Alvarez wasn’t a judge.

The exercises hurt, all right. As far as Chaim could tell, everything that had anything to do with getting wounded hurt.
Funny how that works, isn’t it?
he gibed to himself. At first, he couldn’t do everything with the hand that the surgeon wanted him to. Everything? He could barely do anything, and the effort left him more worn down than hauling a sack of concrete should have.

“Patience. Patience and persistence,” Alvarez told him. “You must have both.”

To Chaim, they sounded like a couple of round-heeled Puritan girls. Patience and Persistence Mather: something like that. He imagined himself in bed with both of them at once, because he had an imagination like that—especially after he’d been stuck in the hospital for so long without any friendly female company.

A few days later, as he healed more, he started being able to do things he couldn’t at first. That made him feel better. It also made him think—again—that the doctor might know what he was talking about after all. And, a couple of days after that, La Martellita paid him a rare visit.

The Little Hammer
—that was what his ex-wife’s
nom de guerre
meant. Communist activist, drop-dead gorgeous woman with a mane of blue-black hair, mother of his son … Even a glimpse of her made his dreams of wicked Puritan maids pop like pricked soap bubbles.

“I heard you might be able to take up arms again for the cause after all,” she said gravely. “That’s good news—better than I expected when they brought you here.”

“Better than I expected, too,
querida
.” Chaim’s Spanish wasn’t smooth or grammatical, but it got the job done. “Wish I could take
you
in my arms.”

“No.” Her voice went hard and flat. “It’s over. Don’t you see that?”

“I see it. Doesn’t mean I have to like it.” Chaim sighed. “How’s Carlos Federico?” He’d never expected to have a son named for Marx
and
Engels, especially not in Spanish.

“He’s well. Maybe I will bring him here again. It is good to see you are doing better, too. Now I must go.” And La Martellita did. Five chilly minutes—that was all he’d got. He could count himself lucky … or he could go back to daydreaming about Patience and Persistence.

German 105s pounded the trench line in which Staff Sergeant Alistair Walsh crouched—well, cowered, if you wanted to get right down to it. In the last war, the Germans would have—had—shot 77s at him. Those were a lot less dangerous; they didn’t fly as far, and, because they
came from flat-shooting guns rather than higher-trajectory howitzers, they had a smaller chance of coming down into the trench with you and going off.

He hadn’t thought in the last war that he’d still be soldiering in this one. But the other choice was going back into the Welsh coal mine from which the Army had plucked him. A soldier’s life, especially in peacetime, seemed better than that. So did anything else, hell very possibly included.

So he’d stayed in. He’d risen in the ranks, as far as a lad plucked from a Welsh coal mine could hope to rise. Staff sergeants saluted subalterns and first lieutenants. They called them
sir
. But, with their years of experience, they mattered more than the junior officers nominally set over them. A smart regimental colonel would sooner trust a senior sergeant than any lieutenant ever hatched, and would back him against quite a few captains, too.

All of which was fine when there were choices to be made and courses to be plotted. When Fritz was throwing hate around, all you could do was hunker down and hope it missed you. No, you could do one more thing besides. Walsh fumbled in the breast pocket of his battledress tunic, pulled out a packet of Navy Cuts, and stuck one in his mouth. The shelling hadn’t made his hands shake too much to keep him from striking a match.

He sucked in smoke. Logic said that couldn’t make anything better. Logic be damned, though. A cigarette relaxed him to some small but perceptible degree. He wasn’t the only one, either. Nobody in the front-line trenches ever quit smoking. Plenty of people who’d never had the habit before picked it up when the Germans started trying to kill them, though.

Sure as hell, the Cockney who’d pushed up against the muddy front wall of the trench next to him nudged him and said, “ ’Ere, Sarge, can I bum a fag orf yer?”

“Here you go, Jack.” Walsh handed him the packet.

“Fanks.” Jack Scholes took one and gave it back. He was young enough to be the staff sergeant’s son. He had close-cropped blond hair, a tough, narrow face with pointed features, and snaggle teeth. He
looked like a mean terrier. He fought like one, too. He was the stubborn sort of soldier who took a deal of killing.

Walsh leaned close so Scholes could get a light from his cigarette. Most of the German fire was a couple of hundred yards long. That was about the only good news Walsh could find.

He’d just ground the tiny butt of his latest smoke under the heel of his boot when the barrage stopped. Beside him, Scholes flipped off the safety on his Lee-Enfield. “Now we see if the buggers mean it or not,” he said.

That was also how things looked to Walsh. If the Germans did mean it, they’d throw men and tanks into the attack and try to push the British forces back toward the border between Belgium and France. Otherwise, they’d sit and wait and make the Tommies come to them.

They’d done a lot of sitting and waiting lately. With positions hardened by reinforced concrete, with MG-42s waiting to turn any enemy attack into a charnel house, with tanks that had bigger guns and thicker armor than anything the Allies boasted, why shouldn’t the Nazis wait? The Western Front was narrow. Their foes had to come at them head-on. They could bleed them white without paying too high a butcher’s bill of their own.

But trusting the Germans to do the same thing every time didn’t pay. Several English Bren guns started shooting all at nearly the same time. A mournful shout spelled out what that meant: “Here they come!”

Scholes popped up onto the firing step, squeezed off a couple of rounds, and quickly ducked down again. Alistair Walsh stuck his head up for a look, but only for a look. In place of a rifle, he carried a Sten submachine gun, one of the ugliest weapons ever invented. The stamped metal pieces were more botched together than properly assembled. Some of them looked as if they’d been cut from sheet metal with tin snips; for all Walsh knew, they had. If you dropped a Sten, chances were it would either fall apart or go off and shoot you in the leg.

At close quarters, though, it spat out a lot of slugs in a hurry. A Lee-Enfield
could kill out past half a mile. Inside a couple of hundred yards, the Sten was the horse to back.

The Germans weren’t inside a couple of hundred yards yet. They had to work through the gaps in their own wire, cross the space between their stuff and the stuff the English had put up, and get through
that
before they could start jumping down into the trenches.

Their machine guns made it dangerous for any Tommy to stick his head up over the parapet and shoot at them. Twenty feet down the trench from Walsh, an Englishman bonelessly toppled over backwards. A bullet had punched a neat hole in his forehead. It had probably blown half his brains back into his tin hat, but Walsh couldn’t see that—a small mercy.

Possibly a bigger mercy was that he hadn’t seen any German tanks moving up with the foot soldiers. He especially dreaded the fearsome Tigers, which smashed British armor as if it were made to the same shoddy standards as the Sten gun.