Two Fronts (12 page)

Cullum saluted him as if he’d sprouted stars on his shoulders. No, fat gold stripes on his sleeves, for the other sergeant said, “Thank you, Admiral King. Now that you’ve got all our troubles wrapped up with a pretty pink ribbon around ’em, you should write FDR a nice letter and let him know how he needs to be running the goddamn war.”

“Ah, fuck off,” Pete replied without heat. When guys didn’t chin about women or gambling or sports or the crappy chow in the galley, strategy often reared its ugly head. “Tell me this, man. Suppose I was in charge.”

“We’d be really screwed,” Cullum said at once.

“Odds are,” Pete admitted, which made his buddy blink. He went on, “But how could we be screwed any worse’n we already are?”

That did make Cullum stop and think. “Well,” he said at last, “in the big fight the slanties might’ve sunk
Ranger
, too. Then we wouldn’t have any carriers operating out of Pearl at all. Past that, though, it couldn’t hardly be fubar’d any worse than it is right now.”

“See?” Pete said triumphantly.

“Hey, a stopped clock is right twice a day. That puts it one up on you,” Cullum said. Pete flipped him off. Slowly, without any fuss, they drifted back to work.

SPRING WAS IN THE AIR
outside of Madrid. All things considered, Vaclav Jezek could have done without it. The bitter cold of winter in central Spain—a nasty surprise, that—kept down the stink of unburied and badly buried bodies, of which there were always far too many. It also fought the reek of latrine trenches, and of the waste that never got as far as the latrine trenches.

Pretty soon, flowers would bloom. They’d smell sweet, but not sweet enough to quell the stenches. Birds would sing, when you could hear them through the rumble of artillery and the machine guns’ deadly chatter.

When Vaclav pissed and moaned about it, Benjamin Halévy eyed him with his usual air of detached amusement. “I didn’t know we had a poet among us,” the Jew said.

“Oh, fuck you!” Vaclav snarled.

Halévy tapped the little metal star that marked him as a second lieutenant. “That’s ‘Oh, fuck you, sir!’ ” he said.

Vaclav laughed. What were you going to do? In the line, you made your own fun. If you didn’t, you sure as hell wouldn’t have any. A few hundred meters away, the Fascist bastards on the Nationalist side were no doubt cracking the same kind of dumb jokes.

Then the Czech sniper stopped laughing. Homesickness and weariness hit him like a blackjack behind the ear. “Christ, I wish I were back in Prague!” he burst out. “I’ve been carrying a gun for three and a half years. I’m fucking sick of it.”

“Here. Have a knock of this.” Halévy offered his canteen. Vaclav took it. It was full of Spanish brandy—not good, but strong. He swigged, then wiped his mouth on his sleeve and handed back the canteen. The Jew went on, “Some of the people here started two years before you did, you know.”

“That’s right!” Vaclav said in surprise. Not many countries had got it before Czechoslovakia did, but Spain was one of them. He looked around. It was the landscape of war, all right: trenches, shell holes, barbed wire, ragged and muddy uniforms. How many times had this stretch of ground gone back and forth between Nationalists and Republicans? How many more would it change hands till somebody finally won, if anyone ever did? Better not to wonder about such things. Instead, Vaclav asked, “Got a cigarette?”

“That’s also ‘Got a cigarette,
sir
?’ ” the Jew observed, but he pulled out a pack and handed it to Vaclav. The smokes were Spanish: even harsher than the stove polish and barbed wire the French put in their cigarettes. Given a choice, Vaclav would have opted for a better brand. Given a choice, he never would have come to Spain to begin with. Beggars didn’t get choices like that. He took a cigarette, scraped a match against the much-repaired sole of his boot, and hollowed his cheeks to draw in smoke.

He let it out again with a cough. “Jesus Christ! Is that phosgene, or what?”

Halévy also lit up. After a judicious puff of his own, he answered, “More like mustard gas, I’d say.”

They both went right on smoking. You could complain about the tobacco as much as you pleased. Everybody did. You couldn’t do without it, though. Almost everybody on both sides smoked like a factory chimney. Going without cigarettes while he hid himself somewhere in no-man’s-land always gave Vaclav the jitters. He sometimes thought a smoke would be worth getting shot. He didn’t yield to those temptations, but he had them.

As if to fuel them, Halévy said, “Marshal Sanjurjo’s still out there somewhere.”

“Yeah, yeah.” Vaclav waved that away. “Like he’s gonna come out and stand in the same place where I plugged what’s-his-name—Franco. Nobody’s that goddamn dumb, not even a Nationalist Spanish general.”

“
Cojones
,” Halévy murmured.

That was a Spanish word the Czech understood. There weren’t many, but he’d picked up the dirty bits first, as he had with French. And maybe it
was
a question of balls. Would Sanjurjo say, in effect,
I’m not afraid to go where Franco got shot?
If he did, he was liable to be sorry—but not for long, not if he stopped a 13mm armor-piercing antitank round.

During the night, the Nationalists shelled the Czechs and the Internationals. They hit them harder than most Republican troops. Vaclav, huddling in what he devoutly hoped was a bombproof, could have done without the gesture of respect.

As soon as the shelling stopped, Jezek tumbled out and rushed to a firing step, ready to repel the enemy’s infantry if they pressed the attack. But they didn’t. The Nationalists just wanted to hurt their foes without much risk to themselves. Who wouldn’t make war on the cheap if he could?

Republican guns gave back a belated response after sunup the next morning. Maybe the artillerists wanted to see what they were shooting at. Maybe they hadn’t had any shells handy during the night. Maybe they’d been drinking sangria in a cantina back of the line, and catching crabs from the barmaids. Maybe … Who the hell knew, or cared?

Any which way, Vaclav got to scout no-man’s-land while the Nationalists were keeping their heads down. The two barrages had torn up the landscape—again. He looked for new hiding places from which he might torment Sanjurjo’s men. Then a short Republican round burst in front of the trench and showered him with dirt. He ducked as fragments whined not far enough overhead.

“Fucking assholes!” he shouted. “Whose side are they on?” He brushed at his uniform, for all the world as if it would do any good.

“They’re artillerymen,” Benjamin Halévy said. “If it’s in front of them, it’s a target—and it’s all in front of them.”

“Too right, it is,” Vaclav said. Warily, he straightened and looked out toward the Nationalist trenches again. That new crater with the tall lip facing the enemy’s line … That just might do. Republican shells kept coming down. With his luck, they’d flatten the hidey-hole before he ever got to use it.

But they didn’t. He crawled out to it under cover of darkness. Yes, it was the kind of place he needed. He had foliage stuck to his helmet with a strip of inner tube. A muddy burlap cloak with branches thrust into it also helped break up his outline. And he camouflaged the antitank rifle’s long barrel well before light could give him away.

Then he settled down to wait. He wanted a cigarette, but no, not enough to risk his life for one. He knew the urge would grow on him. He gnawed garlicky Spanish sausage instead. He’d taste that all day, too, but it wasn’t the same thing, dammit.

He eyed the Nationalist lines through a magnified circle with crosshairs. Men in yellowish khaki did the kinds of things soldiers did. Out beyond ordinary rifle range of the Republican forward trench, they didn’t take much cover. They didn’t think they were in any great danger, and they were right. Jezek didn’t feel like wasting his rounds on ordinary jerks. Those fat, fancy bullets were reserved for extraordinary jerks.

Maybe he’d lie here till darkness came again. He didn’t fire every day. When he did pull the trigger, he wanted his shots to mean something. He also didn’t want to get killed himself. He swung the heavy rifle a couple of centimeters to the right, then peered through the scope again.

A glimpse of a fabric long familiar but not seen for some time made his attention snap back to it. The Nationalists wore that diarrhea-colored khaki. Republican forces used khaki, too, khaki or denim or whatever civilian stuff they happened to own. No Spaniard, though, had a uniform of
Feldgrau
.

Sanjurjo and Hitler, of course, had been in bed together since the war in Spain started. The Germans had helped the Nationalists take Gibraltar away from England. German troops and flyers of the
Legion Kondor
let the Nazis field-test weapons and doctrines. But Germany’d paid Spain much less attention since the big European fight heated up.

So what was this Nazi officer doing here now? Whatever it was, he wouldn’t keep doing it long. Neither he nor the Spaniard with him worried about snipers. They were more than a kilometer away from the front. Why should they?

Vaclav showed them why. The antitank rifle slammed against his shoulder. The German stood stock-still for a moment, then crumpled. No, he wouldn’t report back to Berlin, or even back to Marshal Sanjurjo. They paid a sergeant pathetically little, but Vaclav knew damn well he’d earned his handful of pesetas today.

CHAIM WEINBERG HUDDLED
in a hole scraped into the front side of his trench, waiting for the Nationalists to quit shelling the front. Sanjurjo’s shitheads were ticked off about something, sure as hell. This was what they did when they got up in arms: used the big guns to make the Republicans sweat. Chaim was sweating, all right.

Latrine-trench rumor said the Czech sniper with the elephant gun had punched some
Wehrmacht
big shot’s ticket for him. When you got punched with that piece of artillery, you stayed punched, too.
Gotta ask him the next time I see him
, Chaim thought as another round from a 105 crashed down. That Vaclav knew some German, and Chaim’s Yiddish came close enough.

What really worried the International, though, was why a German officer had been looking over the Republican lines in the first place. Ever since the balloon went up in Czechoslovakia, and especially since Gibraltar went under, they’d had Spain on the back burner.

His fertile imagination could conjure up plenty of reasons for them to bring it to the front of the stove again. If the Nationalists smashed the Republic, German planes in northeastern Spain could pay France back for rejoining the fight against Fascism by knocking the crap out of the southern part of the country. Maybe Sanjurjo could even mount some half-assed raid across the Pyrenees. That would set the froggies hopping like fleas on a hot griddle.

But the Republic wouldn’t fall any time soon. It had been teetering in 1938. After Hitler jumped the Czechs, though, France and England threw enough supplies into Spain to level the war, and it had stayed pretty much level since. Chaim shook his head as he tried to make himself smaller. Christ, but 1938 was a long time ago now! A marriage ago. A child ago. A lifetime ago.

All at once, the shellfire let up. The first thing Chaim did was stick a cigarette in his mouth. His hands shook as he lit it. Shellfire always took a toll on you. Some guys couldn’t get over it. There were beggars in Madrid who twitched all the time. Odds were they’d been reasonably good soldiers once. Modern war dished out more than a lot of human beings were made to take.

Chaim was still with it: at least well enough to make sure the Nationalists didn’t try anything cute while they figured they still had the Abe Lincolns punchy. A couple of Republican machine guns sprayed murder out across the lunar ground between the lines to send Sanjurjo’s men the same message. A Nationalist Maxim hammered back. Chaim ducked, though none of the bullets came close.

A few feet away, Mike Carroll hopped down off the firing step. He was a lot taller than Chaim, so more of him stuck up above the parapet unless he was careful. And he was: he’d been in Spain even longer than Chaim. You learned and you lived. You could learn and not live. Bad luck always lay around the corner somewhere. But you couldn’t not learn and live. Stupidity was its own punishment.

“Wonder what the Fritzes are up to,” Mike said. He’d also heard the scuttlebutt about Vaclav, then.

“Nothing good,” Chaim said with doleful certainty.

“Tell me about it,” Mike said. “Germans are nothing but bad news. Even the Fritzes in the Internationals are a bunch of Prussians. And if the Nazis are sniffing around again …”

“Less I see of ’em, better I like it.” Chaim hadn’t seen any Nazis here, not with his own eyes. But he believed Vaclav had shot one. The way the Nationalists were throwing hate around sure argued for it.

Mike changed the subject, asking, “How’s your kid?”

“He’s great,” Chaim answered with a grin. “He’s at that silly age, where his own toes are the funniest goddamn things in the world. He can laugh and roll over and kinda sit up. He says something that sounds like
dada
, but he doesn’t know it’s me.”

“Sounds like a baby, all right.” Mike might have heard more than he’d really wanted to know. Perhaps incautiously, he asked another question: “And how’s his mother doing?”

Chaim’s face went hard. “La Martellita is … going along,” he said in a voice like a slammed door. She was not only going along, she was going out with a Red Army captain, one of Stalin’s henchmen who’d stayed in Spain because they had no chance of getting back to the USSR. By everything Chaim had heard, the Russian was shorter and squatter and homelier than he was himself.

If he ever did see the guy, he figured he’d punch him in the nose. If La Martellita had given him the bum’s rush for some tall, handsome Spanish grandee (a Spanish grandee with sense enough not to have joined the Nationalists; there were a few, though not many), he could have lived with that. But a Russian plug-ugly? Maybe she just liked apes.

It was, no doubt, a good thing Chaim had never set eyes on the Red Army captain. If he did give the son of a bitch a fat lip, he might end up in front of a firing squad. The Republic took its friendship with the Soviet Union
very
seriously.