Two Fronts (17 page)

Well, Peggy wasn’t thrilled when Herb went off and did whatever he did for the government, either. She walked out of the train station and caught a northbound bus. The Packard mostly sat these days. The gas ration was too small to let you go anywhere you didn’t really need to.

Things could have been worse, though. She knew that. In Hitler’s Germany, doctors were the only civilians who could get any gas at all. Most private cars had had their batteries and tires confiscated for the war effort. The Nazis weren’t melting them down to turn them into tanks and U-boats, but that was probably just a matter of time. From all she’d heard, things weren’t much better in France and England. She wondered what they were like in Japan. How many cars had the Japs had to begin with? It wasn’t as if they built them for themselves, the way the European countries and America did.

The very idea of Japanese-made autos set her to laughing softly as she got off the bus. What were Japanese factories good for except cheap tin knockoffs of better goods made somewhere else? If you saw something with
MADE IN JAPAN
stamped on it, you knew it would fall apart if you looked at it sideways.

But the laughter stopped as she headed home. American fighting men had assumed the Japs’ planes and warships were made of tinfoil and scrap metal and rubber bands, too. That turned out not to be quite right. The Jap Navy ruled the Pacific everywhere west of Hawaii, and it seemed only dumb luck that the Rising Sun didn’t fly over Honolulu, too.

She hadn’t bothered locking the front door when she and Herb headed for the station. She knew there were burglars, but she didn’t worry that anyone would break into the house the minute the people who lived there left for a little while. People who did worry about silly stuff like that were also people who snapped their fingers all the time to keep the elephants away.

Sure enough, no one had absconded with the silver and the fine china by the time she got back. No masked thug waited in the foyer to knock her over the head and beat it out the door with her handbag. It was just the good old familiar house, empty but for her. She turned on the stove and waited for the coffee to start perking again.

Coffee, now, coffee was a blessing she appreciated. Considering the horrible stuff that degraded its name and reputation on the Continent, she didn’t think she’d ever take the real McCoy for granted again.

She turned on the radio. A chorus of singers was celebrating the virtues of Ivory soap. Another chorus, this one masculine, sang the praises of Old Gold cigarettes. A happy couple made it plain they wouldn’t have been happy if not for Spam. A local shoe store told the world—or as much of it as this station’s signals reached—that it was having a sale. Eventually, music that wasn’t trying to sell you something came on.

That didn’t mean it was good music. Peggy turned the dial. The next station over boasted—if that was the word—a fast-talking comic going through ways of beating the very mild American rationing system. His routine lacked the essential quality of humor known as being funny.

Peggy thought so, anyhow, and changed the station again. Maybe somebody who hadn’t seen what real shortages were like would have thought the comedian was a riot. But all the commercials she’d listened to before made it plain how much the United States still had, and how much of that abundance remained available to civilians. If you complained about it, what were you but a spoiled little brat?

Or maybe you were just an American who’d never been abroad and had no standards of comparison. By all the signs, that made you the world’s equivalent of a spoiled little brat. People here hadn’t the faintest idea of how lucky and how well off they were.

On the next station Peggy found, a woman was talking seriously about wives and girlfriends who feared their menfolk would be unfaithful to them after being in the service for a while, or who were afraid they might decide to look for new companions themselves once they got lonely enough. That was a genuine problem, all right, here and in every other country at war. Even so, Peggy twisted the tuning dial again, and twisted it hard. She knew too well what a problem it was, and didn’t want to have to think about it now.

She finally found some news. The world report was over, though. A train derailment in South Dakota had killed four people. The longshoremen’s union on the West Coast was threatening a strike if working conditions didn’t improve—and local authorities were threatening to jail all the union leaders if the longshoremen did presume to strike. The mayor of Kansas City was under arrest on corruption charges, some of which went all the way back to before the last war. “Another machine politician bites the dust,” the newsman intoned piously.

“Business as usual,” Peggy said, and turned the dial again. This time she discovered, to her surprise, a baseball game. The Athletics had scheduled their matchup with the Browns for ten in the morning: “To give the people who work the later shifts the chance to see it,” their broadcaster explained. Since the A’s and the Browns had both sunk like a rock in the standings ever since Opening Day, odds were not too many fans would have gone to Shibe Park no matter when the game started. Peggy did admire Connie Mack. He’d managed the A’s since the start of the American League, back when she was a little girl. The Tall Tactician, people called him. He wore a suit and a hat, even in the dugout. He’d had some great teams—but not lately.

The Browns, by contrast, had never had any great teams. They were the only American League franchise without a pennant to their name. When you played in the same town as the powerhouse Cardinals, drawing crowds was tough. The Phillies, at least, were as wretched as the A’s, and historically even more so.

Peggy listened to the game till the bottom of the hour. The A’s botched a rundown. The Browns’ left fielder dropped not one but two fly balls. Both clubs were in midseason form. At half past, she switched stations again (not without regret, for the ballgame was funnier than the comic making wisecracks about rationing) and found some more news.

She got the international reports, but they mostly consisted of both sides’ lies about what was going on in Russia. Whoever finally came out on top in the war, truth had been one of the first casualties. She wondered if anything could bring it back to life. She doubted that. After Dr. Goebbels’ ministrations and those of his Soviet counterparts, it would need Jesus’ touch even more than Lazarus had.

Then the newsman talked about skirmishes on the Franco-German frontier. Peggy smiled. With a two-front war on his hands, the
Führer
wouldn’t be doing the same.

SOMETIMES YOU HAD
to take the long way around to get where you wanted to go. Julius Lemp and the U-30 certainly had. Setting out from Wilhelmshaven after a refit more thorough than the U-boat could have got in Namsos, he’d taken it all the way around the British Isles to reach the western end of the Channel. Minefields and nets kept German warships from making direct attacks.

He had to be careful in these waters. The Royal Navy and the RAF knew that U-boats might come calling. The welcome they laid on was warm but less than friendly. Along with the enemy patrols, there were also nets and minefields on this side of the Channel. That forty-kilometer-wide stretch of water was vital for getting soldiers and supplies from the island to the Continent.

If a U-boat could slide past the barriers, it might hurt the enemy badly. Plenty of U-boat skippers curled up in their cramped cots each night dreaming of sending a fat troopship to the bottom or of blowing a freighter loaded with munitions halfway to the moon.

Dreams like that came with a price, as Lemp had better reason to know than most. Even if you did sink an important vessel in the English Channel’s narrow waters, you might not come home again to celebrate. The Royal Navy viciously hunted submarines, and had all the advantage in these parts.

Or you could make a mistake. Lemp’s mistake, back when the war was new, was the reason he remained a lowly lieutenant more than three years later. Sinking a troopship or a big, fast freighter was splendid. Sinking a liner with Americans aboard when you thought it was a troopship or a big, fast freighter …

Well, they hadn’t beached him. And if he could get into the Channel, anything he found there would be a legitimate target.

He ascended to the top of the conning tower. It was night now, with a fat moon, nearly full, in the sky. He wouldn’t want to venture into the Channel surfaced in daylight hours. Going in submerged would be too slow—so he told himself, at any rate. He’d sneak in under cover of darkness, pick his spot, and go down to periscope depth. Then he’d see what came by and what the U-30 could do about it.

Even though it was dark, ratings with field glasses scanned sea and sky. You never wanted to get taken by surprise, and seven times never in waters like these. The U-boat would be hard to spot, and an enemy ship or plane might take it for one of their own rather than a German vessel, but … you never wanted to be taken by surprise.

No sooner had that thought crossed his mind than he heard what could only be airplane engines approaching rapidly from the north. The plane didn’t sound very high. “Go below, boys,” Lemp told the ratings. He shouted down the hatch: “Dive!”

Half a minute was all the U-30 needed to submerge. A good thing, too, because not long after the U-boat went under a bomb burst in the ocean not nearly far enough away. It shook the submarine. A couple of light bulbs popped. A wrench fell off a rack and hit the deck with a clang of iron on iron.

“Good thing we got under in a hurry,” Gerhart Beilharz said.

“
Ja
.” Lemp nodded, not very happily. “That was a damned good night attack, damned good. He really rattled our teeth there.”

“The moon
is
bright,” the engineering officer said.

“
Ja
,” Lemp repeated, even less happily than before. “As bright as that, though? I don’t think so.”

“Luck.” Beilharz was always inclined to look on the bright side of things: a useful attitude for a man who nursed along the sometimes-temperamental
Schnorkel
.

“Well, I hope so,” the skipper said.

“What else could it be?”

“I know for a fact the English have radar, the same as we do,” Lemp answered. “If they’ve found a way to make a set small enough to stuff it inside an airplane …”

Beilharz looked horrified. “That would be awful!”

“It would make our lives harder, that’s for sure,” Lemp said.

“How can we find out?” Beilharz asked.

“Carefully.” Julius Lemp’s voice was dry. The thought of surfacing and seeing whether they got attacked again had crossed his mind. No sooner had it done so, though, than he torpedoed it. Things were dangerous enough in these waters. Inviting an attack when you didn’t have it might add injury to insult.

“You want to make our approach at
Schnorkel
depth, then?” Of course the engineer would plump for his favorite toy.

Lemp nodded, though. “Yes, I think we’d better. We won’t get where we’re going as fast as I’d like, but we have a better chance of getting there in one piece. And the Channel seems calm enough. We probably won’t have waves tripping the safety valve and making the snort suck all the air out of the boat.” He made a popeyed face, miming what happened to the submariners when the
Schnorkel
did just that.

“It doesn’t happen very often … sir.” When Beilharz used military formality, he wanted Lemp to know he was affronted.

“Once is plenty,” Lemp said. “but the beast does have its uses. I can’t imagine a radar set that could spot a
Schnorkel
tube.” The engineering officer beamed when he added that. Lemp smiled to himself. You had to know what made your crew tick, all right.

It was as if the war were new. Ships carried England’s soldiers and everything they needed to fight with over to France. Get into a likely sea lane and you could make them sorry. It
would
take longer chugging along with only the
Schnorkel
and periscope surfaced, but once they did it …

He heard occasional distant pings from enemy ships’ echo-locating systems, but no vessel fired on the U-30 and started an attack run. Overhead, day slowly vanquished night. Lemp could see much farther with the periscope. He could be seen more readily, too. He had to remember that.

There! That was what he wanted: several freighters waddling across the water, escorted by a sleek destroyer that chivvied them along like a sheep dog guiding a flock of animals too stupid to remember where they were going unless they got some help.

He stayed on the
Schnorkel
as long as he could. The diesels gave him that unexpected extra submerged speed. Then, when he feared some alert sailor might spot the tube, he ordered it lowered and proceeded on battery power.

He fired three eels, one after another. He kept the last one in a forward tube in case he had to use it against the destroyer. The U-30’s bow tried to break the surface as it got lighter after the torpedoes zoomed away. One missed, but the other two struck home: the explosions and the breaking-up noises from the stricken ships came clearly through the hull. The men raised a cheer.

“Now comes the interesting part,” Lemp said to no one in particular. He turned the boat away from the stricken convoy. Looking back over his shoulder, so to speak, with the periscope, he saw what he knew he’d see: the Royal Navy destroyer rushing up to pay him back. Its pings sounded furious. Maybe that was his imagination, but he didn’t think so.

The destroyer would expect him to dive deep and sneak away at the pitiful pace the batteries gave. It would rain ash cans down on his head and hope to sink him. But he didn’t feel like enduring another depth charging. “Raise the
Schnorkel
again,” he ordered. “We’ll get out of here twice as fast as he thinks we can.”

He caught the ratings glancing at one another as they obeyed. If this worked, he was a genius. If it didn’t, if the Royal Navy ship’s echo-locater located them …

We can dive deep then
, he thought hopefully. In the meantime, that destroyer would be pinging in the wrong place. He was betting his life, and his crewmen’s lives, that it would, anyhow.