Two Fronts (29 page)

But their bellies hung over their belts. Their wives had double chins. Demange knew what hungry people looked like. He’d seen enough of them in Russia, and in Germany right after the end of the last war. The peasants hereabouts weren’t hungry. They just wanted to hang on to what they had.

They weren’t shy about letting you know what they thought of you, either. After Demange and some of his men requisitioned three fat geese, the farmer from whom they took them growled, “You people are as bad as the
Boches
.” He could speak perfectly plain French when he felt like it.

“Ah, your mother,” Demange replied. The thought of goose fat on his tongue helped mellow him as much as anything ever did. “If we were
Boches
, we’d be banging on you with our rifle butts right now.”

“
Merde
.” The farmer spat. “The
Boches
were here, remember. Not that you
cons
did anything to keep them out. And they were correct enough. They paid for what they took, in fact.”

“Oh, it’s pay you want?” Demange flipped him a franc. “Here. And I’m giving you something else to go with it, too.”

“What’s that?” The farmer stared at the gold-colored (but only gold-colored—it was really aluminum-bronze) coin in disgust.

“Your fucking big mouth, with all its teeth still in it. And believe me, pal, you don’t know how lucky you are.” Demange gestured to his men. Off they went with the geese, leaving the farmer staring after them, his fists clenched uselessly by his sides.

THE AIRSTRIP BY
Philippeville was every bit as grim as the barbed wire surrounding it had made Hans-Ulrich Rudel fear it would be. The locals were surly. The food was worse than it had been in Russia. That didn’t just dismay Hans-Ulrich; it horrified him.

Sergeant Dieselhorst complained about it, too. He was a noncom, after all. Pissing and moaning were second nature to him. But, unlike Rudel, he knew the ropes. Hans-Ulrich often suspected the older man had been born knowing the ropes. “Rules are different here,” he said after Hans-Ulrich made rude noises about the stew the mess cooks had ladled out.

“Rules? There weren’t any rules in Russia.” Hans-Ulrich didn’t want to think about the fat that had flavored those potatoes. If it wasn’t motor oil, it had no business tasting so much like it.

“That’s the point … sir,” Sergeant Dieselhorst said patiently. “In Russia, we went and grabbed whatever we wanted. We didn’t care whether the goddamn Ivans liked us or not. It’s different here. We don’t want the Belgians to hate our guts and go playing games with the froggies. So we can’t take as much from them as we did in the East.”

“So we get stuck with that hog-swill ourselves.” Rudel belched. The last stew didn’t improve when it came up instead of going down. “Sure makes me want to jump into the Stuka and kill things—I’ll tell you that.”

“There you go.” Albert Dieselhorst grinned wryly. “You see? It boosts morale.”

Hans-Ulrich said something he was ashamed of as soon as it came out of his mouth. He didn’t talk like that most of the time. He was a minister’s son, after all. And his father’s hard hand, applied to the seat of his pants or the side of his head, had done its best to make sure he never talked that way. Every once in a while, though …

Sergeant Dieselhorst laughed so hard, Hans-Ulrich wondered if he would have a heart attack. “Oh, shut up,” the pilot muttered.

“
Jawohl, mein Herr! Zu Befehl!
” Dieselhorst came to attention, clicked his heels, and shot out his arm in a Party salute all the more sarcastic for being so full of vigor. Then he dissolved in mirth again.

“It wasn’t
that
funny,” Rudel said. Sergeant Dieselhorst wordlessly called him a liar. In something close to desperation, Rudel added, “Shut up or I’ll pop you one.”

He got his crewmate’s attention, anyhow. Dieselhorst favored him with a mild and curious gaze. “Well, sir, you can try, anyhow,” he said.

Hans-Ulrich was larger and younger and stronger. He neither smoked nor drank, so he was bound to be in better shape, too. Sergeant Dieselhorst just stood there, waiting to see what happened next. He wouldn’t start anything, not when he was squaring off against an officer. Something about the way he stood suggested that he expected to finish whatever Rudel did start, though. How many dirty tricks had he learned, in the
Luftwaffe
or in one barroom brawl or another?

More than Hans-Ulrich really wanted to find out about. With dignity, the pilot said, “There. That’s better. You aren’t braying like a jackass any more.”

Sergeant Dieselhorst’s expression might have said it took one to know one. It might have, but Hans-Ulrich didn’t try to find out. Sometimes—pretty often, in fact—you were better off not knowing things officially.

RAF bombers droned overhead on nights when the English thought the time was ripe to drop some
Schrechlichkeit
on German cities. They didn’t bomb Belgium very often, though. Nor did the
Luftwaffe
pound the French positions just over the border, though German bombers hit Paris and London under cover of darkness.

Sitting there outside of Philippeville not doing anything much finally irritated Hans-Ulrich enough to make him complain to the squadron commander. “We should have stayed in Russia, sir! At least there we’d be flying and blowing up Ivans.”

Colonel Steinbrenner smiled and raised an eyebrow. Hans-Ulrich wondered whether Steinbrenner would point out that, had they stayed in the East, he might still be able to get leave in Bialystok and disport himself with Sofia. But the colonel didn’t. All he said was, “Both sides here have their reasons for not pushing things as hard as they might.”

“Sir?” Rudel’s one-word reply politely declared he didn’t believe it for a minute.

Colonel Steinbrenner’s sigh said he understood as much, and that he thought he was dealing with a classic specimen of boy idiot. “We’re at war with France and England, yes,” he said, coming as close as he could to explaining things in words of one syllable. “But that’s not the war we want, and it’s not a war they want very much. If we don’t push it, maybe, just maybe, the boys with the top hats and striped trousers can make it go away. Then we
will
see the Ivans again—count on that.”

“Ah.” Hans-Ulrich was an indifferent chess player. Someone else’s clever move often made sense to him—once a man who knew the game better explained it. He never would have seen it or made it himself. He found himself with the same feeling now.

“So that’s what’s happening—I mean, what isn’t happening,” Steinbrenner said. “For the time being, we have to stay ready, that’s all. If the diplomats bugger it up, we’ll get all the flying we want and then some. Or if England and France decide they do mean it after all …” He made a sour face. “Here’s hoping they don’t. Life is complicated enough as is.”

As he’d needed to more than once before, Rudel reminded himself that Steinbrenner had taken over the squadron after the
Sicherheitsdienst
hauled away the previous CO because he wasn’t loyal enough to satisfy them. So the colonel was politically reliable. And if a man who was politically reliable could go so far …

In that case, life really was complicated enough—and then some.

“
Heil
Hitler!” Steinbrenner said, which meant he’d had as much of Hans-Ulrich as he aimed to take.

“
Heil
Hitler!” Hans-Ulrich echoed. His arm shot out in the Party salute. So did Colonel Steinbrenner’s. The junior officer beat it.

Before long, though, not flying started to drive him crazy (or, depending on how you looked at things, crazier). The Stukas remained grounded. He talked himself onto a Fieseler
Storch
reconnaissance plane for a look-see above the French lines.

It was like piloting a dragonfly when you were used to flying a crow. Sergeant Dieselhorst came along for the ride. Like the Stuka, the
Storch
carried a rear-facing machine gun. It was almost the only resemblance between the two planes. “I forgot how much fun flying could be,” Dieselhorst said as they buzzed along not far off the ground.

“I know what you mean,” Hans-Ulrich answered. The
Storch
took off in nothing flat and could land in even less. You could make it hover like a kestrel in any kind of headwind. “What will you use that gun for?”

“Shooting ducks,” Dieselhorst said. “If we can keep up with them, I mean.” He wasn’t kidding, or not very much. The
Storch
cruised along at 150 kilometers an hour. A Stuka going that slow would have been hacked from the sky in nothing flat. But the Fieseler was so nimble, and could go so much slower than its cruising speed, that enemy planes were almost bound to overshoot it.

Here and there,
poilus
down below took pot shots at the
Storch
. When a French machine gun opened up on Hans-Ulrich, he decided it was time to head for home. As he banked out of trouble, Sergeant Dieselhorst fired a defiant burst at the machine gunners on the ground.

“That’s telling ’em,” Rudel said.

“Bet your ass,” Dieselhorst replied. “If they forget we’re a warplane, hell, we’re liable to do the same thing.”

Hans-Ulrich didn’t think that was likely. But the trip in the
Storch
reminded him there were plenty more ways to fight the war than he was used to.

At sea. Julius Lemp had forgotten how beautiful those words could be. Yes, the U-30 was still a claustrophobe’s worse nightmare. Yes, it smelled like a rubbish tip crossed with an outhouse. But nobody on the U-boat gave him a hard time on account of his politics.

He made a sour face. He stood on the conning tower, hands raised to hold binoculars to his eyes, so chances were no one noticed. Somebody aboard the boat was bound to report to the people who worried about what snoops aboard submarines said.

His own view was that those people would serve the
Reich
better if they picked up Mausers and killed Russians till the Russians got lucky and killed them instead. He understood the worst thing he could do was to announce his view. People like that wouldn’t know what to do if they had to fight. Suggesting that they should would only scare them. And if you scared those people, they’d kill you. You couldn’t count on many things in this old world, but you could count on that.

The U-boat rolled. Of course it did. A U-boat would roll in a bathtub, and the North Sea made about the most unruly bathtub there ever was. A faint stink of puke rose from the hatch that led below. But up here, Lemp had some of the freshest, purest air in the world blowing into his face. It was cold, but warmer than it would be in a couple of months—or up in the Barents Sea. Probably warmer than it would be in the Baltic this time of year, too. Which, when you got right down to it, wasn’t saying one hell of a lot.

He wouldn’t have to worry about the Baltic or the Barents this time around. The U-30 was ordered out into the North Atlantic. He looked forward to that the way he looked forward to getting a tooth pulled by a drunken pharmacist’s mate. The Atlantic’s broad, tall swells made the North Sea seem like a wading pool, if not quite a bathtub, by comparison.

Somebody had to sink the ships from America that gave England the food and supplies she needed to keep fighting, though. This time, the
Kriegsmarine
handed him the job. He’d do it, too, or die trying. Too many officers he’d known at the start of the war had already died trying.

He wished he hadn’t thought of it like that. You felt the footsteps of a goose walking over your grave often enough as things were. When you might as well have invited the damn goose into the churchyard …

“
Scheisse!
” said one of the ratings up on the tower with him. A moment later, he amplified that with, “Plane—heading our way!” He pointed.

Lemp saw it even without his binoculars—not a good sign. He said “
Scheisse!
” too, most sincerely. “Go below!” he added, and shouted down the hatch: “Dive! Dive! Crash dive!”

Klaxons hooted inside the steel cigar as the sailors on the conning tower hurtled themselves down the ladder. Air hissed and bubbled from the U-boat’s tanks as she started down. She could submerge in less than half a minute. How much less? Enough to save them from the flying marauder? Well, they’d know pretty soon.

It was a Swordfish, a biplane that should have been obsolete—and was, except for flying off Royal Navy carriers and raising havoc in other people’s navies. The conning tower was already three-quarters of the way underwater when Lemp went below. He slammed the hatch and dogged it shut after him.

Being years out of date, the damned Stringbag couldn’t come on very fast. Not much in the way of good news, but Lemp cherished what he had. “Hard right rudder!” he ordered. “All ahead full!” Eight knots submerged would drain the batteries in an hour, but he didn’t intend to go on anywhere near that long. He guessed the Swordfish would drop its depth charge along his previous course, and wanted to get as far away from that as he could.

“Hard right rudder,” Paul the helmsman answered, sounding calmer than he probably was. “Down past twenty-five meters, now thirty …”