The War That Came Early: Coup d'Etat

by Harry Turtledove

  Not that Theo necessarily thought slaughtering SS men a bad idea … He did disapprove of waste, though. Even when the SS broke through, its butcher’s bill was higher than the Wehrmacht’s would have been.

  Right now, Theo and Adi Stoss and Hermann Witt were messing with their Panzer III’s transmission, trying to figure out which gear in the train didn’t want to mesh and whether they had or could get their hands on a replacement. “The Ivans don’t worry about shit like this,” Adi said. “Their drivers have a mallet next to their seat. When a gear doesn’t want to engage, they give the stick a good whack. That makes the son of a bitch behave.”

  “You’re making that up,” Sergeant Witt said. “I know the Russians can be rude and crude with their equipment, but that’s over the line even for them.”

  Lothar Eckhardt, the panzer’s gunner, and Kurt Poske, the loader, watched without saying much. They were both new men, much less experienced than the three veterans. Theo wished it were a new Panzer III, but no. Somebody else got the new machines. This one was a hand-me-down, not so old and beat-up as the Panzer II that was now being cannibalized for spare parts if its carcass had been brought in and quietly rusting if it hadn’t.

  Adi raised his right hand with the first two fingers raised and crooked, as if he were swearing an oath in court. “Honest to God, Sergeant. I’ve seen the damn things with my own eyes.”

  “Me, too.” Theo rarely contributed to the conversation, but a fact was a fact—and this one cost him only a couple of words.

  “Well, fuck me,” Witt said mildly. Heinz Naumann wouldn’t have let his juniors get away with disagreeing with him, even when they were right—maybe especially when they were. Theo missed Naumann not a bit, and suspected Adi missed him even less than that. Seeing that a fact was a fact even when it wasn’t his fact was one of the many things that made Witt a better panzer commander than Naumann had ever dreamt of being.

  Adi pounced with a wrench. Three minutes later, he held the culprit in the palm of his hand. “Will you look at that?” he said. “One tooth gone, and another one going. No wonder things were getting sticky.”

  “No wonder at all,” Witt agreed. “Have we got a new one we can swap in?”

  “I’m pretty sure we don’t,” Adi said.

  Witt nodded unhappily. “I’m pretty sure you’re right.” He tossed the toothed steel disk to Eckhardt. “Go on back to the maintenance section and get a replacement. Check it out before you take it, too. Don’t let ’em give you one that’s had new teeth welded on. They’ll tell you it’s just as good, but that’s a bunch of crap.”

  The kid looked shocked. He was very fair, and couldn’t have been above nineteen—he hardly needed to shave. “They’d try to dump defective stuff on us?”

  “Listen to me.” Witt spoke with great conviction. “You know the Russians are the enemy, right? But your own side will screw you just as hard if you give ’em half a chance. Go on, now. Scoot.”

  Theo wondered if Witt would ask Adi or him to go along with Eckhardt. But the sergeant didn’t. The new guys had to learn the ropes. Whenever you had the chance, you broke them in a little at a time. Trouble was, a fast-moving campaign—which this one had become, now that the mud was dry—didn’t always give you chances like that.

  Witt pulled out a pack of Junos and offered everybody else a smoke. “We may as well take ten,” he said. “We sure aren’t going anywhere till he comes back with that gear.”

  New green grass was pushing up through the dirt and through the gray-yellow dead growth from the year before. Theo sat down and sucked in smoke. Not far away, a skylark sang sweetly. The clear trilled notes couldn’t drown out the distant rumble of artillery, though. Theo cocked his head to one side, listening to the guns. Ours, he decided, and relaxed fractionally.

  Another panzer crew was working on their machine at the far edge of the field. Resting infantrymen sprawled in clumps between the two panzers. They all wore SS runes on helmets and collar patches. They were eating or smoking or passing around water bottles that probably didn’t hold water. Some of them lay with their eyes closed, grabbing a little sleep while they could.

  They were doing all the things Wehrmacht foot soldiers would have done, in other words. Theo still looked at them differently. Anybody could end up in the Army. He had, for instance. So had Adi Stoss. You had to volunteer for the Waffen-SS, and you wouldn’t do that unless you were a convinced Nazi. They wouldn’t take you unless they were sure you were a convinced Nazi, either, so that worked both ways.

  One of the guys propped up on an elbow maybe ten meters away bummed a chunk of black bread from his buddy and squeezed butter onto it from a tinfoil tube. Theo’s stomach rumbled. He told it to shut up. It didn’t want to listen.

  “Can you believe those stupid goddamn Frenchmen?” the trooper asked after he swallowed a heroic bite of bread.

  “Jesus Christ, but that was chickenshit! For twenty pfennigs, I would’ve blown the fuckin’ froggies a new asshole with my Schmeisser,” answered the other man from the Waffen-SS. Theo’s stomach rumbled again. Once more, he told it to keep quiet. It might not want to listen, but all of a sudden he did.

  The first fellow who wore the runes couldn’t have looked more disgusted had he tried for a week. “Once we finish with the Ivans, we’re gonna have to do for the froggies, all right,” he said. “It’s a hell of a note when we can’t give the Hebes what they deserve on account of our so-called friends don’t like it.” He spat in the dirt.

  “Damn straight,” his friend agreed. “Damn straight. This whole stupid, stinking war, it’s about Reds and kikes. If the Frenchmen can’t see that, tough shit for them, that’s all I’ve got to say.”

  “Amen!” the first trooper said, as if in church. “The Führer’s gonna bring things around to the way they’re supposed to be, even if he’s got to wipe out all the goddamn Jews to do it.” The other fellow with the SS collar tab nodded, then started cleaning his submachine gun.

  Ever so casually, Theo’s gaze swung toward Adi Stoss. He wouldn’t have been surprised to find Adi hopping mad, or else sizzling inside and trying to pretend he wasn’t. But the panzer driver lay on his back, his hands clasped behind his head, staring up at the clouds drifting across the watery blue sky. If he’d paid any attention to what the infantrymen were saying, he gave no sign.

  Lothar Eckhardt came back with the gear. He anxiously showed it to Sergeant Witt. “Is it all right?” he quavered. No doubt he was imagining bread and water, if not a blindfold and a last cigarette at dawn, if the answer was no.

  The panzer commander carefully inspected the part. If it wasn’t all right, he would go back to the maintenance section and give those clowns a piece of his mind. But he nodded. “Looks good. They knew they couldn’t pull a fast one on you, so they didn’t even try.”

  “Wow!” Eckhardt breathed.

  “Now you and Kurt are going to install the son of a bitch,” Witt said. “The more you know about keeping your panzer running on your own, the better off you’ll be. One of these days, you’ll run into trouble where you can’t go off to the mechanics.”

  Eckhardt and Poske both gulped. “I’m not sure we know how to do that, Sergeant,” the loader said, which could only mean We have no idea how to do that.

  Witt chuckled; he understood at least as well as Theo. “Adi and I will coach you,” he said. “It isn’t black magic. It isn’t even real hard, as long as you don’t mind getting your hands dirty. And you’d damn well better not. Now come on, both of you.” He led them back to the waiting Panzer III.

  Chapter 10

  Going back to Madrid was nothing new for Chaim Weinberg. Going back to Madrid with money in his pocket was. He was carrying the proverbial elephant-choking roll. He’d played a lot of poker since coming to Spain. (He’d played a lot of poker before he came to Spain, too, which didn’t hurt.) When luck and skill came together … He shook his head in wonder. He’d never known a night when luck and skill came together like the night befor
e.

  Fins, sawbucks, pound notes, fivers … It was just about all good money, not asswipes like pesetas and francs. Poker, after all, was serious business. It brought out the hard currency.

  On rattled the ancient, beat-up French truck. Chaim tried to listen for aircraft noises over the engine’s farting and the rattle of stones off the undercarriage. Of course a Nationalist bomber or a Legion Kondor Messerschmitt would pick this exact moment to target this ratty truck.…

  But none did. Brakes squealing—hell, brakes shrieking—the truck shuddered to a stop. “Raus!” the driver yelled. He wasn’t a German. He was an Estonian, or something like that. But he knew Raus! was something everybody in the back of the truck would get. And everybody did. Out scrambled the soldiers. The Spanish kid who hopped down just in front of Chaim mimed rubbing at his abused kidneys. Chaim chuckled and nodded.

  He looked around. As always, Madrid saddened and awed him at the same time. You could kill tens of thousands of people if you bombed the crap out of a big city. Everyone between the wars had seen that clearly. The heavy-duty thinkers hadn’t understood just how big a big city was, though. With the worst will in the world, bombers couldn’t smash all of one.

  And bombing a city didn’t cow the people it failed to kill. Instead, it really pissed them off. The heavy-duty thinkers missed that one, too—missed it by a mile. They underestimated the proletariat’s resilience (and the bourgeoisie’s, though Chaim had no great use for the bourgeoisie, either).

  So Madrid looked like hell. Streets were cratered. Buildings had chunks bitten out of them. There were mounds of rubble that had been buildings in happier times. Window glass was a prodigy; whenever Chaim caught a glimpse of some, his head started to whip around, as if toward a pretty girl.

  Communist Party headquarters, where his own particular pretty girl worked, had taken a pounding. Naturally, the Nationalists wanted to knock it flat. But you couldn’t hit one building in particular with high-altitude bombing—one more place where the theorists had it wrong. And enough antiaircraft guns surrounded the place to make even the most fanatical Stuka pilot think twice before tipping his plane into a dive.

  Men from one of the gun crews waved to Chaim as he walked into the building. They recognized him by now. “You lucky so-and-so!” one of them called—they knew who La Martellita was, too. Chaim laughed and waved back.

  If his Spanish ladylove was glad to see him, she hid it very well. “What are you doing here?” she snapped when she looked up from the report she was working on. Chaim couldn’t read Spanish upside down. He wondered what the report was about, and how many people would wind up in trouble because of it. Party reports always landed people in trouble—that was what they were for. He counted himself lucky that none of La Martellita’s reports had had his name in them.

  “What am I here for? I’ll show you, babe.” Chaim reached into one of his front pockets and extracted the roll. (He wasn’t dumb enough to carry it in a hip pocket, where it practically begged to get stolen.) He started peeling off greenbacks and British banknotes and laying them on the desk one after another. “Here you go. These are for you—and for the kid, claro.”

  He startled her, enough so she couldn’t keep from showing it. “Where did you get all this?” she asked, as if sure he couldn’t have come by it honestly.

  I earned it by oppressing the working class. Communist or not, Chaim made that kind of joke without even thinking about it. But he did have to think about it to translate it into Spanish. And thinking about it, this time, made him decide not to translate it. La Martellita wouldn’t appreciate it.

  That should have warned that they weren’t destined for many long and happy years together. But she was stunning, she tasted good, and she felt even better. Infatuation had blinded plenty before him. It wasn’t likely to stop after he ran aground, either.

  Instead of joking, he said, “Cards,” and let it go at that.

  She was counting the money and, he supposed, turning the count into pesetas. “You don’t win like this all the time,” she said accurately.

  “Querida, nobody wins like this all the time. Nobody who doesn’t cheat, anyhow,” Chaim answered, also accurately. “But at least I have the sense to use the money. I’m not going to waste it, and I didn’t lose it all again as fast as I won it.”

  “You didn’t gamble the sun away before morning,” La Martellita said.

  It sounded like a proverb, but it wasn’t one Chaim had heard before. “The sun?” he echoed.

  “One of the conquistadores in Peru got a big golden sun disk as his share of the loot from the Incas. He lost it at dice before the real sun came up,” La Martellita explained.

  “Gotcha.” Chaim knew plenty of guys like that. Spaniards weren’t the only ones who came down with gambling fever. Oh, no—not even close.

  She looked from the cash on the desk in front of her to him and back again. “You didn’t waste it or lose it again,” she agreed slowly. “You brought it to me. Why?”

  “Why do you think?” He knew he sounded irritable, but he couldn’t help it. “Because I want to take care of the baby the best way I can. And because I love you.” Speaking Spanish imperfectly meant he had to say what was on his mind: he couldn’t beat around the bush, as he might have in English.

  Saying what was on his mind didn’t necessarily help him, though. By the look on La Martellita’s face, she was on the point of laughing in his. She didn’t—quite—do that. She did say, “The more fool you. The people’s cause matters more than any personal attachments.”

  “Really?” he said. “What is the people’s cause, if it isn’t to make people happy with other people?”

  “It has nothing to do with love,” La Martellita insisted.

  “What a pity!” Chaim answered. ¡Qué lástima! sounded much more pitiful to him than its English equivalent did.

  A slow flush heated her olive-skinned face. She tossed her head in annoyance, as if that could make the blush go away. She might have wanted to tell him where to head in, but she didn’t quite do that, either, not with all the money he’d given her still sitting on top of her desk. Her elegant nostrils flared. “You enjoy being as difficult as you can,” she accused.

  “I’m sure Marshal Sanjurjo’s soldiers agree with you,” he said. “They probably talk about it a lot down in hell.”

  “None of this would have happened if I hadn’t got drunk that one night.” Was she reminding him or herself?

  “You can’t pretend it didn’t happen, though.” With a certain sardonic relish, Chaim added, “It’s part of the historical dialectic now, after all.”

  Those gull-winged nostrils flared again, wider this time. “And I suppose you’ll tell me it’s part of the historical dialectic that I should sleep with you some more because you thought to bring me this money. Well, I’ll tell you right now that the historical dialectic hasn’t made me your puta.”

  Chaim had been thinking about saying something like that if he could find a way to do it that wasn’t quite so blunt. Since she’d forestalled him, all he said was, “The historical dialectic did turn you into my wife.”

  “Sí,” La Martellita answered. That wasn’t delight filling her voice, no matter how much Chaim wished it would have been.

  “I am trying to take care of you, and take care of our child, the way a husband ought to,” he said. “I’m doing my best.”

  “Sí,” she said again, a little more warmly this time. “Maybe—maybe—I’ll do the things a wife ought to do, as long as you don’t try to make me do them.”

  That kind of reply should have made him bang his head against the wall. Coming from La Martellita, who was mercury fulminate in a sweetly curved wrapper, it made a weird kind of sense. “Whatever you say,” Chaim told her, which only proved him a born optimist.

  ALISTAIR WALSH HAD spent some time in the stockade, and in civilian jails as well. Boys will be boys, and soldier boys will be soldier boys. Sometimes the police, military or otherwise, showed up befor
e the tavern brawl finished. He’d never hurt anybody badly in those little dustups, and he’d never spent long behind bars.

  Things were different this time. And he liked none of the differences. If they jugged you for rearranging a bloke’s face after he tried to smash a pint mug over your head, you knew what you’d done and you knew how long you’d stay jugged on account of it.

  If they jugged you for treason, though … In that case, they were making up the rules as they went along. He’d asked for a solicitor. They didn’t laugh in his face, but they didn’t give him one, either. They might as well not have heard him.

  But when they asked him questions, they expected answers. Oh, yes! No one asked you questions after a barroom brawl, except maybe Why were you such a bloody idiot? Here, they wanted to know everybody he’d ever met, what all those people had said in the past six months, and what he’d said to them. They weren’t just building a case against him. He was a minnow. They were trying to use him to hook the big fish.

  They weren’t fussy about how they went at it, either. Bright lights, lack of sleep … “No wonder you back the buggers who threw in with the Nazis,” he told one of them. “The SS must have taught you all its tricks.”

  That won him a slap in the face. They didn’t bring out the thumbscrews and the hot skewers. He wondered why not. Some lingering memory of the days when they were decent coppers? It seemed too much to hope for.

  They told him all the other traitors were in cells, too. They told him the others were singing like canaries. They told him half a dozen people had named him as one of the earliest and most deeply involved plotters. “Then you don’t need me to tell you anything more, do you?” he said.

  He got another wallop in the chops for that. When his ears stopped ringing, one of the detectives—if that was what they were—said, “You can make it easier on yourself if you give us what you know.”

  “If you think I’m a traitor, you won’t go easy on me any road,” Walsh said. He might be sore. He might be half drunk with sleepiness. No matter what he was, that seemed obvious to him.