The War That Came Early: Coup d'Etat

by Harry Turtledove

  Too much like that? For what had to be the first time, Chaim wondered. Yes, she was beautiful. Yes, she was dangerous. Yes, the combination was intoxicating. But, when you got right down to it, how bright was she really?

  Intoxicated, Chaim had never stopped to worry about it. He’d never stopped to think it might matter. Not thinking was most unusual for him, and telling testimony to just how head over heels he was about her. Most of the time, he thought convulsively, propulsively, continuously. If he hadn’t turned Red, he would have made a yeshiva-bukher to be remembered for generations. If he thought about La Martellita instead of remembering what touching her felt like …

  “Why are you looking at me like that?” she asked.

  “Like what?” Chaim feared he knew like what, but he didn’t want to acknowledge it, even—especially—to himself. For a while, you imagine that something broken will put itself back together by magic. But magic is in desperately short supply in the material world.

  “Like the way you’re looking at me, that’s like what.” It was obvious to La Martellita. “Like I just died or something.”

  “No, not you,” Chaim said sadly. He’d never imagined himself a prophet, but he could see the future all too clearly now. It was a future where he didn’t see the son or daughter swelling in La Martellita’s belly. It was a future where he didn’t see her, either, and probably one where she told the child nothing but bad things about its father. He’d just watched his love die, and he had no idea what he could do about it.

  “What, then?” she demanded. It wasn’t obvious to her. He could see why not, too. She’d never been in love with him. If he’d thought she was, it was only because he’d made her reflect what he most wanted to see.

  He could tell her. What difference would it make? Not much, which was part of the problem. But, like a wounded soldier who won’t look to see how badly he’s hit, Chaim didn’t want to bring out the fatal words. He said “Never mind” instead, hoping against hope the wound wasn’t mortal after all.

  Chapter 16

  Nothing in Central Europe or France had braced Vaclav Jezek for summer outside Madrid. Dust. Blazing sun. Air that sucked moisture from your body like a vampire. The only thing that hadn’t changed was the stink of death. That stayed the same everywhere. It was bound to be the same in hell, assuming this battlefield wasn’t one of Satan’s ritzier suburbs.

  Vaclav wasn’t the only one to feel the heat, either. Several of his countrymen got carried off the field with sunstroke. He heard later that one of them had died.

  Through it all, Benjamin Halévy went about his business as calmly as if it were an April day in Paris or Prague. He might have been made of metal. Whatever he was made of, the savage Spanish heat couldn’t melt him.

  “Why aren’t you baked like the rest of us?” Vaclav snarled. The weather left him short-tempered, too.

  “It’s hot,” Halévy said. “But my people came out of the desert, remember. I guess the memory of it’s still in my bones.”

  He sounded serious. As Jezek had seen, though, he often sounded that way when he was anything but. “Desert, my ass,” the sniper said.

  “Well, if your ass seems cooler than the rest of you, maybe it came out of the desert, too.” Halévy eyed him. “Have to say you don’t look like you’ve got any Jews in the woodpile.”

  What first sprang to Vaclav’s mind was something about Halévy’s mother. But he could see for himself how Halévy would parry that. You didn’t want to get into a manure fight with a guy who ran a fertilizer factory. Halévy thought faster and nastier than he did, and that was all there was to it. Instead of being bitchy, Jezek asked, “Have you heard anything about when Marshal Sanjurjo will inspect the trenches again?” He waved toward the Nationalist lines, taking care not to raise any part of his arm above parapet level.

  Benjamin Halévy grinned crookedly. “I’ve finally sucked you in, huh? You want him?”

  “Bet your sweatless ass I do,” Vaclav answered, and the Jew laughed out loud. Undeterred, Vaclav continued, “If I pot the fat old bastard, they’ll pin a medal on me. They’ll promote me, so I get some extra pay for real and more besides in promises. They’ll send me back to Madrid and let me drink and fuck as much as I want. Maybe they’ll even pay for the spree. So, yeah, if Sanjurjo shows up, I’ll punch his ticket for him.”

  “You’ve got all kinds of good reasons,” Halévy allowed. “And, on top of it, it might even help the war effort.”

  “That, too,” Vaclav agreed. The damned Jew started laughing again. Vaclav couldn’t see why. If it had provoked him enough, he might have taken a swing at his buddy. Halévy was an officer now, so that could have been a capital crime. Worrying about it wasn’t what held Vaclav back. The sensible concern that he’d wake up in the bottom of the trench with a sore jaw and maybe a couple of broken teeth had much more to do with it.

  Instead of decking the Jew, Jezek lugged his antitank rifle down the line and spied on the Nationalist positions. The enemy soldiers carried on in plain sight of him. He could have killed some of them, but to what end? They’d tighten up and get more wary. That was the last thing he wanted.

  Almost the last thing … A Spanish sharpshooter had hunted him for a little while. The would-be marksman was now of concern only to his next of kin. It wasn’t that he hadn’t been brave. It wasn’t even that he hadn’t been a good shot. But he must have got what he knew about concealment out of some badly translated manual from the last war. The Nationalists wore German-style helmets, which made them familiar-looking enemies. Those helmets were pretty good. But they wouldn’t stop an ordinary bullet, let alone the fat ones Vaclav used. That sniper got only one lesson in the art, a very final one.

  There were steel loopholes along the line from which Vaclav could inspect the enemy’s trenches. As was his habit, he stayed away from them. An ordinary soldier couldn’t put a bullet through one except by luck, and from what he’d seen Spanish soldiers were often less than ordinary. But you never could tell. The Nationalists might have a few real experts. Or they might talk to their Italian allies or to the Germans of the Legion Kondor. For someone who knew what he was doing, a loophole was a challenge, not something too tough to bother with.

  He crossed into the trenches the International Brigades held. They greeted him in several languages, some of which he understood. A—probable—Magyar spoke in German: “Haven’t seen any elephants around here for a long time.”

  “I keep snapping my fingers—that’s why,” Vaclav answered in the same language. The International made a horrible face. Vaclav trudged on down the line.

  The Americans in the Abe Lincoln Battalion (or maybe it was a brigade; even they didn’t seem sure) had more trouble talking to him than most of the other Internationals. They knew English, and some of them had picked up enough Spanish to get by. Neither of those did him much good, and they were unlikely to speak any other tongue.

  One exception was—surprise!—a Jew from New York City. Chaim understood Vaclav’s German, and Vaclav usually managed to cope with his Yiddish. The Abe Lincoln didn’t look very happy right now.

  “What’s up?” Vaclav asked.

  “My girl and me—it’s gonna go down the drain.” Chaim mimed a little whirlpool in case Vaclav didn’t get it.

  But he did. “It’s gonna go down the drain?” he echoed. “It hasn’t happened yet? Maybe it won’t.”

  “It’s gonna,” Chaim repeated gloomily. “Some stuff you see coming way ahead of time. You can’t stop it, not unless you’re Superman. Maybe not even if you are.”

  “Not unless you’re who?” Vaclav asked.

  “Superman. Übermensch, it’d be in German, but the English doesn’t make you sound like a fucking Nazi. The guy’s a comic-book hero. Lemme show you—a buddy sent me a couple from the States, and they honest to God got here, would you believe it? They’re pretty good.” Chaim rummaged in his pack till he grunted in victory and pulled out a gaudily printed comic book.

  The text was
in English, of course. Vaclav knew even less English than Spanish—he could get beer and some food in Spanish now, and was starting to be able to swear when he didn’t get them fast enough to suit him. But there wasn’t a whole lot of text, anyway. The pictures carried the action, and pictures were a universal language. For what he couldn’t get from them, Chaim made an enthusiastic translator and explainer.

  “See, Metropolis is pretty much like New York City,” the American Jew said. “Not exactly, but pretty much. I’m from New York City, so I should know, right?”

  “New York City is like that?” Vaclav pointed to one of the panels. Superman was rescuing a scantily clad girl with one hand and picking up an enormous locomotive in the other. The bad guys’ Tommy-gun bullets ricocheted off his chest as if he were armored like a tank.

  “Well, not exactly.” Chaim sounded a little embarrassed. “But the look of the place—the skyscrapers and the cars and the clothes and all—that’s pretty close. And the newspaper office where Superman works when he’s being Clark Kent, that looks like a newspaper office. I mean, it’s bigger and cleaner than a real one—I’ve been in ’em, so I know—but it’s got the idea right, anyway.”

  Vaclav had been in a newspaper office in Prague. It was tiny and airless and dark, housed in some building left over from the eighteenth century. It smelled of ink and beer and tobacco and unwashed people. How it turned out a newspaper every day, God only knew; the editor plainly had no idea. Next to that, even a rougher version of what the comic book showed seemed very much like heaven.

  “America must be a strange place,” Vaclav said.

  “Man, you got no idea,” Chaim answered.

  “If you lived there, why did you come here?”

  “For freedom. For adventure. For love.” The Jew’s face twisted. “And I got ’em all, and they ain’t worth shit. Women are crazy, you know? You can’t live with ’em and you sure as hell can’t live without ’em.”

  Not much originality there, but great feeling. Carefully, Vaclav said, “You aren’t the first guy who ever found this out.”

  “I guess not, but that don’t make it hurt any less,” Chaim replied, and Vaclav found himself without a comeback for that.

  WILLI DERNEN SEWED his pip onto a patch with a chevron, then sewed the chevron onto the left sleeve of his uniform tunic. Not just a Gefreiter—an Obergefreiter. The promotion gods had smiled on him again, presumably because he’d stayed lucky enough not to stop anything. He was a very senior private indeed.

  He found it obvious that, if and when a bullet finally found Arno Baatz, he could step right up and do Awful Arno’s job better than Arno did himself. Corporal Baatz, unsurprisingly, held a different opinion. “You think you’re such hot shit, don’t you?” Baatz said. “Well, puff and blow all you want. They won’t make you an Unteroffizier if you live to be a million.”

  Blow me, Arno, Willi thought. Aloud, he said, “How about that?” It was a pretty safe phrase any old time.

  “Well, they won’t, dammit,” Awful Arno insisted. “You have to go to noncoms’ school to learn to do all the stuff an Unteroffizier has to do. It takes weeks. You’d never hack it—no way in hell.”

  As far as Willi was concerned, if Awful Arno had made it through noncoms’ training school, anything this side of Hans the counting horse could probably do the same. Telling him as much was a great temptation. Regretfully, Willi held back. Life was too short … he supposed.

  So all he said was, “I notice you’re wearing your shoulder straps upside down so the Ivans don’t spot the pips on them.”

  “I should hope I am,” Baatz said importantly. “Most noncoms do, you know. The Reds understand that we’re what makes the army tick. They’d sooner shoot a corporal than a private any old day.”

  Willi had never dreamt he would sympathize with the Red Army, but all of a sudden he did. Again, letting Baatz know everything on his mind struck him as less than a good idea. He hoped he sounded patient as he answered, “I understand that. But my pip’s on my sleeve, where I can’t hide it. And the chevron only makes it stand out more.”

  “Shall I cry for you?” Awful Arno said, and Willi sympathized with the Russian sharpshooters more than ever. Luckily not understanding that, Baatz went on, “Anyway, you’ve only got it on one side. From the right, the Russians will just figure you’re an ordinary, miserable, no-account private.”

  “Wunderbar,” Willi said. At least Baatz hadn’t added instead of an ordinary, miserable, no-account Obergefreiter. He was probably thinking it, though, the same way Willi was having unexpected kind thoughts about the Ivans.

  No matter what he thought about them, they didn’t love the Wehrmacht. Several batteries of 105s opened up on the German positions southwest of Smolensk. Willi and Corporal Baatz both dove for a foxhole. It was big enough to hold the two of them, though Willi would have bet Baatz was no happier about being cheek-to-cheek with him than he was smelling Awful Arno’s stale sweat.

  If a shell came down on top of them, they’d both head for the Pearly Gates at the same instant. Willi looked forward to passing through while demons with pointy pitchforks dragged the Unteroffizier down to a warmer place. He would cherish the look on Baatz’s face, damned if he wouldn’t. That was an un-Christian thought; he knew as much. Knowing and caring were two different beasts.

  Somebody a couple of hundred meters away shrieked for an aid man. That sobered Willi. No, he didn’t want a 105 round to come down on them after all, not when he had no guarantee of dying instantly. He’d seen too many slow, anguish-filled ways of passing to want to experiment. Baatz’s cheese-pale face said he wasn’t thrilled about what was going on, either.

  “Damn Russians have too many guns,” Baatz yelled through the din.

  “Too right they do!” Willi agreed with great feeling.

  And then things got worse. He hadn’t dreamt they could. Something screamed down out of the sky, trailing a tail of fire. No, not one something, but dozens of them spread through a square kilometer or so, all screaming the way Willi’d imagined Arno Baatz’s damned soul doing. And then, over no more than a few seconds, they all slammed into the ground and they all exploded.

  “Gott im Himmel!” Willi shouted, as loud as he could. He hadn’t a prayer of hearing himself. Awful Arno’s lips were moving, too, but Willi couldn’t hear him, either. He had trouble breathing, and tasted blood when he coughed to try to clear his ears. He suspected he was lucky—if he was lucky—the blast hadn’t finished him altogether.

  He looked around. The Russian rockets—he supposed they couldn’t be anything else—had left the ground a smoking moonscape. Bodies and pieces of bodies lay scattered at random across it. And the German soldiers who survived were panicking like a bunch of Dutchmen suddenly up against panzers.

  Mouths wide open to let out cries of terror Willi couldn’t hear, Landsers raced toward the rear. Some still carried their rifles or machine guns. Others had thrown them away so they could run faster—or else just forgotten all about them. Here and there, officers and Feldwebels tried to stem the tide. They had as much luck as King Canute.

  Willi might not have heard those frightened yells, but even his battered ears caught the rising screams in the air to the northeast. “Oh, no! Not again!” he wailed, and curled up in a ball like a pillbug.

  The second rocket salvo caught too many panicked Germans out in the open. Between shattering blasts and scything shards, a man standing up without shelter didn’t have a chance. Side by side with Willi, Arno Baatz also tried to squeeze himself into as small a space as he could. Willi could read his lips as he howled, “Make it stop, Jesus! Make it stop!”

  Jesus, unfortunately, wasn’t in charge of that. The Soviet high command was. The rockets didn’t come again. But a wave of Red Army foot soldiers surged out of their trenches and swarmed toward the battered German line. Willi supposed they were yelling “Urra!”—they always did when they charged. He sure as hell couldn’t hear them, though.

  If they got close
enough, they would kill him. No matter how blast-stunned he was, he could see that. His fine new sniper’s Mauser found its way to his shoulder without his quite realizing how it got there. He could hear the report, and the kick helped bring him back to himself. An Ivan fell over. Willi swung the rifle a little to the left. He potted another Russian.

  Arno Baatz uncoiled and started shooting, too. So did other Landsers here and there. The rockets hadn’t taken out or terrorized everybody. But that khaki Russian wave kept coming. There weren’t enough Germans left to stop it, and wouldn’t have been even if the discombobulated ones were still able to fight.

  Willi could see that. Could Awful Arno, or would he get sticky? Mouthing exaggeratedly, Willi shouted, “We’ve got to get out of here!”

  “What?” Baatz mouthed back. Willi repeated himself. The corporal’s eyes showed white all around the iris. Baatz bit his lip. Then he nodded.

  They both scrambled out of the foxhole and staggered toward the rear—toward a place where, God willing, things like this didn’t happen. They weren’t the only ones, either. Something in Willi’s chest loosened when he saw Adam Pfaff. He first recognized his buddy by his rifle’s gray paint job. Pfaff himself was too filthy to put a name to. Willi guessed he was no cleaner himself.

  Pfaff waved. A Russian bullet cracked past, between him and Willi. They both ducked. Pfaff said something. Willi held a cupped hand to his ear to show he couldn’t hear. Pfaff mimed shock, horror, and disbelief. Then he turned and fired a couple of shots to slow down the oncoming Ivans. That struck Willi as a brilliant idea. He did the same thing himself. Corporal Baatz also sent a round their way. Arno might be awful, but he did have balls.

  Then a chattering machine gun really slowed the Russians. Cannon shells burst among them, too. Panzers to the rescue—and Willi hadn’t even realized they were around till they started firing. He wondered if his hearing would ever come back. Or had the rockets scrambled it for good?