The War That Came Early: Coup d'Etat

by Harry Turtledove

  Peggy started to tell Herb that all at once she understood why European nations went off the rails every generation or two. But she didn’t go ahead and do it. It would have involved reminding him they’d gone off the rails themselves. They were both doing their best to forget that. Whose fault was it that their best didn’t seem to be good enough?

  It probably wasn’t anybody’s fault exactly. It—

  “Did you say something?” Herb asked, so she must have made a noise after all.

  She shook her head. “Not me. Must have been the goldfish.”

  “We haven’t got a goldfish,” Herb pointed out. They grinned at each other from a distance of about six inches. How many times had one of them or the other—or, as here, both of them in collusion—made that same silly joke? It was one of the things they shared, one of the things that made them a couple.

  Gladys wouldn’t have known how to finish it. Neither would Constantine Jenkins. We’re like an old sock and a shoe, Herb and me, Peggy thought. We fit, and we’re comfortable together. That wasn’t such a bad thing, not when you considered the alternatives.

  Chapter 21

  If anything was more fun than changing a panzer track in mud and rain, Theo Hossbach had trouble imagining what it might be. The job resembled nothing so much as a bout of all-in wrestling, with the added chance of getting squashed if you were careless.

  Having a five-man crew instead of three did help. More hands couldn’t make this work light, but they did make it a little lighter. And the gunner and loader complained just as much as the three men who’d come out of their little Panzer II together.

  Which didn’t mean those three didn’t complain. “These fucking things better work, is all I’ve got to say,” Adi Stoss growled, plying spanner with might and main.

  “This beast should have come with them,” Lothar Eckhardt said. The gunner wiped a wet sleeve across his equally wet forehead and went on, “I mean, they knew all along what things in Russia would be like, right?”

  Adi and Hermann Witt both laughed raucously. Even Theo snorted. Sergeant Witt said, “Lothar, they didn’t know their ass from their elbow. Highways on the maps are horrible dirt tracks on the ground. Secondary roads on the maps aren’t there at all. They didn’t realize we’d need wider tracks on our panzers till we screamed at ’em that the Russians could keep going where we bogged down. And it’s taken a fucking year to get the Ostketten out to us so we could dance like this.”

  Ostketten: East tracks. Panzers hadn’t needed wider tracks in Czechoslovakia or the Low Countries or France. They sure did here in Russia. This wasn’t much of a civilized country, or much of a civilized war.

  Eckhardt stared at Hermann Witt. “But hasn’t the General Staff come out and looked at this ground?”

  “Don’t bet anything you can’t afford to lose,” Adi said.

  “Son of a bitch!” Eckhardt said with feeling. “If they haven’t, somebody ought to stick ’em in a penal battalion. Maybe they’d learn some sense if they lived through that. And if they didn’t, who’d miss ’em?”

  Penal units were a Soviet idea the Wehrmacht had borrowed. Take a bunch of guys who’d disgraced themselves by cowardice or some other mortal sin. Give them a chance at redemption—throw them in where the fighting is hottest. If they try to retreat, shoot them yourself. If they die in action, oh, well. Chances are they’ll shake the enemy doing it. And if they happen to live, you can turn them back into ordinary soldiers again. Or, if you’re so inclined, you can fill up the holes in the penal battalion with new fuckups—there are always new fuckups—and throw it into action somewhere else.

  The system had an elegant simplicity. Theo was surprised the Nazis hadn’t thought of it for themselves. But then, they’d never been shy about stealing ideas from other people. Instead of talking about that—which might have made him learn more about penal battalions than he’d ever wanted to know—Theo went on manhandling the Ostketten into place on the road wheels and the idlers and, most important of all, the drive sprocket.

  After close to two hours, they finished. A couple of them had vodka in their canteens instead of water. Say what you would about vodka, but it didn’t give you dysentery. The haves shared with the have-nots. Socialism was real at the front. Everywhere else, as far as Theo could tell, it was only a sour joke.

  Smacking his lips, Adi said, “No dumb cop’s gonna write me a ticket for drunken driving, not today.”

  “If anybody tries, mash him like a potato,” Hermann Witt said. He eyed their backbreaking handiwork. “Let’s see if we can go mash some Ivans now.”

  Ostketten wouldn’t keep out shells from a T-34 or a KV-1, of course. But the panzer crew had lashed the old, narrow tracks to the glacis. They might help turn an enemy round there. Or, of course, they might not. But it was worth a try. Theo had seen several other Panzer IIIs similarly decked out. More and more crews would improvise improved armor as more Ostketten arrived.

  At least the panzer’s engine started up right away. Hard freezes hadn’t begun yet, let alone the kind of weather that made a mockery of German antifreeze and motor oil. Mechanics swore this year’s antifreeze and lubricants were better than the stuff the Wehrmacht had used the year before. Theo hoped that meant they wouldn’t have to build a fire under the engine compartment to thaw things out enough to start. He hoped … but he didn’t really believe it.

  He dripped on his seat when he took his place inside the panzer. The radioman and bow gunner was as far from the engine compartment as he could get. In the Panzer II, Theo’s station had been right on the other side of the fireproof—everyone hoped!—bulkhead. He’d warmed up in a hurry there. No such luck in this machine.

  Over on the other side of the centrally positioned radio sat the driver. At Sergeant Witt’s command, Adi put the Panzer III in gear. It rattled and clanked ahead. The engine’s grinding growl seemed a long way off to Theo, who’d been used to listening to it right at his elbow.

  Theo glanced over at his comrade, but Adi was paying attention to what he was doing. “How does it seem?” Theo asked. If he wanted to find out, he had to spend some words.

  “Feels … a little better, maybe,” Adi answered after a judicious pause. “I don’t want to charge into the thickest slop I can find, you know, just to see if the Ostketten’ll pull us through it. They’re liable not to, and then you’d have to call a recovery vehicle to fish us out. Everybody’d love me for that.”

  If by love he meant scream at, he was right. Otherwise … Otherwise, he was a sarcastic, cynical veteran panzer man, just like thousands of others in the Wehrmacht. Well, almost just like thousands of others. As long as the authorities didn’t notice the difference, everything was fine. It had been fine for quite a while now. Theo hoped it would stay that way.

  German authorities weren’t the only ones who could foul things up, of course. The Russians weren’t thrilled about having other people’s tanks gallivanting across their landscape. Theo wondered why. Now that he could see out, he could see what a broad, bleak country this was. It might not have looked so bad when the trees had leaves and the grain was greening toward gold, but the harvest was over and cold and rain had done for the leaves. The word that crossed his mind for the land hereabouts was haunted.

  If you were a German panzer man, the landscape damn well was haunted. Russians wore mud-colored uniforms to begin with. And they took camouflage very seriously: more seriously than the Germans did, for sure. They wouldn’t mind rolling in the mud and rubbing it on their faces to make themselves harder to spot. They’d daub mud on their panzers, too, or drape netting over them to disguise their outlines. You might not suspect they were around till a shell slammed into your side armor from a direction you hadn’t worried about.

  Adi hit the brakes. Hermann Witt’s voice came through the speaking tube: “Why’d you stop?”

  “Ground up ahead doesn’t look quite right,” Stoss answered.

  “What’s the matter with it? Just looks like ground to me,” th
e panzer commander said.

  “I’ll go ahead if you want me to, but I’d sooner back up and go around,” Adi told him.

  “Do that, then,” Witt said. “You don’t usually get the vapors—and if you have ’em this time, well, shit, you’re entitled once in a while.”

  “Thanks, Sergeant. You’re all right, you know that?” Adi put the panzer into reverse. Theo wondered what would have happened were Heinz Naumann still in charge here. No, he didn’t wonder; he knew. Naumann would have ordered Adi to go straight ahead, just to show him who the boss was. And then they would have seen … whatever they would have seen.

  As Adi was making his loop, another Panzer III did head straight across the stretch of ground he hadn’t liked. It did fine for about thirty meters. Then it hit a mine that blew off its left track. Curses from the other panzer’s radioman dinned in Theo’s earphones. Now those guys would have to wait for a recovery vehicle, or else come out of their steel shell and try to repair things well enough to limp away. If the Reds aimed an antipanzer cannon at them while they were stuck … That would be hard luck. For them.

  Hermann Witt’s voice came through the speaking tube again: “Good job, Adi.”

  “Thanks, boss,” the driver answered. Theo wondered what Naumann would have said after they charged into the minefield at his orders. Since the other commander had stopped one with his head, nobody would ever know now. And maybe that was just as well for everyone—except Naumann, of course.

  VACLAV JEZEK SPRAWLED under a battered chunk of rusting corrugated iron between the Republican lines northwest of Madrid and the Nationalist positions. Rain drummed down on the iron. The ground around the Czech’s hidey-hole was getting muddy. No, by now it had already got muddy. Every so often, a little chilly rill dribbled in with Vaclav. Summer was over. Spanish autumn warned that Spanish winter was coming.

  Some yellowing bushes concealed where the muzzle end of Vaclav’s antitank rifle stuck out from under the sheet iron. The bushes also made it harder for him to peer through the telescopic sight, but he didn’t mind. A sniper’s first commandment was Don’t let them spot you. If you didn’t honor that commandment and keep it wholly, you wouldn’t live long enough to learn the second one.

  And, naturally, the rain also cut down on visibility. That blade also had two edges. Yes, Vaclav had more trouble finding likely targets. But Marshal Sanjurjo’s men would also have more trouble noticing him if he made a mistake.

  He gnawed on a chunk of spicy Spanish sausage. His tongue thought Spaniards put peppers and garlic in everything this side of ice cream. They were even worse than Magyars for hotting up their food. The sausage, actually, wasn’t too bad now that he’d got used to it.

  He wished for a cigarette. He had a pack in his pocket, but lighting one now would be a king-sized mistake. Even through the rain, an alert Nationalist might spot smoke leaking out from under the iron sheet.

  Some of the American Internationals chewed tobacco when they got into a spot where they couldn’t light up. Vaclav thought about it, but not for long. The idea seemed too disgusting to stand. He could deal with the no-smoke jitters till night fell. Then he could either have a careful cigarette here—making sure the struck match and the coal didn’t show—or go back to the trenches and smoke his head off.

  In the meantime … Waiting was a big part of the sniper’s game. If you weren’t patient, you wouldn’t last. One of these days—one of these years—Vaclav wanted to go home to a free Czechoslovakia. Letting some Spanish Fascist asshole pot him before he could wasn’t in his plans.

  He moved the antitank rifle a few millimeters. Through the scope, he eyed a new stretch of the Nationalists’ rear entrenchments. It seemed no more interesting than the old stretch had. The Spaniards there were more careless than they were at the front, where an ordinary rifleman could pot anybody who unwarily stuck his head up over the parapet. They thought they were far enough away to be safe.

  The hell of it was, they were right. He could have blown some of their brains out, sure. Seeing them in helmets so much like the ones the Nazis wore made him want to do it, too. But he wasn’t about to waste his precious ammo on ordinary Josés and Jorges. If you were going to snipe at long range, you wanted to get rid of the officers, the high-powered guys whose loss hurt the enemy out of proportion to their numbers.

  Like this bastard, for instance. He wore an officer’s cap with a high crown and a brim, not a helmet or a service cap. The brim helped keep the rain out of his eyes, but it also told the world what he was. There were stars above the brim. How many? Small or large? That would say how big a fish Vaclav had in his sights. At this range and in this weather, he couldn’t be sure.

  Whoever the jerk was, he pointed a finger at one of the ordinary soldiers and told him off in no uncertain terms. That decided the sniper watching him from afar. Anybody who thought he was such a big shot deserved whatever happened to him. Vaclav took careful aim, inhaled, exhaled, and pressed the trigger.

  The elephant of a gun slammed against his shoulder. The stock was padded, but that helped only so much. And the report, always fearsome, seemed four times as loud under the sheet of corrugated iron. But the Nationalist officer fell over, which was the point of the exercise.

  Vaclav quickly chambered another round. Had the Nationalists seen the muzzle flash when he shot their officer? If they had, would they come after him and try to pay him back?

  No one came. He wouldn’t have wanted to hunt snipers in the rain, either. You never could tell, though. Sometimes people got upset when you murdered their officers. Sometimes, no doubt, the regular guys in the trenches hoisted one in your direction when you blew the head off some jackass they couldn’t stand. That was the kind of thing you were unlikely to hear about, which had always struck Vaclav as too damn bad.

  He kept watching through the sight. He didn’t intend to fire two in a row from the same spot, not unless he got a terrific target. He’d think twice even then; shooting two in a row without moving felt almost like signing your own death warrant.

  After a while, he took a small swig from his canteen. Cheap Spanish white wine tasted different from cheap French white wine, but no better. With regret, he kept it to the one small swig. The less you drank, the less you needed to get rid of. He didn’t have much room to piss under here unless he wanted to lie in it.

  Some more sausage, some chewy barley bread … This wasn’t the Ritz or the Adlon, no two ways about it. Where was the barmaid with the big tits to bring him another bottle of bubbly?

  Wherever she was, she wasn’t anywhere around here. He didn’t find any more overbearing officers to shoot at. You could peer through a sight for only so long. Once he decided he wouldn’t spot anything more, he pillowed his head on his arms and fell asleep.

  It was dark when he woke up. Under the iron sheet, it was black as Hitler’s heart. He needed a second or two to realize he hadn’t died or been buried alive. He had a way out, a way back to his friends.

  “Fuck!” he muttered. He had to give his own heart stern orders not to try to pound its way out of his chest. His hands shook. Of course, that was partly because he hadn’t had a cigarette in much too long.

  He carefully backed out of the little artificial cave where he’d sheltered. It was still raining. No one in the line challenged him till he was clambering over the parapet.

  “Good going, guys,” he said as he dropped down into the forward trench and fumbled for his cigarettes. “I could have been a Nationalist with a machine pistol. You never would have known the difference till I opened up.” He cupped his hands so he could strike a match in spite of the waterworks from on high.

  “Nah. You would’ve made more noise getting through stuff if you were,” one of the other Czechs answered.

  “You hope I would,” Vaclav said. “Some of those guys know what they’re doing, though.” It started coming down harder. He kept a hand over the cigarette so the raindrops wouldn’t put it out. After so long without, he needed more than just a
drag or two to feel right.

  “We heard you fire,” the other Czech said. “Get the guy you were aiming at?”

  “Bet your ass,” the sniper said, not without pride. “He won’t be telling anybody what to do again.”

  “So some other jerk will do it instead.” That cynicism came from Benjamin Halévy.

  With exaggerated patience, Vaclav answered, “The idea is, if we kill enough of them, they’ll run out of men—or the ones they have left won’t be worth shit.”

  “Yeah, that’s the idea, all right,” the Jew agreed. “Sure is taking it a long time to work, though.”

  Vaclav looked at him—looked through him, really. “If you don’t like it, you can always go back to France. The rest of us, we’re fucking stuck here. We aren’t going back to Czechoslovakia—that’s for goddamn sure.” The Nazis held—held down—two-thirds of what had been his country. Slovakia, the remaining chunk, called itself independent. It might be able to sneeze on its own. It couldn’t wipe its nose afterwards, though, till Hitler countersigned the order.

  “Bite me, Jezek,” Halévy said without heat. “I’m not going anywhere, and you know it. I volunteered for this shit, same as you.”

  “Maybe that proves you really are a dumb sheeny after all. You don’t usually talk like it, though,” Vaclav replied. They swore at each other in a companionable way. Nobody would be going anywhere much till the rain quit for a while, and they both knew it.

  RAIN. SLEET. A little snow mixed in for good—or bad—measure. Julius Lemp wondered why he’d brought the U-30 up to the surface. He could hardly see the U-boat’s bow from the conning tower, let alone anything farther away. Stumbling over a target in the storm-tossed Barents Sea would be purely a matter of luck.

  True, the boat could go faster surfaced than submerged. Again, so what? If all he saw was this tiny circle … Yes, he’d sweep out more area cruising along at fifteen knots, but enough to matter? He doubted it.