Coup d'Etat

Chapter 9

The major standing by Alistair Walsh murmured to himself: “ ‘If it were done when ’tis done, then ’twere well it were done quickly.’ ”

“What’s that, sir?” Walsh kept looking across the street toward what had to be England’s most famous address.

“That”-the major’s handsome face set in disapproving lines at Walsh’s ignorance, and very likely at his accent, too — “ that is Shakespeare. Macbeth, to be precise.” He was the sort who’d set great stock in precision. Yes, the Army needed that kind of man… which didn’t mean the bloke would have a great pack of friends.

“We ought to move a bit, not let ourselves be seen staring at the place,” Walsh said. He didn’t think he himself was important in the grand scheme of things: not in the other side’s calculations, at any rate. He didn’t know what kind of reports they had about the major. He didn’t even know the man’s name. What you didn’t know, you couldn’t tell, no matter how clever-or cruel-the questioner.

Absently, the major nodded. “Quite,” he said, and started mooching down the street. Sighing, Walsh went along. The major was bound to be very good at… well, at whatever he was good at. Whatever that might be, it wasn’t acting. He might have drawn more notice with a battery-powered signboard featuring flashing electric lamps. On the other hand, he also might not have.

Walsh didn’t notice anything out of the ordinary about the guards in front of the famous address. Of course, if the other side was on the job, he wouldn’t. But if the other side were on the job, he wouldn’t have been strolling along with the officer.

He did some murmuring of his own: “Gunpowder.”

“Oh, we’ve got better toys than that these days,” the major said.

“I meant the Gunpowder Plot, sir. Guy Fawkes’ Day.”

“Well, don’t equivocate, then,” the major snapped. “Say what you mean.”

“Yes, sir,” Walsh replied with dour precision. Since he was nominally a civilian, he couldn’t salute, even sarcastically, but he had to remind his twitchy arm of that. “What I mean, sir, is that if we bugger this up little tykes a hundred years from now will take lessons about the Second World War Traitors and get browned off because they’ve got to memorize our names.”

“Little tykes a hundred years from now will take lessons about the Second World War Traitors regardless.” The major spoke with gloomy certainty. “The only question left is which list of names they’ll have to memorize.”

Walsh grunted. That was much too likely to be true. A nice-looking blonde came up the street past him. Of itself, his head swiveled so he could check her hip action, too. The little things in life went on no matter how grandiose the big things were. A blackbird on a rooftop opened its yellow beak and poured out springtime song. It hopped into the air and flew off, right over Walsh and the major.

The officer ducked away. Walsh eyed him sympathetically. He must have had a rugged war if a thrush could remind him of a grenade or a shell fragment. The ribbon for the Military Medal on his chest did nothing to argue against that. But then the major said, “Ought to be a bounty on those bloody things. Did you ever try to clean bird shit off your cap visor?”

“Er-no.” Walsh’s sympathy evaporated.

“Stinking nuisance,” the major said, before returning to the business at hand: “I’m told you know something of this business. What do you think of our chances for success?”

Do I know something of this business? Walsh wondered. He’d planned and led attacks on strongpoints in urban settings-no doubt of that. It made him more of an expert than most people, even probably more of an expert than most soldiers. He pursed his lips, weighing what he’d seen. “So long as we do keep the advantage of surprise, chances look tolerably good to me. If they’re waiting for us when we make the attempt…”

“We’re ruined for fair, then,” the major finished for him, which wasn’t how Walsh would have gone on. Again, though, that didn’t make him wrong.

A boy on a street corner was waving the Times of London and bawling out the latest war headlines. The British Expeditionary Force and the rest of the Nazis’ allies were advancing deeper into Russia. In Malaya and Burma, the Japanese kept pushing imperial troops back. Even Singapore, said to be the strongest fortress in the world, might come under attack soon.

“Strange business,” the major said, walking past without buying a paper.

“How’s that, sir?”

“Well, the bleeding Japs are supposed to be Hitler’s chums. But we’re supposed to be Hitler’s chums, too, and we’re at war with Japan. And the Russians are Hitler’s deadly enemies, but they’ve already had their war with Japan, so they’re neutral now. And the USA and Japan are fighting, but Russian ships can cross the Pacific free as so many fish, load up on guns in American ports, and haul all that stuff back to Russia to fire it off against the Nazis-and us.”

When you thought of it like that, it was enough to make your head swim. Walsh found one problem: “How many ships in the Pacific have the Russians got left now that Vladivostok’s fallen?”

“They have some yet. And there’s a road connection-not a good one, but it’s there-between Magadan and what the Russians still hold of the Trans-Siberian Railway. No, the real question is, how much can they bring in whilst the harbor at Magadan’s not iced up?”

Walsh had never heard of Magadan. He had no idea where in Siberia it lay, or, for that matter, whether the major was simply inventing it to bolster his argument. The officer ducked into a pub. Walsh followed. A pint of bitter made him stop caring whether Magadan was real.

Beer, steak-and-kidney pie, more beer… A French estaminet couldn’t hold a candle to a proper pub. Two wars’ worth of experience on the other side of the Channel and years of diligent experimenting in his own country left Walsh as sure of that as made no difference. The major wasn’t the best drinking companion he’d ever had, but also wasn’t the worst.

It was dark by the time Walsh went back to his little furnished room. London’s lights were on again. With Germany friendly, the need for a blackout disappeared. Sometimes conveniences came at too high a price. Walsh thought so, anyhow. The Prime Minister would have disagreed. Walsh reckoned disagreeing with Sir Horace Wilson sure to put him in the right.

Because of the beer he’d taken on board, the knock at the door took longer to rouse him than it might have. He lurched off the bed-which doubled as a sofa in daylight hours-ready to give whoever was out there a piece of his mind. But the two somber men in trenchcoats hadn’t the slightest interest in listening to him.

“You’re Alistair Walsh-is that right?” one of them said.

“What if I am?” Walsh answered indignantly. “Who wants to know?”

Both men produced Scotland Yard identity cards. “You’re under arrest,” said the one who did the talking. “Come along with us-quietly, if you please.”

Ice and fire chased each other along Walsh’s spine. “The devil I will,” he blustered. “Show me your warrant.”

With startling speed, the copper or detective or whatever he was produced a pistol: a. 455 Webley and Scott Mark VI, a great man-killing brute of a revolver, the same weapon British officers carried into battle. “Here’s all the warrant we need, mate. Let out a peep and I’ll blow a hole in you they could throw a cat through.”

The other Scotland Yard man spoke up for the first time: “Don’t tempt us, either. Shooting’s better than a damned traitor deserves.”

“I’m no traitor!” Walsh said, wondering how many MPs and Army officers were being scooped up in the same net.

Both men in the hallway laughed-two of the nastiest laughs he’d ever heard. “Now tell us another one,” said the fellow with the Webley and Scott. “No-tell your stories at headquarters. Get moving, right now. This is your first, last, and only chance.” He gestured toward the stairway with the pistol.

Numbly, Walsh got moving. The Fritzes had almost captured him a couple of times. He’d counted himself lucky to escape that fate. Now his own countrymen had him by the ballocks. Better if the Nazis had got him. At least they were enemies, and honest enough about that at the time. These bastards imagined they were patriots. It only went to show how crazy and useless a thing an imagination could be.

Pete McGill hadn’t thought of Australia as a tropical country. When he was on shipboard duty, before he got posted to China, he’d put in at Sydney and Melbourne and Perth. They weren’t half bad-they kind of reminded him of Southern California. He’d never been to Darwin before.

Here he was in Darwin now. It wasn’t the Dutch East Indies-it wasn’t right on the Equator. No, it lay all of twelve degrees south. That made a difference. As far as Pete was concerned, it didn’t make nearly enough.

He was just glad he’d got here in one piece, and that the Boise had got here under her own power. Most of the ships and sailors who’d fought the Japs with the American light cruiser farther north weren’t so lucky. The Dutch East Indies were falling, if they hadn’t already fallen. All that oil, all that rubber, all that tin… They lay in Japanese hands now.

How long the Boise would be able to keep running under her own power-and how long she’d stay in one piece herself-he had no idea. Japanese bombers called on Darwin night after night. They were, not to put too fine a point on it, knocking the crap out of the place. Darwin was just a little town at the edge of nowhere. The Japs seemed intent on knocking it over the edge.

And so Pete wasn’t astonished when the Boise steamed out of the harbor one evening just when the sun was going down. If one of those bombers with the meatballs on the wings got lucky, the light cruiser wouldn’t go anywhere again, except to the bottom. So she was getting out while the getting was good.

It seemed that way to him, anyhow. Joe Orsatti was much less happy about it. “I’m sick of running from those shitass little yellow monkeys,” he groused as the Marines manned the five-inch guns in case an enemy plane or a sub or even an arrogantly aggressive destroyer spotted the Boise.

“Who isn’t?” Pete agreed. They hurried east. Scuttlebutt said they were bound for New Zealand, and ultimately for Hawaii. Pete hoped the scuttlebutt was true. He wouldn’t be sure till they made it through the Torres Strait. If they kept heading east after that, New Zealand it would be. If they swung more to the south, paralleling Australia’s coast, they were liable to be bound for Melbourne or Sydney. He understood that the Aussies needed to keep up the fight. But so did America, and he wanted to help. He figured he owed the Japs more than Orsatti did.

The other leatherneck warmed to his theme: “I’m a white man, God damn it to hell. Those lousy slant-eyed cocksuckers got no business pushing me around.”

Plenty of Marines in Peking and Shanghai had felt the same way. Pete wondered how his buddies were doing these days. He wondered how many of them were still alive. Not for the first time, guilt stabbed at him because he wasn’t up there sharing their fate, whatever it turned out to be. He couldn’t do anything about that, of course, but his impotence made him feel worse, not better.

He’d had some of that white man’s arrogance himself, but only some. “I saw a lot of the Japs in China,” he said slowly. “They’re just as sure they’re hot shit in a gold goblet as we are.”

“Yeah, but they’re really nothin’ but cold diarrhea in a Dixie cup,” Orsatti replied, which got a laugh from everybody in the gun crew, including Pete. He went on, “You wait and see. We’ll make ’em wish they never took us on. We get the whole fleet together at Pearl, then we sail west and bash ’em.” His voice went all dreamy. “The Big Fuckin’ Pacific Battle. It’ll make Jutland look like a couple of kids playin’ with toy boats in the bathtub.”

“There you go,” Pete said. There weren’t many sailors or Marines who didn’t daydream about the Big Fuckin’ Pacific Battle. Anybody with a brain in his head had seen that the USA would tangle with Japan one of these days. Why else had both sides built all those battlewagons and carriers and cruisers and destroyers and subs, if not to get ready for the day? So we’d put all of ours together, they’d put all of theirs together, and then both sides would bash heads. And the winner would go forward, while the loser… What about the loser?

He’d get what losers always got. T.S., Eliot.

Without warning, the Boise heeled to port, as hard as she could. A split second later, klaxons hooted. “Torpedo attack!” The shout burst from the loudspeakers’ iron throats. “We are under torpedo attack!”

They’d gone to battle stations as soon as the ship left port. Pete stood by the open ammunition locker, ready to pass shells to the loader. He couldn’t do anything else except wait and worry and hope like hell he wouldn’t get his ankles broken when the Jap fish slammed into the cruiser.

“There’s the wake!” Orsatti said hoarsely.

Sure as hell, a phosphorescent line arrowed through the tropical sea, seeming to run straight for the Boise ’s vitals. Now-how many fish had the Japanese sub launched? Holy crap! Here came another one, much too soon after the first. It sped along on a track almost identical to the other.

Could the Boise dodge them? She was sure as hell trying. Smoke spurted from her stacks as the engines roared up to emergency full. Machine gunners opened fire on the torpedoes, trying to detonate them before they could hit… if they were going to hit.

“Hail, Mary, full of grace…” Orsatti rattled off the prayer. The hand in his pocket was probably working a rosary. Pete wished he could pray that way. He’d seen how it made people feel better. But he’d never got the habit when he was a kid, and talking to God now only made him feel like a phony.

He tried the next best thing, saying, “I think the bastards are gonna slide on by us.” The Boise had turned into the torpedoes’ paths, and was running along them in the opposite direction-straight toward the sub that had turned them loose. If that sub was still surfaced, it would be mighty sorry mighty fast. Pete peered forward. He saw nothing that looked like a periscope or a conning tower, but how much did that say?

Bow on, the Boise also offered torpedoes the smallest possible target. They did slide past, both to port. One seemed close enough for Pete to spit on. He refrained. No grinding, rending crash told of a cruiser-submarine collision. The Boise threw a few depth charges into the warm, dark water. The deck shook under Pete’s feet as they burst one by one. The ocean boiled above the bursts.

“I wish I thought we were really after those assholes,” Joe Orsatti said. “Way it feels, though, is we’re just makin’ ’em keep their heads down.”

“Fine by me.” Pete profanely embellished that. “All we’re doing now is getting out of town any which way. So we’ll go, and they can give somebody else a hard time next week.”

The other Marine grunted. “Yeah, you got somethin’ there. I didn’t look at it from that angle. Maybe you’re smarter’n you act most of the time.”

“Ahh, up yours,” Pete said without heat. “Besides, if I’m so goddamn smart, what am I doing here?”

That drew another laugh from everybody at the gun. “Well, if I remember straight, your other choice was staying in Manila,” Orsatti answered. “Like I said a minute ago, maybe you ain’t so dumb after all.”

Pete wondered what he would have done if he hadn’t come aboard the Boise. He didn’t need to wonder long. He would have picked up a Springfield, found a tin hat that came close to fitting, and joined the Americans and Filipinos trying to hold off the Japanese invaders. From the reports trickling out of the Philippines, the defenders were losing ground day by day.

Well, the Boise and the handful of other American ships in the western Pacific hadn’t done much to slow down the Japanese attacks on Malaya or the Dutch East Indies, either. Here on the cruiser, though, he wasn’t shivering with malaria. He had plenty of chow. It might not be great, but it wasn’t terrible, either. He wouldn’t come down with amoebic dysentery if he ate it or drank water that wasn’t heavily chlorinated. If you wanted to fight a war in comfort, a ship was the place to do it-unless you got hit, of course. Getting hit was bad news no matter where or how it happened.

It wouldn’t happen right this minute. That sub lurked somewhere deep in the sea, with luck damaged by the ash cans the Boise threw at it. Any which way, the cruiser would be long gone before the sub surfaced again. And then…? New Zealand and Hawaii? Sydney or Melbourne? In a way, which choice hardly mattered. They both meant that, sooner or later, the Japs would get another chance at the Boise and everybody she carried.

To say that the Spanish Republic wasn’t rich only proved what a poor, inadequate thing language could be sometimes. Vaclav Jezek had heard that the Republic had sent all its gold to Russia for safekeeping (and, incidentally, to buy weapons). Giving Stalin your gold reserves struck him as the exact equivalent of handing a fox the keys to your chicken coop. He might be here fighting for the Republic, but he had scant use for Stalin.

Because the Republic was chronically broke, soldiers’ pay chronically ran late. He didn’t much care about that; he had little to spend money on but cigarettes and booze, and he usually found enough in his pockets for those. Before long, the Spaniards doled out rank insignia so their people would know who was who and what was what among the Czechs. Vaclav got two gold cloth stripes with red borders.

“Is the mark of a brigada,” the fellow who gave it to him said in German with a Spanish accent strong enough to make it almost incomprehensible to Jezek. “A sergeant, they say in this language.”

“But I’m only a corporal,” Vaclav answered, also in German.

“People from European armies, we promote one grade,” the Spaniard said. “You have combat experience soldiers from Spain do not.” His face clouded. “The Fascists, they also this do with the men of the Legion Kondor.”

“Oh, terrific,” Vaclav said, fortunately in Czech. Gaining a privilege because a pack of Nazis also enjoyed it was the last thing he wanted. But he damn well did have combat experience the locals lacked. And, if his pay went up to match the Spanish rank, he’d get more money even if they stiffed him now and then. So he managed to compose himself when he returned to German: “Danke schon.”

“Bitte,” the Spaniard answered, and showed himself a true student of Kultur by clicking his heels German-style. Vaclav didn’t tell him any Czech despised that nonsense as a reminder of the not-quite-dead-enough Austro-Hungarian past. The fellow doubtless meant well. Then again, when you thought about which road was paved with good intentions…

Because Benjamin Halevy was already a sergeant, the Spaniards made him into a second lieutenant. He took it for a joke, which made Vaclav think better of him. “I sure as hell never would have turned into an officer if I’d stayed in France!” the Jew exclaimed.

“Maybe if you’d gone to Russia and done something brave, the Germans would have given you a battlefield promotion,” Vaclav suggested with a sly grin.

Halevy told him what he could do with any battlefield promotion won from the Nazis. It sounded uncomfortable, especially if Vaclav tried to do it sideways, as the other man urged. When the Czech said so, he found Halevy remarkably unsympathetic.

By the time the Spaniards got through, none of the Czechs had a grade lower than PFC, and most of them were at least corporals. It might matter when they dealt with the locals. Their relative ranks remained unchanged, so for their own purposes the promotions gave some merriment but otherwise might as well not have happened.

More serious business for Vaclav was picking off any of Marshal Sanjurjo’s officers who came within range of his elephant gun. The Nationalists made his murderous work easier by prominently displaying their rank badges and medals. “Stupid,” he said, after potting a fellow he thought was a colonel. “They’d be a lot safer if they showed off less.”

“But they’d be less macho,” Halevy told him.

“Less what?” Vaclav hadn’t run into the Spanish word before.

“ Macho. It means being tough for the sake of being tough. It means, if you’ve got a big cock, you wear a codpiece so it looks even bigger. It’s like elk growing antlers every spring so they can bang heads with other elk.”

“Elk can’t help growing antlers every spring,” Vaclav protested.

“Spaniards, or a lot of Spaniards, can’t help showing how macho they are,” Halevy said with a shrug.

“If they had any brains, they could,” Jezek said. “That colonel would still be breathing if he’d worn a private’s tunic and kept his medals in the boxes they came in. The way he was strutting around with all those gold stars and ribbons, he might as well have written SHOOT ME! across his chest in big red letters.”

“If they had any brains, Vaclav, how many of them would be officers in a Fascist army?” Benjamin Halevy asked.

Vaclav pondered that. “Well, you’ve got something there,” he admitted.

The next day, the Spanish papers that came out from Madrid had big headlines. The only problem was, Vaclav had no idea what those headlines said. Spanish was even more a closed book to him than French had been.

Halevy, who read French like the native he was, could make a stab at written Spanish, just as a native Czech speaker would recognize some written Polish words and might be able to extract sense from a Polish newspaper story. “Something’s going on in England,” the Jew reported. “Somebody-the army, I think-doesn’t like the way the government’s jumped into bed with the Nazis, and they’re trying to do something about it.”

“And?” Vaclav said. “Don’t cocktease, goddammit! Are they winning? Are they losing? Will England tell Hitler where to head in? That’d be something, wouldn’t it?” He imagined the Royal Navy and the RAF pounding the hell out of German-held Europe again.

“I don’t know ‘and,’ ” Halevy replied in an unwontedly small voice. “Either the paper doesn’t say or my Spanish is too crappy for me to figure it out. Maybe they’re hanging traitors from lampposts. Or maybe the traitors are still running things and they’re translating ‘Deutschland uber Alles’ into English right now.”

“Give me that goddamn thing.” Jezek snatched the newspaper out of Halevy’s hand. As usual, the Czechs and the men from the International Brigade held adjoining stretches of the Republican line. The Republic naturally grouped its best fighters together. And the Czech didn’t take long to find somebody who could read Spanish and speak German.

“It just says there’s unrest in England,” the International told him. By the way the man pronounced his r’s, Vaclav guessed he was a Magyar. Had they met anywhere but in Spain, they probably would have quarreled-Hungary had sat on Slovakia for centuries, and mistrusted Czechs for wanting to help Slovaks. Here, they both had bigger things to worry about.

“Who’s winning?” Vaclav asked, as he had with Halevy.

The Magyar spread his hands. “We’ll have to wait and see,” he said. “The guy who wrote this doesn’t know. He’s trying to hide that so he won’t look dumb, but he doesn’t.”

Vaclav made a disgusted noise down deep in his throat. “Sounds like a newspaperman, all right.”

“It sure does.” The Magyar studied him. The fellow had green eyes, high cheekbones, and an arrogant blade of a nose. He looked the way Vaclav would have expected a Magyar to look, in other words. And he sounded faintly surprised when he added, “You’re not such a fool, are you?”

For a Czech, he might have meant. To Magyars, Slovaks were nothing but bumpkins, and Czechs were a lot like Slovaks, so… Vaclav thought Slovaks were bumpkins, too, and Fascist-loving bumpkins at that, but he knew Magyars were dead wrong about Czechs. How did he know? By being a Czech himself, of course.

“Well, I try,” he said dryly.

“Heh,” the Magyar said. He tapped the paper with his left hand. The little finger was missing its last joint. “Thanks for bringing this. I hadn’t seen it yet. If England really is having second thoughts, that could be big.”

“What do you think the odds are?”

“Either she’ll change her mind or she won’t. Right now, you can toss a coin,” the Magyar answered. Grimacing, Vaclav nodded. If you tried to guess when you didn’t know enough, you were bound to end up looking like an idiot. The Magyar declined that dubious honor. Declining made sense. Vaclav still knew what he hoped.

Theo Hossbach didn’t like any SS men, as a general working rule. He disliked the Waffen — SS less than the other branches, though. Men who joined the SS intending to fight foreign foes took more risks than the ones who joined to hit prisoners who couldn’t fight back.

These bastards were still bastards. Unlike their comrades in the Black Corps, they were brave bastards. He’d seen that in France. Waffen- SS units there went straight at obstacles the Wehrmacht would have tried to outflank or would have ignored altogether. Sometimes taking a position was more expensive than it was worth.

So it seemed to the Wehrmacht, anyhow. So it certainly seemed to Theo. The SS men looked at things differently. Sometimes they bulled through where the Wehrmacht would have hesitated, perhaps not least because the enemy often thought they wouldn’t be crazy enough to attack here. Sometimes they got slaughtered for their trouble.

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 Fuhrer ’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.