Two Fronts

Chapter 22

A couple of miles behind Alistair Walsh, the English artillery had lined up as many guns as the artillerists could get their hands on, all of them hub to hub. They’d piled up as many shells for them as they could, too. And now they were shooting them at the Fritzes in western Belgium.

They’d started two days earlier, and they showed no signs of stopping. The staff sergeant hadn’t been at the Battle of the Somme; he hadn’t been old enough to join the Army in 1916. The bombardment before the Tommies went over the top must have been a lot like this, though.

The Battle of the Somme, of course, had been a bloody disaster, in both the slang and the literal senses of the word. A week’s worth of shelling hadn’t been enough to knock out German cannon and, more important, German machine guns. Something like 50,000 got killed trying to advance the first day of the attack, and the numbers didn’t shrink much in the days that followed. And all they acquired were a very few square miles of muck and corpses pulverized as thoroughly as modern science knew how.

He hoped-Christ, he prayed, and he wasn’t a man in the habit of praying-things would go better this time when the order to advance came. The tank was supposed to have consigned trench warfare and days-long bombardments to the same dustbin of history that held cavalry charges and infantry squares and catapults. Tanks made warfare mobile again. So all the big brains insisted, anyhow.

Then the Germans brought their Tigers into Belgium. Tigers smashed English tanks and French chars as if their armor were tinfoil. Not a single Allied fighting vehicle had a gun that could punch through a Tiger’s frontal plates.

Tigers were slow. They weren’t very maneuverable. They were so wide and heavy, they strained bridges and sometimes even broke them. Going forward, they left a lot to be desired. But God help you if you were in a Crusader or a Matilda and you had to try to shift them.

God hadn’t helped enough. Thanks to the Tigers and their own good soldiering and general stubbornness, the Germans had kept England and France from taking back most of Belgium.

Thus the reversion to the last war’s tactics. If we kill them all and smash the whole countryside to rubble, the thinking seemed to be, we’ll be able to walk through them and then get on with the war.

It might work. Stranger things had happened … hadn’t they? The generals seemed confident. Of course, from everything Walsh had heard, they’d seemed confident at the Somme, too. Even if this did work, would England and France have to repeat it ten miles farther east, and then another ten miles later after that? If they did, would any Belgians not in exile be left alive to reclaim their country? Would any country be left for them to reclaim?

Fascinating questions, all of them, but not questions even the most senior NCO was in any position to answer. Walsh mainly worried about what would happen once the shelling stopped and the officers’ whistles ordered the advance. Most of the Tigers, he assumed, would survive. A few would take direct hits on the turret or engine decking and go up, but most would remain.

What about the ordinary Landsers in their holes? Whether the guns could do for them would determine whether this was a replay of the Somme or something with a happier ending from the English point of view.

At the Somme, even English troops in sectors where the Fritzes got smashed had trouble going forward because the ground was so torn up. When they did advance, the ground complicated resupply or made it impossible. Now there were tanks and Bren-gun carriers and other tracked vehicles that could cope with the worst terrain. That would help.

Not all the shells here flew from west to east. The Germans shot back whenever they saw the chance-and, no doubt, whenever they managed to get shells to their big guns. Some of it was counterbattery fire. That didn’t bother Walsh. When the buggers in Feldgrau took their whacks at the English front line, though …

All he could do was hunker down and hope nothing landed close enough to murder him. He’d picked up a Blighty wound in each fight so far. If he got hit again, he couldn’t count on being so lucky three times in a row.

RAF bombers pounded the Germans, too, the usual planes by night and a few squadrons of American Fortresses by day. Spitfires escorted the day bombers, but the Luftwaffe savaged them anyhow. Watching one fall out of the sky in a flat spin with two engines on fire made Walsh think there might be more rugged ways to make a living than the one he’d found for himself.

Little by little, the English bombardment lifted. It didn’t die out altogether, but went after more distant targets. Ever so cautiously, Walsh looked out over the forward lip of the hole in which he crouched. If people ever sent a rocket to the Moon, whoever peered out from the cabin might see a landscape that looked a lot like this one. Oh, he wouldn’t spot shattered tree stumps on the Moon-or Walsh didn’t think so, anyhow. And all those battered coils of barbed wire also struck him as unlikely … unless the Lunarians were fighting a particularly vicious war amongst themselves. And if there were Lunarians, they might be.

Tanks rumbled and clanked forward. Infantrymen trotted along with them to protect them from determined Fritzes with grenades and Molotov cocktails or other handheld unpleasantnesses. Walsh wasn’t sorry his company hadn’t been told off for that little job. They’d done it before. Whenever you took the lead, you wanted to make sure you had all your policies paid up.

Blam! … Clang! … Boom! Walsh didn’t see the enemy tank or antitank gun that opened up on the English armor. He recognized the flat, harsh bark of an 88, but wasn’t sure whether the dreaded German beast was mounted on a Tiger or in an emplacement all that gunnery hadn’t taken out. Either way, the clang! was a round penetrating a tank’s vitals, while the boom! was all the ammo inside the iron coffin going up at once. The turret flew off the stricken tank. It came down fifteen or twenty feet away, and squashed a luckless Tommy. The poor beggar was doubtless dead before he knew it, not that that would be much consolation for him and his mates.

Blam! … Clang! … Boom! Another English tank turned into a burning hulk. The surviving tanks started shooting, but at what? Walsh still couldn’t see the cannon that was murdering them. Then German MG-34s and the newer, still more vicious MG-42s opened up on the foot soldiers stumbling across the broken ground.

Walsh had hated MG-34s since he first made their acquaintance in the war’s early days. They were as portable as Bren guns-you could even pick one up and fire it like a rifle if you had to-but put three or four times as much lead in the air. MG-42s were even worse. They fired so fast, you couldn’t really hear the separate rounds. An MG-42 sounded like a buzz saw, and cut men down like a buzz saw, too.

Officers’ whistles shrilled. “Follow me, men!” a captain shouted. “Our armor will lead us into the Germans’ rear!” He clambered up out of his hole and dogtrotted after the tanks and the men who’d advanced with them.

Follow me! almost always produced the desired effect. So did a calculated show of bravery like the one the captain gave. “Come on, lads!” Walsh called to the Tommies within earshot. “No help for it-let’s be at ’em!” He got out of his own lovely foxhole and went after that captain.

He’d already seen more than enough to make him sure the attack wouldn’t do what the generals hoped it would. The bombardment hadn’t smashed the Nazis’ tanks or wiped out their machine-gun nests. Which meant neither foot soldiers nor armor would be seeing the Germans’ rear any time soon.

To show that to the brass hats, though, the Army had to pay the butcher’s bill. Walsh slipped in some mud and sprawled on his belly. A couple of rounds from a German machine gun cracked through the air where he probably would have been if he hadn’t taken a header.

Another man was down not far away, wailing and clutching at his thigh. Walsh crawled over to him. He did what he could to dress the wound. He gave the Tommy morphine. He stayed with the poor fellow as long as he could, or a little longer. It let him do something useful that didn’t put him in too much danger of getting killed. At last, reluctantly, he had to return to the attack. He could already see it wasn’t going anywhere. Eventually, the blokes who gave the orders would realize the same thing. His job now was to stay alive till they did. If their orders in the meantime would let him.

A soft bed. Clean sheets. A shower ever day. Regular meals with enough food in them. Except for a scalp laceration and a mangled hand, Chaim Weinberg would have said he hadn’t had it so good since he got to Spain.

Once the scalp wound got cleaned up and stitched, it healed on its own. X-rays showed that that mortar fragment might have dented his hard head, but hadn’t cracked it.

His hand was a more complicated, more painful business. Dr. Alvarez kept doing things to it, waiting till it got halfway better, then doing more things. When Chaim complained about operations every couple of weeks, Alvarez said, “I will stop if you like. You will have a claw with a usable thumb. Is that what you desire?”

“What I want is for the goddamn mortar bomb to’ve come down somewhere else,” Chaim answered. “I’d still be in one piece, and they wouldn’t’ve had to plant poor Mike.” Carroll had died on the way back to the aid station. Word took a while getting to Chaim in Madrid, but he knew now.

“I cannot do anything about that now, nor can you,” Dr. Alvarez said patiently. “I can do something about your hand-if you wish me to proceed, of course.”

“Yeah, go ahead,” Chaim said. “I’m sick of getting carved on, but go ahead. You give me something I can use well enough to help me handle a rifle, that’s what I want.”

More ether. More pain. More morphine. He wondered if he’d end up a junkie by the time this was all over with. That was one more thing he’d just have to worry about later.

He was pretty doped up after the latest surgery, his hand elevated and wrapped in enough bandages to make a suit of clothes with two pairs of pants, when La Martellita walked into his room. “Wow,” he said. “Hola, beautiful! I hope like hell you’re real, not something I’m imagining on account of the drugs.”

“Of course I am part of objective reality. There is nothing else.” La Martellita sounded absolutely certain-but then, when didn’t she?

Chaim started to giggle. “Yeah, you’re you, all right.” No matter how luscious she looked, that uncompromising tone couldn’t belong to anyone else.

She sent him a severe look. “I came to see you because you were wounded in the service of the Republic.”

If she came to see everybody who got hurt on the Republican side, Internationals and Spaniards alike would jump out of their trenches and charge Marshal Sanjurjo’s machine guns. Even woozy from morphine, Chaim knew he’d only piss her off if he said so. Male horniness was a part of objective reality she didn’t much care for.

Instead, he asked, “How’s your Russian boyfriend? Will he get mad if he finds out you came to see me?”

Her sculpted nostrils flared. “I am not his property. I am every bit as much a free citizen as he is.”

“It’s okay by me, sweetie,” Chaim assured her. “How about the kid?”

“He is well. He is happy,” La Martellita said. And he doesn’t miss you one bit. Blunt though she was, she didn’t say that, but it hung in the air anyhow.

“Good. That’s good,” Chaim said. “If you come again, I’d like to get the chance to see him.”

“Again?” Now La Martellita sounded surprised, as if he should have known he was damn lucky she’d come once. I guess I should have, he thought. But she grudged him a nod. “Pues, puede ser,” she said. Well, maybe. He knew he had to be content with that. It was more than he’d expected to get.

He tried a different question: “And what’s going on with the Party these days?”

That got him more than he’d expected, too. La Martellita gave forth with a blow-by-blow account of all the Marxist-Leninist-Stalinist wrangling she knew about in Madrid, in Barcelona, and in Moscow over the past couple of months. By the verve she used to narrate, she might have been broadcasting the Joe Louis-Max Schmeling heavyweight championship fight. She was just as sure about who was the good guy and who was the crook as any of the clowns screaming into their microphones had been then.

Chaim didn’t have to listen very hard. He could just watch her and admire her. He even seemed to be doing that from a distance considerably greater than the one between him in bed and her at the bedside. He knew why, too. Morphine was a wonderful drug in all kinds of ways. It blunted pain that laughed at medications like aspirin.

Most of the time, though, seeing and hearing La Martellita would have made Chaim want to drag her down and jump on her. Not now. Now his admiration, while still there, felt far more abstract, almost as if he were approving of the way a perfect statue had been carved. With morphine sliding through his veins, he just wasn’t horny.

Anything that could make a guy not horny while he was around La Martellita was heap big medicine indeed. Chaim admired the drug in much the same way as he admired the woman.

In due course, she said, “You’re probably lucky you’re laid up. If you weren’t, your big mouth would only get you into trouble.”

“I wouldn’t be surprised,” Chaim answered, not without pride. “I never did think Party doctrine was like going to Mass, and that only the priests were sure to have it right.” One other thing morphine could do, as he’d already discovered, was to make you say (or let you say, depending on how you looked at things) what you were thinking.

In a land where the Party called the shots, that was beyond merely dangerous. La Martellita’s kissable mouth narrowed to a thin, red line. “I am going to do you a large favor,” she said. “I am going to remember you are my son’s father. Because I am going to remember that, I am not going to ask you what you mean when you make such counterrevolutionary cracks.”

“Gracias.” Chaim meant it, which saddened him. She really was doing him a favor. He’d heard of men in the Soviet Union who ended up on trial because of stuff they mumbled when coming out of anesthesia after surgery. He didn’t know for sure that such stories were true, but he believed them. Some stuff, you couldn’t make up. It was too unlikely.

“De nada,” La Martellita said, in such a way as to remind him that, if it was nothing, it was a large nothing. “And now I had better go.”

Away she went. Her behind would have drawn a backfield-in-motion penalty on any gridiron in the USA (Canada, too). No doubt she was reminding Chaim of what he couldn’t get his hands on any more. She couldn’t know that the morphine made him stop worrying about whether he got his hands on it or not.

After her exit, Dr. Alvarez came up and asked Chaim, “You know that woman?”

“Nah,” he said blandly. “Who was she, anyhow? Kinda cute.”

His deadpan was good enough to make Alvarez start to answer him. The sawbones stopped with his mouth hanging open and sent Chaim an exasperated stare. “You are being difficult on purpose.”

“Darn right I am,” Chaim agreed. “It’s one of the things I do best. You don’t believe me, ask La Martellita.”

“You do know her, then,” Alvarez said in now-we’re-getting-somewhere tones.

“Doc, I knocked her up. I was married to her for a little while,” Chaim replied. “What about it?”

For the first time, he impressed Alvarez for something other than the sorry state of his smashed left hand. One of the surgeon’s eyebrows twitched a few millimeters. “Oh,” he said. “You’re that fellow.”

“That’s me.” Chaim nodded. “Uh, can I have another shot, please? Damn thing’s starting to bite me again.”

At Wilhelmshaven, Julius Lemp accepted his superiors’ congratulations for sinking the Royal Navy submarine. He shaved off the scraggly beard he’d grown on the U-30’s latest cruise. And he talked shop with the maintenance crews who brought the U-boat up to fighting trim again.

One of the men working on the engines was Gustav the diesel mechanic. Lemp passed the time of day with him as if he’d never got called on the carpet for asking the mechanic a few questions he still thought harmless. He never let on that he knew talking with Gustav had landed him in the soup before. That was how you played the game. The less innocent you really were, the more you pretended.

He got his trouser snake tended to at the officers’ brothel. He made damn sure he stuck to the business of pleasure there, and that he said nothing even remotely political. Like Gustav, and like the veteran petty officer behind the bar at the officers’ club, the girls were bound to report to somebody. He judged that particular somebody was much more likely to be a Gestapo or SD operative than the base commandant.

In due course, he found himself back at the bar. He’d known he would. You could drink longer than you could screw. Plenty of officers, from ensigns for whom that might almost not have been true to a commodore for whom it certainly was, filled the tables.

That gray petty officer was tending bar when Lemp walked in. “I hear you had good luck, sir,” he said. “First one’s on the house.”

“Thanks,” Lemp said. “Now that makes me want to go out and sink things, by God.” He waited for the barkeep’s chuckle, then went on, “Let me have a schnapps, in that case.”

“Here you go, sir.”

Lemp knocked back the drink. It tasted more like something that ought to go into a cigarette lighter than proper booze. It went down his throat as if someone had already lit it. If it hadn’t been free, he would have complained about it-or, if he’d already had a few, he might have thrown it in the petty officer’s face.

As things were, he set coins on the bar and said, “That hit the spot. Let me have a refill-and pour yourself one, too.”

“That’s nice of you, sir,” the petty officer said. “I don’t usually-if I did, I’d get too smashed to do my job. But I will this time.” He fixed two fresh drinks. They both came from the same bottle he’d used to give Lemp the one on the house. The man behind the bar clinked glasses with him. They drank together.

“Strong stuff,” Lemp remarked, in lieu of saying rotgut.

“Ja.” The barkeep nodded and shrugged at the same time, which made him look like something out of a bad movie. “What can I do, though? This is as good as we’re able to get.”

“Well, that’s a shame,” Lemp said. Anything more, anything like The Reich is in deep water if Kriegsmarine men have to guzzle paint thinner like this, would have made the petty officer write a note as soon as he stepped away from the bar.

With a nod, Lemp ambled over to the tables and sat down at one. Nobody else was using that little pocket of space. He wouldn’t have minded company, but he got the feeling most of the officers in the club didn’t want his just then. They were pouring down booze with the dedication of men who intended to be swallowing aspirin tablets in the morning.

Here and there, they talked with one another in groups of two or three. They kept their voices down. Lemp made a point of not seeming to listen. He had the feeling that he might have an accident when he went outside if any of those little groups of officers decided he was trying to eavesdrop. Would it be a fatal accident or only an instructive one? That came from the large group of questions more interesting to ask than to answer.

A commander got up from one of those tables. He raised his arm in the Party salute. “Heil Hitler!” he said in normal tones that seemed abnormally loud, and made for the door.

“Heil!” echoed his comrades in … well, in whatever. They also raised their voices to come out with the Party greeting and farewell. Then they lowered them again and went back to talking about something that didn’t need so much noise. Whatever it was, Lemp couldn’t make it out. He could, and did, make a point of not seeming to try.

Whenever men got up to leave or joined groups of friends, they went on exchanging “Heil!”s. A cynical man might have said they were making a point of doing it so no one with a suspicious, cynical mind would suspect whatever they talked about in those near-whispers.

Lemp didn’t suspect them. Of course not. He didn’t have anything in the least resembling a cynical, suspicious mind. Again, of course not.

While ostentatiously not listening, he got to the bottom of his next schnapps. Foul though the stuff was, it called for reinforcements. He heard it calling more clearly than he heard anything that was going on at those other tables. He raised an index finger and waited for the petty officer behind the bar to notice him.

It didn’t take long-the fellow was back there for a reason. A very young sailor, so young he hardly needed to shave, carried Lemp’s drink over to him on a tray. “Here you go, sir,” he said.

“Danke schon,” Lemp answered, trying not to laugh in the kid’s face. That broad dialect said the youngster was just off a Bavarian farm, a place about as far from the ocean as any in Germany could be. Well, plenty of Bavarians had turned into tolerable sailors-better than tolerable, even-once the Kriegsmarine knocked them into shape. Chances were this fresh-faced lad would, too. But, in the meantime, he still sounded like somebody just off a farm from the back of beyond. A casting director in a comedy couldn’t have found anybody who talked less like a sailor.

More of that wicked schnapps snarled down Lemp’s throat. The cynical, suspicious mind-the one he didn’t have at all, of course-wondered whether the kid worked here because he talked like that. If such an obvious bumpkin fetched you drinks, wouldn’t you go on talking about whatever you’d been talking about? Wouldn’t you assume he wouldn’t pay your words any mind and couldn’t understand them even if he did?

Sure you would. And wouldn’t you be surprised when the Sicherheitsdienst started whacking you with pipes and rubber hoses and pulling out your toenails a few days from now? Wouldn’t you wonder how Himmler’s hounds had got their teeth into you? Sure you would. And would you even remember the hick with the thick South German accent who’d brought you a fresh drink in the officers’ club? Sure you wouldn’t.

Maybe I’m all wet. Maybe I’m full of it. Maybe I’m seeing shadows where nothing’s casting them, Lemp thought. But he didn’t believe it, not for a minute. Things didn’t happen by accident, not in the National Socialist Grossdeutsches Reich they didn’t.

And if all the little gaggles of officers talking to one another and anxious not to be overheard meant anything … If they did mean anything, they most likely meant the people who ran the National Socialist Grossdeutsches Reich had reason to try to find out what they were saying.

As part of one of those little gaggles, Lemp might have had a thing or two to say himself. Whether the other officers would have taken him seriously was a different question. They might have figured him for an agent provocateur. For that matter, some of the gaggles would already have an agent provocateur or two in them. If you made the mistake of joining the plots he spun, you were a dead man-a stupid dead man-talking.

Lemp decided he wasn’t so bad off sitting here by himself. All he had to worry about was this lousy schnapps. He gulped his glass dry, then raised a finger to show the bartender he wanted to worry about some more of it.

The sun rose off to Vaclav Jezek’s right. The Republican and Nationalist lines here ran almost due east and west. He could see farther and farther: not just the inside of the shell hole where he lay, but also the pocked landscape that stretched out to and beyond Marshal Sanjurjo’s barbed wire and entrenchments. If he turned to peer back over his shoulder, he could see his own countrymen’s entrenchments and barbed wire, too. They looked the same as the enemy’s.

What he had to remember was, the farther he could see, the farther from which he could be seen. He’d done what he could to make that harder. The antitank rifle had bits of branches wired to the barrel to break up its outline (the wire was carefully rusted so the sun wouldn’t flash off it). His helmet had more foliage stuck to it. Strips of burlap and still more greenery fixed to his tunic meant that, from any distance, he didn’t look like a man at all. He’d rubbed his face and hands with dirt. A sniper who wasn’t careful wouldn’t have a long career.

But even a sniper who was careful could have something go wrong. Or the enemy could have somebody uncommonly good hunting him. The first thing he knew of that would be the last thing he knew of the world.

He pressed his eye up to the telescopic sight. There were Sanjurjo’s men, all right. The ones at any distance behind the forward trenches went about their business without a care in the world. Artillery or mortars might hurt them, but they couldn’t do anything about those. They didn’t worry about riflemen, who could hit them only by accident.

Jezek could hit them on purpose. They had to have family in the provinces, the way he had family in Prague. If their kin lived on this side of the line, they might not have heard from them for as long as he’d gone without a letter from home.

But so what? They were still Fascist shitheads, followers of their fat almost-Fuhrer. Vaclav smiled, remembering all the honors with which the Republic had showered him for exterminating General Franco. He’d get even more if he could blow Marshal Sanjurjo’s head off. And if ifs and buts were candied nuts, we’d all have a wonderful Christmas, he thought.

He scanned the area behind the Nationalists’ lines, trolling for targets. No overweight marshal in a gaudy uniform presented himself to be shot. Since the Czech hadn’t expected to spot Sanjurjo, he wasn’t disappointed when he didn’t. He kept searching for other officers who might deserve to catch an antitank round in the teeth.

German soldiers wore medals even into combat. But the Nazi officers, and even the sergeants, often turned their shoulder straps upside down so enemy snipers couldn’t single them out by their rank badges. It wasn’t cowardice. You could say whatever you pleased about Hitler. The men who fought his war for him were as brave as any. No, their desire not to show off their rank came from simple military pragmatism. A practical fellow himself, Jezek got that.

The Spaniards, now, the Spaniards were different. Maybe they hadn’t got the Middle Ages out of their system. Or it might have been an overdose of machismo, assuming that wasn’t the same as the other. Whatever it was, when a Spaniard-especially a Fascist Spaniard; they had the disease worse than the Republicans-got to be a colonel or a general, he wanted not just his subordinates but the whole goddamn world to know he’d arrived.

And so his uniform glittered with brass buttons-or perhaps they were gilded. His cap was a production an Austro-Hungarian officer from the turn of the century would have envied, which was really saying something. You could recognize him for what he was from a couple of kilometers away.

If you lugged an antitank rifle into place and waited patiently, you could kill him from a couple of kilometers away, too.

A loudspeaker came to life. Someone who sounded indecently cheerful for this hour of the morning started yelling in Spanish. Vaclav ignored the propaganda. He didn’t speak enough of the language to follow it, anyhow. Benjamin Halevy, who did, said the guy usually went on about how wonderful the Nationalists’ rations were. Typical horseshit, in other words.

What the bastard sounded like was somebody trying to seduce a deaf girl. He sounded sweet and smarmy and much too loud. Did he ever draw anybody across no-man’s-land for a big plate full of Sanjurjo’s slumgullion? Whether he did or not, he kept trying.

All he managed to do with Vaclav was remind him he was hungry. The Czech poured some olive oil that wasn’t quite past it on a roll that pretty much was and gnawed away. Olive oil at its best tasted medicinal to him; in Prague, you were more likely to find it at a drugstore than in a grocery. Why would you want the stuff when you could have butter instead?

Why? Olives didn’t thrive in Czechoslovakia. In Spain, they grew like weeds: the short, pale-barked trees with the gray-green leaves were everywhere you looked. Butter didn’t want to keep in the Spanish heat, either; that the Spaniards were casual about cleanliness couldn’t help. And so … olive oil.

A dust cloud on a road leading up to the front said something motorized was heading this way. “Well, well,” Vaclav muttered, there in his hole. “What have we here?” He swung the elephant gun so the sight would bear on the approaching vehicles.

What they had were three Italian CV33 tankettes-the English would have called them Bren-gun carriers, and they were based on the English design. Two mounted a pair of 8mm machine guns in their little turrets, while the one in the lead carried a 20mm cannon. They bore the Nationalist emblem-a white circle with a black X through it-so Vaclav supposed they had Spanish crews.

They’d been obsolete for years. At its thickest, their armor was only 15mm. They were just the kind of vehicles his equally obsolete antitank rifle was designed to fight.

Obsolete didn’t always mean useless. Real tanks would have smashed them in short order. Vaclav doubted the Republic had any real tanks within twenty-five kilometers. Armor was hard to come by in a backwater like Spain. Against soldiers with nothing better than rifle-caliber weapons, the tankettes could prove as deadly as they had in Abyssinia and other backwaters.

Vaclav waited. He didn’t want to open up on the CV33s at extreme range. Even his fat bullets would need plenty of oomph to punch through their steel, thin though it was.

As soon as the Czechs and Internationals in the trenches saw the tankettes, they started shooting at them with machine guns. The rounds sparked off their armor. The CV33s kept coming. The machine-gun fire did discourage most of the Nationalist foot soldiers from coming with them. Vaclav liked that. Even if he could stop the tankettes, foot soldiers might hunt him down and get their revenge.

The CV33s’ machine guns and toy cannon-it wasn’t too different from what a Panzer II carried-spat death at the Republican line. Vaclav fired at the cannon-carrying tankette. Swearing at the elephant gun’s vicious kick, he worked the bolt and fired again. The tankette slewed sideways and stopped.

He swung the massive French rifle toward one of the others. A shot through the front hull to discourage the driver, another through the turret to make the gunner unhappy. A hatch popped open in the turret as the tankette nosed down into a crater and didn’t come out again. Vaclav fired once more. The would-be escapee’s chest exploded into red mist. What was left of him slid back into the CV33.

Now … What would the last one do? If it knew where he’d been shooting from and plastered his hole with machine-gun bullets, he might not get the chance to return fire. But the no doubt badly trained crew hadn’t seen him and had seen enough. The tankette turned around and tried to get away.

He put two rounds into-probably through-the engine. The armor was thinner there. Gasoline and motor oil hit hot metal in places they weren’t supposed to. Smoke and fire roared up through the cooling vents. The smoke let the tankette’s crew get out and get away.

As if the antitank rifle were a lover, Jezek patted it. He’d stopped an armored assault in its tracks. As long as he was up against something as outdated as the piece he carried, he could still do just fine.