Last Orders: The War That Came Early (9 page)

Down he came. Much of northwestern Oahu didn’t have much on it and wasn’t soaking wet. The combination made good landing country. You needed to bend your knees and tuck your chin against your chest. When you hit, you took the impact as best you could. They told you to roll with it.

The ground swelled—not anywhere near so fast as it would have if he were falling free, but it did. He’d thought about soaring birds in
general a moment before. Now he thought about albatrosses in particular. Some other Marine had told him about watching them glide in at Midway and crash-land every goddamn time. The way he made it sound, it was hilarious.

Well, if any albatrosses were landing on Midway these days, the goddamn Japs were watching them. And watching a crash landing might be funny. If anybody was watching Pete right now, the bastard might laugh his ass off. Going through a crash landing was a whole different ballgame.

An albatross who didn’t like the way things were going could flap and gain height and try it again somewhere else. A guy under a parachute didn’t have that luxury. You were supposed to be able to spill wind from the canopy by shifting your weight. So the instructors claimed. Maybe you could, too, after a few more practice jumps. This first time, Pete wasn’t inclined to experiment.

Here came the ground. He bent and tucked as he’d been told to do.
Wham!
He might have controlled his crash a little better than an albatross did, but not a whole lot. And he hit
hard
. Not long before he joined the Marines, his girlfriend’s musclebound brother unexpectedly walked into the apartment they shared with their folks. He’d gone out a second-story window then, and landed like a ton of bricks. He thought he hit harder now.

Now, though, he had boots, knee and elbow pads, and a helmet on his head. He rolled a couple of times, realizing he hadn’t sprained or broken anything. Then he used the lines that attached him to the chute to get the air out of it. He didn’t have to cut himself free to keep from being blown all over the place. The bookkeepers would be happy—here was another parachute they could use again.

More and more men came down from the sky. They landed to the west of him, in the direction the C-47 was flying. One of them let out a yell he could hear from a couple of hundred yards away. The luckless guy didn’t get up. He lay there clutching an ankle and howling like a wolf.

A jeep chugged up to Pete. “Hop in,” the driver said, so he did. The little utility vehicles could go damn near anywhere. The only trouble
with them was, after they’d jounced over rough terrain for a while, you thought your kidneys would fall out.

McGill pointed toward the hurt Marine. “Pick him up next,” he said. “He landed bad.”

“Okey-doke.” The driver put the jeep in gear and went over to the man. “Give you a hand, pal?”

“You better,” the other leatherneck answered. “I sure as shit busted somethin’ in there. I heard it crack when I hit, an’ it hurts like a mad son of a bitch.” He did some fancier cussing as the driver and Pete hauled him up and got him into the back of the jeep.

“Got your morphine syrette in your wound kit?” Pete asked him. “If you want, I’ll stick you.”

“Yeah, that’d be good,” the other Marine said. His face was gray and drawn; he had to be hurting bad. Pete knew what that pain was like. He’d broken bones before. He fumbled in the pouches on the guy’s belt till he found the one with the wound dressing and the sulfa powder and the syrette. Pulling off the cap, he drove the needle home and pushed the plunger.

“I’ll take you both back to Schofield Barracks,” the driver said. “They got a hospital there.”

Even on the road, the jeep didn’t have the smoothest ride in the world. The injured Marine groaned at every bump till the morphine took hold. Then he let out a soft sigh of relief.

Schofield Barracks, west of the central town of Wahiawa, had taken damage from Japanese air raids. It was an Army base. The hospital accepted the injured man without any trouble. The driver had to talk to a light colonel, though, before he got permission to return Pete to his fellow leathernecks.

Since the Army was doing him a favor, even if with no great enthusiasm, McGill kept his opinion of it to himself. But he remained damn glad he was a Marine. And now he was a Marine who could fly!

When Julius Lemp brought the U-30 into Namsos, he wondered whether the U-boat base in the far north of Norway would be ready
for him and his rowdy crew. Namsos had been a nothing town before Germany occupied it. But its position made it important in wartime. German U-boats staging from Namsos could easily get out into the North Atlantic. Or they could go up into the Barents Sea and harry the English convoys bringing supplies to the Russian ports of Murmansk and Archangelsk.

Proper U-boat bases had bars and brothels where sailors who’d been cooped up inside a smelly steel tube for weeks could blow off steam. The last couple of times the U-30 put in there, Namsos had been badly deficient in such amenities. His men sparked disorders that came within centimeters of turning into open mutiny.

When the U-boat tied up at a pier this time, Lemp discovered it had a welcoming committee, all right. A couple of dozen stalwart shore-patrol men stood waiting in the planking in naval-infantry uniforms that looked a lot like what the
Wehrmacht
wore. Each of them had a
Stahlhelm
on his head, a truncheon on his belt, and a Schmeisser in his arms.

“What the devil is this?” Lemp called from the conning tower as his soldiers tossed lines to ordinary
Kriegsmarine
personnel on the pier, who made the U-30 fast.

“Sir, we don’t want any trouble when your men come ashore,” answered the young lieutenant, junior grade, who seemed to be in charge of the shore-patrol detachment.

“I don’t want any trouble, either. And my men don’t,” Lemp said irately. “They just want to be able to have a good time.”

“What you mean by having a good time is tearing the place to pieces … sir,” the junior officer said.

“
Leck mich am Arsch!
That’s a bunch of
Scheisse
!” Lemp yelped. “They never would have got out of line if there were anything to do here. But I guess when you’ve got to stay
am Arsch der Welt
, you don’t notice things like that.”

“Sir,” the puppy said one more time, his voice so stiff it would have snapped if you tried to bend it, “accommodations have improved since the last time the U-30 made port here,
sir
.” He plainly used the title of respect twice in one sentence to convey the exact opposite: insubordination by supersubordination, you might say. After a long, angry
breath, he went on, “Your men will be allowed out from the barracks in small groups, with armed escorts. They may drink. They may enjoy female companionship. If they put one foot out of place, I promise we will jug them … sir.”

“Christ on His cross! I think you’d treat an English U-boat crew better than you’re treating us,” Lemp said.

“They’d probably behave better, too, sir,” the junior officer retorted. “Your other choice is remaining confined to the boat during refitting.” That was no choice at all, as he and Lemp both understood. The first thing you wanted to do when you came into port was get the hell off the cramped, stinking boat. Lemp was tempted to swing the deck gun around and start lobbing 88mm shells at the base commandant’s headquarters. The scary thing was, he knew his sea wolves would not only do it if he gave the order, they’d cheer while they were doing it.

But no, you had to act like a grownup, even—often especially—when you didn’t want to. “All right,” Lemp said with a sigh. “We’ll do it your way. We’ll come out peacefully, and we’ll play nice. Wait here. I’ll go below and give the lads the good news.”

They took it as hard as he’d expected. Their objections were loud and profane. “You should have told that
Schokostecher
where to put it, skipper!” one of them shouted. He was a petty officer with several years’ service, too, which really alarmed Lemp.

“No, dammit. We’ve got to play nice,” he said, as he had to the punk on the pier. “This isn’t a joke.”

“You bet it isn’t!” another sailor yelled.

“This is for the boat,” Lemp said—if that didn’t hit them where they lived, nothing would. If nothing would, Lord help them all. “We’ve got into trouble twice here. Third time and they really would scuttle us. Drink some beer. It sounds like they do finally have a brothel, so screw the girls. But don’t brawl and don’t break things. You hear me?”

They heard him. They didn’t like it, but they did. They came up the ladder, down the conning tower, along the deck, and onto the pier in their filthy clothes, with long, greasy hair and badly groomed beards. They hardly looked like members of the same species as the spick-and-span shore patrolmen, much less members of the same armed force.

But they had their own pride. As they passed the neat men with helmets and machine pistols, they asked them things like “Ever been seasick, pal?” and “Ever done any fighting?” and “Know what fuel oil smells like?” and “Did you tell your mommy you were coming way up here?” The shore patrolmen didn’t answer. They gave a good, game try at not changing expression. Try as they would, though, they couldn’t keep the backs of their necks and their ears from going red as hot coals.

Julius Lemp waited in front of the junior lieutenant until that worthy, his own ears on fire, saluted. With a certain irony, Lemp returned the gesture. Escorted by the shore patrolmen, the U-30’s men went off to the ratings’ barracks. The lieutenant, junior grade, took the U-boat’s tiny contingent of officers to the slightly better quarters their rank entitled them to.

“Is there an officers’ brothel, too, sonny?” Lemp inquired. “Or wouldn’t you know about that?”

“Sir, there is one,” the puppy answered stiffly, and his ears went red all over again.

“Well, isn’t that nice?” Lemp scaled his unstiffened, white-crowned officer’s cap onto a cot. “Might as well freshen up a bit before I go find it. Somebody ever tell you where it was at?”

Biting the words off between his teeth, the junior officer gave precise directions. Then he spun on his heel and hurried away, as if to escape before he said something that might not be in the line of duty. Lemp’s quiet chuckle behind his back only made him go faster.

Lemp had a duty call to the base commandant to make before he could visit the brothel or the officers’ club. Cleaning himself up before he saw Captain Böhme also seemed a good idea. He couldn’t give his superior the same kind of hard time he’d inflicted on the very young lieutenant. After a bald report about the latest patrol, he did say, “I think singling out my crew the way you have is unfair, sir.”

The commandant fixed him with a cold gray stare. “That, Commander, is too damned bad,” he growled. “I did not single out your hooligans. They did it to themselves when they tried to turn this base inside out and upside down two leaves running.”

“If they would have had a better chance to relax—” Lemp began.

Waldemar Böhme cut him off: “It’s a rough old war for everyone, Commander. You are dismissed. Try to keep
your
nose clean, too.”

“Zu Befehl, mein Herr!”
Lemp put as much spite as he could into his salute. He feared the commandant was immune to such childish gestures, but it was all he could do.

Having been dismissed, he drank bad schnapps at the officers’ club and had a skinny blonde in the brothel perform an unnatural but enjoyable act on him. Afterwards, they talked a little, a luxury his men wouldn’t enjoy. She spoke fair German, with a singsong Scandinavian intonation. “What will you do after the war?” he asked her.

“Change my name and move away,” she said matter-of-factly. “What will
you
do?”

He started to answer, then realized he hadn’t the faintest idea. He’d made no postwar plans. It was as if he didn’t expect to be around to worry about it. And maybe he didn’t. When you were a U-boat skipper, the odds weren’t on your side.

Now Aristide Demange had a name for the prissy second lieutenant who’d been running this company after the late Captain Alexandre stopped a machine-gun burst with his belly and chest. The
con
was called Louis Mirouze. He practically exuded spit and polish.

Past making sure his men kept their weapons in good working order, Demange didn’t care about spit and polish. He would have got rid of Mirouze in a heartbeat except for one thing: the youngster was recklessly brave. He took chances Demange thought suicidal, and hardly seemed to notice he was doing it. An officer like that had no trouble getting his men to follow him.

Things in southern Belgium being what they were, too often officers had to try to get men to follow them straight into the blast furnace. It wasn’t as if the Germans didn’t know they were there and didn’t know they were coming. It wasn’t as if the
Boches
hadn’t had plenty of time to get ready for them, either.

One attack on a farm village that—surprise!—turned out to be much more strongly fortified than it looked thinned the company of men whose names Demange hadn’t even learned. The doctors would
learn some of those names as they tried to put the poor bastards back together. Others would be for the graves detail to find out.

After they drew back to their start line, Demange took Mirouze aside and said, “We would’ve been better off if you hadn’t tried to push so hard there.”

“I thought we could take the place,” Mirouze answered. “We were ordered to, so we had to do our best.”

Demange rolled his eyes. “Spare me! The jerks who give those orders don’t know their assholes from their sisters. All that happened was, we took more casualties than we needed to ’cause you wouldn’t see it was hopeless.”

“If we could’ve got into that lane—” Mirouze started.

“Merde!”
Demange cut him off. “That was no good, either. What do you want to bet they had a couple of MG-42s around the corner waiting to chop us into ground round? You get into trouble when you start sending the
poilus
out to die and they see they haven’t got a chance in hell to carry out their mission.”