The War That Came Early: Coup d'Etat (19 page)

OUT OF THE FRYING PAN
,
into the fire. That was how Peggy Druce thought of it, anyway. As soon as the people in Philadelphia discovered she really could stir folks up about the war, they sent her out to do it again and again.

After York,
Lancaster. Red Roses instead of White. When she made that crack in Lancaster, somebody told her the two towns’ bush-league baseball teams actually did refight the War of the Roses every time they took the field against each other. She laughed, but later she wondered
why. That showed more of a sense of history than was common in the United States.

Not in Europe. They had a sense of history there,
all right. Everybody could give you all the reasons for the past 900—or sometimes 1,900—years that showed why he deserved to kick his neighbor in the teeth with a steel-toed jackboot. And his neighbor had reasons just as numerous and just as ancient for kicking
him
.

And the Japanese were responding to something ancient, too. For hundreds of years, Europeans and Americans had lorded it over the
proud, ancient, weak empires in Asia. They’d had the warships and the guns and the military doctrine that let them do it. They’d had the arrogance that let them do it, too. What was that sign in the Shanghai park supposed to say?
NO DOGS OR CHINSESE
, that was it. Maybe the sign really was, or had been, there. Maybe it was just a story. Either way, it showed an attitude that was definitely there.

Now the Japs had licked the Russians twice. So they thought they were strong enough to swing the bat against the white men’s first team. The United States was going to have to throw a high hard one right at Hirohito’s head to convince them they weren’t ready for the big leagues yet.

Or maybe they were. The war news coming out of the Pacific was uniformly lousy. The Philippines were falling. A
bomb from a Japanese plane was said to have blown General MacArthur into dog food. The Japs claimed that at the tops of their lungs. The USA said nothing one way or the other. Peggy’s time in Europe had made her sensitive to the nuances of propaganda. You didn’t talk about what you didn’t like.

By the same token, the American papers weren’t saying much about the way Japan was overrunning Malaya
and the Dutch East Indies. You heard occasional stories about how heroic the handful of American ships in the area were. If you paid close attention and checked a map, you notice that fewer and fewer U.S. Navy vessels got mentioned by name. Even the survivors were reported as being heroic farther and farther south.

But how many people checked that closely? How many Americans knew off the tops
of their heads whether Borneo was south of Java or the other way around? Peggy hadn’t, not till she looked, and she’d traveled
a lot more than most folks. Timor? Sumbawa? Cerami? They sounded like the noises your stomach made after you ate bratwurst and sauerkraut. (At least it wasn’t Liberty Cabbage in this war. Then again, Germany still remained officially neutral toward the USA.)

Peggy didn’t
blame the administration for minimizing failures and playing up whatever small successes it could find. If she had, she wouldn’t have gone to Reading, to Easton, to Scranton, to Altoona, to Williamsport.… You did what you needed to do, and you tried not to tell too many lies while you were doing it. If you couldn’t help telling a lie, you tried not to make it a whopper.

She stuck to the principles
she hoped the administration was also using. It worked. She got big hands everywhere she went. War bond sales at her rallies were bigger yet. So were contributions to the Democratic Party. An election was coming next year, after all. It seemed as if an election was always coming next year. If it wasn’t, it was coming this year instead.

The one place she didn’t go was Pittsburgh. The world had
a North Pole and a South Pole. Pennsylvania, by contrast, had an East Pole and a West Pole. Philadelphia was bigger and older and richer and snootier than Pittsburgh. Pittsburgh was tougher and grittier—and if you didn’t believe it, all you had to do was ask anybody who came from there. Pittsburgh prided itself on coal and steel the way Philadelphia bragged about the Main Line. If Chicago hadn’t
called itself the City of the Big Shoulders, Pittsburgh would have.

And so, even though Pittsburgh was a more reliably Democratic town than Philadelphia, Peggy wasn’t welcome there. She got an invitation from Wheeling, West Virginia, so she traveled through Pittsburgh going and coming back, but she didn’t get off the train there.

She also went to Erie. Pennsylvania’s only Great Lakes port, Erie
cared nothing for either Philadelphia or Pittsburgh. It might have turned its back on both of them. It was a low, spacious city, with only one fourteen-story skyscraper projecting above the three- and four-story business buildings in the center of town.

She made her speech. It went over as well in Erie as it had anywhere else. It might even have gone better there than most places. A plump, prosperous
fellow who sold real estate came up to her after she was
done and spoke in tones of wonder: “I don’t recollect the last time Philadelphia remembered we were alive, much less did anything about it.”

“We’re all one state. We’re all one country. If a war doesn’t remind us of that, what will?” Peggy said.

“Well, I don’t know. My guess was that nothing would,” the real-estate man answered.

After
he went away, a weather-beaten woman in her late sixties came up to Peggy and introduced herself as Matilda Jenkins. The name was as ordinary as she was. “You spoke very well,” she said, her voice almost painfully genteel. “No wonder you impressed my son so much.”

“Your son?” Peggy didn’t remember meeting anybody named Jenkins at one of her earlier rallies. But that might not prove anything;
she didn’t have a pol’s photographic memory for names and faces.

“Yes, of course,” Mrs. Jenkins said—she wore a thin, plain gold band on the ring finger of her left hand. “My son Constantine, at the American embassy in Berlin. He thought you were the cat’s pajamas, he did.”

“Oh!” Peggy blurted. She felt herself blushing. She had no idea when she’d last done that. Now that she looked, she saw
the resemblance. But the suave embassy undersecretary—so suave, she’d guessed he was queer—seemed more than an ocean removed from this mousy woman clinging so hard to lower-middle-class respectability. Something more than
Oh!
seemed called for. Peggy tried again: “How about that? He helped me a lot.” The second part was true, the first usually safe.

Matilda Jenkins beamed. “He said you knew what
you wanted and how to go about getting it. Just listening to you, I can see that. He said you were mighty sweet, too. Constantine usually knows what he’s talking about, all right.”

“How about that?” Peggy repeated, this time through clenched teeth. Exactly how much about her had Constantine Jenkins told his mother? He wouldn’t have bragged about … that, would he? Not to his mother!

“He said
you had such a good time at the opera and afterwards,” Mrs. Jenkins went on, oblivious—Peggy sure hoped she was oblivious, anyhow. After the opera in Berlin … What Herb didn’t know wouldn’t hurt him—she hoped. Matilda Jenkins kept burbling: “Such a pleasure to get the chance to meet you. I never dreamt I would.”

“How about that?” Peggy said one more time, wondering how soon she could get the
hell out of Erie.

COLONEL STEINBRENNER LOOKED
at the Stuka pilots in his squadron. Hans-Ulrich Rudel looked around at them, too. Not many faces were left from the ones he’d seen when the balloon went up in Czechoslovakia. He’d been shot down once himself, and thanked heaven he’d been able to bail out. Too many of his former comrades hadn’t been so lucky.

“Things are heating up again,” Steinbrenner
said. “Our infantry and armor can move forward now that the roads are drying. They need air support.” He grinned wryly. “We have a chance to give it to them, too, because the runways are drying.”

Rudel chuckled, though it wasn’t as if the squadron CO were kidding. Planes flying off forward airstrips had to deal with mud just like panzers and trucks and foot soldiers. There were times when nobody
could deal with it. At times like those, the Ju-87s stayed on the ground.

At times like those, he always wished he could hop on a train and go back to Sofia in Bialystok. If he couldn’t do the
Reich
any good at the moment, why shouldn’t he enjoy himself instead? Unfortunately,
Luftwaffe
higher-ups disapproved of such little jaunts. As far as they were concerned, it would always turn thirty Celsius
tomorrow—day after at the latest—and the deep Russian mud would magically dry up so the flyers could get back to walloping the snot out of the Reds.

Well, it had finally happened, or enough of it had. It wasn’t thirty Celsius—it probably wasn’t even twenty—and the mud hadn’t cleared up by magic. But it wasn’t twenty below any more, and neither was it pouring rain. The Stukas
could
get back to
walloping the Ivans.

After lighting a
papiros
—German quartermasters weren’t too proud to dole out captured stocks of smokes—Steinbrenner went on, “The Russians tried to knock us back from our bridgehead in the direction of Smolensk during the winter, but they couldn’t bring it off. So we—and our allies—are going to keep pushing that way. Once Smolensk falls, I suspect it will be time to start
thinking about Moscow.”

Moscow! Driving Stalin out of his lair, taking the lair away from
him? No wonder an excited hum rose from the flyers. Napoleon had taken Moscow away from Tsar Alexander, but he hadn’t had much joy afterwards. He couldn’t fight a winter campaign, not in weather like what they got here he couldn’t. The
Wehrmacht
had already proved it could.

“Questions?” Steinbrenner asked.
He pointed toward a pilot who raised his hand. “What’s on your mind, Helmut?”

Helmut Bauer was big and blond and broad-shouldered; he seemed almost too wide to fit inside a Stuka cockpit. But fit he did, and he flew with nearly as much reckless enthusiasm as Hans-Ulrich himself. Now he asked, “Colonel, with Romania in the war, what happens when things down south get screwed up?”

“You’re assuming
they will,” the squadron commander said, his voice dry.

“Damn straight I am … sir,” Bauer agreed. “I know what the Romanians’ve got. It isn’t much, and they aren’t what you’d call eager to use it, either.”

Heads bobbed up and down, Rudel’s among them. He didn’t care for having Polish allies. You couldn’t say the Poles lacked guts, but most of their equipment was junk. The Romanians mostly used
junk, too, and precious few Germans had ever figured them for heroes. Hans-Ulrich sure didn’t.

Even more dryly than before, Steinbrenner answered, “There may just be a few German soldiers along with the Romanians, to help remind them how to play the game and why they’re playing it.”

The flyers chuckled. Hans-Ulrich knew why the Romanians were playing the game: the
Führer
had promised them the
Black Sea port of Odessa and the adjoining lands on the far bank of the Dniester. If nothing else could get somebody moving, good old greed would often turn the trick.

“I do understand that, sir,” Bauer said. “But still … The Ukraine’s a hell of a big place, if you know what I mean. I hope we’ll have enough men and equipment in place to bite off the chunks we need—and to keep the Ivans from bunching
up down there and biting our flank.”

“Helmut, if they decide to move the squadron down to the Ukraine to support our men and the Romanians, you can’t do anything about it,
and neither can I,” Colonel Steinbrenner said. “I’m sure you’ll be able to find yourself another lady friend, though.”

More chuckles from the pilots, and a snicker or two to go with them. “Oh, so am I,” Bauer said, unmistakable
complacency filling his voice. Hans-Ulrich wasn’t nearly so sure he could find another girl he liked as much as Sofia.

You’ll be safer if you find one who isn’t half a Jew
, he told himself. The SD didn’t like such liaisons. Neither did the National Socialist Leadership Officer standing at Steinbrenner’s elbow. Building a case against someone who wore the Knight’s Cross and who wasn’t shy about
saying he backed the
Führer
wouldn’t be easy, but it wouldn’t necessarily be impossible, either. Nothing was impossible if somebody important enough decided to build a case.

“Can we get on with the war we
are
fighting, not the one we may be fighting some day?” Steinbrenner asked. Nobody told him no, so he did: “The Ivans have a concentration in front of Studenets, southwest of Smolensk. Our forces
are in the neighborhood, and so are the French. If we bomb the enemy’s infantry and shoot up his panzers, word will get back to Paris that the froggies would be smart not to think about changing horses again. So we’ll do that, gentlemen, if it’s all right with you.” Again, nobody told him no. He nodded briskly. “We take off in forty-five minutes.”

And they did, the first Ju-87 kicking up dust
from the unpaved strip and climbing into the air right on time. Hans-Ulrich pushed back his leather flying glove and the sleeve to his fur-lined flight suit to check his watch and make sure. “Ready, Albert?” he called through the speaking tube.

“Not me,” Sergeant Dieselhorst answered. “I’m still soaking in the bathtub, and after I get out I’ll go pick flowers so I keep on smelling nice and sweet.”

Hans-Ulrich snorted. Dieselhorst did deadpan even better than Colonel Steinbrenner. When his Stuka’s turn came, he goosed the throttle. The Ju-87 rattled down the runway, then sedately got airborne. The weight and drag from the underwing gun pods made the ungainly plane even more so.

“Studenets,” Rudel repeated to the rear gunner, as if they hadn’t gone over it before takeoff.

“Gesundheit,”
Dieselhorst said, so it was going to be one of
those
missions.

Messerschmitt Bf-109s clustered around the Stukas. The 109s had plenty of other things to do; dive bombers got escorts only when the
Luftwaffe
feared the Red Air Force had fighters of its own in the neighborhood. And the Reds did: blunt-nosed, stumpy Polikarpov Po-16 monoplanes. They were a long step slower than the Messerschmitts,
but they could have made mincemeat out of the lumbering Ju-87s had the bombers had no friends. As things were, one of them tumbled to the ground, trailing smoke. Two more made halfhearted runs at the Stukas and then peeled off. The rest decided to go somewhere else, to some place where misfortunes like 109s never happened.