The War That Came Early: The Big Switch (24 page)

“
Danke schön
. This would be good,” Hess said.

Back they went. It was several miles. They took turns walking and riding slowly on the bicycle. Hess spewed out a million reasons why England
and France should turn on the Bolsheviks. At last, Walsh got sick of listening. He said, “Look, pal, I’m only a bloody sergeant. I can’t do anything about it one way or the other.” The German subsided into wounded silence.

When they got into Dundee, Walsh had a devil of a time convincing his superiors that Rudolf Hess was Rudolf Hess. They were even more certain than he had been that Hess wasn’t about to arrive in Scotland by jumping out of a Bf-110. Then they
did
believe him, and that might have been worse, because they started having kittens right before his eyes. They whisked Hess away in a swarm of military policemen.

“You will forget about this,” a captain barked at Walsh. “It never happened. You have no knowledge of it. Do you understand me?”

“Yes, sir.” Walsh judged that was the only possible answer that would keep him out of a military jail. The bloke who said a little knowledge was a dangerous thing knew what he was talking about. To show he understood what the captain meant, Walsh added, “I won’t tell a soul.”

“You’d better not.” The captain sent Walsh a hard look, as if wondering whether to jug him like a hare on general principles. Walsh tried to exude innocence: not easy for a man of his age and experience. After a long, long pause, the captain jerked a thumb toward the door. “Get out.” Walsh had never been so happy to obey an order in his life.

JULIUS LEMP WAS
used to getting strange orders from his superiors, and even to attracting them. He was still paying for sinking the
Athenia
. Chances were he’d go on paying for the rest of his career, unless he did something wonderful enough to cancel out the screwup. Offhand, he couldn’t think what that might be. Finding Jesus walking barefoot across the swells of the North Sea might do it. Anything short of that, no.

When you were in the U-boat business, strange orders were liable to get you killed. (So were ordinary orders; it was that kind of trade. But with strange orders your odds were worse.) If that bothered his superiors in the
Kriegsmarine
, they went out of their way not to show it.

And so the U-30 cruised slowly through the chop off the east coast of Scotland. Not very far off the Scottish coast, either: land was clearly
visible to the west. One of the ratings on the conning tower with Lemp said, “If they’ve got a 105 on the beach, they can hit us with it. We can hit ’em back with the 88 on deck, too.”

“I know,” Lemp replied. “But even if they do have a 105 there, chances are they won’t shoot with it. They’re bound to think we’re one of their own U-boats, not a German machine. No German boat would be mad enough to show itself so close to their coast.”

“Sure, skipper,” the rating said, as if humoring a lunatic. “So what the hell
are
we doing here?”

“We are carrying out our orders,” Lemp said, which was literally true. “We are searching for any signs of wreckage or survivors from a Messerschmitt-110 that may or may not have gone into the North Sea in these waters.”

“Sure,” the rating said again. “But why?”

“Martin, you never ask that question,” Lemp answered patiently. “Because they told us to, that’s why.”

Martin only sniffed. The hell of it was, Lemp had a hard time blaming him. He wondered why they were looking for bits and pieces of a Bf-110, too. However much he wondered, he didn’t know. The hard-faced captain back in Kiel hadn’t looked the sort who was much inclined to answer questions. In fact, he’d looked the sort who would bite your head off if you had the nerve to ask any. Sometimes the best thing you could do was salute, go
“Zu befehl!”
, and get the hell out of there. Lemp had judged that to be one of those times.

Had he been wrong? If the Royal Navy or the RAF decided the U-30 wasn’t an English U-boat, the enemy owned all the advantages here. Cruising along in broad daylight was all very well.
Audace, audace, toujours l’audace
, the French said. Well, yes, but when the fellows on the other team trumped all that audacity with depth charges …

He scanned the gray-green sea. This close to the coast, all sorts of rubbish floated in it. He hadn’t seen anything from a German fighter plane, though. He wondered if some important officer’s son had been flying the 110. That might account for a search like this. He couldn’t think of much else that would.

One of the things floating in the North Sea was a basket of the kind and size that might have held a baby. Martin said, “Sir, with all this shit
around, how are we supposed to recognize stuff from a 110 even if we do come across it?”

“We’ve got to do the best we can,” Lemp answered, by which he meant he didn’t have the faintest idea.

Martin, unfortunately, understood him much too well. “Right,” the rating said, and scratched the side of his jaw. Gingery stubble sprouted there. Lemp didn’t shave when he was at sea, either. Like a lot of U-boat men, from the lowliest “lords”—ordinary seamen—to skippers, he trimmed his whiskers when he got back into port.

“What do they do when we send them the message that we can’t find what they’re looking for?” another rating asked.

“We don’t send it.” Now Lemp’s voice grew sharp. “We’re ordered to maintain radio silence throughout this cruise. I will make the report orally when we return to Kiel. Have you got that?”

“Yes, skipper. Sorry,” the rating said. Lemp didn’t usually come down hard on his men, but he had to be sure no one fouled up here. Somebody’s head would roll if the U-30 broke radio silence. He knew whose, too: his.

Like the rest of the men on the U-boat, he wished he knew what was going on. He didn’t like getting sent out on wild-goose chases. He especially didn’t like it when he had to wear a blindfold while hunting his wild geese.

All of which had nothing to do with anything. They’d given him his orders. He was following them. If he found no wreckage—or even if he did—he was to return to Kiel after four days of searching. It made no sense, not to him or to the men he commanded. Maybe that was because the officers set over them knew more about what was going on than they did. Or maybe the geese had got uncommonly wild lately.

The U-boat performed the ordered search. It found nothing from a Bf-110. For that matter, it found nothing from any airplane. Lemp wasn’t sorry to order the boat away from the Scottish coast. He counted himself lucky not to have been spotted. The Royal Navy must not have believed the
Kriegsmarine
would give any of its boats such an idiotic assignment. Well, he wouldn’t have believed it himself if he hadn’t got stuck with it.

No English planes happened on the U-30 as it hurried back across the North Sea. The farther Lemp put the British Isles behind him, the happier he grew. He was downright delighted when the boat got back to Kiel. But his pleasure chilled when armed guards on the pier kept anyone but him from going ashore. “We have our orders,” said the chief petty officer in charge of the detachment. That was a sentence unchallengeable in any branch of any military service the world around.

More sailors with Mausers escorted Lemp to the office where he was to make his report. He wasn’t astonished to find Rear Admiral Dönitz there waiting to hear him. Whatever was going on, it was going on at levels far over his head.

He came to attention and saluted. “Reporting as ordered, sir. My news is very simple: we saw nothing and found nothing.”

“Very well,” Dönitz said. “That makes it more likely the 110 reached England, then. Scotland, I should say.”

“Sir, did you
want
it to do that?” Lemp asked.

The admiral looked through him. “Don’t worry about it, Lieutenant.” In his mouth, Lemp’s rank might as well not have existed. A word from him, and Lemp’s rank wouldn’t exist.

“Yes, sir,” Lemp said. “But you can’t wonder if I’m a little curious. Everyone on my boat is a little curious, or more than a little.”

“It has to do with high policy. You can tell them that much,” Dönitz answered. “And you can tell them not to push it, not if they know what’s good for them.” His eyes were gray-blue, and at the moment frigid as the North Sea in February. “The same goes for you.”

Lemp could take a hint. “I understand, sir,” he said quickly.

“I doubt that. The scheme surprised
me
when I heard about it,” Dönitz said. “If it works, everything changes. And if it doesn’t, we’ve lost very little.”

What was
that
supposed to mean? One more quick look at Dönitz’s face discouraged Lemp from asking. He saluted again. Then he asked, “May my men go ashore for liberty now?”

“After you let them know they’d better keep their mouths shut,” the admiral said. “Anyone who makes a mistake will regret it. Is that clear?”

“Yes, sir,” Lemp said.
Clear as mud
, he thought. Maybe events would
answer his questions for him one of these days. Or he might spend the rest of his life wondering. You never could tell.

CHAIM WEINBERG COULDN’T
believe his eyes. Was he really seeing this? Damned if he wasn’t. Half a dozen French tanks clanked up to the stretch of line the Abe Lincoln Battalion was holding outside of Madrid. These weren’t slow, ancient Renaults—leftovers from the last war. They were brand-new Somua S-35s, the best medium tanks the French made. The Spanish Republic had got a few—only a few—in 1938. Chaim didn’t know France had turned any loose since.

But here they were, painted a pale grayish green that put him in mind of olive leaves. It was a good color for operating in Spain. It would be even better once they got dusty and dirty. The Italians and Spaniards painted theirs khaki. The German tanks of the
Legion Kondor
were mostly dark gray, which made them stand out more. That mattered only so much. If you couldn’t stop them, so what if you saw them coming?

He wasn’t the only guy who got a charge out of seeing these—nowhere near. And he wasn’t the only guy who could see what they meant. The Abe Lincoln Battalion, like the International Brigades generally, was full of people who found politics a game more exciting than baseball, bridge, or chess.

“We’re going to knock Sanjurjo’s cocksuckers into the middle of next week,” somebody said gleefully. “The froggies must’ve decided Hitler ain’t gonna do ’em in, so they can turn loose of some of their toys.”

“About fuckin’ time, ain’t it?” Chaim said. “Been a year now since the big German push fell short. They woulda given us these babies back then, we coulda started cleaning out the Nationalists that much sooner.”

“Piss and moan, piss and moan,” the other Abe Lincoln said. “We’ve got ’em now. That’ll do it.”

Maybe it would. Each tank had the Republic’s flag—horizontal stripes of red, yellow, and purple—painted on the side of the turret. The crewmen were Spaniards. They all seemed as enthusiastic as the men
from the International Brigades. They knew what the tanks meant. In a word, victory.

So it seemed to Chaim, anyhow. The next interesting question was, could victory and
mañana
coexist? The Abe Lincolns were wild to hit the Nationalists in front of them as soon as the tanks arrived. The attack was ordered—but nobody bothered to tell the artillery, which stayed quiet. Even with tanks, you couldn’t go forward without artillery support. Well, you could, but they didn’t. Things got pushed back a day.

Then one of the tanks broke down, and the driver to another caught influenza, which spread to the rest of his crew the next day, to two other crews the day after that, and to the Abraham Lincolns the day after
that
. “Germ warfare,” an International said dolefully, in between sneezes. “The fucking Nationalists are trying to make us too sick to fight.”

If they were, they made a good job of it. Chaim lay flat on his back, weak as a kitten with aches and fever, for five days, and felt as if one of the fancy French tanks had run over him for a week after that. The tanks, meanwhile, sat out in the open. No one seemed to wonder whether the Nationalists were watching.

At last, everything was ready again. The attack was scheduled for 0600. The artillery barrage was scheduled for 0500. It actually started at 0530. By Spanish standards, that was a masterpiece of punctuality.

At 0618 on the dot, the tanks rumbled forward. The Abe Lincolns trotted along with them. Nothing like putting all those tonnes of hardened steel between yourself and the other fellow’s machine guns.

Chaim loped with his buddies. He wasn’t a hundred percent yet, despite enough aspirins to make his ears ring. He wished he were still in bed—with luck, with La Martellita, but even alone would do. But he’d improved to the point where he could carry a rifle without falling over. He went forward. Plenty of other Americans—and the foreigners and Spaniards who filled out the battalion—were in no better shape.

One of the fancy French machines stopped so the commander, who doubled as the gunner, could blast a machine-gun nest to ruin. Which he did. But, while he was doing it, a Nationalist soldier popped up out of a foxhole next to the tank and chucked a wine bottle filled with blazing gasoline through the open hatch. Flames, greasy black smoke, and
screams rose from inside the tank. The Republicans shot the brave Nationalist, but the damage was done.

“Fuck,” Chaim said, eyeing the pyre the tank had become. The Republicans had invented the infantryman’s antitank weapon. The Nationalists had christened it the Molotov cocktail. Now both sides used it. So did foot soldiers everywhere who had to fight tanks without antitank guns.

Another Nationalist threw a Molotov cocktail at the back of a Somua S-35. Flaming gasoline dripped down through the louvers over the engine. Before long, the engine started burning, too. The crew got out, but that tank wouldn’t go anywhere ever again.

“Assholes,” an American near Chaim said. “Don’t they know how expensive those goddamn things are?”

“I wonder how the Republic
is
paying for them,” Chaim said.

“IOUs,” the other Abe Lincoln said. They both laughed. The Spanish Republic might not have thought it was so funny. Spain’s gold reserves had gone to the USSR for safekeeping, and to pay for Soviet aid in the dark days when no one else thought the Republic was worth helping. Would that gold ever return from Moscow? Chaim might be a loyal—if talkative, even argumentative—Marxist-Leninist, but he wasn’t holding his breath.