The War That Came Early: The Big Switch (27 page)

Pete wasn’t even sure he could protect his woman. If anything in the world felt worse than that, he didn’t know what it would be. Other Marines had had to keep him from going after Herman Szulc, too. Herman had a big mouth, and liked to hear himself talk. One of these days … 
But not yet. Not yet, dammit
, Pete thought, not without regret.

ALISTAIR WALSH HAD
his own opinions about politics. He was the staunchest of Tories: a Winston Churchill supporter who put up with Neville Chamberlain only because he might be marginally better than whatever Labour put up to oppose him.

Of course, Walsh was also a soldier. He was actively discouraged
from doing anything about his views. The last thing Britain wanted was Bonapartism, and soldiers doing anything about their political opinions seemed to the powers that be a long step in the wrong direction. And so, but for mouthing off in barracks and barrooms and foxholes, Walsh had stayed as politically innocent as his superiors could have wanted.

Staying politically innocent after Rudolf Hess almost literally fell into his lap wasn’t easy, though. You couldn’t keep a thing like that secret. The Army and the government did their best, and failed. Too many people saw and recognized the German big shot when Walsh brought him back into Dundee. And Hess’ Bf-110 crashed into a barn farther inland, killing several cows and a horse and just missing the farmer himself, who’d tended the animals in there a few minutes earlier.

They took Hess down to London, presumably to tell the government about what he’d already told Walsh. They brought Walsh along, presumably because they didn’t know what else to do with him. After all, he already had the vision of
Landsers
and Tommies and
poilus
marching into Russia shoulder to shoulder implanted in his brain. If they didn’t get him out of sight, he might start telling people about it before they decided what the people ought to think.

He knew what he thought, not that anyone asked a staff sergeant’s opinion. Walsh would have been shocked had the tight-lipped young officers from the Ministry of War and their even tighter-lipped colleagues from the Foreign Ministry done any such thing. The way they kept eyeing him made him wonder if he would suffer an unfortunate accident before he made it to the capital.

He didn’t. But he worried when they put him up in a posh hotel instead of with his mates. “You may do as you please, so long as you don’t leave your room,” one of the tight-lipped captains said.

“Meals?” Walsh asked.

“They’ll be sent in. Order what you please from room service,” the officer replied, an extravagance Walsh had never enjoyed before. But he didn’t really enjoy it now, either. It came at too high a price: four armed guards outside the room made sure he wouldn’t amble down the corridor. It was six floors up; he couldn’t very well leave by the window, either.

“Gets a bit dull here, all by my lonesome,” Walsh hinted. The captain only shrugged, as if to say that wasn’t his worry. Walsh decided to be more direct: “If you’re spending all that filthy lucre on room service, can you lay out a bit more and get me a girl? I’ll have better things to talk about with her than Rudolf bloody Hess, by God—I promise you that.”

The officer’s lips got tighter, and paler, than ever. “I shall have to take that under advisement,” he said, and got out of there as fast as he could.

No girl knocked on the door. Walsh hadn’t really expected one would, but asking didn’t hurt. The food was pretty good, and room service would send up beer and whiskey when he asked for them. Things could have been worse. He kept reminding himself of that. They could have stuck him in a cell somewhere and lost the key.

But he couldn’t talk to anybody. That was why they kept him here. They didn’t want reporters asking him questions. They didn’t want other soldiers asking him anything, either. They knew how news flashed through the military. Soldiers and sailors were worse than women when it came to gossip.

He could step out into the hall. The guards would only shake their heads if he spoke to them, though. And, while he could go into the hall, those guards wouldn’t let him take more than a couple of strides along it. They had old-fashioned bayonets—the long ones—fixed to their rifles. By all appearances, they were ready to use them if he looked like getting out of line. He didn’t; he owned a well-honed sense of survival.

Like any prisoner, he suspected changes in routine. What were they going to do to him
now
? Find that cell and drop him into it? Or bump him off as if he’d never existed to begin with? They could do that, if they decided to. They could do anything they damn well pleased. Who’d stop them?

What would happen if the Nazis sent bombers over London? Would the guards escort him to the cellars, perhaps with a gag on his mouth so he couldn’t blab to anyone? Or would they leave him up here, staying themselves to share his fate? He didn’t want to find out, and was glad the
Luftwaffe
seemed to be staying away.

Even if the alarms outside didn’t go off, the ones inside his head did when somebody knocked on the door one night at half past eleven. His
heart pounded as he walked over to it. Was this the moment? Had they decided to imitate the Fascists and the Reds and dispose of him at midnight?

If they had, he could do damn all about it. Defiantly, he threw the door wide. There in the hall stood a short, portly man in his mid-sixties, with a round red face—a wrinkled, irascible baby face, it was, although he smoked a large and decidedly unbabyish cigar.

Walsh recognized him right away. Few Britons wouldn’t have, of course. “Winston!” he blurted.

“At your service,” Winston Churchill replied, his voice familiar from the wireless but more resonant now that he was here in the flesh. “May I come in?”

“How can I say no?” Walsh stepped back to let the politician enter, then closed the door behind him. He pointed to a whiskey bottle on the sideboard. “I could use a drink, sir. Would you care for one?”

“How can I say no?” Churchill repeated, blue eyes twinkling. Moving as if in a dream, Walsh poured for them both. He gestured toward the siphon-equipped soda bottle beside the whiskey: a silent question. Churchill shook his head. Walsh was just as well pleased. He wanted something potent himself.

Churchill raised his glass. “The King!” he said. Walsh echoed the toast. They both drank. Churchill smacked his lips. “Not bad. They
are
treating you satisfactorily?” The six-syllable word sounded natural in his mouth, though more often than not he was the most plainspoken of politicos.

“Yes, sir.” Walsh finished his whiskey at a gulp—he needed it. “Did you come here to ask me that?”

“I did not,” Churchill rasped. “I came to ask you this: how would you and your comrades in arms like to march with the Germans and against Russia?”

That was as plainspoken as a man could get. Walsh poured himself a refill. Churchill held out his glass, and Walsh filled it as well. “I don’t care to speak for anyone but myself, sir.… ”

“Then by all means do that. Your reluctance does you credit.”

Shrugging, Walsh said, “I don’t know anything about that. What I
know is, I’m damned if I want some Nazi general giving me orders. And that’s what it comes down to, isn’t it? We’d be helping Hitler do what he already wants to—hell, what he’s already started doing. He couldn’t lick us, so now he wants us to join him. I’ve fought against Fritz twice now. I don’t want to be on his side. He makes a fine enemy, but I doubt he’d prove such a good friend. If he’s after the Russians now, there’s more to Stalin than I looked for.”

The words poured out of him, fueled more by nerves than by whiskey. Once he ran dry, he wondered whether he’d just doomed himself. If the government had already decided to throw in with Adolf …

But the wrinkles smoothed out of Churchill’s face as he smiled. “God bless you, son. I thought you’d say that—I hoped you would—but I was far from sure. Even if you’re too modest to say so, I feel sure you spoke for most British fighting men. And, most eloquently, you spoke for me as well.”

“Good Lord!” Walsh did not expect ever to win the VC. Aside from that, he couldn’t imagine a finer honor. He dared a question of his own: “Is it decided? What we’ll do, I mean?”

“Decided?” Churchill snorted and shook his head. “Not likely! Neville Chamberlain couldn’t decide to change his drawers if he shat in them.” That made Walsh blink. Then he remembered Churchill had fought in the Boer War and commanded a battalion on the Western Front in the last big go-round. Some of it must have stuck—he knew how soldiers talked, all right. He went on, “No, Sergeant, it’s not decided. But I daresay you’ve helped put a spike in
Herr
Hess’ wheel. That you have.” This time, he poured the whiskey. He raised his glass. “Down with Hitler!”

“Down with Hitler!” Alistair Walsh had never heard a toast he was gladder to join.

RUMORS ALWAYS RUMORS
.
Vaclav Jezek didn’t like the ones he was hearing lately. “That’s what they’re saying,” Benjamin Halévy told him. “There’s supposed to be talk in Paris about throwing in with the Germans.”

“They can’t do that!” Vaclav exclaimed in dismay verging on horror.

“Tell me about it,” the Jewish sergeant said. “But the trouble is, they damn well can. And the
poilus
think they’re going to.”

Most of the time, Vaclav found speaking next to no French an asset. If he didn’t understand an idiot officer, he didn’t have to follow idiotic orders—unless the fellow knew German, as some of the bastards did. Now, though, he wished he could pick up the trench rumors at first hand instead of relying on Halévy to pass them along.

“Some of the
poilus
want to fight. Some of them don’t, though.” Vaclav put that as politely as he could. He didn’t want to offend the sergeant, who was at least as much Frenchman as Czech (and, to Jezek, more Jew than either).

He needn’t have worried. Because Halévy was more Jew than anything else, or Jew first and everything else later, he was all for giving the Nazis one in the nuts. “Too right they don’t. How’d you like to take on the Russians instead?”

“Oh, so it works like that, does it?” Vaclav said. Halévy nodded. Vaclav didn’t need to think it over. “No, thanks. Not me. Russia tried to help Czechoslovakia when Hitler jumped us, and that’s more than anybody else can say—France included.”

Once more, the challenge turned out not to be one. “Yes, I know,” Benjamin Halévy answered. “We did as little as we could to technically honor our treaty.”

“Aren’t there a lot of Reds in the French Army?” Vaclav said. “What’ll they think about fighting for Hitler and against Stalin?”

That made Halévy pause, at any rate. “Interesting question,” he said at last. “I’m not sure. We’ll just have to find out, if that’s what the big wheels decide to do. Most of
them
would sooner throw in with the Nazis—you can bank on that.”

“Oh, sure,” Vaclav agreed. “France really
would
have done something when Germany invaded us if your government didn’t halfway wish you were in bed with Hitler.”

He wondered if that would make Halévy angry, but the redheaded noncom took it in stride. His only response was “I’m glad you said ‘halfway.’ ”

“What are we supposed to do while the boys in the cutaways and the striped pants figure out which way to jump?” Jezek asked.

“Ha! That I can tell you: same as we’d do any other time. We keep on killing the assholes in
Feldgrau
and do our goddamnedest to keep them from killing us.”

“Sounds like a plan,” Vaclav allowed.

The Germans wanted to kill him in particular. They knew too much about him, too: they knew he was a Czech, not a Frenchman. Their imported sharpshooter (or maybe he was homegrown—Vaclav didn’t know for sure) started singling out men who wore the domed Czech helmet rather than the crested Adrian style that made
poilus
look as if they were still fighting the last war. This was a better Adrian helmet than the old model. It was stamped from a single piece of manganese steel instead of being built up from two pieces of lower-quality ironmongery. But it still
looked
old-fashioned. And it still was made of thinner metal than the Czech pot.

Not without regret, Vaclav switched to a French helmet. He’d done that before; doing it again didn’t bother him too much. He wanted to hang on to the Czech helmet he was abandoning, but he didn’t. The antitank rifle meant he lugged around extra weight as things were. He didn’t need another kilo or kilo and a half.

Somewhere over there, off to the east, that German sniper lurked in the trenches. Or maybe he wasn’t in the trenches any more. Maybe he sprawled in a shell hole between the lines, or inside the carcass of a dead automobile, or under a smashed-up rubbish bin. You could sneak out under cover of darkness. One shot would be all you needed. Odds were nobody would see where it came from. When night came, back you’d go. In the meantime, you could amuse yourself by carving another notch into your rifle’s stock.

You could if you were a nice, thorough German, anyhow. Vaclav wouldn’t have cared to be captured carrying a rifle that bragged that way. If you were, your chances of seeing the inside of a POW camp ranged from slim down toward none. He chuckled sourly when that crossed his mind. The weapon he carried was a hell of a lot more conspicuous than any ordinary rifle, notched or not.

He began looking with a new eye at possible hiding places out in no-man’s-land. The way he went about it made him laugh once more, on as
dry a note as he’d used earlier. Was this how ducks scouted for hunters’ blinds in the marshes at river’s edge as they flew down to land and feed?

There was a difference, though. Unlike the ducks, he could shoot back.

He suddenly laughed again, this time in real amusement. He imagined flocks of mallards or pochards or smews with machine guns under their wings and cannon in their beaks. By God, you’d think twice—three times, if you had any sense—before you went after one of those!

“All right. What’s so funny?” Benjamin Halévy asked. Vaclav explained his conceit. The Jew gave him a peculiar look and found another question: “Are you sure you’re a Czech?”