The War That Came Early: The Big Switch (40 page)

Was he saying the Red Army wasn’t doing its job? Would some political
officer rake him over the coals for telling the truth? Such things happened all the time. That was a shame, but they did.

“One more thing,” he added. “The best way to become a Hero of the Soviet Union isn’t to try and dogfight the 109s. The Pe-2 may have started out as a heavy fighter, but it’s a bomber now. It’s a good bomber, but it’s still a bomber, dammit. The best way to become a Hero of the Soviet Union is to finish your mission, come back, and fly your next one and the one after that. That’s what heroes do: what needs doing. Go take care of it.”

Thus encouraged, they hurried to their planes. Antiaircraft guns’ snouts stuck up around the airstrip. Stas hadn’t seen any bomb craters, though. The Germans hadn’t found this place, then. Not yet.

Groundcrew men bombed up the squadron’s Pe-2s. Fyodor Mechnikov was ready. “Let’s blow the living shit out of these Nazi cunts,” he said.

“I couldn’t have put it better myself,” Stas replied.

Up they went. After the more sedate SB-2, takeoff in the new machine was like a kick in the pants. “I could get used to this,” Ivan Kulkaanen remarked.

“Let’s hope so,” Stas answered. Kulkaanen gave him a sidelong look. Stas didn’t know about Karelians in general—he hadn’t met many—but his bomb-aimer had an ear for the little things … if they were little. If the aircrew didn’t get used to these takeoffs, they’d probably be too dead to care.

They droned west. Orders were to hit the Germans outside of Mogilev, on the Dnieper. When they got there, they discovered the enemy was already ten or fifteen kilometers over the river. They bombed the biggest concentration of Germans they could find. Antiaircraft fire came up at them from the ground, but it wasn’t too bad. Mouradian had flown through plenty worse. No Messerschmitts seemed to be in the neighborhood. Nobody could anger Lieutenant Colonel Tomashevsky by pretending the Pe-2 still was the fighter it had originally been intended to be.

Once the bomb bay was empty, they sped back to Russia—Mother Russia to Mechnikov, if not to Mouradian or Kulkaanen (although it was to Tomashevsky: by his name, he was a Russian). Stas taxied into a
revetment and killed the engines. As soon as the props stopped spinning, groundcrew men spread camouflage netting over the plane. The Germans wouldn’t have an easy time finding this airstrip.

Unless, of course, they followed the Red Air Force planes and watched where they landed. Maybe that was what happened. Any which way, the antiaircraft guns around the airstrip suddenly all seemed to go off at once. Mouradian, Kulkaanen, and Mechnikov scrambled out of the Pe-2 and sprinted for the nearest slit trench.

One after another, Stukas dove on the field. The first one flattened what had been a
kolkhoz
supervisor’s office and was now Lieutenant Colonel Tomashevsky’s headquarters. Stas hoped Tomashevsky hadn’t got back in it yet. Two other dive-bombers planted 500-kilo bombs right in the middle of the runway. Nobody would fly in or out till those holes got filled. And a fourth German bomber blew up a Pe-2 in spite of the netting that covered it. The flak didn’t get any Stukas. As they roared off to the west, Mouradian only wished he were more surprised.

laustrophobia was foolish. Julius Lemp kept telling himself so. It helped … some. The Baltic was a couple of hundred kilometers across. But he was used to the greater elbow room of the North Sea and the vast freedom of the North Atlantic. Here in these enclosed waters, he felt as if he had land at his elbow every way he looked.

“Oh, good, skipper. I’m not the only one, then,” Gerhart Beilharz said when Lemp complained out loud.

“You’d best believe you’re not,” Lemp agreed. If anyone on the U-30 was entitled to feel cooped up all the time, it was Beilharz. With his size, it wasn’t as if he were wrong.

“Not a whole lot of traffic out there, either,” the engineering officer said. “I hope we’re not just wasting our time.”

“Me, too,” Lemp said. “Well, at least it’s a war.”

His voice sounded hollow. If he could hear it, no doubt Beilharz could, too. And he had his reasons for keeping enthusiasm on a tight lead. You could foul up all too easily in the Baltic, and foul up your career, such as it was, while you were at it. In the North Atlantic or the
North Sea, he could assume any surface ship he saw was bound for England or France.

Here … Suppose he sank a Swedish freighter bound for the
Reich
with a load of iron ore. That would torpedo any hopes he might still have for moving up the chain of command. Would it ever! He’d survived sending one ship to the bottom by mistake. Nobody could get away with being wrong like that twice.

Even if he spotted a gunboat, it might not belong to the Ivans. It might be Swedish or Finnish or Polish or Latvian or Lithuanian or Estonian. He’d wondered if Stalin would gobble up the Baltic republics the way Hitler had seized the Low Countries. No sign of it yet. Like drowning men with life preservers, the little nations in these parts clung to neutrality for dear life. As soon as one side invaded them, the other would, too. Whichever big power won the war, Latvia, Lithuania, and Estonia would lose.

So he had to be careful. Airplanes might belong to one of the neutrals, too. He couldn’t shoot it out on the surface with one unless it fired at him first. Since that would be just exactly too late, he dove as soon as anybody spotted anything flying. Once, what turned out to be a Russian flying boat dropped depth charges on him—fortunately, with bad aim. They rattled his teeth and made the sailors use some amazing profanity, but did no damage.

“Are we going into the Gulf of Finland?” Beilharz asked one afternoon on the conning tower, in much the same tones a patient might use when asking his doctor if a biopsy had come back malignant.

“That’s where Leningrad is. That’s where the Russians go in and out,” Lemp answered. Beilharz only sighed. Well, Lemp felt like sighing himself. The Baltic was narrow. The Gulf of Finland wasn’t more than a good piss wide. If something went wrong while the U-boat was there … The technical term for that was
screwed
. But Lemp went on, “When somebody asked that American gangster why he robbed banks, he said, ‘Because that’s where the money is.’ ”

“Hey, even if we got a boatload of rubles, we couldn’t spend ’em in Germany anyhow,” Beilharz said.

Lemp was a pretty fair submarine driver. He hadn’t been blessed with the sharpest or quickest sense of humor, though. He was about to
snap at Beilharz for missing his point when he realized, in the nick of time, that the
Schnorkelmeister
was joking. “Heh,” he managed—not the merriest or most sincere laugh that ever rang out on the U-30, but a laugh all the same.

Estonia owned the lower jaw to the Gulf of Finland, its namesake country the upper. Soviet territory lurked back deep in the throat. Minefields shielded that territory from visitors like Lemp’s U-boat.

He respected those minefields without fearing them. He had good charts of where they lay. He didn’t know for sure, but he would have bet the Finns had contributed a lot to those charts. They didn’t love the enormous neighbor who’d ruled them till the Russian Revolution, and they needed to worry about the minefields, too, if their fishing boats and freighters were to stay safe.

But the Russians also sowed mines through the gulf at random. They’d sneak out under cover of darkness in fast attack craft, dump a few in the water, and run away again. They denied everything, of course. When one of those floaters blew a Finnish steamship sky-high, the Russians insisted the Germans must have placed it.

There
were
German mines in the Gulf of Finland, to make things difficult for the Soviet Union’s Baltic Fleet. Lemp also had charts showing their positions. Sometimes, of course, a mine would slip its mooring cable and go drifting with wind and wave. You might not think any bobbed close by, but you had to keep your eyes open.

At least one Soviet battleship, the
Marat
, lurked inside the minefields. If she came out, she could cause all kinds of trouble … for a while, anyway. How long she’d last against U-boats and bombers was anybody’s guess.
Not very long
was Lemp’s. The
Marat
was a dreadnought built before the last war: a dinosaur, in other words. New and more deadly predators prowled these days.

No monster from wars gone by put the U-30 in trouble. Another damned flying boat did. It came out of the sun, so nobody on the bridge saw it till it was almost on top of the submarine. The first clue Lemp had that it was there was tracers snarling past his face.

“Jesus Christ!” he yelled. Then he heard the growl of the Beriev MBR-2’s engine. The flying boat zoomed overhead no more than thirty meters above the sea. Bombs fell from under the wings. They didn’t hit
the U-30, but went off close enough to her hull to knock Lemp down on the conning tower and almost drown him with two enormous gouts of seawater.

Coughing and spluttering and trying not to puke, he pulled himself to his feet. One of the ratings who’d been on the tower with him was down and moaning. His hands clutched his belly. Blood poured out between his fingers—a fragment must have got him. The moans turned to shrieks a moment later.

Curses and shouts of surprise came from inside the boat. How much water had suddenly flooded down the hatch? Much too much, by the noises from down there. But that, at the moment, was the least of Lemp’s worries. The MBR-2 was turning for another pass.

They couldn’t get down fast enough to escape it. The only thing they could do was bang away at it with the 37mm antiaircraft gun. “Take off the tompion!” Lemp shouted. Both the antiaircraft gun and the 88mm deck cannon had bronze plugs protecting the inside of the barrel from seawater. If you tried to fire one without removing that protector, you’d be very unhappy—but not for long.

Off went the tompion. It dangled from the barrel by a chain so it wouldn’t roll into the ocean. The gun roared. The flying boat fired back with its machine gun. Lemp had hoped the gunfire would scare it off, but no such luck.

Then he cheered when smoke and fire spurted from the Russian plane’s engine. The MBR-2 came down in the Baltic. Lemp hoped it would cartwheel and break to pieces. Again, no such luck. There it sat, on the water, and it went on shooting at the U-boat. Bullets clanged off the conning tower. Some bit through it. Those holes would have to be patched before the boat could dive again.

“Man the deck gun!” Lemp yelled down the hatch. He had to jump back as sailors sped up the steel ladder inside. The antiaircraft gun was still trading fire with the flying boat’s machine gun. Chunks flew from the plane’s metal wing and wooden hull, but the Ivans inside kept up their fire. No one could say they had any quit in them.

Then the deck gun roared. It wasn’t identical to the 88mm antiaircraft piece that was also a fearsome antipanzer weapon, but it came
close enough. No plane could take that kind of pounding. A couple of rounds into the cockpit and the enemy machine guns went quiet.

Two more sailors were down, one at the flak gun, the other at the 88mm. The latter had taken one through the head. They’d bury him at sea, along with the poor devil with the belly wound, although that unlucky fellow might be a long time dying. The other wounded man had a neat hole through his leg. He’d probably live.

“Good Lord!” Lemp said, deeply shaken. “I hope we never have to do
that
again!” Everybody up on deck with him nodded. Several ratings crossed themselves. Lemp was no Catholic, but he felt like doing the same thing.

PEGGY DRUCE HAD
already voted for FDR twice. She had every intention of voting for him again. If ever anyone deserved a third term, Franklin D. Roosevelt was the man. It looked that way to her, anyhow.

Most of her Main Line friends and acquaintances were rock-ribbed Republicans. Rock-headed Republicans, as far as she was concerned. They seemed convinced the world ended right where good old American beaches gave way to the ocean. The sole exceptions they recognized were shopping trips to London and Paris and gambling junkets to Havana.