The War That Came Early: The Big Switch (51 page)

“All right, not ungrateful,” Father said. “Difficult, though. Let’s see you talk your way out of ‘difficult.’ ”

“Why should she?” Mother said. “Only right that someone in the family should take after you.”

“I don’t know what you’re talking about,” Father replied with dignity.

But he did. Sarah was sure of that. So did she. Her mother was much more easygoing than her father. Saul was a purely physical being; strength and speed served him the way rational thought did for Father. Sarah was rational, or hoped she was. She was also prickly and impatient with other people’s foolishness. That too marked her as her father’s daughter.

So did her hunger. Eagerly, she asked her mother, “How are you going to cook them?”

“Does it matter?” Hanna Goldman said.

“As long as they’re hot and not too burnt, no,” Father said. Sarah nodded—that summed things up for her, too.

Her mother stuffed the squab with bread crumbs and roasted them. They were wonderful. “I don’t dare tell Isidor how good that was,” Sarah said after crunching through the smaller bones and sucking all the meat off the larger ones. “Bread may be the staff of life, but meat is the gold crown on the end of the staff.”

Her father raised an eyebrow. “That doesn’t come from the Bible or the Greek philosophers, but it sounds as though it should.”

“Just out of my own mouth. Sorry,” Sarah said.

“Don’t be,” Father told her. “Old wisdom gets—well, old. We need new wisdom, too. Here and now, we really need it.”

“We have new wisdom. It comes from the
Führer
,” Mother said brightly. “The
Führer
is always right. That’s what everybody says.”

“Well, yes, of course. I knew that myself, as a matter of fact.” Father was also playing to the listener who might not be there. As soon as the words were out of his mouth, he made as if to gag. The SS might have planted microphones in the house. Putting secret movie cameras in there was beyond the Nazis’ skill. They might want to, but they couldn’t.

Sarah smiled at her parents. Somehow, the silly games they had to play made her happy. Jews in Münster had no business being happy. The
Führer
would surely have agreed with that. But, no matter what he wanted to decree, no matter what his minions tried to enforce, happy she was.

Father winked at her. “It’s the meat,” he said. “It does strange things—especially after so long without.”

If she was the one most like him, no wonder he could guess what she was thinking. “Maybe it is. Whatever it is, I like it,” she answered. The
Führer
wouldn’t approve of that, either. Well, too bad for the
Führer—
that was all there was to it.

ONE OF THE RATINGS
on the U-30’s conning tower jerked as if a horsefly had bitten the back of his neck. He pointed to port. “Mine!” he said. “To hell with me if that’s not a goddamn mine!”

Julius Lemp’s binocular-enhanced gaze followed the German
sailor’s outthrust index finger. Sure as the devil, the metal horns of a contact mine and part of the sheet-iron sphere itself stuck up out of the cold gray water of the Baltic. “Good job, Sievert,” he said. The mine drifted a few hundred meters away, no great danger to the U-boat now. Still, nobody in his right mind wanted to leave one of those hateful things bobbing in the sea, waiting for a target.

“Shall we get rid of it, Skipper?” another sailor asked eagerly. What was it about things that went boom that got grown men as excited as a pack of kids at a fireworks show?

Whatever it was, Lemp had it, too. “You bet we’ll get rid of it,” he answered, and bawled an order down into the pressure hull: “Man the deck gun!”

The sailors from the gun crew swarmed up the ladder. They hurried to the 88mm cannon on the deck in front of the tower. One of them carefully removed the tompion from the muzzle and let it dangle on its chain. Lemp nodded to himself—he hadn’t even had time to give the order. Nothing would ruin your day like opening fire without uncorking your gun.

He did give the order that swung the cannon toward the floating mine. The gun crew banged away with great enthusiasm and no great skill. The 88 was really an anachronism left over from the days of more gentlemanly warfare. It couldn’t fight any kind of surface warship. The idea behind it was that a surfaced U-boat could stop a freighter, pause while the crew took to the lifeboats, and then sink the vessel with gunfire, saving valuable torpedoes.

But that didn’t work in an age of escorted convoys and radio sets. If an enemy destroyer wasn’t bearing down on you at top speed, the freighter was calling in bombers to blow you out of the water. Antiaircraft guns gave you a chance against those, and the U-30 did carry one aft of the conning tower. And it had the 88, too, as much from the designers’ force of habit as for any other reason.

Blam! Blam! Blam!
Flame burst from the gun’s muzzle as each round went off. Brass cartridge cases clanged on the deck. Columns of seawater leaped into the air as shells burst all around the mine. But the damned thing went right on bobbing in the sea. Lemp waited for a hit with rapidly mounting impatience.

At last, when he was about to shout something sharp to the gunners, he got one. It yielded a much bigger
Blam
!—one that rocked him and the submarine even though the mine wasn’t close. The gout of water that rose on high was much bigger and much less tidy than the ones the shells had produced.

At the 88, the ratings shouted and pumped fists in the air and capered like lunatics. “We killed it!” one of them yelled. A couple of others dug fingers into their ears. They’d be ringing, all right. Lemp’s rang even though he stood up on the conning tower. That was part of the chance you took when you played with things that went boom.

“Very good, heroes,” he called to the gunners. “You can go below now.”

They pretended not to hear him. Or maybe, since they’d been playing with explosives, they weren’t pretending. Lemp figured they were. Coming topside was a rare treat for a lot of the men cooped up inside his steel cigar. They could breathe fresh air. They could focus their eyes on something farther away than their outstretched hands. Why would they want to go down into the dim red light, the humid air, and the symphony of stinks that characterized any working U-boat? Wasn’t it like descending into hell? Wasn’t it much too much like that?

Lemp had to give the order again before the gun crew obeyed it. They resealed the 88 and climbed from the deck to the conning tower once more: climbed far more slowly than they’d rushed down to start shooting. The fun was over now, and their dragging steps said as much.

They were even glummer about climbing down the hatch and into the U-30. One of them wrinkled his nose. “I wish they could make a U-boat that didn’t smell like a polecat three days dead,” he remarked.

“Well, Martin, if you don’t fancy it, you should have stayed in the surface navy,” Lemp said sweetly.

That did the trick. Martin—bearded, grimy, in a uniform that hadn’t been washed any time lately—vehemently shook his head, as if the skipper had suggested that he engage in some unnatural vice. “Not me, by God,” he declared. “The surface pukes, they fuss about every little thing like they’re on the rag or something.” And he vanished into the U-boat’s fetid bowels. His buddies followed without another word of complaint.

Julius Lemp smiled. It wasn’t that he thought the sailor was wrong. On the contrary. He was a U-boat man himself, after all, not a surface puke. He remembered how horribly out of place he’d felt when Captain Patzig summoned him to the bridge of the
Admiral Scheer
. Aboard the U-30, he was lord of all he surveyed. On the pocket battleship, he felt like a poor relation, and a damn scruffy poor relation at that, even if he’d put on his best clothes for the visit.

“Skipper?” said the man who’d spotted the mine.

“Eh?” Lemp came back to the here-and-now. “What is it, Sievert?”

“Was that a Russian mine, or one of ours?”

“I don’t know,” Lemp replied after a moment’s thought. “Considering where we are, it could be either. I sure couldn’t tell through field glasses. And I’ve heard the Ivans just copied our model when they started making their own mines, so there might not have been much to tell from.”

“You couldn’t read the ‘Made in Moscow’ plate bolted to the shell, eh?” Sievert asked with a grin.

“Er—no.” Lemp managed a chuckle of his own, even if it took some effort. It wasn’t that he didn’t have a sense of humor, but the poor thing did suffer from lack of exercise.

“Well, it won’t take us out, and it won’t take any of our surface ships out, and we’ll do for any Russian ships we come across,” the rating said.

“That’s right.” Lemp nodded. No jokes lurking in the underbrush there. He felt relieved.

The watchers on the conning tower had gone on scanning sea and sky even while the gun crew played with its big, loud toy. Lemp would have been furious had they let the fireworks distract them. In the Baltic’s close confines, trouble was never far away. It could land on you all too fast even when you were lucky enough to spot it before it showed up. If you didn’t … If you didn’t, some flying-boat crew would go home to paint a U-boat silhouette on the side of their fuselage and then fly off to look for more unwary Germans.

I should have paid more attention, too
, Lemp thought. He made a quick scan himself, first with the naked eye and then sweeping his binoculars through a quadrant of the sky. Nothing. His breath smoked as he sighed with gratitude aimed at a God Who didn’t listen enough.
He remembered the horror that had coursed through him when he’d spotted a small silver speck in the sky not too long before. He’d been about to shout for a crash dive before he realized the planet Venus probably wouldn’t strafe the U-30.

He made a more careful scan of the sea, looking for periscopes. No matter how much the
Kriegsmarine
and
Luftwaffe
harried them, Red Fleet U-boats did get out into the Baltic. Ending up on the wrong end of one of their eels would be embarrassing, to say the least.

Again, nothing. His boat might have had the sea all to itself. He was master of everything he surveyed: gray water and gray sky. A gull winging its way south didn’t acknowledge his supremacy. Gulls never did. They were an ill-bred lot, scroungers and scavengers and ne’er-do-wells. They were quite a bit like submariners, in other words.

His nose flinched when he had to lay below after his watch ended. He logged the incident with the mine. His script was tiny, cramped, and precise. Things could have been better: he might have sunk a Russian battleship. But they could also have been worse: nothing at all might have happened on his watch. Or no one might have spotted an approaching enemy U-boat. He wouldn’t have had to log anything then: he would have been a trifle too dead. The one small detail aside, he couldn’t see anything to like about that.

FDR WAS COMING
to Philadelphia. The election was only a few days away. Four more years? Peggy Druce hoped so. At least, she supposed she hoped so. Everything in the world seemed to have turned inside out and upside down since England and France did their spectacular back-flip with Germany.

Before the big switch, Roosevelt had sent England and France as many planes and guns as American factories could crank out, along with a whole fleet of destroyers he said the United States didn’t need any more. Wendell Willkie, the latest Republican to try to boot FDR out of the White House, hadn’t yelled at him for that. He’d yelled at the President for not doing more and not doing it faster. A bunch of Republicans were isolationists, but not Willkie.

Trouble was, all of a sudden isolationism looked a lot better than it
had even a few weeks earlier. If England and France were on Hitler’s side against Russia, they weren’t using the American guns and planes and ships against the
Führer
, the way FDR had had in mind. Nobody in Washington was (or, at least, admitted to being) in love with Stalin, but nobody much wanted to see all those weapons turned against him, either.

Willkie’s trouble was, he agreed too much with Roosevelt. He was Tweedledum complaining about Tweedledee. After the big switch, some Republicans tried to boot him off the ticket and run somebody more in line with how they figured the party ought to think. Their only problem was, they settled on Alf Landon again: a man only a diehard isolationist Republican could love. (And even then, remembering how FDR had trounced him in 1936, it wasn’t easy.) Landon’s campaign mostly amounted to
I told you so
. He himself had no hope of winning. The more votes he stole from Willkie, the easier the time FDR would have.

“You ready?” Herb called to Peggy. “The rally starts at half past seven.”

“Just about.” Peggy patted each cheek with a powder puff one more time. Looking in the mirror made her sigh. It would have to do, but it was a long way from perfect.
Well, too goddamn bad
, she thought.
She
was a long way from perfect. Perfect would have been twenty-five—twenty-nine, tops.

They drove down into the city. Blazing street lamps and headlights and neon signs reminded Peggy she wasn’t in Europe any more. She supposed they’d lifted the blackout in London and Paris. People there were probably happy as could be. You could buy happiness, all right—as long as you didn’t care what you paid for it.

A valet—a kid, maybe still in high school, maybe just out—took charge of Herb’s Packard in the parking lot. As Herb tipped him, Peggy reflected that he would be wearing a different kind of uniform on the other side of the Atlantic. The USA didn’t know how lucky it was.

At the Arena on Market Street, Herb confidently said, “Druce—that’s D-R-U-C-E,” to an important-looking fellow with a clipboard.

The man ran his finger down a typed list. The moving finger suddenly stopped. “Oh, yes, sir!” he said, and then, to a younger fellow standing behind him, “Eddie, take Mr. and Mrs. Druce down front. Make sure they’ve got good seats.”

“Sure thing, Mr. Terwilliger,” Eddie said. “Come with me, folks.”

They couldn’t have got better seats unless he put them up on the podium. Peggy recognized most of the big shots who were sitting up there: Pennsylvania politicos and union leaders. Herb was neither, for which she thanked heaven.