Two Fronts (18 page)

He won the bet. Other Royal Navy ships pinged away, too, but all of them well to the east of U-30. The crewmen wrestled fresh eels into those bow tubes. The “lords”—the most junior sailors—would have more room to sleep tonight, because they bunked in the compartment where reloads were stored. And then the U-boat would go hunting again.

“What the hell have you got there?” Mike Carroll asked, staring at the fat book Chaim Weinberg was reading. “New Hemingway.” Chaim held it up so Mike could see the spine—the cover was long gone. “It’s called
For Whom the Bell Tolls
, and it’s about the war here before the fighting started all over everywhere.”

“How is it?” Mike asked.

“Pretty damn good. I wish I could get a pretty girl to hop in my sleeping bag as easy as this guy Jordan does, though.”

“I was up on the Ebro when he was in Madrid,” Mike said. “Hemingway, I mean, not the guy in the book.”

“I understood you. So was I,” Chaim said. “I know some guys who knew him while he was here, though.”

“Oh, sure. Me, too.” Carroll nodded. The sun glared down on the trenches. Spring in Spain didn’t last long. It quickly rolled into summer, and summer in central Spain, like summer in central California, was nothing to joke about. Mike went on, “Didn’t Hemingway have that lady war correspondent hopping all over him then? What the hell was her name?”

“Gellhorn. Martha Gellhorn.” To show how he knew, Chaim flipped back to the very beginning of the book. “It’s dedicated to her. They’re married now, I think.”

“Yeah, I think you’re right.” Mike nodded again. “Married and living in Cuba or some such place. That’s the nice thing about covering a war when you’re a reporter. You can leave once you’ve got your story, and then write a book while you’re pouring down rum and Coke thousands of miles away.”

“You got that right. He wrote a good book, though—I will give him that much,” Chaim said. “The stuff about what the Republicans and the Fascists did to each other when the war was breaking out … I’ve talked to enough Spaniards to have a notion of how it was, and what’s in here feels real.”

“Okay. Give it to me when you’re done with it, then,” Carroll said.

“Will do. Just so you know, it’s not one of your cheerful-type books. No matter how much screwing this Jordan guy does, no way in hell he’s gonna live to the end of it,” Chaim warned.

“I’m a big boy, Mommy.” Mike grinned to take away the sting.

Chaim grinned, too. “Fuck you, big boy.” They both laughed. Chaim wiggled his back so the forward wall of the trench didn’t dig into it in so many places—or at least so the trench wall dug into it in some different places—and went back to plowing through
For Whom the Bell Tolls
.

He was about fifty pages from the end when Nationalist howitzers opened up on the stretch of line the Internationals held.
The nerve of the bastards!
he thought as he huddled in the almost-bombproof he’d scraped in that forward wall. Couldn’t they even let a guy finish his book? He didn’t remember the Czech sniper’s monster rifle going off, so Sanjurjo’s men weren’t taking revenge for some newly fallen alleged hero.

Or he didn’t think they were. Hemingway had sucked him in deeply enough that he might not have noticed the Czech firing the antitank rifle. The damn thing was hard to ignore, though. Chances were the Nationalists were just being their usual asshole selves.

More 105s came down. How crazy would it be if an American International in Spain who was reading about an American International in Spain who was going to get killed by the goddamn Nationalists got killed by the goddamn Nationalists while he was reading? Well, not at the exact moment he was reading, but close enough to satisfy even the most dedicated coincidence-sniffer.

Chaim didn’t want to get killed. Well, Robert Jordan didn’t want to get killed, either, but that wouldn’t do him any good. The god named Hemingway was one merciless son of a bitch. Jordan could screw till the earth moved for him and Maria; his movie wouldn’t have a happy ending even so.

The earth was moving for Chaim, too, but he couldn’t enjoy it the way Jordan did in the book. The damn shell bursts were making it shake. If one of those shells came down too close, Chaim’s story wouldn’t have a happy ending, either.

Hey
, he thought,
I did some fancy fucking in Spain, too. I even have a kid to prove it
. La Martellita was nothing like Maria. She was as tough as Pilar, if you could imagine Pilar beautiful. And if you could imagine Pilar beautiful, you could imagine just about anything.

After forty-five minutes or so, the shelling let up. No, the Nationalists didn’t mean anything in particular by it. They were throwing some hate around—that was all. Chaim had heard an English International give artillery fire that name. God knew it fit. Whenever Chaim said it himself, the people he was talking to always got it.

Stretcher-bearers carried a moaning wounded man back toward the doctors. Chaim hoped it was one of the Spaniards who filled out the Abe Lincolns’ ranks these days. Not many Americans were left any more. He didn’t want to lose a friend—or even a jerk who spoke English.

For Whom the Bell Tolls
had got dirty and a little crumpled when he dove for cover. He figured Hemingway would approve. From things he’d heard, the writer was a blowhard and drank like a fish, but the man could sure as hell put words on paper.

Back behind the line, Republican guns came to life. They started repaying the Nationalists for their bad manners. If only they could take out Sanjurjo’s artillery … But they didn’t seem interested in trying. They inflicted the same kind of misery on the enemy’s forward trenches as the Fascists had sent this way.

Chaim hated artillerymen. He didn’t know a foot soldier who didn’t. He suspected the Roman legionaries had hated the bastards who served the Parthian catapults—and their own as well. How could you not hate someone who could hurt you at a range where you couldn’t hurt him back? There the son of a bitch was, drinking coffee and smoking a cigar, maybe with some cute dancer on his lap, and all he had to do was yank that rope to blow you into the middle of next week. It wasn’t even close to fair. No matter where you were in the world, it had to look the same way.

When storming parties went forward, enemy machine-gun teams had a tough time surrendering. They dished out too much woe to atone for it by throwing up their hands. Artillerymen were the same way, only doubled and redoubled. The trouble was, storming parties rarely got far enough into the rear to give them what they deserved. That took more artillery, dammit.

After a while, the Republican gunners decided they’d done what they could for their benighted brethren in the trenches. Their cannon fell silent. Chaim waited to see if the Nationalist 105s would open up again. They didn’t. Maybe they were short on shells, maybe on outrage.

Either way, he settled down not far from where he’d sat before and went back to the novel. When things were quiet, you savored the moment. Looking back, he’d done more sitting around and waiting than fighting. That might be true, but when he did look back he knew he would remember the moments of terror and the even rarer moments of exaltation far better than he recalled the longer boring stretches.

When he looked back. If he looked back. If he lived to look back. He’d been in the war a long time, and he hadn’t once got badly hurt. That made him even luckier than a guy who broke the bank at Monte Carlo. The gambler only won money and all the fine cars and champagne and loose, beautiful women it could buy. Chaim won the precious chance to be that guy.

If he stayed long enough, he’d catch it as surely as Robert Jordan was going to in the story. A shell would come down in the wrong place or he’d make the unwanted acquaintance of a machine-gun bullet or some Fascist would smash in his skull with an entrenching tool in a raid. In the long run, the house always won.

They’d been on the point of demobilizing the Internationals when the big European war blew up. That would have been his chance to leave with his honor still in one piece. But it hadn’t happened. He was still here—and still reading.

Robert Jordan blew the bridge. The Republic fucked up the attack he was supposed to blow the bridge for. Sure as hell, he got it. And so did the one halfway decent Nationalist Hemingway stuck in the book. War sucked, all right. Hemingway might be a drunken blowhard, but he sure as hell knew that.

COLONEL STEINBRENNER STOOD
under the broad Russian sky, looking at the assembled pilots and radiomen and groundcrew personnel in their black coveralls. He’d climbed up onto a ration crate so they could all see him, too: not much of a podium, but it was what he had.

Hans-Ulrich had elbowed his way up toward the front of the squadron. He wanted to hear what the CO had to say. The cynical part of him that had sprung up during the war wondered why. He’d get the same orders no matter what Steinbrenner said now. But, cynical part or not, here he stood. Like Luther, he could do nothing else.

Steinbrenner raised both hands, almost like a minister offering benediction. The
Luftwaffe
men in front of him quieted down. A couple of guys who didn’t quiet down fast enough to suit their comrades got elbows in the ribs to encourage them

“Well, boys, it’s finally gone and happened,” Steinbrenner said. “We
are
being recalled to the West.”

A buzz ran through the flyers and groundcrew men. Rage and disappointment warred within Hans-Ulrich: rage that betrayal from England and France was forcing the
Reich
to shift the squadron away from the vital war against Bolshevism, disappointment that his affair with Sofia was being forcibly ended.

“When they told me they were transferring us, they warned me, ‘You’d best be careful in the West—you’ll be going up against the hottest new RAF Spitfires and French Dewoitines,’ ” Steinbrenner went on. He raised one eyebrow till it almost disappeared under the patent-leather brim of his officer’s cap. “And I looked at them, and I said,
‘Ja? Und so?’
”

The squadron exploded into laughter. Hans-Ulrich barked as loud as anyone else. Yes, modern RAF and
Armée de l’Air
fighters could hack Stukas out of the sky with the greatest of ease. But so could the biplane Po-153s the Red Air Force was still flying. The Ju-87 was not made to dogfight, or even to run away. You had to be an optimist to use it where you didn’t have unchallenged air superiority.

Which meant somebody in the
Luftwaffe
high command probably
was
an optimist. There wouldn’t be unchallenged air superiority in the West. The comment Colonel Steinbrenner had got from his superiors made that only too plain. Hans-Ulrich had been shot down once in the West and once here in the East. He and Sergeant Dieselhorst had managed to bail out both times. He supposed they might stay lucky once or twice more.

He also had the feeling they would need to. If they went hunting panzers in France, the gun pods would make their plane even less airworthy than it was without them. Maybe he could surprise enemy fighters with the 37mm guns. Any cannon that would do for a panzer would do for a Spitfire … if you could hit it. He’d knocked down a couple of enemy planes with the big guns. Again, he supposed he might stay lucky.

Or he might not. And if he didn’t, his story wouldn’t have the kind of ending a cinema audience liked.

“We fly west day after tomorrow,” Steinbrenner said. “Our new base will be in Belgium, not far from the French border. Groundcrew men will come by rail—we won’t mount you on the wings and drop you over the new airstrip.”

He got another laugh, this one mostly from the men in the black coveralls. Hans-Ulrich envied his ease up there in front of everybody. The pilot wished he could match it himself. He knew he had a long way to go.

When he and Albert Dieselhorst climbed into their Stuka for the journey into the wild, exotic, and almost forgotten West, Dieselhorst said, “Well, I won’t be sorry to get the hell out of Russia, and you can take that to the bank.”

“Neither will I,” Hans-Ulrich agreed. The next German he met who admitted being sorry to leave Russia would be the first. But he couldn’t help adding, “The
Reich
isn’t leaving. We’ve still got a lot of men here on the ground.”

“Some of them will head west, too,” Dieselhorst said. “If the froggies and the Tommies are serious, we sure don’t have enough troops there now to do more than annoy them.”

“Two-front war,” Rudel said gloomily. “
Damn
the Englishmen! It’s their fault.”

“It sure is.” Sergeant Dieselhorst chuckled, almost too low for Rudel to hear him. Hans-Ulrich didn’t swear very often. Maybe that meant he got more mileage out of the cussing he did use. Maybe it just meant he was a prig.

Bf-109s flew top cover as the Stukas buzzed back toward Byelorussia. If the Ivans had somehow heard the squadron was pulling back, it would be just like them to try to ambush it. But the planes escaped without harm, and came down somewhere not far outside of Minsk.

The Germans were putting their mark on occupied Byelorussia. White signs with black letters from an alphabet a man could read marked the airstrip and the roads around it. Opel trucks—gasoline tankers—rattled up to refuel the dive-bombers. Then the Stukas flew off again, their next stop not far from Bialystok.