Two Fronts (23 page)

Kuchkov knew such things instinctively, the way he knew he breathed air and drank water (or vodka, whenever he could get it). He never failed to be amazed that men better educated than he was, men by all accounts smarter than he was, didn’t get it. Almost every time the
politruk
asked for questions, he found some suckers who came out with them.

Sure as hell, a soldier raised his hand now. “Comrade Political Officer, are the English and the French still class enemies of the Soviet state now that they’re fighting the Hitlerites again?”

“What a
clever
question, Sergei!” Maxim Zabelin beamed at the soldier, the way a village butcher would beam at a fat sheep. “Yes, of course they are. The revolution of the workers and peasants will find a home in those lands, too. This shows the inevitability of the historical dialectic.”

The company commander ambled over. First Lieutenant Obolensky puffed on a
papiros
while he listened to the
politruk
’s blather. He outranked the other man, which meant exactly nothing. The
politruk
had the Party behind him. He could countermand the company commander’s orders whenever he felt like it. If he said Obolensky was ideologically unsound, his alleged superior would find himself in the gulag or a penal battalion, and would no doubt spend the short rest of his life wondering what the devil he’d done to deserve that.

A couple of other fools asked questions, too. The
politruk
handled them with the effortless ease of a circus performer going through an act for the thousandth time. He was also bound to be noticing who they were and what they wanted to know. If he didn’t fancy the questions, or the questioners, the dumb dickheads would wind up unhappy pretty damn quick.

As usual, the
politruk
’s meeting closed with a shout of “We serve the Soviet Union!” When the men went off to do what they should have been doing instead of listening to him, the political officer aimed a sloppy salute at the company CO and said, “All yours, Comrade Lieutenant.”

“Thank you so much, Comrade Political Officer,” Obolensky replied dryly. Kuchkov’s head went up as if he were a wolf taking a scent. Sarcasm was what educated people used instead of
mat
. No wonder Kuchkov had an inborn sensitivity to it. The
politruk
never noticed. No surprise there: he was so full of himself, such things flew right over his head.

Off to the west, German artillery growled itself awake. Kuchkov’s head came up again. Artillery was serious business—it could slaughter you without giving you a chance at the bare-chested cunts serving the big guns. But this barrage would come down on some other sorry bastards’ heads. Kuchkov relaxed.

He wondered whether the Nazis were saddled with
politruks
. He would have bet against it. If they had those fuckers looking over their commanders’ shoulders, too, how could they have pushed this far into the
Rodina
?

In spite of the
politruk
’s bold words, the whole regiment fell back the next day. There were rumors the Germans had tanks in the neighborhood. Kuchkov knew damn well the Red Army didn’t. The Red Army was so worried about Smolensk—and about Moscow, which Smolensk shielded—that that part of the front had first call on men and matériel.

When rumors failed to turn into slab-sided German panzers painted dark gray, the retreat stopped. The men dug in amongst the brush and scrubby trees on the east bank of a stream that might slow down an arthritic goat but that wouldn’t keep anyone serious from crossing.

Lieutenant Obolensky came up to Kuchkov. “You’ve been around the block a time or two, eh, Comrade Sergeant?”

“Oh, fuck, yeah.” Kuchkov remembered formality at the last instant: “Uh, sir.”

One corner of the lieutenant’s mouth twisted upward. “What do you think of our dispositions?”

That was a word Kuchkov had learned in the military. It still sounded faggy to him, but he got what it meant. Shrugging, he answered, “We’ve got some cover. We’ve got fucking mortars. We’ve got our machine guns. If the cocksuckers in
Feldgrau
’re dumb enough to stick their dicks into the sausage grinder, we can chop ’em up pretty good—for a while, anyways.”

“Yes. For a while.” This time, Obolensky’s smile lifted both sides of his mouth, but it never touched his eyes. He peered west, as if expecting to see a whole
Wehrmacht
division bearing down on the company. He did see the same thing Ivan saw: nothing. With a sigh, he said, “Well, all we can do is all we can do.” Was he trying to reassure Kuchkov or himself?

The Germans showed up late in the afternoon, when the sun setting behind them made them harder to spot. It might have been chance. It might have been, but Kuchkov didn’t figure it was. The Nazis still in business in Russia were pros, damn them. The dumb ones were mostly dead by now.

Scouts in Nazi gray filtered forward across the fields. The Red Army men in khaki sat tight, waiting for bigger, tastier targets. With the sun going down, they probably wouldn’t get them till morning. They’d have some then, though. The Germans had got better at concealing themselves, but they still weren’t up to Soviet standards.

And it all turned out not to matter. The Hitlerites slipped across the stream a few kilometers south of the company. They didn’t have tanks, but they did have armored cars and armored personnel carriers, which were almost as deadly. The Red Army fell back again.

Falling back meant watching out for Ukrainian nationalist bandits as well as the Nazis. By now, Ivan was used to it. He also watched out for vodka to liberate over and above the daily hundred grams, and for peasant girls who didn’t bother with bourgeois affectations like morals. Even when he didn’t find those, he watched out for his men. They’d be fighting the Hitlerites again, and probably soon.

WHEN THE U-30
put in at Wilhelmshaven, technicians swarmed over the boat the way they always did. But something about the way they went about it put Julius Lemp’s wind up. He went back to the engine room to talk with a diesel technician he’d known for a long time.

“What’s cooking, Gustav?” he asked quietly. “Something’s going on, sure as hell.”

Gustav was checking a valve’s clearance with a butterfly gauge. After a satisfied grunt, he went on to the next one. “Don’t know what you’re talking about,” he replied, his voice elaborately casual. To judge by his broad Bavarian dialect, he might never have set eyes on the sea. It only proved you never could tell.

Lemp’s snort filled his nostrils with the heavy stink of diesel oil. It was even stronger back here than it was in the rest of the boat. That really said something—nothing good, but something all the same. “
Quatsch!
” Lemp said, more quietly than he was in the habit of using the word.

If Gustav would understand one word from how Berliners talked—so different from his own way of speech that it might almost have been a different language—it would be their pungent slang for
rubbish
. He chuckled. Then he looked around to see if any of the other men working on the engines were paying him any special attention. So did Lemp. Nobody seemed to be. What was more natural than a U-boat skipper hashing things out with somebody from the maintenance crew?

“Nothing for someone who spends most of his time at sea to worry his head about,” Gustav answered after due consideration. “Politics starting to bubble again, that’s all.”

Lemp wanted to clap a hand to his forehead. That was the stuff of bad movies most of the time, not a U-boat’s crowded confines. Every so often, though, life wanted to imitate art, even bad art. “Politics is never ‘that’s all,’ ” Lemp said with great conviction that he hoped would replace the extravagant gesture. “Who’s gone and pissed in the stewpot now?”

“Huh.” Gustav said nothing more for a little while: not till after he’d made sure the next valve was still working as designed. He checked his comrades again, as carefully as he’d checked the valve. Then, not quite whispering, he continued, “Well, you won’t be too surprised to hear some folks aren’t jumping up and down now that we’ve got our two-front war back.”

“
Ach, so
,” Lemp said, and pointed at the valve Gustav had just examined. The mechanic’s thin smile said he appreciated the artistic touch. While eyeing the valve, the U-boat skipper went on, “Haven’t we gone through that nonsense already?” He knew too well they had; machine-gun fire that confined the crew to barracks during the last failed
Putsch
wasn’t how he’d wanted to spend precious time ashore.

“As long as things are going good, politics looks like nonsense, ja,” Gustav said. “When they aren’t …” He didn’t go on, or need to.

Now Julius Lemp felt like banging his head against one of the engine’s sharp, greasy projections. “The more we squabble amongst ourselves, the more the Ivans and the Tommies and the froggies laugh.”

“Well, there you are,” Gustav replied, which might have meant anything or nothing. “But folks are as jumpy as a pail of toads.”

He wouldn’t say anything more than that. He’d told Lemp what the U-boat skipper absolutely had to know. Who was doing what to whom … Lemp would have to piece that together for himself.

The officers’ club would have been a good place to check, if only anyone were saying anything. But it was uncommonly quiet there. People drank with a grim intensity Lemp had seen before. Even when they’d taken on enough torpedo fuel to sink them deeper than the
Titanic
, though, they didn’t open up. They just put head on hands and fell asleep.

All the schnapps was rotgut. Lemp drank anyway. If you couldn’t talk about the monster under the bed, at least you could blur its outlines. He didn’t seem to be the only one with that attitude. Oh, no. Nowhere close.

“This place is like a morgue,” he said to the petty officer behind the bar. The man was older than he was, and might have mixed drinks here for the Kaiser’s bewhiskered officers during the last war.

“Yes, sir. Sure is,” the rating agreed. “Wish we could pep things up a bit.”

Before Lemp answered, he asked himself the necessary question:
to whom does this man report?
The bartender was bound to report to somebody. If it was only the base commandant, that was one thing. If it was the
Gestapo
or one of the
Reich
’s many other security agencies, that was something else again. You went into one of those interrogations as beefsteak, but you came out as ground round—and maybe burnt ground round, at that.

With such gloomy reflections on his mind, Lemp answered, “Sometimes peace and quiet is the best thing you can hope for,” after what he hoped was an imperceptible pause.

“Well, I don’t expect anyone could argue about that.” The petty officer pointed to Lemp’s empty glass. “You need to take some more ballast on board, sir?”

“Oh, you bet I do,” Lemp said.

He woke up with cats yowling the next morning. Timbermen, the Danes called a hangover: little guys felling trees inside your sorry skull. By the way he ached, they were using power saws. He dry-swallowed three aspirins. They helped some. The coffee he poured down would have done better had it held more of the real bean and less chicory or whatever other ersatz they used to stretch it. The military got the best the country could give. If this
was
the best, no wonder the political pot had started bubbling some more.

Lemp had better sense than to say that out loud. He got called on the commandant’s carpet even so. Rear Admiral Markus Apfelbaum looked as if he’d been left out in the North Sea brine too long. He stared at Lemp with eyes of Baltic gray. “You have been asking questions.” By the way he said it, that might have been a capital crime. And indeed, if the
Reich
was in ferment, it might prove to be one.

“Sir, it’s always a good idea to find out which way the wind’s blowing,” Lemp said stolidly. “How else do you judge how to trim your sails?”

“You trim them by loyalty to the
Reich
,” Apfelbaum ground out. “First, last, and always. You can do nothing else.”

“I don’t want to do anything else. If anyone doesn’t think I’m loyal to the
Vaterland
, he should go talk to the English and Russian skippers I’ve sent to the bottom.”

But that wasn’t good enough. Lemp might have known it wouldn’t be. As a matter of fact, he had known, but he’d hoped against hope he was wrong. “You are loyal to the
Vaterland
, you say.” Apfelbaum sounded implacable as fate. “But are you loyal to the
Führer
and the National Socialist
Grossdeutsches Reich?
They are not necessarily one and the same, I must remind you.”

When some families lost a son in the war, the death notice said
died for
Führer
and
Vaterland. Other notices simply said
died for the
Vaterland. It was one of the few ways people had to show what they thought of the current regime.

“I am loyal to the
Führer
,” Lemp replied, as he had to—and as was true. He hadn’t said anything to the petty officer behind the bar that would have made Markus Apfelbaum summon him. What he’d said to Gustav the diesel mechanic, though … 
Well, now I know to whom
he
reports, anyhow
, Lemp thought.

Admiral Apfelbaum went on studying him. “People who are loyal don’t need to go snooping around.” The senior man might have been Moses delivering the Tablets of the Law—except Moses was a damn Jew, while Apfelbaum was anything but.

What the admiral said admitted of only one possible response. Lemp gave it: he came to stiff attention, saluted, clicked his heels, and said, “
Zu Befehl!
”

“All right. Get out of here. You’ve wasted enough of my time,” Apfelbaum said.

Lemp saluted again, and got. He half wondered if a couple of blackshirts would be waiting for him outside the commandant’s office. But no. He let out a discreet sigh of relief. The enemy, you could fight. Your own side? That often seemed a hell of a lot harder.