Two Fronts (26 page)

Sure as hell, he slept till 0600. It was getting light out by then. A couple of smoke plumes rose into the air. The Japs must have hit something worthwhile, or those fires would have been out by now.

He got coffee and scrambled eggs and toast in the galley. The eggs were fresh, a shoreside luxury. He could eat the powdered ones—you’d starve if you couldn’t stomach them at all—but they weren’t the same.

A petty officer sitting across the table from him said, “We’ve got to find some kind of way to take back fuckin’ Midway. This air-raid shit gets old fast, y’know?” He punctuated his opinion with a yawn, then headed back to the Silex for more java.

When he came back, Pete said, “Sounds good. But how d’you aim to pull it off?”

“Can’t be
that
tough,” the Navy man said. “C’mon, man. How many carriers you figure the Japs keep in these waters?”

“Enough,” Pete answered. Since the
Ranger
was still the only American flattop in the Pacific, that didn’t have to be any enormous number.

He waited to see if he’d get an argument. He more than half expected one. Navy files reflexively disagreed with Marines. When that happened in a Honolulu bar, it usually led to a fight. Aboard ship, it had better not. He didn’t feel like wasting time in the brig on bread and water—piss and punk, in the pungent language swabbies and leathernecks used among themselves.

But the petty officer’s broad shoulders slumped as he sighed. “Yeah, I guess you’re right,” he said. Pete wanted to dig a finger into his ear to make sure he’d heard that right. The man in warm-weather whites went on, “We fucked this war six ways from Sunday, didn’t we?”

“Well, I’ll tell you,” Pete said. “I was in Peking. Then I was in Shanghai, on account of Peking’s way inland and they decided they couldn’t get us out if the balloon went up. Then I got blown up in Shanghai”—he scowled, remembering poor, dead Vera—“and they shipped me to a military hospital in Manila, ’cause they didn’t figure they could get us out of Shanghai, either.”

“They were right, too,” the petty officer said tactlessly.

“Yeah, I know.” Pete didn’t want to think about the buddies he’d had to leave behind in Shanghai. They’d be dead now, or prisoners of the Japs. From things that leaked out of China, it wasn’t obvious which fate was worse. Scowling some more, he went on, “I got out of Manila on the
Boise
, one jump ahead of the invasion. I’ll tell you, man, I’m goddamn sick of going east.”

The petty officer nodded. “I hear you. Oh, boy, do I ever! But when we went west against the Japs, a lot of good guys went west for good, if you know what I mean.”

“You bet I do. I was almost one of those guys myself,” Pete said. “When the
Boise
went down, you guys fished me out of the drink. Otherwise I’d be nothing but sharkshit by now.”

“Sharkshit.” The Navy man considered that. A slow smile delivered his verdict. “Way to go. I didn’t think anybody could come out with a dirty word I never heard before, but you just went and did it.”

Pete had never heard it before, either. It just came out of his mouth. He hadn’t thought about it before it did. He didn’t have much time to think about it now. He got to his feet and gave his tray and dishes to a Samoan steward in what looked like a skirt—only the guy was about six feet four and almost as wide as he was tall, so ribbing him about it wasn’t the smartest thing you could do.

They’d put out one of the fires by the time he got topside. The others went on burning. The Honolulu papers were sure to have rude things to say about that. Civilians here didn’t like getting bombed any more than civilians anywhere else in the world. Come to that, Pete hadn’t met a whole lot of men in uniform who enjoyed explosives dropping on their heads.

He didn’t see how Japan could hope to conquer the USA. But Japan didn’t have to. As long as she hung on to her conquests in China and the Pacific, she won. And Pete had no more brilliant plans to keep her from doing that than the petty officer did.

VACLAV JEZEK DIDN’T
know what a wrecked and rusty Citroën was doing out between the lines the Republicans and the Nationalists held. More than the rust said it had sat here for quite a while. Scavengers had stripped it of tires and inner tubes. Rubber was precious for both sides. They’d taken the battery from under the hood, too. The poor dead son of a bitch who’d been driving the car still lolled behind the wheel. He was dried out, half mummified, and hardly stank at all any more: another proof how long the Citroën had been there.

That the dead man didn’t stink much made the wreck all the better for Jezek’s purposes. He spent one night digging a hidey-hole under the car. He made sure to keep the dirt he dug out behind the chassis. He didn’t want the Nationalists to see anything had changed.

He slithered in under the Citroën. The day dawned gray and gloomy. Pretty soon, it might rain. He did some more digging. Rain would soften the ground and might make the car settle. If it settled on him, it would also settle his hash.

Once he was satisfied he didn’t need to worry about that any more, he scanned Marshal Sanjurjo’s positions with binoculars he’d taken from a German International who’d never need them again. The field glasses were from Zeiss, which made them as good as any in the world.

Men in yellowish khaki, some with field caps, others wearing almost-German helmets, went about their business. As long as they were out of rifle range of the Republicans, they didn’t bother concealing themselves. He could have potted one of them as easily as he pleased, but he didn’t put down the binoculars and set his shoulder against the antitank rifle’s stock. When he killed somebody, he wanted it to mean something.

A skylark sang sweetly overhead. The bird knew nothing of war, save the war it made on mosquitoes and butterflies and crickets. Vaclav wished he could say the same.

He traversed the Zeiss glasses as if they were a machine gun. Suddenly, they stopped and snapped back, almost as if they had a will of their own. What the devil was that? A moment later, he had his answer.
That
was a German in
Feldgrau
, no doubt a survivor from the
Legion Kondor
. And damned if the son of a bitch wasn’t carrying the long asbestos hose of a flamethrower, with the fuel tanks strapped on his back.

Vaclav hadn’t killed many Germans since he came to Spain. He would have gone after anybody who carried a flamethrower, no matter who the bastard was. He couldn’t imagine a filthier weapon. Cooking a man like a pot roast … He shook his head in disgust. He’d never yet heard of anyone who lugged one of those horrible things being able to surrender, and no surprise, either.

He shook his head again, this time to drive the hate and revulsion out of it. He needed to be steady to do his job. He needed to be, and he would be. He aimed his elephant gun at the German. The sight, of course, had crosshairs. He put them right where he wanted them. The German wasn’t going anywhere fast. He stood there talking with a Spaniard, and paused for a moment to get his pipe going.

The antitank rifle smashed against Vaclav’s shoulder. A split second later, the 13mm bullet smashed through the flamethrower’s fuel tanks. They weren’t armored; that would have added weight. The jellied gasoline caught. Then it exploded, covering the German—and, as a bonus, his Spanish friend—in unquenchable fire.

“There you go, cocksucker!” Vaclav muttered as he chambered another round. “See how you like getting it instead of giving it.”

Flame and smoke soared skyward from the enemies’ pyre. The Nationalists close by ran every which way, as if a small boy had brought his foot down hard on an anthill. But what could they do? The flamethrower man and his chum were nothing but charred meat now. Even if somebody managed to extinguish them before they died, the kindest thing to do would be to shoot them and take them out of their agony.

Some ants—the red ones—had stings. Vaclav waited to find out if anyone over there had spotted his muzzle flash. No machine guns snarled at the dead Citroën. No mortar bombs walked toward it. He decided the excitement created behind the enemy line made the Spaniards forget about everything else.

Marshal Sanjurjo’s men didn’t even start shelling the Republican trenches to avenge the fallen flamethrower specialist. They almost always did that after Vaclav killed somebody. From their quiet, he concluded that they were as uneasy about their late German friend and his little toy as soldiers from the other side would have been.

It was funny. There wasn’t likely to be much difference between any one man on Vaclav’s side and his opposite number on the other. Both guys worried about staying alive, about not getting maimed, about their rations, and about making themselves as comfortable as they could while they fought this stupid war. Taken in a mass, though, the guys on his side were his friends, while the guys who followed Marshal Sanjurjo were nothing but Fascist swine.

Of course, they’d call his buddies a bunch of Reds and swear on a stack of Bibles they had God on their side. But what the hell did they know?

The sun eventually burned through the morning clouds. It crawled across the sky. When it went down, Vaclav wriggled out from under the dead Citroën and crawled back to the Czech positions. When he scrambled down into the trench, he found his usually stolid countrymen more excited than he could remember seeing them for a long time.

“What’s going on?” he asked after he fired up a cigarette—first things first.

“We can go back to France and shoot Nazis again if we want to!” one of the men answered. “The French government asked our government-in-exile to send us up there again.”

When the Third Republic jumped into bed with the Third
Reich
, the soldiers who still fought under Czechoslovakia’s red, white, and blue tricolor turned into an embarrassment. Vaclav supposed they were lucky to have been allowed to go to Spain instead of getting interned or turned over to the Nazis. Now, though, Daladier had decided Hitler wasn’t the lover of his dreams after all. And so the Czechs turned useful again. When it came to cynicism, Frenchmen were hard to beat.

“What’s the government-in-exile got to say?” Vaclav asked. If it tried to give orders, he didn’t know if he’d be any happier following them than Benjamin Halévy had been with his from France.

“So far, it hasn’t said anything,” the other Czech answered. The Czechoslovakian government-in-exile had abandoned Paris the last time the French switched sides—no, the next to last time now—and was currently ensconced in Barcelona. Marshal Sanjurjo’s bombers visited Barcelona every so often. Otherwise, from what little Vaclav had seen of it, it was a nice place. It was a lot nicer than these trenches; the sniper was sure of that.

“Can’t say I’m surprised,” he observed. “They’ve probably caught
mañana
from the Spaniards.” Most of the people in Barcelona thought of themselves as Catalans. Hearing themselves called Spaniards would have pissed them off, the way Slovaks got pissed off if you mistook them for Czechs. Vaclav didn’t worry about that. Catalans had
mañana
fever, too.

“My bet is, if they tell us to go, they don’t know whether we will or not,” the other soldier said. “They don’t know whether the Republic will let us go, either.”

Vaclav grunted. France was clogged with soldiers. The Spanish Republic starved for them. On the other hand, the Republic was only fighting the equally half-assed Spanish Fascists. France was up against the Germans. Anybody up against Germans had his hands full by the nature of things, as Vaclav had too much reason to know.

“Me, I’d go to hell to kill Nazis,” he said. “I guess I’d go to France, too.”

“Yeah, that’s the way it looks to me,” his countryman agreed. “Christ only knows what the government-in-exile will decide, though. Christ only knows what the Frenchies’ll end up doing, too. Maybe they’ll flip over one more time. How are you supposed to know?”

“Good question.” Vaclav found another good question: “What’s in the stewpot? After sausage and hard bread all day, I’ll eat damn near anything.”

ALISTAIR WALSH REMEMBERED
telling another English soldier he was lucky to have caught a Blighty wound. That was just before he’d caught one himself. You didn’t think it was such ruddy wonderful luck when something laid open
your
leg.

He didn’t know whether they’d taken the other wounded man back to England. He did know he hadn’t said boo when they decided to ship him home instead of letting him recover in Egypt and go back to war against General Model’s
Afrika Korps
.

Had someone behind the scenes quietly pulled wires for him? He hadn’t tried to get anybody to do that. He’d pulled wires to get to Egypt. He wasn’t about to do the same thing to get away.

And even if someone had, he didn’t know whether that someone was necessarily doing him a favor. For the second time in this war, England had troops on the European mainland. One Staff Sergeant Alistair Walsh, who’d done a tour in France the last time around and another much more recently, might make a prime candidate to go back yet again.

He might once he recovered, anyhow. He’d gone back to Blighty the long, slow way: through the Suez Canal and around Africa. That was what losing Gibraltar did to you. By the time his hospital ship reached London, he was limping on the deck with a stick.

He was limping through London now, still a convalescent. The leg hadn’t festered—not badly, anyhow—but it wasn’t up to the demands going into the field would put on it. The people at the hospital had made noises about turning him into a behind-the-lines type: a military bureaucrat, in other words. The look he gave them put paid to that. He had the front-line soldier’s essential quality—he wanted to go out there and do for the buggers on the other side. He just didn’t want them to have too good a chance to do for him instead. At least the doctors and such had the sense to see that.

And maybe, again, he had people pulling wires for him. How many career NCOs got visits in hospital from sitting MPs? Ronald Cartland and Bobbity Cranford both called on him. “Heard you stopped a packet in the desert,” Cartland remarked. “Hard luck, that.”