Two Fronts (30 page)

Wham!
The first depth charge staggered Lemp. Light bulbs blew out with pops that sounded too much like gunshots. The U-boat shuddered as if it had just taken a body blow from Max Schmeling. Sailors swore when the explosion flung them into some of the boat’s many sharp projections.

Wham!
There was another one—farther away than the first, and not quite so horrific. The U-Boat lost a few more bulbs, but only a few. Lemp dared breathe again. He’d guessed right. And he didn’t
think
a Swordfish carried more than two depth charges.

Now, would the pilot loiter to see if he could machine-gun a surfacing submarine? To say Lemp didn’t want the pressure hull colandered proved the power of understatement.

“Bring us down to all ahead one-quarter,” he told Paul, who relayed the order back to the engine room. “And take us up to periscope depth. I want to see what’s going on upstairs before we come up for air.”

He swept the periscope around in a complete circle. At the very edge of visibility, he spotted the Stringbag flying away. It had done what it could do. The crew wouldn’t know whether they’d damaged the U-boat or not. They would know they had to get back to their carrier to rearm before they went out on another patrol.

That thought sparked another one in Lemp as the plane vanished over his short horizon. He noted its course. “Raise the
Schnorkel
,” he ordered. “I want eight knots at
Schnorkel
depth. Paul, turn us to course 320.” That was more or less northwest, and the direction in which the Swordfish had flown away. “Maybe they’ll lead us back to where they came from.”

“That’d be nice, eh, Skipper?” Paul swung the U-30 to the heading Lemp wanted. They exchanged sly grins. A U-boat couldn’t ask for a more important target than an aircraft carrier.

Sinking one just might get me promoted at last, or at least win me the Knight’s Cross
, Lemp thought as the diesels roared to life and the familiar vibrations rose up through the soles of his shoes to fill him again. With the
Athenia
to blot his escutcheon, even sinking a carrier might not haul him up to lieutenant commander.

He knew he’d have to be lucky to get to launch a spread of eels. The carrier would have to be somewhere close by. And he’d have to find it in the vastness of the sea. Well, all he could do was try.

A rating brought him something from the galley: sliced tinned meat on sliced tinned bread. It was the body’s diesel oil. He fueled mechanically. The less he thought about what he was swallowing, the better.

He turned the periscope back and forth, back and forth, sweeping as wide an arc as he could. He didn’t expect to see anything for quite a while. (He didn’t really
expect
to see anything at all, but you had to go through the motions as if you did. They would have been in the soup for sure if that rating hadn’t spotted the Swordfish.) Patience paid. Patience always paid, even if it didn’t always get its reward.

No way to know what course the carrier was steaming. No way to know how far off it was. Darkness came early in these latitudes at this season. If it put paid to his search … 
I’ll go out into the Atlantic and hunt freighters. What else can I do?

Back and forth. Back and—Lemp stopped swinging the periscope.
Something
stuck up on the horizon. “I will be damned,” he whispered. Then he spoke aloud: “Change course to 295, Paul. And I want eleven knots from the engines.”

The engines weren’t the problem. When the U-boat made much over eight knots at
Schnorkel
depth, though, it shook as if it were coming to pieces. But if that was the carrier, and if he was going to have any chance at all to hit it … Things started rattling as speed picked up.

It was the carrier. It loomed out of the water like an enormous cliff. A pair of destroyers shepherded their charge. Both sent out pings from their dangerous new fancy hydrophones. Neither was close, though, and neither changed course as if catching an echo from the U-30.

Lemp wanted to sneak within a thousand meters of the carrier before firing his torpedoes. What you wanted and what you got turned out differently too damn often in this world. He had to shoot the eels from a kilometer and a half. Aiming got harder. The target was smaller. Travel time stretched. If the limeys were alert, they might be able to turn away.

They started to. One torpedo missed, but two struck home: one at the bow, the other back toward the stern. The carrier began listing and settling in the water right away. Lemp could see she wouldn’t stay afloat.

He didn’t need to see that the destroyers would do their best to pay him back for shooting their big friend. Their pinging picked up. They might have the torpedo wakes to guide them toward him. He dove deep and steered near the sinking carrier. Let all the noise coming from that shattered ship confuse their detecting gear.

It must have worked. The destroyers dropped depth charges, but none near him. When the U-30 surfaced after sundown, it was in the middle of a broad, empty ocean. Lemp ordered a bottle of beer for every crewman from the crates the boat carried for celebrations. The first depth charge had smashed some of the bottles, but there were still plenty left. And how the ratings cheered him!

PEGGY DRUCE DELICATELY
turned the radio dial. All of a sudden, she heard Edward R. Murrow’s voice, and there was London, right in her living room. The wonders of living in modern times! A set that could get shortwave transmissions brought the whole world to your door.

“The British Admiralty has confirmed the loss of the
Ark Royal
northeast of Scotland,” Murrow said mournfully. “German naval authorities claimed the sinking yesterday, but the Germans, during this war, have claimed a good many things that later proved not to be true.”

That was slightly unfair. The
Luftwaffe
, from what Peggy had seen while she was in Europe, lied whenever its lips started moving. German land forces told lots of what they’d called stretchers in the old days, but you could usually tell what was in fact going on from what they said. And the
Kriegsmarine
, most of the time, stuck close to the facts.

“Loss of life on the torpedoed aircraft carrier is believed to be heavy,” Murrow went on. “Some sailors were killed while struggling in the water when the destroyers escorting the stricken carrier depth-charged the U-boat that had attacked it. There is no evidence the submarine was damaged.”

“Well, shit,” Peggy said. Alone in the big house, she could come out with whatever she pleased. For that matter, she could have come out with the same thing if Herb were home. The most he would have done was cluck. More likely, he would have laughed.

Static hisses and pops rode the shortwave signal. As long as Peggy could make out what Edward R. Murrow was saying, she didn’t mind. In fact, she liked the noise. It reminded her how far away the American broadcaster was.

“England eyes the American Congressional elections with more worry than usual,” Murrow said. “Gains by the isolationist wings of the two parties could make the USA concentrate on the war in the Pacific and slow efforts to keep Europe’s democracies supplied with the arms they need to boost the fight against the totalitarian powers.

“And that supply is vitally necessary if England and France are to continue the struggle. Many here and more across the Channel were happier with their stitched-up peace with Germany than they are at the moment.”

“Shit,” Peggy repeated, more sharply this time. She was worried about the elections, too. Who in her right mind wouldn’t be? Anybody who’d seen Hitler’s Germany with her own eyes knew the only thing you could do with it was squash it with the biggest rock you could find.

But most people in Arkansas and Nebraska and Wyoming—and Philadelphia—hadn’t seen the Third
Reich
with their own eyes. That was the trouble. It didn’t seem real to them. They couldn’t believe anyone would really do the kinds of things the Nazis did every day without even thinking about them. And so they didn’t care whether the English and French kept fighting. It wasn’t their worry.

Only it was. If somebody didn’t take care of Hitler now, before too very long he’d decide he could take care of the United States. The really scary thing was, he might turn out to be right.

It was rainy on election day. Peggy’s polling place was at a fire station a couple of blocks from her house. She squelched over in galoshes and under an umbrella. A bored-looking cop with a bigger bumbershoot stood watch. Every once in a while, a wardheeler would follow a voter toward the polling place.

“No electioneering within a hundred feet,” the cop would growl.

Of course the wardheelers bellyached. They were out there in the rain to snag votes any way they could. The cop ignored their complaints. He had the law on his side, and he knew it.

Peggy voted. She’d done more for FDR and his foreign policy than any of the Democratic wardheelers. She was as sure of it as the cop was about the electioneering statutes.

The fire station was warm. It smelled of tobacco smoke and something Peggy finally decided was brass polish. She didn’t want to go back out into the wet. At last, with a martyred sigh, she did.

Rain drummed down on her umbrella. The cop was going, “Louie, if you don’t knock it off, swear to God I’m gonna run you in.”

Louie, by then, had dogged a man almost to the fire-station door. “Have a heart, Walt,” he whined. Yes, he was enough of a wardheeler to know the cop by his first name. But he also must have known Walt wasn’t kidding, because he skittered away.

Tipping his fedora to Peggy as they passed, the man he’d been trailing remarked, “Those guys are harder to get rid of than the ringworm.”

“They’ve got a job to do, too.” Peggy did the same job, if at a different level. It gave her more sympathy for the wardheelers than most people felt. The man rolled his eyes and walked inside, closing his dripping umbrella as he did.

Peggy went home. The house still felt too big and too empty and too quiet. She still liked having Herb around, and she missed him when he rolled out of town on one of his hush-hush trips for good old Uncle Samuel.

To make some noise, she turned on the radio again. She sat there, not really listening, and read an Agatha Christie. She didn’t pay that much attention to the mystery, either. It was something that kept her eyes moving back and forth so she didn’t have to think about the miserable state of the world or the almost equally miserable state of her marriage.

Cigarettes were good for not thinking, too. She methodically went through them, almost the way Herb would have. At least smoking in the States was a pleasure. It had been a duty while she was stuck in Europe. You got the jitters and the jimjams if you quit. But Jesus God, the tobacco over there was awful! When it was tobacco, anyway. Maybe it was horseshit after all. Some of it sure tasted as if it was.

Bread crumbs. An egg. Chopped scallions. Salt. Pepper. A can of salmon. Some lard in the pan. A few minutes later, croquettes. Canned string beans heated in a little pot. Supper. A stiff bourbon-and-water kept her from noticing whatever deficiencies it had. After supper, she sent the bottle a longing look. A little to her own surprise, she put it back on the high shelf without opening it again.

When she turned on the radio this time, election returns were starting to come in. Her own Congresscritter got reelected handily. He was a Republican; no, her neighbors hadn’t seen the joys of the
Reich
for themselves, either, so they still thought of FDR as That Man In The White House. But she’d known he would win. The only way he could blow the election was by molesting a nun in the middle of the street at rush hour. Even that might not do it.

Before midnight, though, the prognosticators on NBC, CBS, and the Mutual Network agreed that the makeup of the next Congress wouldn’t be too different from this last one. “President Roosevelt does seem to have lost some ground,” Lowell Thomas intoned gravely. “Incumbents usually do in offyear elections. But it seems unlikely that the new Congress will upset his foreign-policy apple cart. In any case, the general working rule for the USA is that partisanship stops at the frontier.”

Peggy nodded to herself. She’d heard that rule before. It did seem true more often than not, no matter how little the isolationists liked it. And hearing a veteran reporter talk about it that way reassured her. Nobody was going to go and do anything stupid, anyhow.

She made a small, unhappy noise. Nobody was going to go do anything stupid? Was that the most you could hope for from government? She made the same noise again, louder now. More often than not, it was. And, a lot of the time, you couldn’t even get that much.

RAIN CAME DOWN
on the trenches northwest of Madrid. Chaim Weinberg swore as he stumped along one. “My goddamn boots are gonna rot right off my feet,” he groused. “You think anybody’ll care? Not fuckin’ likely!”

Mike Carroll was properly sympathetic: “They’ll care, all right. The way your feet smell now, they’ll get you new boots in a minute if the stink leaks out through holes in the old ones.”

“Funny, man. Fun-ny. Har-de-har-har. See? I’m laughing my ass off.” Chaim laid on the sarcasm with an entrenching tool. “Funny like stepping on a land mine, you ask me. That’ll ventilate your boots, too. Better to venti late than never, right?”

“Right.” Mike’s tone suggested he meant anything but what he said. He went on, “We’ve been here long enough. We damn well oughta be used to living out in the rain when winter comes by now.”

“There is that,” Chaim admitted. “Man, when I got here I never figured I’d stay so long. Fight for a while, then go home and try and set things right in the States …” He shook his head. “But the Spaniards really meant it. You’re ashamed to show you don’t. And they’re in the fight till there’s two left on one side and one on the other. And when the two kill off the one, waddaya wanna bet they start fighting each other ’cause that’s all they know how to do any more?”

Carroll sent him a disapproving look. “No wonder you keep getting in trouble with the Party.”