Two Fronts (40 page)

Only now they did. What was different? Theo realized he didn’t have to wear the crimson stripes of a General Staff colonel on his trousers to figure it out. When the
Reich
started its Russian adventure, Hitler had managed to arrange a cease-fire in the West. For a while, English and French contingents even fought side by side with the
Wehrmacht
.

Now the West was waking up again. Quite a few German units had already left the Soviet Union to make sure the
poilus
and Tommies didn’t swarm into the Rhineland and the Ruhr. And the Ivans had turned out to be tougher than the
Führer
ever dreamt they would be. The Nazis like to say the
Führer
was always right. Well, so he was … except when he wasn’t.

One thing you had to give him: he didn’t make small mistakes. Nobody could say that about Russia. Other things, yes—plenty of them. But not that. And if the
Reich
didn’t have enough soldiers and panzers and planes hereabouts to hold the line, pulling back to a shorter one did make a certain amount of sense—provided there were enough to hold that shorter one.

We’ll find out, won’t we?
Theo thought. Hitler might have done better to patch up some kind of peace with Stalin till he’d whipped France and England for good. Then he could have turned east without worrying about his other flank. But what were the odds of Nazis and Communists ever making any kind of pact? Theo shook his head. No, that just couldn’t happen. Not a chance.

JULIUS LEMP ALWAYS
went up before boards of his superiors as if he were going to the dentist. He hoped things wouldn’t hurt too much, and that the senior officers would numb him up a little before starting in on the really painful stuff.

So here he was in Wilhelmshaven. His uniform jacket reeked of mothballs, but he couldn’t do anything about that. He hardly ever wore the goddamn thing. Except for that chemical smell, he was as spruced-up as he could get. Well, almost. Not even for a board of his superiors would he put the stiffening wire back into his white-crowned cap. A floppy hat was part of a U-boat skipper’s idea of himself.

He came to stiff attention before all those gold-ringed sleeves and regulation uniform caps. Saluting, he said, “Reporting as ordered!” His voice might have come from the throat of a machine.

But then the highest-ranking big cheese on the board—a rear admiral, no less—replied, “At ease, Lieutenant Commander Lemp.”

At ease? All the starch oozed out of Lemp’s backbone when he heard and understood that. “Lieutenant … Commander?” he whispered. He hadn’t been promoted since the war started. He’d long since assumed he would never see any rank higher than lieutenant, save perhaps posthumously. Discovering he’d been wrong took the wind from his sails, even in a navy of diesels and batteries and steam.

“Yes, yes,” the rear admiral said with a gruff nod. “You’ve lived down your sordid past, shall we say?” He nodded again, more gruffly yet. “Christ on His cross, Lemp, you’ve
lived
, and too many others haven’t. Might as well let your experience—and the
Ark Royal
—count for something, hey?”

Even the aircraft carrier had been no lock to win the next higher grade. “
Heil
Hitler!” Lemp—Lieutenant Commander Lemp—managed, and shot out his right arm. With politics as touchy as they were, showing your loyalty to the regime could never be wrong.

Unless, of course, it could. The
Kriegsmarine
had never warmed to the
Führer
and to the Nazis the way the Army had (to say nothing of the parvenu
Luftwaffe
, run as it was by one of Hitler’s old henchmen). A couple of the men on the board gave Lemp unblinking stares, as if they were old tortoises watching a fox slink by.

No matter what your view of things political was, though, you couldn’t afford to seem lukewarm about the powers that be, not in the Third
Reich
you couldn’t. Five arms shot out in unison across the table from him, each with more gold at the cuff than he’d ever wear. Five throats chorused, “
Heil
Hitler
!
” No one was perceptibly behind anyone else.

The rear admiral produced two small, hinged imitation-leather boxes from his briefcase and shoved them across the table at Lemp. “Here are your new shoulder boards, with the appropriate pips, and here are the new stripes for your sleeves. Congratulations. Belated congratulations, maybe, but congratulations even so—Lieutenant Commander Lemp.”

“
Danke schön, mein Herr
.” Dazedly, Lemp took the boxes. Each was stamped in gold leaf with the
Kriegsmarine
’s eagle—which, like the Army’s and the
Luftwaffe
’s, clutched a swastika in its claws. He stowed them in the jacket’s pockets: pockets he hardly ever used. When he put it on, he’d found a ticket stub in an inside pocket from a film he’d seen before the war started.

“Have we got anything we really need to know about U-30’s latest patrol right this minute, gentlemen?” the rear admiral asked his colleagues. His tone warned that they’d damned well better not. And they didn’t. He nodded once more, with an older man’s dour satisfaction, and gave his attention back to Lemp. “
Sehr gut
. You are dismissed. I hope you enjoy your liberty while the repair and replenishment crews go over your boat.”

“
Danke schön
,” Lemp repeated. Liberty! He hadn’t even thought about that. He’d have to go out and get drunk. Not only that, he’d have to get the whole crew drunk, from his exec and the engineering officers down to the lowliest “lords”: the junior seamen who bunked in the forward torpedo room.

How much would the carouse cost? More than the jump in pay from lieutenant to lieutenant commander brought in for a couple of months—Lemp was only too sure of that. Well, you couldn’t make an omelette without chocolate and powdered sugar and whipped cream. And it wasn’t as if a U-boat skipper who spent most of his time at sea got a lot of chances to throw his cash around. He could afford it. Whether he could afford it or not, he knew he had to do it.

He saluted the board again, this time with a proper military gesture rather than the one from the Party. Did the senior officers show a touch of relief when they gave back the same salute? If they did, Lemp didn’t have to notice, not today he didn’t.

His feet scarcely seemed to touch the ground as he walked back to his U-boat. Ratings and junior officers saluted him. He returned their gestures of respect and gave back his own to the handful of men he passed who outranked him. The journey from the board room to the boat was more than half a kilometer, but seemed to take no time at all.

That tall figure on the conning tower could only be Gerhart Beilharz. The
Schnorkel
expert greeted Lemp with an enormous grin, a salute—most unusual on a U-boat, where such surface-navy formalities went down the scupper—and the words, “Congratulations, Lieutenant Commander!”

Lemp gaped. “How the devil did you know, when I just now found out myself?”

Beilharz’s grin got wider. Lemp hadn’t thought it could. “Jungle telegraph, how else?” the younger man said.

And that was about the size of it. Lemp knew he’d never get anything that came closer to a straight answer. Nothing went faster than the speed of light … except gossip at a naval base. Maybe somebody from the repair crew had heard something and brought word to the boat. Or … Oh, who the hell cared?

The sailors who hadn’t yet headed out for the taverns and brothels of Wilhelmshaven made a point of shaking their skipper’s hand and thumping him on the back. “About time!” they said; several of them profanely embroidered on the theme.

They like me. They really like me
, Lemp realized, more than a little surprised that they should. He knew himself well enough to know that he wasn’t an enormously likable man. His focus was too inward; he had next to nothing of the hail-fellow-well-met in him. And he was the skipper, the great god of his small, stinking world. You could respect a god. You could admire one or fear one. Loving one, despite what the preachers claimed and proclaimed, was a lot harder. Gods and mortals didn’t travel in the same social circles.

Except sometimes they did. Lemp gathered up the officers and ratings still aboard the U-30. “Come along with me, boys,” he said. “We’ll see how many crewmates we can gather up, too. I’m buying—till you head for the whorehouses, anyway.”

“Three cheers for Lieutenant Commander Lemp!” Peter shouted, and the sailors lustily followed the helmsman’s lead. Turning back to Lemp, Peter added, “You should get promoted more often, Skipper.”

“Damn right I should,” Lemp replied, which made his men laugh raucously. They hadn’t started drinking yet, so it must have been a good line for real.

Despite flak guns on rooftops and in parks and little squares, Wilhelmshaven had taken bomb damage. Of course a German naval base near the Dutch border would make a juicy target for the RAF. But the air pirates wouldn’t come over while brief winter day lit the landscape (not so brief here as it was up in the Baltic or, worse, the Barents Sea, where the sun stayed below the horizon for a long stretch around the solstice).

The men poured down beer and schnapps. Lemp bled banknotes. Well, he’d known he would. If he got plastered himself, he wouldn’t care … so much. He drank till his head started spinning. When the men sought pleasures even more basic than beer, Beilharz guided him to an officers’
maison de tolérance
. Hearing that he was celebrating a promotion, the madam let him go upstairs with a pretty, round-faced young redhead for free.

“I’m a patriot, I am,” the madam declared. “
Heil
Hitler!”

“
Heil!
” Lemp echoed. He patted his girl on the backside. Before long, he’d salute her in a way older and more enjoyable than any Party rituals.

THESE DAYS, LEATHERNECKS
and swabbies aboard the
Ranger
walked soft around Pete McGill. It was a compliment of sorts, but one he could have done without. When you showed you could damn near kill a guy with your bare hands, naturally people on the carrier would notice. Just as naturally, they’d go out of their way to make sure you didn’t want to do unto them as you’d done unto Barney Klinsmann.

Barney was out of sick bay at last, and back on light duty. He still insisted he’d fallen down stairs. Nobody believed him, but the polite fiction kept Pete out of the brig.

Two new carriers had steamed to Pearl from the West Coast. They were both makeshifts. Their official title was escort carrier. Everybody called them baby flattops or sometimes jeep carriers, though. They were freighters with flight decks, was what they were. They could hold only half as many planes as a fleet carrier like
Ranger
, and they couldn’t make better than eighteen knots unless you dropped ’em off a cliff.

That was the bad news. The good news was, they were here now. New fleet carriers were supposed to be in the pipeline, but it hadn’t spit them out yet. They were expensive and complicated and slow to build. You could make baby flattops in a hurry. Okay, they had their drawbacks. Drawbacks or not, they let Uncle Sam fly more planes in the Pacific. Pete was all for anything that did that.

Bob Cullum pointed out another flaw the escort carriers had: “Goddamn things are ugly as sin.”

“Well, so are you, but the government still thinks you’re good for something.” Pete smiled when he said it—the other sergeant was senior to him. And he was just needling Cullum. He didn’t want to get into another fight. No one would have accused him of being a peaceable man, but he aimed as much of his rage as he could at the Japs.

“Ah, your mama.” Cullum also made a point of smiling. He might not be eager to tangle with Pete—after what happened to Klinsmann, nobody was—but he didn’t want to back down to him, either. More to the point, he didn’t want to be seen as backing down.

Pete understood that. He didn’t have a lot of empathy. But he’d served long enough in Peking and Shanghai to understand the idea of face. He could see that making Bob Cullum lose face wouldn’t be good for him. A senior noncom could always come up with ways to make a junior noncom’s life miserable. So he didn’t push things, and neither did Cullum, and they both stayed tolerably content.

Then the
Ranger
and the two baby flattops—they were the
Suwannee
and the
Chenango
—steamed out on patrol, and Pete was more than tolerably content. Hitting back at the Japs still roused a fierce, primal pleasure in him, better than anything this side of sex (and more closely related to it than he understood—he was anything but an introspective man).

Because the escort carriers couldn’t get out of their own way—they cruised at fifteen knots—it also struck him as a patrol in slow motion. The
Ranger
and all the escorting cruisers and destroyers had to amble along at the same paltry pace. But Wildcats from the converted freighters joined the combat air patrol above the flotilla. If they ran into a Japanese force, two more squadrons of dive-bombers and torpedo planes would tear into the enemy.

That did matter. It might end up mattering one hell of a lot. On the other hand … “We better not let the Japs catch us unawares, like,” Peter remarked to Sergeant Cullum at gun drill one morning. “It ain’t like the baby flattops can get away from ’em. They can’t run, and they can’t hide, neither.” He beamed, pleased at his own wit.

If Cullum even noticed it, he didn’t let on. He broke into an off-key rendition of “Way Down Upon the Suwannee River” and an equally atrocious soft-shoe routine by the dual-purpose five-incher.

Pete was not inclined to strafe him the way Brooks Atkinson or any other critic in his right mind would have. He was too busy being amazed for that even to occur to him. “Fuck me up the asshole!” he exclaimed, and pointed across the blue, blue Pacific at the slowpoke escort carrier. “She
is
named for that dumb river, isn’t she?”

“Speaking of dumb …” Cullum said pointedly. “You just now noticed, Hercule Poirot?” He pronounced it
poi-rot
, as if the native Hawaiians’ staple had gone bad.