Two Fronts (47 page)

Did they thank him for his care about regulations? It was to laugh. They were as insubordinate as they could get away with, and a little more besides. They swore at him when his back was turned, or sometimes to his face. When they thought he couldn’t hear them, they called him Awful Arno.

He knew he’d worn the nickname for a long time. That just meant he’d hated it for a long time. There were plenty of times when he preferred fighting the Ivans to keeping track of the ruffians in his squad. The Russians were honest. He knew they wanted to kill him. His own men …

“Pfaff!” Arno snapped.

Adam Pfaff was cleaning his Mauser. He’d painted the piece a non-regulation gray. The company CO didn’t want to make a fuss about it, but it distressed Baatz’s orderly, order-craving soul. Pfaff was an
Obergefreiter
, a senior private, so Arno couldn’t even stick him with the fatigue duties that would have brought him back to the straight and narrow. Pfaff thought the lousy chevron on his sleeve meant his shit didn’t stink.

He was also selectively deaf. Right this minute, he pretended to be altogether focused on getting some oiled rag down the rifle’s barrel with the pull-through of his cleaning kit. Well, Arno wasn’t about to let him get away with that nonsense. “
Pfaff!
” He shouted it this time.

“Oh, hullo, Corporal.” Adam Pfaff looked up from what he was doing, his face the very image of stubbly innocence. “Did you want something?”

“Damn right I do.” Arno didn’t bother to hide his irritation. He rarely did. “Go take over for Dirk at the forward sentry station.”

Pfaff gave him a dirty look, which warmed the cockles of his heart. The
Obergefreiter
was a born barracks lawyer. Baatz waited for him to claim that was one of the duties from which his pipsqueak rank exempted him. If Pfaff tried it, Arno intended to shoot him down in flames.
Do it anyhow, ’cause I told you to
was always reason enough—if you were giving the orders, anyhow.

But Pfaff just sighed and reassembled his rifle with a few quick, practiced motions. Even Arno Baatz had to admit he made a decent combat soldier when he wasn’t whining. Pfaff lit a cigarette as he got to his feet. “You
will
remember to send somebody to take over for me?” he said, his tone implying he thought Arno would do no such thing.

“Not me. Far as I’m concerned, you can stay in that hole till 1951.” Baatz laughed to show he was joking. And so he was … up to a point. The laugh sounded nasty even to him.

Well, he wanted to get a rise out of Pfaff. To
his
annoyance, the
Obergefreiter
just ambled out of the ruined Russian village without giving any sign that he was irked.

A few minutes later, Dirk came back. “What’s going on up there?” Baatz asked him.

“Not much, Corporal. Ivans seem pretty quiet right now,” the soldier answered. Then he asked a question of his own: “Any of that stew left? My belly’s growling like a mean dog.”

“Might be a little.” Arno made a face. “It’s not what you’d call a treat.” Buckwheat groats and turnips and onions and mystery meat, all of it boiled together till you could hardly tell where one ingredient stopped and the next started … No, it wasn’t what he would have ordered if he were stepping out with a pretty girl back in Breslau.

But Dirk said, “Beats the hell out of empty.” And that was also true. War in Russia had taught Arno more about empty than he’d ever wanted to learn. Dirk headed toward the hut that housed the field kitchen.

Off in the distance, artillery rumbled. Baatz gauged the far-off thunder. Well to the south, he judged, German and Russian guns thumping each other. It was something he needed to notice. Unless it picked up, it was nothing he or his superiors needed to worry about.

A
babushka
scurried to the well, a big saucepan in her hand to carry the water she drew up. She dipped her hand to Baatz and murmured, “
Gospodin
,” as she slipped past. He ignored her. The way the Russians lived … It was pathetic and disgusting at the same time. No running water or electricity outside the big cities. No paved roads outside the big cities, either, which had come as a nasty surprise to the motorized
Wehrmacht
.

Arno Baatz curled his lip.
We need to clean out this whole country and start over again from scratch
, he thought. He imagined a German farming village, full of handsome German farmers and their good-looking German wives and happy children taking the place of this screwed-up dump. In his imagination, even the cows and pigs were plump and contented.

No cows and pigs at all were left here. If the Russians hadn’t slaughtered them, the Germans had. Only a couple of old men and a few more ugly old women still lived in this place. The younger men probably wore Red Army khaki and carried machine pistols. Maybe some of the younger women wound up in German military brothels, servicing a couple of dozen soldiers every shift. Arno hoped so. What else did they deserve?

A
Kettenrad
chugged into the village. Captain Fellmann, the company’s latest CO, hopped out and waved to Baatz.

The corporal came to attention and saluted. “What’s up, sir?” he asked. He might be hell on wheels to the men below him in rank, but he always showed his superiors perfect military formality.

“We’re pulling back. Gather your men together and head west,” Hans-Joachim Fellmann said. “We’re shortening the line so we don’t need so many troops to hold it.” He made a sour face.
Shortening the line
was what radio newsreaders said to explain away a retreat. It might be true this time, with the
Reich
’s manpower stretched so thin. Even if it was, that made it no more palatable.

Baatz saluted again. “
Zu Befehl, mein Herr!
”

“All right. I’ll see you back at regimental HQ in three or four hours. We’ll all move out then.” Captain Fellmann jumped back into the
Kettenrad
. The driver gunned the engine. The funny-looking little machine putt-putted off to the next German outpost.

Arno Baatz let out a long, mournful sigh. So much for his vision of replacing this rotten little settlement and the lousy Ivans who infested it with a proper German farm town full of proper Germans. It would stay in its native squalor. The
Führer
’s much larger and more grandiose vision for shoving the Slavs out of Europe and back past the Urals was also going a-glimmering with the German retreat, but Baatz lacked the imagination to see all that in his mind’s eye.

He chuckled nastily. Tempting to take the rest of the squad out of the line and leave Adam Pfaff in his forward foxhole with an eye peeled for Russians. Would he find them—would they find him—before or after he started wondering why nobody’d come up to relieve him?

However tempting it was, Baatz didn’t do it. No German on the Eastern Front would leave even his worst enemy to the Ivans’ tender mercies. And Adam Pfaff wasn’t Arno’s worst enemy.

Or, now that Dernen had copped one, maybe he was.

Whether he was or not, the corporal sent Dirk back up to retrieve him. No point giving the
Landsers
anything new to gossip about. They found plenty on their own. The squad trudged away from the village. The Russians could have it. The Russians, as far as Arno Baatz was concerned, were damn well welcome to it.

THEY SAID U-BOATS
could roll in a bucket. They said all kinds of stupid things, but they were dead right about that one. And the North Sea was no bucket—not unless you compared it to the North Atlantic, anyhow. Roll the U-30 did. The boat pitched when a wave caught it bow-on, too.

Up on the conning tower, Gerhart Beilharz turned to Julius Lemp and said, “Skipper, you need to get promoted again, is what you need. Another party would be a hell of a lot more fun than this.”

“Work before pleasure,” Lemp answered. “Work after pleasure, too, unfortunately.”

“I know.” The tall engineering officer nodded. “They haven’t figured out how to make you work
during
pleasure, but I bet some bald old
Herr Doktor Professor
at the University of Tübingen or somewhere has a research grant to see what he can do about that.”

“Wouldn’t surprise me one goddamn bit,” Lemp agreed. “I’d like another promotion party—but I’m not holding my breath. I didn’t think I’d ever get the last one.”

“You deserved it,” Beilharz said loyally.

“Glad you think so.” Lemp never would have made Beilharz’s acquaintance to begin with if he hadn’t been an officer with a screwed-up career. They’d given his boat a
Schnorkel
—and the accompanying
Schnorkel
expert—because they didn’t much care what happened to it (or to him) after he sank an American liner under the mistaken belief it was an English troopship. They didn’t cashier him for the mistake (which German propaganda loudly and stridently denied), but he’d spent a devil of a long time as a lieutenant.

He raised the field glasses to his eyes once more and went back to scanning a quadrant of the sky and the horizon. Ratings in foul-weather gear covered the other three quadrants. You’d never find a target if you didn’t look for it. You’d never spot the plane that was looking for you, either, not till machine-gun bullets slammed into your hull or bombs fell from the belly of the flying beast.

Beilharz went on talking: “Nice to get up here every once in a while—not just for the fresh air, but so I don’t have to worry about banging my stupid head.”

“You’re not tall enough to bump it on the sky,” Lemp agreed. He went on swinging his binoculars through their automatic arc. He had no trouble carrying on a conversation at the same time without getting distracted. A U-boat skipper who couldn’t do several things at once would quickly discover he wasn’t up to filling the role.

“Everywhere else, though,” Beilharz said.
Everywhere
certainly included the U-30’s pressure hull. The inside of the steel cigar seemed cramped even to men below average height. The passageway was barely wide enough for two sailors to squeeze past each other. Getting through the four circular pressure doors inside the boat’s hull was an exercise in gymnastics. And all sorts of pipes and fittings, many of them with points or sharp edges, hung down from the top of the cylinder.

You could easily gash your scalp even if you weren’t tall. All you had to do was hurry or just be careless for a moment. Every patrol, the pharmacist’s mate sewed up several cuts like that.

Even barefoot, there were two meters of Gerhart Beilharz. He was too big a sardine to fit well into his tin. He had to fold up like a carpenter’s ruler to sleep in an officer’s bunk. (As captain of the U-30, Julius Lemp boasted a cabin—a tiny cabin—to himself, complete with a cot. He was the only man aboard who did. Anywhere else, the space would have seemed claustrophobic: it was, for instance, much smaller than a jail cell. It remained the height of luxury on the U-boat.)

Beilharz couldn’t hurt himself while he was asleep, not unless he fell out of the bunk. Awake and on the move, though … Hurrying forward and aft in an apelike stoop wasn’t enough to save his noggin from the slings and arrows of outrageous ironmongery. Whenever he went below, he wore a
Stahlhelm
. That protected his cranium, at the cost of occasional repairs to ceiling fixtures when he forgot to duck.

One of the ratings on watch with Lemp tapped him on the arm. “Skipper, I think there’s something off to the northwest—bearing about 295.”

“
Ach, so?
” Lemp came to a hunter’s alertness. “Here’s hoping you’re right, Rolf. Been a quiet cruise so far.” He swung his own field glasses a little north of west. He frowned as he studied the horizon. “Something … maybe.” Mounted on an iron post on the conning tower was a pair of larger, stronger binoculars. He peered through them. The frown lines got deeper. “Looks like a diesel plume, I think—one a lot like ours.”

“Another U-boat?” Rolf and Lieutenant Beilharz asked the same thing at the same time. You didn’t need to solve crossword puzzles or read detective stories to jump to that conclusion.

Lemp nodded. “That’s my guess. First thing we have to do is make sure it’s not one of ours. Nobody else is supposed to be in the neighborhood, but you can never count on that stuff. If it’s not, we’ll sink the steel turd.”

“I couldn’t see the hull—only the exhaust,” Rolf said.

“Same here, even with the big glasses.” Lemp nodded again. “Let’s go below. We’ll take her down to
Schnorkel
depth and get in closer to find out what we’ve got. It’ll be a lot easier for us to see them than for them to spot us.”

Bootsoles clattered on the steel rungs of the ladder down to the pressure chamber. Lemp was the last man off the tower. He closed the hatch behind him and dogged it tight. Water gurgled into the ballast tanks. Beilharz raised the
Schnorkel
tube as Lemp raised the periscope.

“Snort behaving?” Lemp asked.

“Sure is, Skipper,” the engineering officer answered.

They chugged toward the other U-boat at seven knots. Lemp peered through the periscope. He had to be sure before he loosed an eel or two. No career would survive sinking a
Kriegsmarine
U-boat.

Whatever the other boat was, no one aboard it had any idea he was stalking it. He soon became sure it wasn’t a Type VII like his own or one of the large Type IXs. They didn’t have that smooth bump at the bow. As he recognized it, excitement tingled through him.

“It’s an English U-boat, a Type S or maybe a Type T,” he said. They were bigger than his boat, about the size of a Type IX—and that bow bump let them carry ten forward torpedo tubes, which made them very bad news if they found you first. But they hadn’t, not this time. Lemp went on, “I can see … 
Ja
, I can see the White Ensign flying from the conning tower. And they don’t know we’re around.”

He began setting up the problem, juggling speeds and courses and angles. It was almost like a training exercise—except that in a training exercise the quarry wouldn’t dive and start stalking him if it realized it was being hunted. Leopards didn’t usually hunt other leopards through the jungle. If one took another by surprise, though …