The War That Came Early: Coup d'Etat (12 page)

A plane buzzed over the
Boise
: a Dutch fighter with fixed landing gear. Everybody said the Japs built junk. Everybody said that, yeah, but they’d sure done a number on the U.S. Army Air Force in the Philippines. The Dutch plane looked hotter than an Army Peashooter, but not by one whole hell of a lot.

Joe Orsatti eyed the Dutch plane,
too, and the orange triangles under the wings. “A Fokker,” he remarked.

“A mother-Fokker,” Pete agreed.

Orsatti sent him a pained look. “Har-de-har-har. Y’oughta take it on the road.”

“I did,” McGill answered. “What do you think I’m doing here?”

“Funny again—like a truss.”

“I know,” Pete said. “But I’d sure rather see those triangles than the big old Jap meatballs.”

“Better get used to it,”
Orsatti said. “Five wins you ten we ain’t gonna stick around here real long. We’re useless here. We gotta get up farther north if we’re gonna keep the Japs from landing, y’know what I’m saying?”

“Uh-huh,” Pete replied, not altogether happily. “Talk about sticking your head in the tiger’s mouth …”

“Gonna be a shitass excuse for a fleet, all right,” the other Marine said. “Us, a coupla our destroyers,
some Dutch tin cans, that limey light cruiser … Should be fun, getting all of us dancing to the same tune.”

Pete hadn’t thought about that. He’d been away from ships too long before he found himself back aboard the
Boise
. Trying to get skippers from three countries to act in concert? “Fun. Right.” One thing for sure: the Japs wouldn’t have that problem.

They might have others. Pete could hope
so. If they didn’t, the allies here were in a lot of trouble. Pete had seen enough of the Japanese in China to have more respect for them than a lot of higher-ranking Americans did. They might not be white men, but they were sturdy and tough. And they were proud of not being white, the same way a lot of Americans and Englishmen—and, evidently, Dutchmen—were proud because they were.

Perhaps because
Orsatti had had a lot of shipboard duty, his feel for what the fleet at Surabaya would do next was pretty good. They headed north two days later. Pete wondered if word had come in that Japanese landing forces were on the way. No one said so—but then, nobody ever told the guys who would do the fighting and dying any more than they absolutely had to know. Sometimes not even that.

Then the destroyers
steamed away and left the light cruisers behind. “Something’s goin’ on,” Orsatti opined.

“You oughta be a detective—a private dick, like,” Pete told him, which won another dirty look. They were practicing at the five-inch gun, uneasily aware that the practice could turn real any second. Lookouts constantly eyed the skies. Planes that appeared out in the middle of the ocean would be Japanese.
Did the enemy fleet have carriers along? They’d struck at Hawaii, but that hadn’t gone so well as they would have liked. Manila, unfortunately, proved a different story.

Night fell. The gun crews were on watch and watch, so Pete’s sleep got ruined. He gulped hot coffee to keep his eyes open. He wasn’t the only one. Drinking java near Java was … almost funny.

The
Boise
sliced through the Java
Sea, kicking up a phosphorescent bow wave and wake. If any Japanese subs were in the neighborhood … 
With any luck at all, we’re going too fast for ’em
, Pete thought, yawning. He wasn’t used to sack time chopped into little bits. Yeah, it had been too long.

“Our destroyers are in contact with enemy warships and transports off Borneo,” the intercom blared in harsh, metallic tones. “They are making
torpedo runs at the transports.”

Pete waited to hear reports of Jap freighters blown to smithereens, and he wasn’t the only one. But the intercom stayed quiet after that. Little by little, he realized the silence wasn’t a good sign. So did the other leathernecks on the gun crew. Their high spirits faded.

The sun came up within a few minutes of 0600, as it always did in these waters. A plane
buzzed down out of the north to look over the allied fleet. Orders came to fire at it. All the antiaircraft guns on the
Boise
roared together. The bursts didn’t come close to reaching the plane. It saw what it wanted to see and flew away. And nobody said another word
about the destroyers and what they might be doing—or what might have been done to them. Pete kept his mouth shut along with everyone
else. But he knew damn well that wasn’t a good sign.

A HORSE SLOGGED
up a road pulling a
panje
wagon after it. The wagon had tall wheels and an almost boat-shaped bottom. Russian peasants had—and needed—plenty of experience building wagons that could plow through even the thickest mud.

Thaw’s early this year
, Ivan Kuchkov thought. More freezes would probably come, but little by little the winter
snowfall would melt and soak into the ground. For the next four to six weeks, nobody would go anywhere very fast. No one in his right mind would order any major actions during the
rasputitsa
, because action just bogged down in the mud.

The Poles knew as much about the
rasputitsa
, the mud time, as their Russian neighbors. The Germans had fought in the East last year and during the last war, so
they knew something. Ivan had heard they knew enough to steal as many
panje
wagons as they could, anyhow. Their trucks got stuck in the muck just like everybody else’s.

What the Germans’ French and English lackeys knew … Kuchkov’s lips skinned back from his teeth in a nasty grin. He suspected the Red Army would teach them a few lessons. He also suspected they wouldn’t enjoy the instruction. The
few schoolmasters Kuchkov had known used a switch to make sure their teaching sank in. The Red Army had a bigger switch than even the meanest, most brutal village schoolmaster, and could swing it harder.

Lieutenant Obolensky squelched up. Kuchkov pretended not to see him. It was at least possible that Obolensky needed to talk to somebody else in the squad. Avram, maybe; the nervous little Jew
had his fingers in a million different pies. Ivan wouldn’t have been surprised if he was NKVD.

But no. Obolensky looked around till he spotted Kuchkov. “Come here a moment, Sergeant,” he said.

“I serve the Soviet Union, Comrade Lieutenant!” That was never the
wrong answer. Kuchkov added a salute. The mud tried to suck off his boots as he made his way over to the junior officer. When he got there,
he stood and waited. Let Obolensky show his cards.

The lieutenant also waited, but he was the one who spoke first: “What shape is your squad in, Sergeant?” Ivan smiled to himself. Obolensky was an educated guy, a city guy—his attitude, his accent, his very way of standing all said as much. No way in hell he could outstubborn or outwait a man from a village where the creek was the only running
water … when it wasn’t frozen, anyhow.

“Well, sir, we’re kinda fucked. We lost three guys taking that last village from those Nazi dicks.” No, Ivan neither knew nor cared what was regular Russian and what was
mat
. “We got one back—cocksucking bullet only grazed the bitch, y’know? And we got a replacement, but the pussy’s so green we’d be better off without him. So yeah, we’re fucked.”

To his
surprise, Lieutenant Obolensky smiled. “You sound just like every other sergeant in charge of a squad. Maybe the Red Air Force isn’t so different from the Red Army after all.”

Kuchkov was convinced the Red Air Force was a damn sight better than the Red Army. No one would ever have accused him of being bright, but he had enough animal cunning to know saying so would only get him in deeper. Deeper
in what? He didn’t know that, either, and he wasn’t interested in finding out. He waited some more. Maybe Obolensky would go away and pick some other squad for whatever shitty job he had in mind.

Maybe pigs had wings. Not around here, though. The lieutenant pointed west, toward—no past—the birch and pine woods over there. “You know the Fascists are set up in the fields beyond the trees.”

“Uh-huh.”
Kuchkov only nodded. The Germans had dug in as well as they could while the ground was frozen. Now they had to be shoring up their trenches with boards and sticks and twigs and straw and anything else they could grab. The mud would ooze through anyway. It sure did here.

“Our battalion has orders to shift them,” Obolensky said.

“Happy fucking day, sir!” Kuchkov said. “The whoremongers’ll have
machine guns set up and waiting for us.” German machine guns scared the piss out of him, and he wasn’t ashamed to admit it.

“We have orders,” Obolensky repeated in a voice like doom. “This company is on the right wing. I am going to place your squad as the last feather on the wing. You will try to outflank the Nazi position and roll it up.”

“What? With one little piss-dribble of a squad?” Ivan
burst out. Obolensky just looked at him. He made himself nod and salute. Sometimes you got stuck with it. And things could have been worse. He’d feared the lieutenant would send his squad in ahead of everybody else. If that wasn’t suicide … then this might be.

He gave his men the news. “Oh, boy,” Avram said, and then,
“Gevalt.”
Talking like a German was liable to get him killed, but sometimes
he did it anyway. He took off his submachine gun’s drum magazine and started cleaning the works. Anything he could keep from going wrong, he would. The trouble was, you couldn’t keep everything from going wrong.

They sneaked through the woods during the night. As black began to yield to gray, Ivan and everybody else gulped a hundred grams of vodka. It made him fierce. It also made him even more
what-the-fuck than he had been before.

There was supposed to be an artillery barrage before the attack went in. Red Army artillery was usually reliable. Not today. A few mortar rounds woke up the Fritzes without hurting them much. They started yelling. A machine gun and a few rifles fired at nothing.

“Gevalt,”
Avram said again. Kuchkov’s mouth was dry. The Nazis would be waiting now. No chance
in hell to catch them by surprise. Kilometers back of the line, some fat Russian colonel was probably eating out his secretary’s twat instead of telling the 105s to get busy.

No help for it. Yelling
“Urra!”
, the battalion burst out of the woods and rushed the German trenches. Some men wore snow smocks; some didn’t. Some smocks were clean and white; some weren’t. With slushy snow dappling the
mud, the mixture camouflaged the Russians as well as any more rigid scheme would have.

The Germans opened up on them, of course. Facing machine-gun fire, camouflage hardly mattered. Either a bullet got you or it didn’t. All luck, either way. Something tugged at Kuchkov’s left sleeve. When he looked down, he found the leather of his flying suit had a new rip. But he didn’t hurt and he wasn’t bleeding,
so he ran on.

A potato-masher grenade flew out of the forwardmost German trench, and then another one. Ivan dove for the mud. His tunic would never camouflage him against snow again, but all the fragments went over him and none into him. He yanked the pin from his own egg grenade and chucked it at the Germans from his knees. Then he scrambled up and dashed forward again.

Despite the grenade,
a German in a whitewashed helmet popped up and fired a Mauser at him from point-blank range. As often happened in the rage and terror of combat, the Fritz missed. Kuchkov gave him a burst from the PPD before he could work the bolt for his next shot. It was like spraying a hose—you didn’t have to be a sniper to get two or three hits. The German toppled with a groan, his tunic front all over blood.

“Come on!” Ivan yelled to his men still on their feet. “Let’s clean out these motherfucking cunts!” He jumped down into the zigzagging Nazi trench. Grenades and submachine guns were the right tools for the job.

A German dropped his rifle and threw up his hands.
“Kamerad!”
he squealed, terror on his face. Kuchkov gave him a burst, too. Considering what happened to prisoners, he might have done
the fellow a favor. Chances were he would have shot him anyway, though.

The Fritzes had been thinner on the ground than he expected. They pulled back in good order. What was left of the Red Army battalion began looting the corpses left behind in their trenches. The Russians had taken a devil of a lot of casualties themselves to win this hectare of blood and mud. Was it worth them? Kuchkov had
no idea. He was busy spreading meat paste from a dead German’s tinfoil tube onto a chunk of black bread.
If the bastards eat like this all the time, no wonder they’re so fucking tough
, he thought, and squeezed the tube for more.

WHEN SAMUEL GOLDMAN
came home from his laborer’s job, unusual excitement lit his gray-stubbled face. (No one in Germany had enough soap, and Jews’ rations were smaller
than Aryans’. He didn’t shave very often.) “What’s up, Father?” Sarah asked. “Something is—I can see it in your eyes.”

“You’re right,” he said. “They’ve finally gone and arrested the Bishop of Münster. The
Gestapo
took him away in an armored car.”

“Oh. Oh, my,” Sarah said. “He’s been asking for it, hasn’t he?”

“Just a little bit,” Father answered. “I knew him—not well, but I knew him—back in
the days when knowing a Jew didn’t destroy someone’s reputation. Clemens August von Galen is a proud, stiff-necked man.”

“With a name like that, he’s an aristocrat, too,” Sarah said.

“Right again,” her father agreed. “He’s not the kind to be happy when a jumped-up shoe salesman or whatever tells him what to do. You can hear that in every sermon he preaches—well, every sermon that doesn’t have
to do with foreign policy, I mean.”

Sarah nodded. Hardly a German had ever had a good word to say for the vengeful Treaty of Versailles. She hadn’t herself, back when she was a kid before the Nazis took over. Yes, she’d partly been parroting her parents, but even so.…

Maybe Bishop von Galen could forgive the war, which was designed not least to give Germany her proper place once more. But he
couldn’t forgive the Nazis for confiscating church buildings, for expelling members of religious orders from the
Reich
, or for their program of what they called mercy killings. He said so, loudly, from the pulpit. After RAF planes bombed Münster, he delivered a sermon on loving one’s enemies.