The War That Came Early: Coup d'Etat (41 page)

The veteran noncommissioned officer did some more considering. Ronald Cartland was better suited to the General Staff
than he would be himself if he lived to be a hundred, which didn’t mean he couldn’t cope at need. His calculations were quick and, he thought, accurate. “Musso’d need more than luck to bring it off. He’d need a miracle, or as near as makes no difference.”

“I’ve heard that before from others,” Cartland said. “I like it better from you. I respect your judgment.”

“Thank you very much, sir.” Walsh
suspected pleasure was making his ears turn pink. He was happier—prouder, anyhow—than he would have been had the pretty young barmaid whispered a suggestion that they go find a room together. He didn’t despise animal pleasure—far from it. But the opinion of a man he admired was a weightier business altogether.

“For what? For telling the truth?” Cartland waved his gratitude away as unnecessary.

“For thinking it is the truth.” Walsh wasn’t about to let the aristo get away with that. He was going to be grateful, dammit, and that was all there was to that.

“Have it your way, Sergeant.” Now the MP spoke in a way Walsh
understood completely, like a junior officer addressing a senior noncom. Officers had rank and class on their side. Sergeants had experience and the knowledge that came with
it. More often than not, that left the advantage with them. Senior officers knew what their juniors often didn’t: sergeants were more important to the army than subalterns.

“If I had my way, sir, I’d go to Egypt right now. That’s the kind of thing Mussolini would try, and I’d love to be there to help give him what he deserves,” Walsh said.

“Is that truly what you want? If it is, I daresay I
can arrange it.”

Walsh felt like whooping and turning handsprings. All he did was give back a small, dignified nod. He didn’t even smile, not where Ronald Cartland could see him do it. But what was the point to having well-connected friends if you didn’t make the most of it once in a while?

“Egypt …” Cartland said in musing tones. “Have you been there before?”

“I spent a year—well, not quite—in
Cairo in the Twenties.” Walsh remembered the amazing heat and the crowding and the smells, which made your nose sit up and take notice even after you’d been on a battlefield. “Not much like good old Blighty, but we need to hang on to it even so.”

“That we do. Lord knows how we’d manage without the Suez Canal,” Cartland said. “My sister and I visited once. I’ll never forget the Pyramids. That
was in the Twenties, too: well before the Depression. Perhaps we were there at the same time.”

“Yes, sir. Perhaps we were.”
Long odds
, Walsh thought, but so what? Keeping your officers happy and interested in you was yet another skill sergeants needed to cultivate. And getting back into action would be good, even if he was only going up against the dagos.

THEO HOSSBACH STILL
had trouble getting
used to the radioman’s position in a Panzer III. For two and a half years, he’d stayed hidden away from the war. The radio set in a Panzer II lent itself to that. Now, all of a sudden, he could see out. He not only could, he had to. Along with the radio, he had an MG-34 to take care of.

How many Ivans had he done for by now? He’d lost track. In a way, that embarrassed him. When your occupation
was something as serious
as killing people, shouldn’t you remember how many you were responsible for? But to do that properly, he should have started counting as soon as the original Panzer II rolled across the frontier separating Germany and Czechoslovakia. He’d been part of a killing team since 1 October 1938, after all. The score from the obsolescent machine’s little cannon and machine gun
went partly to his credit—or to his blame, depending on how you looked at things.

The only trouble was, any kind of count along those lines was impossible. Because he hadn’t been able to see out, he didn’t even know where to begin. He couldn’t very well ask Ludwig Rothe or Fritz Bittenfeld, either. They were both dead, as was Heinz Naumann.

Adi Stoss might be able to give him an approximate
score for the second Panzer II, and for this newer, larger machine. Theo didn’t plan to ask him about it. If they ever did talk seriously, they had other things to hash out first. Besides,
might be able to
wasn’t the same as
could
. Theo didn’t know—he’d never asked—whether Adi was running his own tab.

And, the way things worked these days, keeping track of how many Russians you slaughtered wasn’t
the only game in town, or the most important one. Making sure the Russians didn’t slaughter you had become much more urgent. Their light tanks were nothing German panzers couldn’t handle. Even in a thinly armored Panzer II, Theo hadn’t worried about them much.

But the KV-1 was a whole different kettle of cabbage. Yes, it was clumsy and slow, but it was about the size of a whale. A Panzer III,
the
Wehrmacht
’s main battle machine, could hurt it only by luck or from behind. Had the Ivans had more of the damned things or used them with greater skill, the KV-1s could have been even worse news than they were anyhow.

As for the T-34 … It was hot inside the Panzer III, but thinking about the Reds’ newest and finest panzer made Theo shiver all the same. It had all the KV-1’s virtues—a powerful
engine, thick armor, and a big gun—and, so far as he could see, none of the other beast’s vices. T-34s weren’t slow and clumsy. Anything but, in fact. And whoever’d come up with their armor scheme deserved the biggest, gaudiest medal Stalin could pin on him.

German engineers had never considered armor shape, except perhaps
insofar as the simplest shapes were also the easiest to manufacture. If
you needed more protection in a particular place, you made your steel plates thicker there. But all those plates were pretty much vertical. Czech, French, and English designers worked from the same basic principles. It wasn’t as if there were any other way to go about things.

Except there was. Relying on the Russians’ inborn simplicity and fondness for the brute-force approach didn’t always pay.
Some Soviet designer had had a better idea—a much better idea, as a matter of fact. If you sloped your panzer’s armor at, say, a forty-five degree angle, a lot of shells that would have penetrated vertical plate ricocheted away instead. And even the ones that did dig into the armor had to go through more of it to do damage: for shots coming in from most directions, sloped plate was effectively
thicker than the same amount of vertical armor would have been.

Once you saw the stuff in action—once you watched your best shots bounce off a T-34 without hurting the metal monster—the idea seemed obvious. Everything seemed obvious after you banged into it nosefirst. But if it was so goddamn obvious, how come no German engineer in a clean white lab coat had twiddled with his slide rule till
he came up with it first?

The Russians were
Untermenschen
, weren’t they? Hitler and Goebbels loudly insisted they were. If they were
Untermenschen
, though, and the swastika-following Aryans were
Übermenschen
, why did the Red Army have better panzers? If the Ivans just had more panzers (which they also did), that wouldn’t have been so corrosive to Nazi ideology. The USSR was a hell of a big country.
Having seen more of it than he’d ever wanted to, Theo knew that right down to his toes. And he also knew the T-34—and, to a lesser degree, the KV-1 as well—made every German panzer look like a model from the year before last.

He said as much to Adi. The Panzer III’s layout put them side by side at the front of the hull. Not only that, Theo trusted Adi further than he trusted … well, just about
anybody else. You couldn’t count on people to keep quiet if security forces started hurting them. Short of that, Theo was sure Adi would never betray him. He was pretty sure Sergeant Witt wouldn’t, either, but only pretty sure. The new guys who fattened up the crew? He hadn’t made up his mind about them yet. It wasn’t as if there was any hurry.

Adi nodded. “They’re mighty good, all right. Not
perfect, but mighty good.”

“Not perfect? Close enough!” Theo was stung into volubility, or as close to it as he came. “The gun? The armor?
Der Herr Gott im Himmel
, the armor! The diesel engine, so they don’t burn the way our beasts do?”

“Ja, ja.”
Adi sounded like a man indulging a little boy. That infuriated Theo till the driver went on, “The commander’s up in the turret all by himself, though,
the way Hermann was with the Panzer II. He’s got to shoot the cannon, fire the machine gun,
and
command the panzer. And he’s got more panzer to command than Hermann did with the II.”

“Oh.” Theo thought that over. He didn’t need long. With a sheepish shrug, he admitted, “You’re right.”

Stoss shot him a sour look. “How am I supposed to have a proper argument with you when you go and say things
like that?”

“Sorry,” Theo answered. “But I’m not going to lie.”

“Too bad. We could probably keep wasting time till sundown if you did,” Adi said. “Now we’ve got to find ourselves something else to talk about instead.” Irony glinted in his dark eyes. He could come out with something like that, confident Theo wouldn’t take him seriously. Plenty of soldiers would have.

They didn’t need to look
for a new topic for very long. Off to the left, at the edge of an apple orchard, a Russian machine gun snarled to malignant life. The water-cooled Russian gun was much heavier and clumsier than a modern, air-cooled MG-34. It didn’t shoot as fast, either. Once in position, though, it made a more than adequate murder mill.

“Panzer halt!” Hermann Witt’s voice traveled the speaking tube from the
turret to the front of the hull.

“Halting,” Adi answered as he hit the brakes. Witt traversed the turret—smoothly and quickly, with the hydraulics. In case of battle damage, he could also use a hand wheel and gearing to crank it around. It was too big and heavy for him to wrestle it into place with handles, as he could have in a Panzer II.

The cannon spoke twice. After a moment, though, the
Russian machine gun spat more defiant death at the Germans. Back in the turret, Sergeant Witt swore. Theo would have, too. He presumed the panzer commander knew what he was aiming at and had hit it. If the machine-gun
crew was still in business, it was operating out of a concrete emplacement.

Witt snapped, “Armor-piercing!” The cannon fired twice more. This time, Witt grunted in satisfaction.
“Got the fuckers!” he said. “Some poor, sorry shithead lugging a flamethrower won’t have to try to fry them before they puncture him instead. Forward, Adi!”

“Forward,” the driver echoed, putting the Panzer III back in gear. In a low voice—too low for Witt or either of the new guys in the turret to hear—he went on, “Who knows what all else is lurking in the trees? Our foot soldiers will find out.
Oh, won’t they just!”

That same thought had occurred to Theo. He wouldn’t have said it out loud, not even quietly to a friend he trusted. There lay one of the big differences between him and Adi Stoss. They had others, of course, but the fact that Adi
would
speak his mind seemed the most important. It did to Theo, anyhow.

TO HANS-ULRICH RUDEL
,
the woods southwest of Smolensk looked like, well,
woods. They were less manicured than a carefully maintained German forest would have been. The Ivans had so much land, they had forests coming out of their ears. They had everything coming out of their ears, from iron and coal to wood to people. That was the only possible reason they were giving the
Reich
so much trouble.

From 3,000 meters overhead, Hans-Ulrich wouldn’t have been able to tell
that the panzers in front of the woods belonged to the
Wehrmacht
if some of them hadn’t draped themselves in swastika flags as an identification symbol. Even seeing the banner that united Party and
Reich
didn’t leave him a hundred percent sure. The Reds sometimes captured those flags and used them as shields against the
Luftwaffe
.

Hans-Ulrich chuckled, there alone in the cockpit. A swastika flag
might keep German planes from bombing Soviet panzers. But how many of the enemy panzer outfits that used it had suffered attacks from the Red Air Force? That kind of crap happened too often even to Germans who’d carefully briefed their air support about the ruse of war they were using. Given the Russians’ slipshod procedures, they were bound to go through it even more.

“These are the right woods,
aren’t they?” Rudel asked through the speaking tube. He wanted to make certain he didn’t do anything idiotic.

Sergeant Dieselhorst’s quick “You bet, sir” went a long way toward reassuring him. Dieselhorst might not respect the
Führer
as much as he should, but he was the kind of man who went to extraordinary lengths to keep from endangering anybody on his own side. Sure enough, he went on, “The
river curls behind the trees and then goes into them, just like it does on the map. For a change, the map and the landscape match up great. We’re where we ought to be, all right.”

“Good. If I put the bombs in amongst the trees, then, they’ll come down on top of the Russians,” Hans-Ulrich said. Using Stukas for a job ordinary bombers might have done wasn’t efficient. A blind man could see that.
But if no ordinary bombers could be spared, bombs from Stukas were better than nothing—as long as they landed where they were supposed to.

He yanked hard on the bomb-release lever. The explosives under the Ju-87’s wings and attached to the fuselage’s midline fell away. He watched the bombs tumble down toward the treetops—but only for a moment, because Sergeant Dieselhorst’s rear-facing machine
gun suddenly gave forth with a long burst. “A
Rata
! A fucking
Rata
!” Dieselhorst yelled.

The names Marshal Sanjurjo’s soldiers and their German allies had hung on Russian fighters in the Spanish Civil War stuck, even if the Germans were facing them thousands of kilometers from Spain these days. Biplane Polikarpovs were
Chatos;
the shape of the cowling for their radial engines made the nickname
fit.