Two Fronts (52 page)

And if all the little gaggles of officers talking to one another and anxious not to be overheard meant anything … If they did mean anything, they most likely meant the people who ran the National Socialist
Grossdeutsches Reich
had reason to try to find out what they were saying.

As part of one of those little gaggles, Lemp might have had a thing or two to say himself. Whether the other officers would have taken him seriously was a different question. They might have figured him for an
agent provocateur
. For that matter, some of the gaggles would already have an
agent provocateur
or two in them. If you made the mistake of joining the plots he spun, you were a dead man—a stupid dead man—talking.

Lemp decided he wasn’t so bad off sitting here by himself. All he had to worry about was this lousy schnapps. He gulped his glass dry, then raised a finger to show the bartender he wanted to worry about some more of it.

THE SUN ROSE
off to Vaclav Jezek’s right. The Republican and Nationalist lines here ran almost due east and west. He could see farther and farther: not just the inside of the shell hole where he lay, but also the pocked landscape that stretched out to and beyond Marshal Sanjurjo’s barbed wire and entrenchments. If he turned to peer back over his shoulder, he could see his own countrymen’s entrenchments and barbed wire, too. They looked the same as the enemy’s.

What he had to remember was, the farther he could see, the farther from which he could be seen. He’d done what he could to make that harder. The antitank rifle had bits of branches wired to the barrel to break up its outline (the wire was carefully rusted so the sun wouldn’t flash off it). His helmet had more foliage stuck to it. Strips of burlap and still more greenery fixed to his tunic meant that, from any distance, he didn’t look like a man at all. He’d rubbed his face and hands with dirt. A sniper who wasn’t careful wouldn’t have a long career.

But even a sniper who was careful could have something go wrong. Or the enemy could have somebody uncommonly good hunting him. The first thing he knew of that would be the last thing he knew of the world.

He pressed his eye up to the telescopic sight. There were Sanjurjo’s men, all right. The ones at any distance behind the forward trenches went about their business without a care in the world. Artillery or mortars might hurt them, but they couldn’t do anything about those. They didn’t worry about riflemen, who could hit them only by accident.

Jezek could hit them on purpose. They had to have family in the provinces, the way he had family in Prague. If their kin lived on this side of the line, they might not have heard from them for as long as he’d gone without a letter from home.

But so what? They were still Fascist shitheads, followers of their fat almost-
Führer
. Vaclav smiled, remembering all the honors with which the Republic had showered him for exterminating General Franco. He’d get even more if he could blow Marshal Sanjurjo’s head off.
And if ifs and buts were candied nuts, we’d all have a wonderful Christmas
, he thought.

He scanned the area behind the Nationalists’ lines, trolling for targets. No overweight marshal in a gaudy uniform presented himself to be shot. Since the Czech hadn’t expected to spot Sanjurjo, he wasn’t disappointed when he didn’t. He kept searching for other officers who might deserve to catch an antitank round in the teeth.

German soldiers wore medals even into combat. But the Nazi officers, and even the sergeants, often turned their shoulder straps upside down so enemy snipers couldn’t single them out by their rank badges. It wasn’t cowardice. You could say whatever you pleased about Hitler. The men who fought his war for him were as brave as any. No, their desire not to show off their rank came from simple military pragmatism. A practical fellow himself, Jezek got that.

The Spaniards, now, the Spaniards were different. Maybe they hadn’t got the Middle Ages out of their system. Or it might have been an overdose of
machismo
, assuming that wasn’t the same as the other. Whatever it was, when a Spaniard—especially a Fascist Spaniard; they had the disease worse than the Republicans—got to be a colonel or a general, he wanted not just his subordinates but the whole goddamn world to know he’d arrived.

And so his uniform glittered with brass buttons—or perhaps they were gilded. His cap was a production an Austro-Hungarian officer from the turn of the century would have envied, which was really saying something. You could recognize him for what he was from a couple of kilometers away.

If you lugged an antitank rifle into place and waited patiently, you could kill him from a couple of kilometers away, too.

A loudspeaker came to life. Someone who sounded indecently cheerful for this hour of the morning started yelling in Spanish. Vaclav ignored the propaganda. He didn’t speak enough of the language to follow it, anyhow. Benjamin Halévy, who did, said the guy usually went on about how wonderful the Nationalists’ rations were. Typical horseshit, in other words.

What the bastard sounded like was somebody trying to seduce a deaf girl. He sounded sweet and smarmy and much too loud. Did he ever draw anybody across no-man’s-land for a big plate full of Sanjurjo’s slumgullion? Whether he did or not, he kept trying.

All he managed to do with Vaclav was remind him he was hungry. The Czech poured some olive oil that wasn’t quite past it on a roll that pretty much was and gnawed away. Olive oil at its best tasted medicinal to him; in Prague, you were more likely to find it at a drugstore than in a grocery. Why would you want the stuff when you could have butter instead?

Why? Olives didn’t thrive in Czechoslovakia. In Spain, they grew like weeds: the short, pale-barked trees with the gray-green leaves were everywhere you looked. Butter didn’t want to keep in the Spanish heat, either; that the Spaniards were casual about cleanliness couldn’t help. And so … olive oil.

A dust cloud on a road leading up to the front said something motorized was heading this way. “Well, well,” Vaclav muttered, there in his hole. “What have we here?” He swung the elephant gun so the sight would bear on the approaching vehicles.

What they had were three Italian CV33 tankettes—the English would have called them Bren-gun carriers, and they were based on the English design. Two mounted a pair of 8mm machine guns in their little turrets, while the one in the lead carried a 20mm cannon. They bore the Nationalist emblem—a white circle with a black X through it—so Vaclav supposed they had Spanish crews.

They’d been obsolete for years. At its thickest, their armor was only 15mm. They were just the kind of vehicles his equally obsolete antitank rifle was designed to fight.

Obsolete didn’t always mean useless. Real tanks would have smashed them in short order. Vaclav doubted the Republic had any real tanks within twenty-five kilometers. Armor was hard to come by in a backwater like Spain. Against soldiers with nothing better than rifle-caliber weapons, the tankettes could prove as deadly as they had in Abyssinia and other backwaters.

Vaclav waited. He didn’t want to open up on the CV33s at extreme range. Even his fat bullets would need plenty of oomph to punch through their steel, thin though it was.

As soon as the Czechs and Internationals in the trenches saw the tankettes, they started shooting at them with machine guns. The rounds sparked off their armor. The CV33s kept coming. The machine-gun fire did discourage most of the Nationalist foot soldiers from coming with them. Vaclav liked that. Even if he could stop the tankettes, foot soldiers might hunt him down and get their revenge.

The CV33s’ machine guns and toy cannon—it wasn’t too different from what a Panzer II carried—spat death at the Republican line. Vaclav fired at the cannon-carrying tankette. Swearing at the elephant gun’s vicious kick, he worked the bolt and fired again. The tankette slewed sideways and stopped.

He swung the massive French rifle toward one of the others. A shot through the front hull to discourage the driver, another through the turret to make the gunner unhappy. A hatch popped open in the turret as the tankette nosed down into a crater and didn’t come out again. Vaclav fired once more. The would-be escapee’s chest exploded into red mist. What was left of him slid back into the CV33.

Now … What would the last one do? If it knew where he’d been shooting from and plastered his hole with machine-gun bullets, he might not get the chance to return fire. But the no doubt badly trained crew hadn’t seen him and had seen enough. The tankette turned around and tried to get away.

He put two rounds into—probably through—the engine. The armor was thinner there. Gasoline and motor oil hit hot metal in places they weren’t supposed to. Smoke and fire roared up through the cooling vents. The smoke let the tankette’s crew get out and get away.

As if the antitank rifle were a lover, Jezek patted it. He’d stopped an armored assault in its tracks. As long as he was up against something as outdated as the piece he carried, he could still do just fine.

Pete McGill was glad to be out on patrol aboard the
Ranger
. Yeah, bad shit could still happen to him. A Jap sub might sink the carrier. Three Jap carriers might show up, heading straight for Pearl. Their Zeros would make short work of the combat air patrol, and then their dive-bombers and torpedo planes would make short work of the
Ranger
.

But he was a Marine. They paid him—not much, not even with three stripes on his sleeve, but they did—to go where bad shit could happen to him. He did his stolid best not to worry about it.

Besides, he could have been worse off. “You know what?” he said to Bob Cullum.

“You’d sooner be in Philadelphia?” the other leatherneck suggested, proving his taste in flicks ran to W.C. Fields.

“I’ll tell you, man, right this minute I’d sooner by anywhere but Honolulu,” Pete answered. “I’d sooner be out here, and I shit you not. God damn the Japs. God damn the rats.”

“Who would’ve imagined we’d see anthrax in Honolulu in this day and age?” Cullum said. “I never even heard of anthrax till they started giving shots. And the plague, too.”

“Plague was one of the things we always worried about on duty at the legation in Peking,” Pete said. “We had lots of traps and lots of cats to keep the rats away. Never saw it while I was there—told you that before—but some of the guys who were old hands when I first came, they said they’d lost buddies from it back in the day.”

“I hear you,” Cullum said. “But I bet there’s been plague in China as long as there’ve been Chinamen. Not like that in Hawaii. There wasn’t any till the Japs went and brought it to us. None of that anthrax shit, neither.”

“I wouldn’t put anything past the Japs, not anything at all. Stinking slanty-eyed assholes.” Pete hardly even noticed he was cursing them, he did it so automatically.

“Boy oh man, I bet all the bars and the cathouses on Hotel Street are going broke.” By the way Bob Cullum said it, that was the worst consequence of the outbreak of disease in Honolulu. Mournful still, he went on, “I mean, you lay a broad and you don’t use your pro kit, maybe she gives you the clap. Nobody dies from the fuckin’ clap. It just hurts like hell for a while when you piss.”

“Uh-huh.” Pete nodded. “Come down with the clap and you worry about trouble with the brass. Come down with anthrax or the plague and you worry about trouble with Saint Peter.”

Sergeant Cullum laughed. “Good one! Now we just hope like hell we don’t have any rats on the ship.”

“I’ve never seen one,” Pete said. Sure, the
Ranger
’s mooring lines always wore the usual outward-facing hollow copper cones designed to keep the rodents from boarding. The carrier also boasted a ship’s cat. They’d got a big red tabby out of the Honolulu pound and named him Rusty. How much hunting he did, though, was open to question. He spent a lot of time in the galley, where the cooks fed him and fed him. He was already noticeably plumper than he had been when he came aboard.

Even if he’d spent all his time going after rats, whether he could have murdered every last one of them was also open to question. Pete remembered a photo he’d seen of a couple of dozen dead rats and mice found aboard a freighter after the ship was fumigated. Also in the photo was the ship’s cat, which hadn’t got off before they turned loose the gas.

An albatross soared past the carrier. It didn’t really have a wingspan as wide as a fighter’s, but it sure seemed to.

“Goddamn Japs don’t just break international law. They kick it while it’s down and then they shit on it.” Cullum returned to the business at hand.

“You got that right.” Pete nodded again. “They fight us the same way they fight the Chinamen—dirty. You believe what you read in the papers, they started this germ-warfare crap on them years ago.”

“I believe that. The fuckers have it down to a science,” Cullum said. “But if you believe everything you read in the papers, you’re a sucker and a sap, is what you are.”

“Oh, sure.” Pete knew that. Not knowing it, he supposed, was the mark of a sucker and a sap. He absentmindedly scratched an itch. Then, noticing what he’d done, he rolled his eyes. “Every time I itch, I wonder if I’m gonna squash a flea when I scratch.”