The War That Came Early: Coup d'Etat (33 page)

As they rattled along one morning, Theo found a question escaping him: “You all right with the new guys?”

Adi glanced over in surprise. A sentence from Theo was like a couple of chapters from anybody else.
“Ja,”
he answered, pitching his voice so it wouldn’t carry back
to the turret. “Pretty much. We’d all be dead by now if they didn’t shoot straight.”

He had that right, no two ways about it. Eckhardt had been a pretty good gunner before he got this slot. The
Reich
’s training centers took care of that. And Sergeant Witt, with his own wealth of experience, made the kid better than he had been. Except for singing and whistling, Poske did all right in action,
too. Loader was the most junior position in the five-man crew.

None of that had much to do with what Theo meant, though. He tried again: “They give you a hard time?”

“Nah.” Stoss shook his head. “No worse than usual. Nothing a guy can’t handle, know what I mean?”

Theo nodded. Even the usual kind of ragging could rub a man raw. If Heinz Naumann, the guy who commanded the old Panzer II before
Sergeant Witt, hadn’t got killed, he and Adi would have fought it out. Theo was sure of that. He was also pretty sure Adi would have done for the late sergeant. Lucky it didn’t happen—lucky for everybody but Naumann.

One more question formed in Theo’s head. He didn’t ask it. Like a cat, he had a very clear sense of limits.

An authoritative voice spoke into his earphones: “Look for Ivans ahead,
map square Red-6.”

“Red-6. I hear you,” Theo responded, and relayed the news to Witt.

A brief pause followed. No doubt the panzer commander was checking his maps. German maps of Russia weren’t nearly so good as the people who printed them thought, but you did the best you could with what you had. Profanity followed the pause. “Now they tell us,” Witt said. “We’re already
in
square Red-fucking-6.”

As if on cue, machine-gun bullets clattered off the right side of the Panzer III’s hull. If not for the hardened steel, some of them would have punctured Theo. They sounded like pebbles tossed onto a corrugated-iron roof—but not enough like that. Pebbles on an iron roof might startle, but they wouldn’t scare the piss out of you.

Though he had a vision port over there, he didn’t want to open it.
That might have let in a bullet or two, and he would rather have dealt with angry wasps. Wasps only made you wish you were dead. The Russians used old-fashioned, heavy, water-cooled machine guns, like the German Maxim from the last war. They weren’t very portable, which didn’t mean they wouldn’t chew holes in you once they did get set up.

“Panzer halt!” Sergeant Witt ordered, and Adi Stoss hit
the brakes. The turret slewed sideways. Witt gave crisp commands. Eckhardt fired—once, twice. Shell casings clattered at the bottom of the fighting compartment. The stink of cordite filled the panzer. Witt grunted in
satisfaction. “Forward again, Adi,” he said, and traversed the turret so it faced the front once more.

That machine gun wouldn’t bother anyone else. Theo still wondered how many
other Ivans lurked over to the right. German foot soldiers would find out—probably the hard way. No trees off in that direction, so there probably weren’t any Red Army panzers lurking there. He could hope not, anyhow. He could—and he did.

He peered out through his forward vision port. That one boasted thick armor glass, like the stuff in a Stuka’s windshield. It also had a steel shutter to keep
the glass from getting nicked when bullets started flying. Scars and divots on the armor glass said the shutter didn’t always get used. You needed to know what was going on … didn’t you?

Back in the Panzer II, Theo had never known what was going on, or no more than the radio and his crewmates told him. Now he could see out. Monkey curiosity made him keep doing it, too, though as often as not
he couldn’t change anything. He could, and did, tell himself it was line of duty. He had the machine gun, after all. But a lot of the time he was just nosy.

He stiffened in dismay at the same time as Adi let out a horrified yip: “Fucking Ivans!” Where the devil did they come from? One second nothing, the next a swarm of riflemen springing from the ground like the warriors old what’s-his-name,
the Greek, got when he sowed the dragon’s teeth.

Well, Theo had some dragon’s teeth of his own. The bow machine gun chattered, spitting brass out of the side of its mouth. The turret machine gun hammered away, too. The Russian infantrymen went down in waves like threshed barley. But the ones who didn’t get shot kept coming. They were brave, too, damn them.

And they wouldn’t just have rifles.
Some of them would carry Molotov cocktails. Theo didn’t want to think about blazing gasoline dripping into the panzer—no, not even a little bit. So many things that would catch fire, from paint to explosives to precious flesh. They’d have grenades. One of those through a hatch could ruin your day. Or bigger charges would blow off a track. A stuck panzer was like a hamstrung bull waiting to be slaughtered.

Firing short, steady bursts wasn’t easy. He wanted to burn out the
MG-34’s barrel so he could kill as many Russians as fast as he could. Discipline held, though. In its own harsh way,
Wehrmacht
training was a marvel.

So was whatever the Ivans did to their men. Theo was sure he would have run away. The Russians stolidly kept coming … till two Stukas screamed down out of the sky and landed big
bombs on them, close enough to the Panzer III to make it try to rear. That did the trick. Not even the Reds could take a dive-bombing in stride. The handful still on their feet—none near the panzer—skedaddled.

Adi laughed shakily. “All in a day’s work,” he said.

“Aber natürlich,”
Theo answered.

AFTER REFUELING
and resupplying at Narvik, which the
Kriegsmarine
had quickly fitted out as a bare-bones
U-boat base, Julius Lemp took the U-30 back up to the Barents Sea. He understood why the navy wanted to use the little town; it lay pretty close to the Barents Sea itself.

As far as he was concerned, that ended its advantages. The U-boat had got what it needed at Narvik. His men hadn’t. They couldn’t drink and screw and blow off steam there. A U-boat base without a brothel! What was the world
coming to? There was a club for sailors, but it seemed a halfhearted affair, with bad, watery beer and not enough of it. No wonder the ratings grumbled when they put to sea again. In their shoes, Lemp would have grumbled, too. He would have grumbled in his own shoes, except a skipper had no one aboard to grumble to.

He intended to take care of that when he got back to the
Reich
. He didn’t want
to put anything in writing, but some of his superiors would get an earful.

The one good thing was, his men were too busy to complain as much as they would have with more time on their hands. Here up past 70° north latitude, the sun stayed above the horizon most of the summer. Perpetual daylight kept everybody hopping all the time. You never knew when you might spot a British convoy bound for
Murmansk or Arkhangelsk—or when it might spot you. Prowling Russian seaplanes were another danger. Lemp had met one of those in the Baltic. He didn’t care to repeat the experience.

Topside watches took all the concentration a man had. You couldn’t stretch people out past two hours. With unending daylight to face, ratings who’d never stood a topside watch before got the chance to try it. Lemp
got the chance to worry that they might miss something an old hand wouldn’t have. He gulped bicarbonate of soda to soothe an acid stomach, wondering why he’d ever wanted to become a naval officer.

Navigation also got … interesting. The compass deflection was enormous. Accurate sun shoots became vitally important. With no stars in the sky, the sun was the only clue to direction they had. None
of the manuals talked about times like this—U-boat men hadn’t needed to worry about them in the last war. That was another discussion Lemp wanted to have with his superiors.

And, even in summer, the ocean was bitterly cold. Without the Gulf Stream, it would have been colder yet. Without the Gulf Stream, Murmansk and Arkhangelsk—and likely Narvik as well—would have been as icebound as Antarctica.
Then I wouldn’t have to come up here
, Lemp thought.
That wouldn’t be so bad
.

Black-and-white auks and puffins and murres bobbed on the sea, now and then diving after fish or taking off with small, hard-working wings. They weren’t quite penguins, but they came close enough to satisfy anybody this side of a relentless nitpicker.

The
Kriegsmarine
sent out a coded message that a convoy had sailed
from Aberdeen, bound for one Russian port or the other. Lemp admired the British sailors’ courage and decided his own superiors weren’t the only ones with problems. That convoy would have to face not only U-boats but also land-based planes from Norway. Talk about running the gantlet …

Sure enough, the planes soon found the convoy. Not only did they raid—they also shadowed, relaying its position,
its course, its speed. Diesels thrumming through the soles of his shoes, Lemp brought the U-30 southwest to block its path.

He had to be careful. Destroyers or corvettes would be escorting the convoy. On the surface, they could sink him. And he wouldn’t be able to submerge, then come back up later and escape under cover of darkness. Here there was no darkness.

So he made sure he had men who
knew what they were doing up on
the conning tower when the U-30 neared the advancing convoy. That convoy had already taken damage—he didn’t know how much. U-boats transmitted only when they had to, to keep the enemy from using their signals to work out where they were.

One thing he was sure of: the freighters in the convoy would make more smoke than the U-30 did. He’d find the British ships before
they knew he was around. After that was when things would get interesting.

The sun skimmed low above the northern horizon when one of the ratings spotted the smoke from the enemy. Lemp changed course so he could attack with the sun at his back. The harder he could make things for the English, the happier he would be—and the better his chances of doing it again soon.

Up went the
Schnorkel
’s stovepipe.
By now, Lemp took the gadget for granted. More and more of the
Kriegsmarine
’s U-boats used it these days. It wasn’t a punishment any more. It was a tool of war, one he’d come to rely on.

But the Royal Navy had its own tools of war. Sharp, almost musical pings echoed through the U-30’s hull after the boat went to
Schnorkel
depth. “What the fuck is that?” Gunter Beilharz asked, reaching under his
Stahlhelm
to scratch his head.

“They have an echo locater,” Lemp answered. “It’s mentioned in my latest briefing reports. It isn’t perfect, but it’s better than anything they used before.”

Beilharz eyed him in something approaching horror. “They can get range and bearing from the echoes?”

“That’s the idea,” Lemp allowed. “Their toy isn’t everything it ought to be, though.”

“It had better not
be,” the
Schnorkel
officer said. “If they can find us whenever they please, they’ll sit on top of us and drop ash cans till we either cave in or have to come up and fight it out on the surface.”

A U-boat that got into a surface engagement with a warship designed to fight up there was dead meat. Everybody knew it. Lemp would have been happier not to get the reminder. And he would have been much
happier if the periscope hadn’t shown him a Royal Navy corvette speeding his way with a bone in her teeth. That damned echo locater
did
work.

He didn’t want to take on a warship. He could sink her with an eel before she got close enough to hurt him. He could … if he was good enough, and if he was lucky enough, and if he felt like telling the other English warships where he was.
Ping! Ping!
With
that miserable gadget, they already had a pretty good notion.

But then other noises came through the U-30’s steel hull: the unmistakable heavy
crump!
of a torpedo exploding, and after that the sound of a ship breaking up. That dreadful creaking and crackling made any man who went to sea flinch.

It also made the Royal Navy corvette spin through as tight a turn as she could make and dash back
toward the vessels she was shepherding. Half a dozen men inside the U-30 gave forth with various profane variations on
What’s going on?

“Well, I don’t know for sure,” Lemp answered, “but unless they’re sinking their own ships I’d say we aren’t the only U-boat in the neighborhood.” An elk struggling through deep snow would draw a pack of wolves. A convoy crossing dangerous waters might draw a
pack of submarines.

Another torpedo slammed into a freighter. This ship, by the sound of it, didn’t break up right away. Maybe the sailors would have a chance to make the boats and get picked up. For their sake, Lemp hoped so. The poor devils wouldn’t last long bobbing in the Barents Sea.

Those two hits made the enemy forget all about Lemp’s boat. The escorting warships were hellbent on hunting
down the wolf that had already bitten them. With the
Schnorkel
, getting into range of a fat freighter belching coal smoke was almost unfairly easy. She even obligingly zigzagged to present her flank.

“Torpedo one
—
los
! … Torpedo two
—
los
!” Lemp commanded as soon as he had the shot lined up. Twin wet whooshes meant the eels were on their way. Both hit. One was a dud; it thunked off the coal-burner’s
flank. But the other eel tore a hole in her stern before Lemp really started swearing. She soon began to settle in the water.

By then, Lemp and the helmsman had swung the U-30 toward another target, this one a bit more than a kilometer off. A longish shot, but he launched only one torpedo: he saved the last one in the forward
tubes for self-defense. Reloading was a slow, sweaty job, and his boat
wouldn’t stay forgotten now that he’d announced himself.