The War That Came Early: Coup d'Etat (45 page)

He had his own reasons for hoping the Red Army could hold the line in these parts, even if he wasn’t dumb enough to come out with
them. There was a village maybe a kilometer and a half behind this campfire, and his eye had fallen on one of the girls there, a cute little
blonde named Nina.

She’d smiled back at him, too, damned if she hadn’t. Some women liked handsome. Kuchkov didn’t have a prayer with them. He knew it. He didn’t like it, but what can a guy do about his own mug? Some women, though, some women liked strong. And with those broads he had a fighting chance. He wasn’t pretty and he wasn’t smart, but he could break any two ordinary jerks over his knee
like skinny sticks.

A smile, the right kind of smile, was all it took. If he could get Nina alone, especially if he had some vodka along, he knew damn well he’d be able to slide his hand under her skirt. The war was won as soon as you did that.

But if the Germans drove the Red Army back before he got the chance, some Nazi son of a bitch with broad shoulders would end up balling her instead.
That would be a waste, nothing else but.

Kuchkov tore off his own strip of
Pravda
. Or maybe it was
Izvestia
or
Red Star
, the Army paper. Since he couldn’t read, he didn’t care. He wiped his ass with newsprint. And he rolled smokes with it. “Let me have some of that
makhorka
, Vanya,” he said.

“Sure, Comrade Sergeant.” The soldier passed him the pouch. Vanya might be dim, but he was as eager to
please as a dog. With deft fingers, Kuchkov formed a cigarette. He lit it the same way the other man had. He had food, he had smoke in his lungs, he might get laid before too long, the Germans seemed pretty quiet.… Life could have been worse.

Since the Germans stayed quiet through the night, at sunrise the next morning he made up an excuse to go back to the village. No one asked him any questions.
An ugly mug and a strong, hairy back made other people mind their own business. He knew what they called him when that back was turned. When he overheard it, he broke some heads. That worked. Let them mock, as long as they feared.

He reached the place just as the peasants were going out to their chores. Waving, he called, “Nina! Come here!” He didn’t go
Come here, you bitch!
For him, it was the
height of suavity.

She waved back, which made his hopes—among other things—rise. “What do you need, Sergeant?”

You
. But that would be for later. He pointed to a nearby stand of brushy woods he’d noticed—the best privacy you could find around here. “Let’s talk about you whipping up a big tub of stew for my guys, hey?”

“Where do I get the stuff to put in it?” she asked. The obvious answer was
from your village
. That would leave the people there hungry.

But he just said, “Well, we can talk about that.” He hopped over a bush and walked into the woods. Nina followed. He offered her his water bottle. “Here. Have a knock of this first, sweetie.”

Calling it a knock warned her. Her eyes didn’t cross when she swigged Red Army vodka. Calling her sweetie probably warned her, too. But she was
smiling when she handed back the water bottle. “You should drink some.”

“Fucking right I should.” He titled his head back. Fire slid down his throat and exploded in his stomach like a 105. He held out the vodka. “Have some more.”

“Sure. Best way to start the day.” Nina was a Russian, all right.

“Almost the best way.” Kuchkov grabbed her. She squealed and she giggled and she made a token try
at pushing him away, but then they were rolling on the ground together and kissing. When he did reach under her skirt, she laughed again and then she purred. Who ended up on top was a matter of luck. She undid his fly, sucked him for a minute to make him even harder than he was already, and impaled herself on him. His hands clutched her meaty backside while they thrashed. She had plenty to hold on
to.

She threw her head back and mewled. A moment later, he grunted as joy shot through him. A moment after that, before he could decide whether to slide out or start again, German shells started landing on the Russian line and reaching back toward the village.

That made up his mind, and in a hurry. He threw Nina off him, even his rude chivalry forgotten. She let out an indignant squawk. He didn’t
care. He scrambled to his feet, shoving his cock back into his pants and doing up the buttons. Then he took off on the dead run, back toward his section. Fun was fun, but killing the fucking Fascists really mattered.

He ignored the shell bursts. If one got him, it got him. None did. He wasn’t as fast as an Olympic track man getting back, but an Olympic
track man didn’t run in boots and carry
a submachine gun. He reached his men before the barrage stopped and the ground attack came in.

“Hold on to your dicks, boys,” he called when the artillery let up. Nina’d sure had hold of his. “We’ll slaughter the clapped-out cunts.”

They didn’t. The Germans were veterans, and didn’t assume the shelling would make their advance easy. They came cautiously, by small groups, firing and moving. Where
they met strong defensive fire, they held up and started digging themselves foxholes. They weren’t going to let their officers get them killed if they could help it. If they hadn’t been Nazis, they would have been sensible men.

For a wonder, Russian tanks showed up before the Germans brought up any armor. The Fritzes retreated sullenly.
Maybe I can fuck Nina again tomorrow
, Kuchkov thought. You
never knew till you tried.

PETE MCGILL PASSED
five-inch shells as fast as he could. The Japs had more dive-bombers than Carter had little liver pills. Sweat poured down his bare back. He’d be sunburned like nobody’s business if he lived, but that was the least of his worries. He’d got way too hot and sticky to stay in his shirt.

Most of the guys at the gun wore nothing but a helmet above the
waist. You needed a helmet. You needed one bad. What went up eventually came down, and lots and lots was going up. Fragments rained down all over the Pacific. You’d feel like a jerk if one of them smashed your unprotected skull—but not for long, worse luck for you.

The five-incher bellowed again. Pete heard it as if from very far away. If he had any ears at all left by the time this got done,
he’d count his blessings. A shell casing clanged on the deck. Somebody kicked it out of the way to keep from tripping over it. It didn’t roll far. Too much other brass had already been kicked. Pete grabbed the next round and passed it to the loader. Into the breech it went. The gun lowered a little to bear on the dive-bomber.
Blam!
The cycle began anew.

The Jap plane didn’t give a damn about
the
Boise
. It was swooping down on a heavy cruiser. Shells burst all around it, black smoke puffs soiling the clean, moist Pacific air. The pilot ignored everything but his target. He released the bomb and zoomed away bare yards above the
ocean. A shell clipped his wing then. His plane broke up as it went into the drink. Fire floating on the sea was the only grave marker he’d ever get.

Too late
came the hit. The bomb burst right alongside the American ship. It wasn’t a killing blow. But blast and fragments would do their worst, and their worst was no damn good. The
Boise
had taken blows like that, and suffered from them yet.

“One fucker won’t be back!” Joe Orsatti shouted. Everybody at the five-inch mount yelled as loud as he could. It was the only way the Marines had a prayer of making
themselves heard. Even as things were, Pete might not have understood if he hadn’t read the gun chief’s lips.

“How many more have they got?” he yelled back. Orsatti didn’t answer. By the nature of things, he couldn’t know. Neither could Pete. But that was
the
question.

All the guys with the fat gold stripes on their sleeves who’d made up the American attack plan seemed to have missed something:
the Japs had turned their mid-Pacific islands into unsinkable aircraft carriers. They had sinkable carriers, too; the Americans had sunk one. But no American carriers remained afloat, and the U.S. fleet had yet to see any Japanese naval craft at gun range. (No, that wasn’t quite true. One Jap sub incautiously surfaced near a battleship whose big guns happened to be trained its way. A few seconds
later, nothing was left of that sub but paper clips.)

No twilight-of-the-gods super-Jutland here, no matter what the planners—and Pete McGill—had figured this fight would look like. No Joe Louis–Max Schmeling. Instead, the Japs were making like some superfast lightweight. Hank Armstrong on benzedrine, maybe. They jabbed and jabbed and jabbed, and when you tried to hit back they weren’t there.
And they wore you down, one punch at a time.

Pete had guessed the big free-for-all would happen somewhere near the Philippines. And it might have, if the U.S. fleet had been able to get that far. But even Guam still lay far to the west. And reaching Guam would be no cure-all; the Stars and Stripes didn’t fly there any more. How many Japanese planes would come up from all their islands and attack
the remains of the American force? How long before they’d be
more than all the antiaircraft guns aboard the surviving ships could hope to knock down? If the admirals went on being stubborn, that day might come soon.

If it did, Pete probably wouldn’t even get a brief patch of fire on the Pacific to mark where he’d gone down. An oil slick would be about it.

He didn’t want to die. Not yet. He didn’t
have nearly enough revenge for Vera. Four red rings circled his five-inch gun’s barrel, each one signifying a plane Orsatti was sure they’d killed. The rings, and the rest of the paint on the barrel, were blistered and scorched from the heat of all the shells that had gone through. It took a hell of a lot of firing to knock a plane out of the sky: way more than anybody’d figured before the war
got rolling.

The
Boise
’s engines picked up. Pete felt the new vibration through the soles of his shoes. The light cruiser swung into a long turn, carving a white wake into blue water. When the turn ended, she was heading east.

“Now hear this!” blared from the loudspeakers. “At the orders of the fleet’s commanding officer, we are withdrawing toward Hawaii. I say again—at the orders of the CO,
the fleet is withdrawing from these waters.”

So it wasn’t just the
Boise
. It was everybody. Everybody who was left, anyway. Pete wasn’t even sure of the current CO’s name; Admiral Kimmel went down with the
Arizona
when she sank, probably figuring that was easier than having to explain failure back home.

Well, if the new guy was throwing up his hands and hightailing it back toward Pearl, his
name was also likely to be mud whoever the hell he was. The Secretary of the Navy and the President would blame him for not blowing the Japs out of the water. After all, if another admiral fell on—or was pushed onto—his sword, less blame would stick to his superiors.

Then again, if the Americans kept pushing forward no matter what, it wouldn’t be long before they had nothing left to push with.
Going into this war, everybody’d wondered how sea power stacked up against air power. Now that the returns were in, they didn’t look encouraging for the poor bastards in ships. It had been a running fight between airplanes
all the way west across the Pacific. Now that the U.S. Navy was out of carriers, the fleet went on taking it on the chin no matter how much antiaircraft fire the ships threw
up.

Pete nervously scanned the sky. Just because the fleet was on the lam, that didn’t mean the Japs would leave it alone.
Kick ’em while they’re down
was good advice in bar brawls and in war. If the other guy didn’t think he’d almost licked you, he wouldn’t jump on you again any time soon. Now the U.S. Navy was trying to get up off the floor and brush away the sawdust and the spilled beer.

Some of the other ships were still firing—maybe at Japanese planes, maybe at nothing. Around the
Boise
, it was quiet for the moment. Pete suddenly realized how very stiff and sore and weary he was. “Fuck,” he said.

Orsatti must have read his lips, because he didn’t say it very loud. The gun chief nodded. He looked like hell: unshaven, bags under his eyes, his face thin and drawn. Pete probably
looked the same way, but he hadn’t seen himself any time lately. He’d been living on coffee and sandwiches and snatching sleep curled up on the deck next to the gun like a dog since … He couldn’t work out since when. It had been a while now. He knew that.

One of the other guys pulled a crumpled pack of Luckies from his dungarees and gave everybody a cigarette. Pete took his gratefully. The nicotine
seemed to help a little with the haze of fatigue that dogged him. “Fuck,” he said again. This time, the rest of the crew nodded in mournful agreement.

“Didn’t never figure we’d get licked,” Orsatti said, speaking slowly and loudly. “Not by the Japs.”

Pete could have said
I told you so
. He’d known the Emperor’s finest were tougher than most Americans wanted to believe. He kept quiet. Sometimes
being right cost more than it was worth.

But then he did say “Fuck” one more time. After another drag on the Lucky—some luck!—he amplified it: “What’s gonna happen to the poor sorry assholes stuck on the islands we took away from the slanties?”

“Maybe we’ll make pickup while we go,” Orsatti said. But he didn’t
sound as if his heart was in the words. Pete could see why. If the fleet was doing
its goddamnedest to get away from the Japs, would it want to stop for anything? That was asking to get worked over again.

But to leave leathernecks behind to try to hold off Hirohito’s bastards with whatever they happened to have … That was the worst kind of losing proposition. Sweet Jesus, was it ever!

Or was it, really? Wasn’t getting killed trying to take them off and then leaving them stuck
for the Japs anyway worse still? An admiral was bound to think so. The admiral in charge of the fleet
did
think so. Pete was a Marine. For two cents’ change, he would have torn the goddamn admiral’s head off and pissed in the hole.