The War That Came Early: Coup d'Etat (48 page)

Walsh shook it and gave his own name. “And just as much a Taffy as you’d expect from the handle,” he added. If he said it first, the other fellow couldn’t use it against him.

But Billings only nodded. “Heard it in the way you talked,” he said, and no more.
By his own accent, he came from England’s industrial Midlands. He went on, “Some of the Italian regiments, they aren’t worth tuppence ha’penny. Others … Others’ll give you everything you want and more besides. For a while, I should say. They’re all short of staying power.”

“Not the men, by what you say.” Walsh was trying to put pieces together.

“Not in those outfits. Some damn fine soldiers
there,” Billings said. “Rifles, machine guns, grenades, that kind of thing, one bloke’s kit is about as good as the other’s. But they’re short on artillery, they’re woefully short on tanks, and the ones they’ve got are old-fashioned junk.”

“Heh.” Walsh drained his pint. “Back in France, I would have said the same thing about ours. The Germans chased us a deal more than we chased them, and that’s
the truth.”

“You aren’t fighting the Germans any more, though,” Billings said. “This is a different business.”

How different it was Walsh discovered anew when he ducked out of the tent to ease himself. A million stars blazed down on him. The Milky Way was a pearly mesh cast across black, black sky. You never saw night
skies like this in England or France. Too much moisture in the air, and, till
the blackouts, too many lights sullying the darkness. Oddly, the only place he’d ever known the heavens like this before was in Norway, on a few of the rare clear winter nights.

But this wasn’t Norway, either. He’d frozen his ballocks off there despite a sheepskin coat. Nights got cold here—you did want your greatcoat—but not cold like that. The wind smelled different. You didn’t breathe in ice
and pine trees here. You smelled sand and dust and petrol and exhaust. English forces here were far more motorized than they had been in Norway.

Walsh sniffed again as he did up his trousers. He didn’t know what he was sniffing for. Camel shit? Something like that, he supposed. He’d seen a few camels since he got to Egypt. The natives used them. So did the English and the Italians—when they ran
short of lorries. You could also eat them if you had to. Walsh hoped like hell he’d never have to. Could anything that ugly possibly taste good?

He went back into the tent. Joe Billings had bought them both fresh pints while he was outside. Pretty soon, he’d buy a round himself. They’d both be pissing all night long.

He was nursing a headache the next morning. That didn’t keep the personnel
wallahs from sending him up to his new slot: senior underofficer for an infantry company. All the young lieutenants eyed him as if he were a leper. And well they might. They had the seniority of rank, but he had that of experience. They could order him around, and they didn’t have to do what he told them to do—not by military law they didn’t. But they might land in worse trouble for ignoring him than
he would for ignoring them.

One of them asked him, “Did you go through it the last time around?”

“Yes, sir.” Walsh tapped his leg. “Bought part of a plot, but not the whole thing.” He grinned crookedly. “Weather’s better for it here than it is back in Blighty—I’ll tell you that. Hardly aches at all.”

The subaltern nodded. His name was Wilf Preston. He had a sunburned, wind-chapped face full
of freckles, and he looked hardly old enough to have escaped from public school: his posh accent said he’d likely gone to one. He hesitated before continuing, “Speaking of Blighty, were you, ah, in London when the government, ah, changed?”

“Yes, sir,” Walsh repeated. By the way Preston asked the question, he already knew the answer.
That’s … interesting
, Walsh thought.
My reputation goes before
me. They aren’t leery just because staff sergeants are supposed to eat second lieutenants without salt
.

He wasn’t used to having that kind of reputation. For the rest of his life, he would be the man who’d brought in Rudolf Hess, the man who’d known Winston Churchill, the man who’d helped topple Horace Wilson in a military coup. He might be a lowly staff sergeant, but people with far more power
than lowly lieutenants would look sidelong at him from here on out.
Who are your friends?
they’d wonder.
What can you do to me if I cross you?

If he shouted “Boo!” young Wilf Preston would probably jump right out of his skin. It was tempting—damned if it wasn’t. Instead, he pointed west and asked, “Could you tell me what Musso’s lads are up to, sir?”

“They’re just patrolling for the time being,”
Preston answered with transparent relief. “So are we, mainly. They haven’t shown a great deal of push since we drove them back over the border. We have the feeling that the only reason they attacked at all was so Benito could show Adolf he was strafing us for ducking out of the alliance against Russia.”

“Pity he can’t be his own fool instead of Hitler’s,” Walsh said.

Up at the front, a mile
or two from where they talked, gunfire started up. Walsh began to unsling his Lee-Enfield, but noticed Preston wasn’t getting excited. “They always open fire around this time of day,” the subaltern said. “We think they have orders to shoot off so many rounds every morning, and this is how they make their quota.”

“War shouldn’t be about work rates,” Walsh said. “If it were, all the soldiers would
unionize—and likely go out on strike. Then you’d need to hire blacklegs if you wanted any killing done.”

Preston looked at him in yet another new way. “You’re quite daft, aren’t you?” he said.

“Who, me?” Walsh shrugged. “I do my best.”

HANS-ULRICH RUDEL WOKE
to a soft drumming against the canvas of his tent. He was afraid he knew what that was, but he might have been
wrong. He stuck his nose
outside to see. Said nose, and the rest of his face, met raindrops. He didn’t take the Lord’s name in vain. Even now, he remembered he was a minister’s son. But he did say something that never would have come out of his mouth before he joined the
Luftwaffe
.

The rain poured down from a pewter sky. Hans-Ulrich squelched over to the mess tent. Some of the flyers in there had already started drinking.
One of them raised a flask in salute to him. “Have a snort, Rudel!”

“You know I don’t do that,” Rudel answered.

“You may as well. We sure as hell aren’t going up for a while.” Peter took a long pull at the flask. Did his cheeks and nose turn redder, or was that only Hans-Ulrich’s sanctimonious imagination?

Preferring not to dwell on it, Rudel said, “It may stop. The ground may dry up again.”
He didn’t believe himself, either. He’d been in Russia the autumn before. He knew what these rains were like.

So did Peter, who laughed raucously. “Go talk to a virgin, pal! This weather’s fucked us before, and it’s fucking us again.”

Since Hans-Ulrich feared he was right, he walked over to see what the field kitchen had turned out. It was a thick stew of boiled buckwheat groats—kasha, the Ivans
called the stuff—and onions and carrots and bits of flesh. Pointing to one of those bits in his mess tin, Hans-Ulrich asked, “What is it?”

“Meat.” The fellow who’d ladled out the stew gave back a laconic answer.

“I figured
that
,” Rudel said with exaggerated patience. “But will it neigh when I bite down? Or bark? Or meow?”

“As long as it doesn’t ask you for a loan,
Herr Oberleutnant
, odds are
you’re better off not knowing,” the cook replied.

Sighing, Rudel decided he was likely to be right. He sat down on a bench and spooned up the stew. They’d never serve it at the Adlon—although food inside the
Reich
was nasty these days, too. The meat had been boiled so long, he couldn’t tell what it had started out as. It tasted … meaty. He emptied the tin tray faster than he’d expected. He would
have gone back for seconds if he hadn’t worried that the cook would laugh at him.

There was a strange thing. Around his neck hung the Knight’s Cross,
proof that he didn’t fear anything enemy flak might do to his Stuka—or to him. Yet the thought that an enlisted man who needed a shave might mock him kept his behind glued to the planking.

Courage, and then again courage. Before the war started,
he hadn’t understood that it came in different flavors. And what kind of courage was required for an Aryan holder of the
Ritterkreuz
to sleep with a half-Jewish barmaid? To love her? Hans-Ulrich shook his head. It wasn’t like that—quite. Even having anything to do with her, though, took bravery unlike either bearding a cook or diving on an enemy panzer. It took a certain amount of moral courage,
though Rudel himself was unlikely ever to see it in that light.

Colonel Steinbrenner ducked into the mess tent. At a training base in Germany, no doubt, the flyers would have stopped shoveling in kasha and mystery meat. They would have put down the vodka jugs (no, they wouldn’t have had any vodka jugs to begin with). And they would have leaped to their feet, stiffened into attention, and saluted
the squadron commander.

A couple of them nodded. One man paused in lighting a cigarette long enough to wave. The rest went on with what they were doing. Steinbrenner took that for granted. He shed his officer’s cap and scowled at the drops of water on the patent-leather brim. “Fucking wet out there,” he remarked.

“Too right it is,” said the pilot with the cigarette.

One of the men passing around
the jug held it out to the colonel. He laughed, shook his head, and went over to the pot full of stew. The cook filled his mess kit. Then Steinbrenner caught Hans-Ulrich’s eye, wordlessly asking,
May I sit next to you?

Hans-Ulrich nodded and did his best to look eager and inviting. Discipline at the front didn’t work the way it did in the
Reich
during peacetime, but you needed some mighty good
reason to tell your squadron commander to get lost, and he had none.

“How’s it going?” Steinbrenner asked as he parked himself.

“In this weather, sir? It’s not going anywhere,” Rudel said.

“You’ve got that right, anyway. The
Landsers’ll
just have to live without air support for a while. Well, so will the Russians.” Steinbrenner dug
into breakfast. He chewed thoughtfully before delivering his
verdict: “I’ve had worse, but I’ve sure had better. What’s the meat?”

“Don’t know,” Hans-Ulrich admitted.

“Didn’t you ask?” Steinbrenner said.

“Yeah, but the cook said I’d be better off not finding out,” Rudel answered.

The squadron commander turned and shouted at the guy behind the cauldron: “Hey, Klaus, what did you kill before you dumped it into this slop?” He didn’t worry about the enlisted
man’s precious sensibilities.

And Klaus didn’t worry about his, either. “Sir, I believe that’s your granny,” he replied. The mess tent erupted with laughter.

Colonel Steinbrenner spooned up some more meat. His jaws worked again. He shook his head. “Nah. Granny’d be tougher than this no matter how long you stewed her.” More laughter. The cook held up the ladle in salute, acknowledging the hit.

Hans-Ulrich knew he couldn’t have done anything like that. He could sass Sergeant Dieselhorst that way, and maybe a couple of the other flyers he felt comfortable with, but not a cook he didn’t care a pfennig for one way or the other. Yes, Colonel Steinbrenner was older than he was, but Rudel suddenly realized more than age and rank went into running a squadron.

He didn’t go on from there to
realize Steinbrenner had asked to sit next to him for a reason. He was a gear with a worn-down tooth or two, and didn’t fit smoothly into the squadron’s mechanism. Had he realized something like that, he would have taken another step toward being ready to lead such an outfit.

“So what are you going to do now that flying gets tricky?” Steinbrenner asked him. Then the colonel shook his head once
more. “Now that flying gets stuck in the mud, I should say.”

“Oh, I don’t know, sir. Maybe I’ll see if I can con a furlough out of my squadron commander,” Rudel said blandly. “Some people can drink so that weeks seem to go by in days. If you don’t drink, though, weeks stuck in the mud seem more like years.”

“Best argument for drinking I’ve heard lately,” Colonel Steinbrenner
remarked. Hans-Ulrich
hadn’t intended it as anything of the kind, but he could see how the older man might hear it that way—and jab him with it. Steinbrenner went on, “If you did get a furlough—by some miracle, you understand—where would you go? What would you do? And ‘Anywhere away from here’ isn’t a good enough answer.”

Now Hans-Ulrich chose his words with care: “Well, I might take a train back to Poland to get
away from the war for a bit. To, ah, Bialystok.” Why deny it? Steinbrenner knew about Sofia.

He nodded. Yes, he was unsurprised. “And how’s your girlfriend there?”

“That’s what I’d like to find out, sir. She, ah, she doesn’t write much,” Rudel said. In point of fact, Sofia didn’t write at all. He’d never told her not to, but she knew getting love letters—or any letters—from a
Mischling
wouldn’t
be good for him.

Colonel Steinbrenner nodded. “That may not be the worst thing in the world,” was all he said, but it told Hans-Ulrich he not only knew about Sofia but also about her racial makeup.

If they wanted to make a case against me, they could
. The weight of the Knight’s Cross on his neck felt most reassuring to Rudel. But that kind of thing wouldn’t stop them if they decided you were
disloyal. It might slow them down, but it wouldn’t stop them. The only thing that would stop them was obvious, unswerving loyalty to the
Reich
and to National Socialism. Hans-Ulrich had it, in abundance. He also had a half-Jewish girlfriend. Would that make them doubt the other? All he could do—if he didn’t want to give Sofia up, and he didn’t—was hope not.

YOU EXPLAIN HOW
you messed up. You
promise not to do it again, and you mean what you’re saying from the bottom of your heart. After that, the sun’s supposed to come out and everything’s supposed to be wonderful: just the way it was before. It’s straight out of a Hollywood script.