The War That Came Early: Coup d'Etat (53 page)

The guy in
Feldgrau
went whiter than skim milk. “N—N—N—” He couldn’t manage a
“Nein!”
till the fourth try. Desperately, he went on, “I didn’t do that! I
wouldn’t
do that! I’m no rat! On my mother’s name, I swear it.”

What Theo said about his mother would have got him murdered if he weren’t the one holding the machine pistol. “And that’s bullshit, too,” he added.

“It isn’t! Honest to God, will you listen to me?”
the
Landser
said. “That time after the game, I just wanted to say how good he was. How was I supposed to know he’d get his long johns in a twist?” That was what Theo thought he said, anyhow. To a man from Breslau, the other guy’s broad Bavarian dialect came within shouting distance of being a foreign language.

“
Somebody
reported him. You sure looked like a good bet.” Theo let his synthetic anger
cool. He lowered the Schmeisser—a little. “Why don’t you just fuck off? I still don’t trust you. And if I ever see you again, you’ll wish I hadn’t.”

Gabbling thanks and apologies and who knows what, the other fellow beat it. Theo spotted another
Kettenrad
. He’d
been
talking. A little more wouldn’t hurt … much. Damned if he didn’t get himself a lift back to the
kolkhoz
. Every once in a while,
words had their uses.

And Sergeant Witt beamed when he displayed the four tubes. “There you go!” He clapped Theo on the back. “And you’ll save the one that’s going bad, too, right? If it isn’t all the way dead, you can get a little more out of it.” Theo nodded; he’d already thought of that. Witt went on, “Anything else going on at HQ?”

“Nah.” With a slow smile, Theo squeezed out the one word.

HONOLULU AGAIN
.
Pete McGill hadn’t wanted to see it. He’d hoped to see Manila once more instead. No such luck, though. The U.S. Navy
would have had to win the big Pacific slugfest to make that happen. Far from winning, the great fleet the USA sent west from Hawaii had barely got to play. The planes that rose in swarms from Japanese-held islands and from Japanese carriers didn’t give the American
ships the chance to close with the Imperial Navy’s battlewagons.

Wildcats buzzed above Pearl Harbor now. Like the Jap-occupied islands farther west, Hawaii made an enormous, unsinkable aircraft carrier. If anything was going to hold the Japanese Navy away from Pearl, it would be air power.

Meanwhile, Pete and the other Marines aboard the
Boise
joined her sailors in repairing battle damage and
getting her ready to go out again and do … well, something, anyhow. The damage wasn’t anything big—metal dented and torn by near misses from Japanese bombs. The light cruiser hadn’t been a major enemy target. No light cruiser would storm into Tokyo Bay or anything like that. Sensibly, the Japs had gone after the American ships that could do them the most harm.

More planes—fighters, bombers, reconnaissance—came
into Hawaii almost every day by ship. So did more tanks, more soldiers, and more everything else. If the United States had to fight Japan starting from San Diego and San Francisco and Seattle, the war would be far longer and harder—if it could be won at all.

But no new Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor came. Word got back that planes from Japanese carriers were helping to bombard Singapore. Besieged
and isolated, the British bastion at the southern tip of Malaya seemed likely to fall. Everything else from Guam to the border between Burma and India already had.

“I bet the Aussies are sweating bullets,” Joe Orsatti remarked as he and Pete lugged five-inch ammo aboard the
Boise
. The light cruiser had replenished at sea from the
Lassen
—ammunition ships, fittingly enough, were named for volcanoes—but
she’d shot off almost all of what she’d taken aboard then. Her main armament, by contrast, hadn’t fired a shot.

“I bet you’re right. I sure would be, anyway,” Pete said. His leg and his shoulder still pained him when he worked hard. He wondered if they always would. Every time something in either place twinged, he thought of Vera. If the aches lasted the rest of his life, so would his memories
of their time together in Shanghai.

“Gettin’ more stuff through to them, it’s like running the gantlet,” Orsatti said. He set a wooden case that held two shells down on the deck.

With a grunt of relief, Pete laid his burden down, too. Something in his back clicked when he straightened. That had nothing to do with his injuries, or he didn’t think it did. It simply came from hard work.

As other
leathernecks knocked the casings apart and stowed the shells, he said, “You’re right twice running. You ought to quit while you’re ahead.”

“Funny. Funny like a dose of the clap,” Orsatti said.

“I ain’t seen your mother lately,” Pete retorted. Orsatti flipped him the bird while they walked down the gangplank to pick up more shells. Neither man hurried. The job would get done, but it didn’t have
to get done right away. The
Boise
wasn’t heading into action again any time soon. Pete went on, “We’ve got to try it, though. They’re screwed if we don’t.”

“Yeah, I guess.” Orsatti picked up another two-shell case: a hundred pounds of brass and explosives, plus the weight of the wood. He lugged it back toward the cruiser.

Pete did the same. His shoulder and his leg really complained. He didn’t
listen to them. He could do the work. He’d proved that aboard the
Boise
. If he hurt, he hurt, that was all. He had a bottle of aspirins he’d bummed off a pharmacist’s mate in sick bay. When he got especially sore, he took a couple. Sometimes he thought they helped. Sometimes they didn’t seem to do anything.

After he set down his next crate, he said, “We could use some liberty, you know?”

“What?
You’d rather drink and fuck than haul shit around like a draft horse? What kind of Marine are you, anyhow?” Orsatti demanded in mock anger.

“One with my head on straight, that’s what,” Pete answered. “They don’t pay you to drink and fuck,” the other sergeant pointed out.

“They don’t pay me enough to do this shit all the goddamn time when I’m in Pearl,” McGill said. “When I’m on board ship, okay,
fine. I’m stuck there. I ain’t stuck here—except I need a pass.”

“People in hell need mint juleps to drink,” Orsatti told him. “You
had all that soft China duty, where you could eat like a pig and screw like a lord. You aren’t in a good place to piss and moan, you know?”

Pete shut up. China duty
was
soft, especially to somebody who’d spent most of his time in the Corps on one ship or another.
Servants, good food all the time, cheap whorehouses—what more could a Marine want? But when it went bad, it went as bad as it could. He wondered how many of the leathernecks he’d served with in Peking and Shanghai were still alive. He hoped they’d made the Japs pay a high price for bagging them.

A few days later, he did snag a pass into Honolulu. He got drunk, he went to Hotel Street, and he
got laid. Then he drank some more and got laid again. In the course of drinking more still, he knocked an Army sergeant cold with a left to the belly and a right to the jaw. He walked out of that joint before the Shore Patrol showed up, leaving the Army three-striper on the floor. The jerk would be sadder when he woke up, but probably no wiser.

He made it back to the
Boise
on time. Next morning,
it was black coffee and some of those aspirins. He hardly remembered coldcocking the Army guy. Nor was he the only man just back from liberty who seemed a little the worse for wear.

For his sins, the
Boise
steamed out into the Pacific later that day for live-fire exercises with towed targets. Aspirins or no aspirins, when the guns started going off he thought his head would explode with them.
Before long, he hoped it would.

The other guys at the gun razzed him every time he flinched. Since he flinched a lot, he got several weeks’ worth of razzing all in the space of a few hours. “Hangovers and big booms don’t mix,” Joe Orsatti observed.

“Thank you, Albert Einstein,” Pete replied. After a moment, he added, “Fuck you, Albert Einstein.”

His jimjams didn’t keep him from passing shells
to the loader when planes brought targets overhead. If slow-moving strips of orange cloth had dive-bombed the
Boise
, the Marines at her secondary armament would have blown them out of the sky.

A Navy lieutenant warned, “Keep an eyeball peeled for submarines. We aren’t within safe waters.”

He outranked the leathernecks—a two-striper was the equivalent of a Marine Corps captain. So they couldn’t
say much while he was in earshot. Once he’d gone … That was a different story.

“What? He thinks we’re too dumb to look if he don’t tell us to?” Orsatti groused.

“He must figure we’re like ordinary swabbies,” Pete put in. That got some laughs. Marines were convinced sailors were idiots in training to be morons. Of course, it worked both ways, which was one of the reasons sailors and Marines from
the same ship sometimes brawled when they got liberty at the same time.

One of the other guys in the gun crew just said, “Whistleass pecker-head.” That summed things up as well as any other two words Pete could have thought of.

No one saw a periscope, or even imagined he saw a periscope. The hydrophones didn’t report any contacts. There was talk that the
Boise
would get a fancy new version as
part of her refit. Sonar was the name Pete had heard. He didn’t know much about it, but he was in favor of anything that would help keep them from stopping a torpedo.

They made it back to Pearl undamaged. That young lieutenant seemed convinced they got back for no other reason than his own enormous heroism. The leathernecks laughed behind their hands. Otherwise, they kept their opinions to themselves.

IVAN KUCHKOV HATED
squelching through the mud. He hadn’t had to do that when he was in the Red Air Force, or not nearly so much of it, anyhow. But his only other choices were falling behind and letting the Nazis capture him (a bad bet) or getting wounded or killed (a worse one). So squelch he did.

Ukrainian mud seemed particularly oozy and bottomless, too. Everybody said Ukrainian soil—the famous
black earth—was fertile beyond compare. He supposed that was so: this country was all
kolkhozes
. But, when the
rasputitsa
came, the black earth also turned goopy beyond compare.

“Avram!” Ivan called. Then he raised his voice to yell “Avram!” again,
louder this time. The point man was well out ahead of the section, the way he was supposed to be.

He stopped when he finally heard Kuchkov. “What
do you need, Comrade Sergeant?” he shouted back. He could afford to make some noise, as Ivan could; no Germans were in the neighborhood. Or if the Germans were, things were even more fouled up than the brass wanted to admit. Kuchkov guessed—no, on second thought he was sure—that was possible, maybe even likely.

He slogged forward through the muck to catch up to Sasha Davidov. If there were Fascists
around, he didn’t want to call the point man back. Then the whole section might run into them without warning. That
he
might run into them without warning occurred to him only when he’d almost reached the Jew. He hung on to his PPD-34 a little tighter once it did.

And the first question out of his mouth was, “Any fucking sign of the pricks?”

Avram shook his head. “Not around here, Sergeant.”
He pointed ahead. “Once we get over that swell of ground, we’ll be able to see farther. Of course, if there are any Germans on the far side of it, they’re liable to spot us, too.”

Ivan grunted. Normally, he would have had no more use for a skinny, swarthy little kike than any other Russian of peasant stock did. But times weren’t normal—not even a little bit. The game had changed as soon as the
USSR and the Nazis actually came to grips. Some Russians and more Ukrainians and people from the Caucasus liked Hitler better than Stalin. They’d desert if they got the chance. Not even the
politruks
could stop them all the time.

You didn’t need to worry about the Jews, though. They were in the fight to the last bullet. They had to be. If the Nazis caught them, they’d get a bullet, all right.
A Russian might be able to surrender. No guarantees, but he might.
Zhids
didn’t have a prayer. The Germans casually murdered them, the same way they got rid of the political officers who fell into their hands.

Pointing to that same swell of ground, Kuchkov asked, “Can you haul your sorry ass to the top and over without letting the Fascist pussies spot you?”

Avram was no braver than he had to
be. But then, people who were braver than they had to be had a way of not living long. He tossed a
papiros
into the mud—he didn’t want some alert Fritz noticing the coal or the smoke. He nodded: not with any great enthusiasm, but he did. “I can do it.”

“All right. You go ahead, then. But some of the clumsy cuntfaced bitches in our outfit, you know they’d trip over their dicks if they tried, right?”
Ivan said. He waited for the Jew to nod again before he went on, “So I’m gonna lead our assholes around to the left. If it’s clear, you fucking meet up with us there. Got it?”

“
Yob tvoyu mat’
, Sergeant,” Davidov assured him.

Ivan burst into raucous laughter and slapped him on the back. Literally, what the Jew said meant
Fuck your mother
. In a different tone of voice or at a different time, it
might have made Kuchkov try to murder him. But the filthy phrase lay at the bottom of
mat
. It could have a multitude of meanings, foul or fair. What Avram was getting across here was
You bet your ass
.

Fair enough. He was betting his own ass that he could do what he said he could do. “Go on, then,” Ivan told him. “You get into trouble, I’ll send some of the shitheads after you.”

Davidov nodded
and went on. If he got into trouble, Ivan’s promise probably wouldn’t do him any good. He had to know that, but he moved up anyhow. He might be a kike, but he was all right.