The War That Came Early: The Big Switch (59 page)

“I know,” Lemp said. Germany’s only carrier, the
Graf Zeppelin
, remained incomplete and unlaunched. He wondered whether it would ever be finished and go into action, or if the powers that be would find better uses for all those thousands of tonnes of steel and order it broken up. That wasn’t for him to say. Hell’s bells—he couldn’t even give the
Schnorkel
man a straight answer. “If the limeys
are
coming this way, nobody’s told me about it. And now you know as much as I do.”

“It’d be nice if we found out ahead of time,” Beilharz said plaintively. “We shoot an eel at an English dreadnought by mistake, that won’t make ’em want to stay friendly with us.”

“No. It won’t.” Were the Baltic as cold as Julius Lemp’s voice, it would have frozen solid from surface to bottom on the instant, and never thawed out again afterwards. Lemp had already sunk one important ship by mistake. He didn’t even want to imagine another screwup so monumental.

Beilharz hadn’t joined the crew when the
Athenia
went down. The
Schnorkel
man had joined the crew, in no small measure,
because
the
Athenia
went down. And what they’d seen since! The failed
putsch
against the
Führer
, with history playing out before their eyes to the accompaniment of machine-gun chords. And then the great reversal, so that machine guns stopped firing in the west and started up against the Reds.

Hitler had a lot to be proud of … if he could beat the Russians and make it stick. The last people who’d managed that were the Mongols. They’d done it a devil of a long time ago now. They’d stormed out of the east, too. Coming from the west, Germans, Austrians, Poles, Swedes, Turks, English and French together … everyone had failed.

Which didn’t mean the
Reich
and its shiny new Anglo-French alliance
couldn’t
succeed where everybody else had had to toss in the sponge. Of course it didn’t.
Of course it doesn’t
, Lemp told himself, thinking louder than he might have. The previous track record sure didn’t improve the odds, though.

Track record? On land these days, the track was muddy where it wasn’t frozen. The
Wehrmacht
and its allies kept gaining ground all the
same. They just had to go on doing it, that was all. And the U-boats and the rest of the
Kriegsmarine
had to help.

THEO HOSSBACH WONDERED
why he seemed to play football only when it was bloody cold. Here he was, standing in goal on another snow-streaked, bumpy pitch, watching his buddies and—this time—a bunch of Tommies pound up and down. They got warm. Running the way they did, they would have stayed warm at the South Pole.

He, by contrast, was freezing his ass off. A goalkeeper was often as much a spectator as the Germans and Englishmen watching—and betting on—the action from the sidelines. Well, he always had been more a detached observer than a participant in life. If you were going to play football at all, goalkeeper was about the best you could do along those lines, as radioman was if you happened to be part of a panzer division.

Sometimes the world came after you whether you wanted it to or not. A shell from an enemy panzer or antipanzer gun could smash through your armor unless you were good, or at least lucky (or was that
lucky, or at least good
?—no one seemed to know).

And sometimes a grinning Tommy in khaki dribbled past what were supposed to be your rear four defenders and drew back his leg to drive the ball into the net—they had proper goals this time, loot from a Russian school. Unlike an antipanzer round, he couldn’t blow you to smithereens. But he could humiliate you, which hurt almost as much and was far more public.

Make yourself big
. That was what they told goalkeepers in trouble. Theo duly did it, running out at the Englishman to cut off the angle, waving his arms over his head, spreading his legs, and for good measure yelling at the top of his lungs. The Tommy shot. The ball banged off Theo’s left foot and slithered out of bounds for a corner kick.

“Fucking ’ell,” the thwarted footballer snarled. Theo didn’t speak English, but he recognized an endearment when he heard one. He smiled sweetly.

As the two sides jostled each other before the kick, his own teammates thumped him on the back. “That’s the way to play it,” Adi Stoss said. “You couldn’t have done any better.”

“Thanks,” Theo muttered. Praise on the pitch from Adi was praise indeed. As usual, the panzer driver seemed to be in his own world here. He far outshone his countrymen. He far outshone his opponents, too, and the English had invented the game. He’d already scored once, and only a leaping, sprawling save by the other ’keeper kept him from claiming another goal.

The Tommies did the same thing other German sides did: they tried to knock him off his game by knocking him around. Nasty tackles sent him sprawling a couple of times. In a professional match, they would have got the guilty parties sent off. If nobody needed an ambulance here, you just kept playing.

Adi was no fool. He could tell which way the wind blew. He’d probably known it would blow his way long before it did. And he took care of things on his own. One of his tormentors went down in a heap and didn’t get up again for a long time. At last, when Theo was starting to wonder if they
would
need an ambulance, the Englishman staggered to his feet and play went on. A few minutes later, another Tommy skidded a long way on his face. He rose with blood running from his nose, looking for a fight. Adi stood right there. If the fellow in khaki wanted one, he could have it. He decided he didn’t want it. The match resumed once more.

At last, the English lieutenant serving as timekeeper and referee blew his officer’s whistle. Play ground to a stop. The
Landsers
had beaten the Tommies, 5–3. A few of the Englishmen seemed amazed they could lose at their own game, even in a pickup match like this. A couple of others seemed furious. Most, though, were as winded as their German counterparts. They and the Germans clapped one another on the back, clasped hands, and tried to talk, using fragments—often foul fragments—of their opponents’ language.

On the sidelines, cash and chattels personal—especially tobacco and liquor—changed hands as bettors settled up. One of the Germans who seemed to have done well for himself went up to Adi. Whatever he said didn’t sit well with Theo’s crewmate. Stoss turned away, obviously angry.

The other German said something else. Adi snarled something in return. Theo trotted over to them, ready for anything. You didn’t let your buddies down, on the battlefield or on the pitch.

But the fellow who’d infuriated Adi didn’t want to bang heads. He just looked bewildered at what he’d started. “You can clear off, pal,” he said to Theo. “I didn’t mean to get him mad at me.”

“Oh, yeah?” Theo only half-believed that. On the one hand, nobody in his right mind would want Adi Stoss mad at him. The Englishman with the bloody nose had seen that. He’d backed off, too. On the other hand, Adi wasn’t a guy with a short fuse. He didn’t go looking for trouble or start it. He didn’t get sore for no reason at all, either.

Or did he? The other German said, “Yeah. Honest to God. All I said was, he played as well as the last time I saw him on the pitch.”

“Liar,” Adi said, and if that wasn’t murder in his voice, Theo had never heard it.

“I don’t think so.” Theo might have heard the danger in his voice, but the other fellow plainly didn’t. He went on, “I was selling stuff in Münster three, four years ago, and Bayern München was playing a friendly against some town side—the Foresters, that’s who they were. I’m from Munich, so I went. I remember you ’cause you were the only good thing on the pitch for your club.”

Adi shook his head. “I don’t know who you’re talking about, but that wasn’t me.”

“Right.” The man from Munich didn’t believe it for a second. “Then it was either your twin or your ghost—that’s all I’ve got to tell you.”

“Could have been either one,” Adi said. “All I’ve got to tell
you
is, it wasn’t me.”

“Huh!” No, the stranger wasn’t convinced. But what could he do in the face of such stubborn, stony denial? Walk off shaking his head, was the only thing that occurred to Theo. And that was just what the fellow from Munich did.

Adi Stoss swore, loudly and foully. He kicked at the half-frozen ground under his feet. “Now I can’t even play fucking football any more,” he muttered.

“Don’t worry about it.” Words never came easily for Theo. He found a few more anyway: “He’s from Munich, not Münster. Whatever you’re running from, he doesn’t know anything about it.”

Sudden hard suspicion filled Adi’s voice: “Why do you think I’m running from anything?”

He’d been ready to kill the guy from Munich.
He’s liable to want to murder me, too
, Theo realized.
And, all things considered, how can you blame him?
He picked his next words with even more care and reluctance than he usually used: “It’s not like half the guys in the company don’t already know.”

“Know what?” Stoss demanded.

This time, Theo didn’t say a word. He glanced toward the crotch of Adi’s black coveralls, held his eyes there long enough to make sure the driver noticed him doing it, and then looked away.

Adi was swarthier than most Germans. That didn’t keep him from going white now. “You … know?” he whispered.

“ ’Fraid so,” Theo answered.

“And you didn’t turn me in to the
Gestapo
or the SD or the rest of those pigdogs?”

“Oh, sure I did. Six months ago. The rest of the panzer guys have done it dozens of times,” Theo said, deadpan.

Stoss stared. For a second, maybe a second and a half, he believed Theo. He didn’t know whether to clout him with a rock, look around frantically for blackshirts, or just start running. Then he realized he’d tripped over irony. “You son of a bitch!” he said, and he couldn’t have sounded more relieved if the Panzer II’s armor had just held out a burst of machine-gun fire. “You
son
of a bitch! Maybe the whole world’s not out to ruin us after all.” He didn’t say which
us
the world was after, but Theo hadn’t, either. They both knew, all right.

hings weren’t going well for the Soviet Union. The news broadcasts from Moscow did their best to disguise that, and their best was surprisingly good. Had Anastas Mouradian not been a frontline fighter, he never would have realized how rotten things looked.

But he was, and he did. It wasn’t even that the front kept moving east. The USSR was an enormous place. Trading space for time was an old Russian strategy, and now a new Soviet one. The way the Red Army and Red Air Force were making the trade, though …

Stas heard much more about all the Devil’s relations than he wanted to. Bad language about them filled the military frequencies. Among Russians, that was a sure-fire sign things were badly buggered up. And generals and colonels kept getting replaced, one after another. Nobody said anything about what happened to the men who were relieved. Mouradian could draw his own pictures. They weren’t pretty, which didn’t mean they weren’t true.

The replacements came in and gave enthusiastic orders. The Germans and the allies they’d seduced into campaigning against Socialism kept gaining ground regardless. In weeks or days or sometimes hours,
the enthusiastic replacements got replaced themselves. Some of them probably didn’t even know why they went into the gulags, which didn’t stop them from going.

There were times—there were quite a few times, in fact—when Mouradian was glad to be only a lowly lieutenant. All he had to do was follow orders from above. As long as he did that, he was safe—well, as safe as any Soviet frontline fighter. He just had to worry about the Nazis and their allies. He didn’t have to worry that the NKVD would blame him for the next unauthorized retreat.

Josef Stalin spoke on the radio, something he seldom did. “Workers and peasants of the Soviet Union, you must not take one step farther back,” he declared. His Georgian accent was thicker than Mouradian’s Armenian intonations. Russians threw everybody from the Caucasus into the same pile. People from the Caucasus knew better. Georgia and Armenia bordered each other, but so what? Their peoples were as different as Magyars and Czechs. To them, it was obvious. To Russians … But what did Russians know? Georgians and Armenians were both dark, and both used peculiar alphabets nobody else could read. If that didn’t make them brothers … you weren’t a Russian.