Somaliland, I should say.” Ronald Cartland, plainly, had been eyeing mental maps longer than Walsh and spreading them wider.
Walsh had never been stationed in British Somaliland. He knew several regulars who had, though. From everything he’d heard, Cartland was spot-on. Chances were not even the Somalis wanted to drive their sheep and camels through land so miserable-not that Italian Somaliland was any improvement.
He wasted no more time worrying about the Horn of Africa. Even if Mussolini’s legions there carried all before them, all they would have was the goddamn Horn of Africa. Egypt, on the other hand… “Wouldn’t be so good if the bloody Italians”-he pronounced it the same way he had before-“paraded through Alexandria or took the canal away.”
“No. It wouldn’t.” If Cartland’s laconic agreement wasn’t British understatement at its best, Walsh didn’t know what would be.
The veteran noncommissioned officer did some more considering. Ronald Cartland was better suited to the General Staff than he would be himself if he lived to be a hundred, which didn’t mean he couldn’t cope at need. His calculations were quick and, he thought, accurate. “Musso’d need more than luck to bring it off. He’d need a miracle, or as near as makes no difference.”
“I’ve heard that before from others,” Cartland said. “I like it better from you. I respect your judgment.”
“Thank you very much, sir.” Walsh suspected pleasure was making his ears turn pink. He was happier- prouder, anyhow-than he would have been had the pretty young barmaid whispered a suggestion that they go find a room together. He didn’t despise animal pleasure-far from it. But the opinion of a man he admired was a weightier business altogether.
“For what? For telling the truth?” Cartland waved his gratitude away as unnecessary.
“For thinking it is the truth.” Walsh wasn’t about to let the aristo get away with that. He was going to be grateful, dammit, and that was all there was to that.
“Have it your way, Sergeant.” Now the MP spoke in a way Walsh understood completely, like a junior officer addressing a senior noncom. Officers had rank and class on their side. Sergeants had experience and the knowledge that came with it. More often than not, that left the advantage with them. Senior officers knew what their juniors often didn’t: sergeants were more important to the army than subalterns.
“If I had my way, sir, I’d go to Egypt right now. That’s the kind of thing Mussolini would try, and I’d love to be there to help give him what he deserves,” Walsh said.
“Is that truly what you want? If it is, I daresay I can arrange it.”
Walsh felt like whooping and turning handsprings. All he did was give back a small, dignified nod. He didn’t even smile, not where Ronald Cartland could see him do it. But what was the point to having well-connected friends if you didn’t make the most of it once in a while?
“Egypt…” Cartland said in musing tones. “Have you been there before?”
“I spent a year-well, not quite-in Cairo in the Twenties.” Walsh remembered the amazing heat and the crowding and the smells, which made your nose sit up and take notice even after you’d been on a battlefield. “Not much like good old Blighty, but we need to hang on to it even so.”
“That we do. Lord knows how we’d manage without the Suez Canal,” Cartland said. “My sister and I visited once. I’ll never forget the Pyramids. That was in the Twenties, too: well before the Depression. Perhaps we were there at the same time.”
“Yes, sir. Perhaps we were.” Long odds, Walsh thought, but so what? Keeping your officers happy and interested in you was yet another skill sergeants needed to cultivate. And getting back into action would be good, even if he was only going up against the dagos.
Theo Hossbach still had trouble getting used to the radioman’s position in a Panzer III. For two and a half years, he’d stayed hidden away from the war. The radio set in a Panzer II lent itself to that. Now, all of a sudden, he could see out. He not only could, he had to. Along with the radio, he had an MG-34 to take care of.
How many Ivans had he done for by now? He’d lost track. In a way, that embarrassed him. When your occupation was something as serious as killing people, shouldn’t you remember how many you were responsible for? But to do that properly, he should have started counting as soon as the original Panzer II rolled across the frontier separating Germany and Czechoslovakia. He’d been part of a killing team since 1 October 1938, after all. The score from the obsolescent machine’s little cannon and machine gun went partly to his credit-or to his blame, depending on how you looked at things.
The only trouble was, any kind of count along those lines was impossible. Because he hadn’t been able to see out, he didn’t even know where to begin. He couldn’t very well ask Ludwig Rothe or Fritz Bittenfeld, either. They were both dead, as was Heinz Naumann.
Adi Stoss might be able to give him an approximate score for the second Panzer II, and for this newer, larger machine. Theo didn’t plan to ask him about it. If they ever did talk seriously, they had other things to hash out first. Besides, might be able to wasn’t the same as could. Theo didn’t know-he’d never asked-whether Adi was running his own tab.
And, the way things worked these days, keeping track of how many Russians you slaughtered wasn’t the only game in town, or the most important one. Making sure the Russians didn’t slaughter you had become much more urgent. Their light tanks were nothing German panzers couldn’t handle. Even in a thinly armored Panzer II, Theo hadn’t worried about them much.
But the KV-1 was a whole different kettle of cabbage. Yes, it was clumsy and slow, but it was about the size of a whale. A Panzer III, the Wehrmacht ’s main battle machine, could hurt it only by luck or from behind. Had the Ivans had more of the damned things or used them with greater skill, the KV-1s could have been even worse news than they were anyhow.
As for the T-34… It was hot inside the Panzer III, but thinking about the Reds’ newest and finest panzer made Theo shiver all the same. It had all the KV-1’s virtues-a powerful engine, thick armor, and a big gun-and, so far as he could see, none of the other beast’s vices. T-34s weren’t slow and clumsy. Anything but, in fact. And whoever’d come up with their armor scheme deserved the biggest, gaudiest medal Stalin could pin on him.
German engineers had never considered armor shape, except perhaps insofar as the simplest shapes were also the easiest to manufacture. If you needed more protection in a particular place, you made your steel plates thicker there. But all those plates were pretty much vertical. Czech, French, and English designers worked from the same basic principles. It wasn’t as if there were any other way to go about things.
Except there was. Relying on the Russians’ inborn simplicity and fondness for the brute-force approach didn’t always pay. Some Soviet designer had had a better idea-a much better idea, as a matter of fact. If you sloped your panzer’s armor at, say, a forty-five degree angle, a lot of shells that would have penetrated vertical plate ricocheted away instead. And even the ones that did dig into the armor had to go through more of it to do damage: for shots coming in from most directions, sloped plate was effectively thicker than the same amount of vertical armor would have been.
Once you saw the stuff in action-once you watched your best shots bounce off a T-34 without hurting the metal monster-the idea seemed obvious. Everything seemed obvious after you banged into it nosefirst. But if it was so goddamn obvious, how come no German engineer in a clean white lab coat had twiddled with his slide rule till he came up with it first?
The Russians were Untermenschen, weren’t they? Hitler and Goebbels loudly insisted they were. If they were Untermenschen, though, and the swastika-following Aryans were Ubermenschen, why did the Red Army have better panzers? If the Ivans just had more panzers (which they also did), that wouldn’t have been so corrosive to Nazi ideology. The USSR was a hell of a big country. Having seen more of it than he’d ever wanted to, Theo knew that right down to his toes. And he also knew the T-34-and, to a lesser degree, the KV-1 as well-made every German panzer look like a model from the year before last.
He said as much to Adi. The Panzer III’s layout put them side by side at the front of the hull. Not only that, Theo trusted Adi further than he trusted… well, just about anybody else. You couldn’t count on people to keep quiet if security forces started hurting them. Short of that, Theo was sure Adi would never betray him. He was pretty sure Sergeant Witt wouldn’t, either, but only pretty sure. The new guys who fattened up the crew? He hadn’t made up his mind about them yet. It wasn’t as if there was any hurry.
Adi nodded. “They’re mighty good, all right. Not perfect, but mighty good.”
“Not perfect? Close enough!” Theo was stung into volubility, or as close to it as he came. “The gun? The
