that. How good a chance? Stas wasn’t willing to risk it.
Something not far enough away blew up. “The ammunition store for one of our guns-maybe for a battery,” Lieutenant Colonel Tomashevsky said.
Mouradian nodded. That was what it had sounded like to him, too. Something else was on his mind: “Where are our fighter planes, Comrade Colonel?”
He didn’t think they could possibly be where Tomashevsky suggested. For one thing, he’d always supposed the Devil was male. But wherever they were, they weren’t here. And that was a crying shame. Of all the German bombers, only the Ju-87 had anything close to the Soviet Pe-2’s performance. The Do-17s and He-111s overhead would have been easy meat for even biplane Polikarpov fighters, let alone their monoplane cousins or the hotter, faster new MiGs. Would have been… Some of the saddest words in Russian or any other language.
At last, after doing what they’d come to do, the Germans went away. Soviet fire had brought down one of them. The shattering roar when its whole bomb load blew as it hit the ground almost shook Stas’ fillings loose. But when he stuck his head up to look around, he grimaced. For all the destruction the Nazis had worked, they hadn’t paid much of a price. Most of the buildings around the airstrip were either gone or burning. The strip itself was cratered like photos of the moon. And four columns of greasy black smoke marked Red Air Force bombers’ funeral pyres. Stas hoped none of them was his. Without revetments, it would have been worse. Even with them, it was plenty bad enough.
And Stas had no idea if any bombs had come down in the trenches where men huddled. He also had no idea where the squadron would fly its next mission from. He was sure of only one thing: it wouldn’t be from here, not for a while.
Little by little, Narvik improved as a U-boat base. As far as torpedoes and diesel fuel and repair facilities went, there had never been anything wrong with it. You couldn’t take on as much fresh food there as you could at a base in Germany or even farther south in Norway. That made the ratings grumble-it made Julius Lemp grumble, too-but it wasn’t the end of the world.
But a U-boat base, a proper U-boat base, didn’t just tend to the boats. It also took care of the men who sailed them. When sailors came back from a long, uncomfortable cruise where, like as not, their lives had been in deadly danger, they wanted to blow off steam. They needed to blow off steam. They wanted good booze and bad women. Bad booze would do in a pinch, but good women were right out.
In Germany and the Low Countries, of course, there were brothels in towns full of sailors. People in those towns might not have been proud of that, but they understood it was part of the way things worked.
Norway was different. The locals didn’t even approve of drinking. Like America, the country went through a spasm of prohibition after the last war, though Norway gave up on it in 1926.
As for friendly fornication, or even fornication for hire… Narvik wasn’t a big city like the ports farther south. You couldn’t be a whore here without all of your neighbors knowing and most of them disapproving. Narvik was probably a nice place for kids to grow up (assuming they didn’t freeze to death or go berserk during a long winter night), but the town had never heard of privacy.
Drinking at clubs supported by the Kriegsmarine took the edge off the one problem. The authorities didn’t seem to know what to do about the other.
“I’ll tell you what to do, by God,” Lemp said to the base commandant after the U-30 came back from its latest cruise in the Arctic Ocean. “Bring in enough girls from Germany to keep the crews happy.”
The commandant was a commander named Robert Eichenlaub. He outranked Lemp, but the U-boat skipper was irked enough not to care. And being sure they’d never promote him again because of his earlier foul-ups gave him an odd advantage. He was free to speak his mind. Unless he got himself chucked in the brig, they couldn’t do anything to him worse than what they were already doing.
Commander Eichenlaub looked pained. “It’s not so easy as you make it sound, Lieutenant.” He bore down on Lemp’s rank, trying to put him in his place.
Lemp was in no mood to let him get away with that. “Why not, Commander?” He bore down on the commandant’s rank just as hard. “You can get volunteers in Kiel or Wilhelmshaven and ship them up. Or you can just grab some. They’re only prostitutes, for heaven’s sake.” By the way he talked about them, they might have been gaskets or valves or anything else you requisitioned from the quartermaster. That was how he thought of them, too.
“It wouldn’t work. We don’t even have female secretaries here-and if we did, they wouldn’t want to associate with the working girls,” Eichenlaub said. “Neither would the Norwegians.”
“I’ll bet some of them would,” Lemp retorted shrewdly-and lewdly.
“No doubt-but that doesn’t help us, either,” Commander Eichenlaub said.
“So you’re worried about keeping the whores comfortable and happy, then,” Lemp said.
“They may be whores, Lieutenant, but they’re also human beings,” Eichenlaub answered.
“How about worrying about keeping my men comfortable and happy, then?” Lemp snarled. “They may be U- boat sailors, Commander, but they’re also human beings, too. I’m pretty sure about most of them, anyway.”
They glared at each other. Maybe Commander Eichenlaub wasn’t sure why Lemp seemed immune to disapproval from on high, but he could see that the junior officer was. He didn’t like it, either. “I know the U-boat service takes wild men, Lemp, but you go over the line,” he said, his voice starchy with distaste.
“Why? Because I’m trying to make my men think this is a place they might want to come back to, not Dachau with polar bears?” Lemp said.
“That will be quite enough, Lieutenant Lemp. A note on this conversation will go into your file,” the commandant snapped.
Lemp left. But he left laughing, which was bound to delight Eichenlaub all the more.
The U-30’s diesels were getting an overhaul. That, the base at Narvik could handle. Lemp went out to the docks to see how things were going. He found that another U-boat had come in while he was having his useless discussion with Commander Eichenlaub. He’d known the skipper, a short-and short-tempered-fellow named Hans- Dieter Kessler, for a long time.
“Here we are. Happy day!” Kessler said. “This place is a goddamn morgue. It’s an icebox even in the summertime-it sticks us on a shelf and freezes us out of the fun.”
“What fun?” Lemp asked.
“Good point!” Kessler agreed. “They ought to do something about it. Either that or they ought to give us enough leave so we can go down to some place where they remember how to have a good time.”
Julius Lemp smiled a slow, conspiratorial smile. “Why don’t you go tell the commandant exactly what you think, Hans-Dieter?”
Kessler cocked his head to one side and studied his fellow skipper. “What? You think I fucking won’t? You think I don’t have the balls?”
“No, I think you will, and I know damn well you’ve got the balls,” Lemp answered truthfully. “And I think Commander Eichenlaub needs to know I’m not the only guy who figures his men get a raw deal every time they have to put in here. He may not want to listen to you once you get going.”
“Aha!” Kessler pounced. “So you just reamed him out, did you?”
“Who, me?” Lemp said. Kessler laughed. He headed off toward Eichenlaub’s office with purposeful strides. Of course, he had more of a career to lose than Lemp did. He’d never been so careless as to sink an American liner by mistake. The powers that be might still visit higher rank upon him.
Lemp climbed the iron ladder to the top of the U-30’s conning tower, then descended into the submarine’s hull. They’d had all the hatches open for days, airing the boat out. They’d cleaned in there as they never could at sea. And she still stank. The reeks of diesel fuel and puke and sour piss and unwashed men and stale food were in her paint, or more likely in her steel.
He liked the mechanics working on her engines. They reminded him of his own ratings: they were utterly indifferent to spit and polish, foulmouthed, and damn good at what they did.
An enormous brawl broke out that night in one of the taverns the Kriegsmarine maintained. For a while, it was touch and go whether the shore patrolmen would be able to put it down. One of them had to fire a shot in the air to make the drunken, riotous sailors pay attention to him and his comrades. Not a few men from the U-30 distinguished themselves-if that was the word-in the action.
Commander Eichenlaub wasted no time summoning Lemp back to his office. “Do you know how much
