wouldn’t have to build a fire under the engine compartment to thaw things out enough to start. He hoped… but he didn’t really believe it.
He dripped on his seat when he took his place inside the panzer. The radioman and bow gunner was as far from the engine compartment as he could get. In the Panzer II, Theo’s station had been right on the other side of the fireproof-everyone hoped! — bulkhead. He’d warmed up in a hurry there. No such luck in this machine.
Over on the other side of the centrally positioned radio sat the driver. At Sergeant Witt’s command, Adi put the Panzer III in gear. It rattled and clanked ahead. The engine’s grinding growl seemed a long way off to Theo, who’d been used to listening to it right at his elbow.
Theo glanced over at his comrade, but Adi was paying attention to what he was doing. “How does it seem?” Theo asked. If he wanted to find out, he had to spend some words.
“Feels… a little better, maybe,” Adi answered after a judicious pause. “I don’t want to charge into the thickest slop I can find, you know, just to see if the Ostketten ’ll pull us through it. They’re liable not to, and then you’d have to call a recovery vehicle to fish us out. Everybody’d love me for that.”
If by love he meant scream at, he was right. Otherwise… Otherwise, he was a sarcastic, cynical veteran panzer man, just like thousands of others in the Wehrmacht. Well, almost just like thousands of others. As long as the authorities didn’t notice the difference, everything was fine. It had been fine for quite a while now. Theo hoped it would stay that way.
German authorities weren’t the only ones who could foul things up, of course. The Russians weren’t thrilled about having other people’s tanks gallivanting across their landscape. Theo wondered why. Now that he could see out, he could see what a broad, bleak country this was. It might not have looked so bad when the trees had leaves and the grain was greening toward gold, but the harvest was over and cold and rain had done for the leaves. The word that crossed his mind for the land hereabouts was haunted.
If you were a German panzer man, the landscape damn well was haunted. Russians wore mud-colored uniforms to begin with. And they took camouflage very seriously: more seriously than the Germans did, for sure. They wouldn’t mind rolling in the mud and rubbing it on their faces to make themselves harder to spot. They’d daub mud on their panzers, too, or drape netting over them to disguise their outlines. You might not suspect they were around till a shell slammed into your side armor from a direction you hadn’t worried about.
Adi hit the brakes. Hermann Witt’s voice came through the speaking tube: “Why’d you stop?”
“Ground up ahead doesn’t look quite right,” Stoss answered.
“What’s the matter with it? Just looks like ground to me,” the panzer commander said.
“I’ll go ahead if you want me to, but I’d sooner back up and go around,” Adi told him.
“Do that, then,” Witt said. “You don’t usually get the vapors-and if you have ’em this time, well, shit, you’re entitled once in a while.”
“Thanks, Sergeant. You’re all right, you know that?” Adi put the panzer into reverse. Theo wondered what would have happened were Heinz Naumann still in charge here. No, he didn’t wonder; he knew. Naumann would have ordered Adi to go straight ahead, just to show him who the boss was. And then they would have seen… whatever they would have seen.
As Adi was making his loop, another Panzer III did head straight across the stretch of ground he hadn’t liked. It did fine for about thirty meters. Then it hit a mine that blew off its left track. Curses from the other panzer’s radioman dinned in Theo’s earphones. Now those guys would have to wait for a recovery vehicle, or else come out of their steel shell and try to repair things well enough to limp away. If the Reds aimed an antipanzer cannon at them while they were stuck… That would be hard luck. For them.
Hermann Witt’s voice came through the speaking tube again: “Good job, Adi.”
“Thanks, boss,” the driver answered. Theo wondered what Naumann would have said after they charged into the minefield at his orders. Since the other commander had stopped one with his head, nobody would ever know now. And maybe that was just as well for everyone-except Naumann, of course.
Vaclav Jezek sprawled under a battered chunk of rusting corrugated iron between the Republican lines northwest of Madrid and the Nationalist positions. Rain drummed down on the iron. The ground around the Czech’s hidey-hole was getting muddy. No, by now it had already got muddy. Every so often, a little chilly rill dribbled in with Vaclav. Summer was over. Spanish autumn warned that Spanish winter was coming.
Some yellowing bushes concealed where the muzzle end of Vaclav’s antitank rifle stuck out from under the sheet iron. The bushes also made it harder for him to peer through the telescopic sight, but he didn’t mind. A sniper’s first commandment was Don’t let them spot you. If you didn’t honor that commandment and keep it wholly, you wouldn’t live long enough to learn the second one.
And, naturally, the rain also cut down on visibility. That blade also had two edges. Yes, Vaclav had more trouble finding likely targets. But Marshal Sanjurjo’s men would also have more trouble noticing him if he made a mistake.
He gnawed on a chunk of spicy Spanish sausage. His tongue thought Spaniards put peppers and garlic in everything this side of ice cream. They were even worse than Magyars for hotting up their food. The sausage, actually, wasn’t too bad now that he’d got used to it.
He wished for a cigarette. He had a pack in his pocket, but lighting one now would be a king-sized mistake. Even through the rain, an alert Nationalist might spot smoke leaking out from under the iron sheet.
Some of the American Internationals chewed tobacco when they got into a spot where they couldn’t light up. Vaclav thought about it, but not for long. The idea seemed too disgusting to stand. He could deal with the no-smoke jitters till night fell. Then he could either have a careful cigarette here-making sure the struck match and the coal didn’t show-or go back to the trenches and smoke his head off.
In the meantime… Waiting was a big part of the sniper’s game. If you weren’t patient, you wouldn’t last. One of these days-one of these years-Vaclav wanted to go home to a free Czechoslovakia. Letting some Spanish Fascist asshole pot him before he could wasn’t in his plans.
He moved the antitank rifle a few millimeters. Through the scope, he eyed a new stretch of the Nationalists’ rear entrenchments. It seemed no more interesting than the old stretch had. The Spaniards there were more careless than they were at the front, where an ordinary rifleman could pot anybody who unwarily stuck his head up over the parapet. They thought they were far enough away to be safe.
The hell of it was, they were right. He could have blown some of their brains out, sure. Seeing them in helmets so much like the ones the Nazis wore made him want to do it, too. But he wasn’t about to waste his precious ammo on ordinary Joses and Jorges. If you were going to snipe at long range, you wanted to get rid of the officers, the high-powered guys whose loss hurt the enemy out of proportion to their numbers.
Like this bastard, for instance. He wore an officer’s cap with a high crown and a brim, not a helmet or a service cap. The brim helped keep the rain out of his eyes, but it also told the world what he was. There were stars above the brim. How many? Small or large? That would say how big a fish Vaclav had in his sights. At this range and in this weather, he couldn’t be sure.
Whoever the jerk was, he pointed a finger at one of the ordinary soldiers and told him off in no uncertain terms. That decided the sniper watching him from afar. Anybody who thought he was such a big shot deserved whatever happened to him. Vaclav took careful aim, inhaled, exhaled, and pressed the trigger.
The elephant of a gun slammed against his shoulder. The stock was padded, but that helped only so much. And the report, always fearsome, seemed four times as loud under the sheet of corrugated iron. But the Nationalist officer fell over, which was the point of the exercise.
Vaclav quickly chambered another round. Had the Nationalists seen the muzzle flash when he shot their officer? If they had, would they come after him and try to pay him back?
No one came. He wouldn’t have wanted to hunt snipers in the rain, either. You never could tell, though. Sometimes people got upset when you murdered their officers. Sometimes, no doubt, the regular guys in the trenches hoisted one in your direction when you blew the head off some jackass they couldn’t stand. That was the kind of thing you were unlikely to hear about, which had always struck Vaclav as too damn bad.
He kept watching through the sight. He didn’t intend to fire two in a row from the same spot, not unless he got a terrific target. He’d think twice even then; shooting two in a row without moving felt almost like signing your own death warrant.
After a while, he took a small swig from his canteen. Cheap Spanish white wine tasted different from cheap French white wine, but no better. With regret, he kept it to the one small swig. The less you drank, the less you
