“You are a smart Hebe,” Vaclav said, less ironically than he’d intended. Every word of that rang true.
“Hey, I love you, too.” Halevy made as if to kiss him.
Laughing some more, Jezek pushed him away. “Leave me alone, you fairy!” he said, and laughed again.
“Not guilty.” Halevy shook his head. “I’m a French Jew fighting for the Czechoslovakian government-in-exile in Spain. I’ve got to be normal some kind of way. I like girls. They don’t always like me, but I like girls.”
“Girls don’t always like anybody,” Vaclav said. He and Halevy went on from there. When everything else failed, you could always talk about women.
Vaclav slipped out through the wire before dawn the next morning. If you were in place by the time the sun rose, the bastards on the other side wouldn’t notice you moving. The Nationalists’ would-be sniper had discovered the error of his ways about that, but he’d never get the chance to do it over and do it right, not now he wouldn’t.
The Czech crawled into a shell hole whose forward lip helped shield him from the prying eyes of Sanjurjo’s men. They wouldn’t find him easy to spot any which way. Twigs and branches torn off bushes broke up his helmet’s outline. More camouflaged the antitank rifle’s long barrel. His greatcoat was dun-colored to begin with, and muddy on top of that. He’d smeared streaks of mud on his face, too. They had chameleons in the far south of Spain. He did his best to impersonate one of the goggle-eyed lizards.
Since he lacked goggle eyes of his own, he peered through the scope on his rifle instead. The Nationalists behind the lines seemed busier than usual, hustling here and bustling there. He wondered if they were getting ready to attack in this sector. That wouldn’t be so good, neither for the Republic nor, more relevantly, for his life expectancy.
After a while, though, he decided it wasn’t that kind of hustle and bustle. It seemed more as if they were getting ready to receive a VIP. In spite of himself, excitement coursed through him. People had been telling him to blow Marshal Sanjurjo’s head off ever since he crossed the Pyrenees. What if he really got the chance?
Don’t blow it, that’s what, he thought. One shot, probably out close to 2,000 meters. He could hit at that range. He’d done it before. He’d missed, too, but he refused to dwell on that. Footballers missed all the time, but they kept playing even so. And strikers shrugged off misses and put the ball in the net the next time. Without false modesty, Vaclav knew he was one of the best strikers in this game. He was still here, wasn’t he?
He’d smoked a cigarette just before he emerged from the Republican trenches. The next one would have to wait. As usual when he was out between the lines, he didn’t want to do anything that might give him away.
Time dragged on. If you didn’t know how to wait, you had no business sniping. He ate some sausage. He took a leak. He’d improved the bottom of the shell hole by digging a little trench so he could deal with such things without needing to lie in a puddle of piss afterward.
A Nationalist officer in one of those almost-German helmets surveyed no-man’s-land through field glasses. The nerve of the son of a bitch! Vaclav almost killed him to discourage the Fascists from doing that kind of thing again. They knew that he was out here, or that he was liable to be, anyhow.
He would have disposed of the officer had those binoculars paused while they were pointed his way. He might have done it on general principles if he weren’t after bigger game. He’d never known the Nationalists to do that kind of thing before. Maybe they were trying to make sure their precious big shot would be safe.
Vaclav ducked down before he shook his head. Sorry, boys, he thought. I’m here, whether you see me or not.
He waited some more. Clouds rolled in and turned the day gloomy. He hoped it wouldn’t rain. That would screw up everything. He needed a clear shot if he ever got a target.
A few drops fell. “Come on, God! Quit screwing around!” Vaclav grumbled. “Whose side are you on, dammit?” The rain stopped. Either God was on his side or the rain just stopped. He remembered a day when he would have figured it was God. Now he would have bet it just happened.
Any which way, after a while he spotted a Nationalist general haranguing a bunch of assembled officers. It wasn’t Marshal Sanjurjo. Vaclav knew what he looked like; the Fascists slapped posters of his jowly mug on anything that didn’t move. This guy was younger and skinnier. A good thing, too: if you were fatter than Marshal Sanjurjo, you were too fat to be a general, and probably too fat to live.
Well, this shithead was too Fascist to live. He had an oval, rather disapproving face and a neatly trimmed dark mustache. By the way he gestured, he wasn’t the most exciting speechifier God ever made, no matter on whose side God turned out to be.
He wasn’t quite so far away as Vaclav had thought he might be: no more than 1,500 meters. The Czech aimed with his usual meticulous care. He took a couple of deep breaths. As he let out the second one, he fired.
Muzzle brake or not, padded stock or not, the antitank rifle always tried to break his shoulder. He’d have a fresh purple bruise tonight, to go with the ones that were fading to yellow. But the Nationalist general stopped in the middle of one of his jerky gestures and fell over. As far as Vaclav was concerned, that counted for more than the bruises.
The Fascists started running around like chickens suddenly minus their heads. The guy with the field glasses popped up again. Except for Vaclav’s rule against shooting twice from the same place, he would have nailed him for his presumption. Sitting tight wasn’t easy, but he did it.
His pals back in the Republican trenches were on the ball. They started shooting rifles and machine guns at the Nationalist lines. That made Sanjurjo’s men decide against going out to hunt for him. He appreciated the gesture. Any heirs he might eventually have would, too.
More waiting, then. Once darkness fell, Vaclav crept back to the little stretch of trench the Czechs held. They pounded him on the back and plied him with harsh Spanish brandy and even harsher Spanish cigarettes. “Do you know who you got?” they yelled. “Do you?”
Since Vaclav didn’t, he answered, “Tell me, for Christ’s sake. All I know is, it wasn’t the big cheese.”
“Next best thing, by Jesus,” one of them said. “It was that Franco asshole who’s given us so much grief.”
“Hey! That was worth doing!” Jezek said. Francisco Franco was-no, had been-one of the Nationalists’ better generals. He had balls even if he was a Fascist, and he had a tenacity few on either side showed. What he grabbed, he held on to.
Well, all he’d grab from here on out was a plot of earth two meters long, a meter wide, and two meters deep. In the end, that was all anybody ever grabbed, but when you got it mattered.
The Republicans hadn’t put an enormous price on his head, the way they had with Sanjurjo. All the same, Vaclav bet they’d give him some leave and some cash to have a good time in Madrid for potting Franco. And if you couldn’t have a good time in Madrid, you weren’t half trying.
Battle damage repaired, the Boise steamed out of Pearl Harbor and headed west, looking for trouble. Pete McGill was happy about that. Any chance to give the Japs one in the slats-or, better, one in the nuts-looked good to him.
He wished he were on the six-inch guns instead of the secondary armament. Then he could have fired at enemy ships, not planes. If you sank a destroyer or another light cruiser, you could give yourself credit for hundreds of Japs instead of the lousy one or two you got for hitting a fighter or a bomber. Vera still needed more revenge. No matter how much he tried to take, it could never be enough. That didn’t mean he didn’t want to up his score, though.
Along with the Boise came three destroyers, a heavy cruiser, and the Ranger. All the other ships were along to protect the carrier. The Ranger wasn’t the ideal carrier to go after the Japs. She was just arrived from the Atlantic, and she’d been more a training ship than a combat vessel. But the fleet carriers that had been in the Pacific now lay on the bottom. If the USA was going to hit back at all, it needed to grab whatever it could get its hands on.
“Two years from now, none of this shit’ll matter,” Joe Orsatti said as the gun crew stood by their piece looking out over the wide, empty ocean. “Two years from now, we’ll have so fuckin’ many carriers, they’ll fly out our nose when we sneeze. Tojo’ll see ’em in his bathtub, for Chrissake. Little tiny Wildcats’ll strafe his fuckin’ mustache.”
Everybody laughed. “You’re outa your goddamn tree, you know that?” Pete said, not without admiration.
“Yeah, well, I have fun.” Orsatti looked around some more. “Except when I gotta put up with youse guys, I
