cannon and machine gun sent death snarling through the woods, hunting him. Ducking back into the foxhole seemed the better part of valor.
He couldn’t stay down there, though, not unless he wanted the Landsers moving with the armored cars to get in among the trees and pull him out with a bayonet like Frenchmen spearing escargots from their shells with skinny little forks. Life wasn’t much fun when your choices lay between bad and worse.
Worse was, well, worse. He popped up again, glumly certain the assholes in that second armored car were just waiting to see him. And they were. Machine-gun rounds cracked past, a meter or two above his head. But he got off a couple of shots of his own before taking cover once more.
Benjamin Halevy’s whoop told him they’d done some good. Cautiously, he peered out to see for himself. The other armored car had gone nose-down in a shell hole. If that didn’t say he’d punched the driver’s ticket, he didn’t know what would. He chambered another round. Going after infantrymen with an antitank rifle was a lot like murder, but not enough to stop him.
But he didn’t have to. Some of the Allied soldiers who’d come into the woods had a mortar of their own with them. The bombs started dropping among the sorry bastards in Feldgrau. Some of the Germans dove for the craters that pocked the landscape. Others beat it back toward the cover of the artificial hillock.
A couple of Fritzes did neither. One lay ominously still, right out in the open. The other writhed like an earthworm after a marching boot came down. Thin in the distance, his screams sounded just like the ones that would come from a wounded Czech or Frenchmen. Torment was a universal brotherhood.
Halevy’s rifle barked: once, twice. The German stopped thrashing and yelling. He lay as quiet as his comrade a few meters off. Vaclav glanced over to Halevy’s foxhole. The Jew looked faintly embarrassed. “I didn’t want to listen to that racket any more,” he said.
“Sure. I know what you mean,” Vaclav answered. Sometimes the only favor you could do a man was kill him. Vaclav hoped even a Fritz would be kind enough to take care of that for him if he ever caught a nasty one.
Not yet, thank God! Benjamin Halevy was eyeing the hill made from industrial rubble. “How the devil are we supposed to clear the Germans off of that?”
Vaclav replied without hesitation: “Have to flank ’em out of it. They could slaughter a regiment that tried to go straight over.”
“Too right they could,” Halevy agreed mournfully. “But do you know how many positions just like this one there are all over this part of France?”
“Too fucking many. I’ve already seen too fucking many,” Jezek said.
“Now that you mention it, so have I,” Halevy said. “And at every goddamn one of them, the foot sloggers stuck in front of it are going, ‘Have to flank it out.’ But a lot of the time there’s no room to go around the flank of one without bumping into another one head on.”
“And so?” Vaclav said. “Infantrymen aren’t dumb. They want to go on living just like anybody else.”
“Uh-huh.” The Jew nodded. “But the generals want to throw the Nazis out of France. And you know what that means.”
“It means a lot of us end up dead whether we like it or not,” Vaclav said.
“Yup. I’m afraid that’s just what it means.” Halevy nodded one more time.
Carefully, Julius Lemp brought the U-30 into the harbor at Namsos. Except for a few diehard Norwegians up in the still-frozen far north-not enough men to matter-Norway lay in German hands. U-boats could put in and depart from any Norwegian port. That made it much harder for the Royal Navy to defend against them. It tore the North Sea wide open, and gave the submarines a running start on getting out into the Atlantic.
Well, up to a point, anyhow. Namsos wasn’t worth much yet, not so far as the Kriegsmarine was concerned. English engineers had done their best to wreck whatever the new occupants might find useful, and to booby-trap whatever they couldn’t wreck. As was usually true in cases like this, English engineers’ best was all too good.
German engineers and labor gangs-some from the Reich ’s Organization Todt, others made up of drafted local men-prowled the harbor, trying to set things right. Lemp supposed they would manage sooner or later. Given the battered state of everything he could see, he would have bet on later.
A man in naval officer’s uniform waved to him from a half-burned pier. “You didn’t see any mines in the fjord, did you?” the fellow called.
“Jesus Christ!” Lemp yelled back from the conning tower. “Haven’t you cleared them yet?”
“Well, we think so,” the other man answered.
That did not fill his heart with confidence. In fact, it made him clap a hand to his forehead. “Heilige Scheisse!” he said. “Why did you let me come in here if you weren’t sure?”
“You made it, didn’t you?” the officer on the pier said soothingly. “The marked channel was all right.”
“Sure-and it was about a meter wider than my boat,” Lemp said.
“What more do you need?” the other fellow said, proving he hadn’t done any shiphandling lately. Lemp wanted to inquire about his mother, but didn’t think the man on the pier would take it in the proper spirit.
He didn’t care to quarrel with the ignorant fellow, anyhow. He could get food and water and fuel and ammunition for his guns here. Pretty soon, no doubt, the Reich would start shipping torpedoes up to the Norwegian ports, too. If the boats didn’t have to go back to the Vaterland, they could stay at sea longer and travel farther-and they could hit the enemy harder.
If only France had gone belly-up like Norway! The French coast lay a lot farther west and south than Norway did. Lemp imagined U-boats staging out of Brest and St. Nazaire and Bordeaux. How long would England have lasted had that happened? The Reich almost starved the British Isles into submission in 1917. With that kind of advantage working for it, making England knuckle under would have been easy this time around.
Would have been, yes. Things hadn’t worked out exactly the way the Fuhrer had in mind. That was why there’d been machine-gun fire in Kiel when the U-30 came in at the end of last year. That was why so many high- ranking Army and Navy officers (only a few from the Luftwaffe, which had belonged to Goring from the start) were either dead or in places designed to make them wish they were.
And it was why, even in the notoriously easygoing U-boat service, people had to watch what they said these days. Every boat had a man or two aboard who would blab to the authorities ashore. Even a joke told the wrong way could get a good seaman hauled off between a couple of hatchet-faced Sicherheitsdienst officials. Men who were hauled off like that didn’t come back again.
For now, Lemp refused to dwell on such things. What was the point, when he couldn’t do anything about them? If he complained to his superiors, he’d find out for himself what the inside of a concentration camp was like. You might not care for everything the people running the country did, but it was still the Vaterland. You had to serve it as best you could.
Once the U-30 had tied up at the pier, Lemp asked one of the men who’d made the boat fast, “Do the Tommies ever pay you a call? Not very far from England to here-a lot closer than from England to Germany.”
“Yes, sir,” the rating agreed. “They’ve come over a few times. But the nights are getting short even faster than they are back home-we’re a long way north, you know. We’ve got good flak, and we’ve got fighter cover. One thing that’s plain as the nose on my face”-he grinned, being the owner of a pretty impressive honker-“is that the bombers can’t fight fighters and can’t run, either.”
“That’s not what people thought before the war started,” Lemp said.
“I know.” The rating lowered his voice a little: “If it weren’t so, though, we would’ve knocked England flat by now, eh?”
“Wouldn’t be surprised,” Lemp said, also quietly. They smiled at each other and went about their business. A man could feel he was bucking the system just by speaking a few plain truths.
A man could also feel good about getting back to terra firma. Supper was chicken stew with fresh vegetables. The crew of the U-30 had been living off sausage and beans and sauerkraut long enough to get sick of them. They kept body and soul together, which was as far as praise would reach. The beer that went with supper was mighty welcome, too.
So were the showers in the barracks. Saltwater soap didn’t get a man clean. Gerhart Beilharz toweled himself off with a blissful grin on his face. “I don’t have to smell myself for a while, let alone everybody else,” the Schnorkel expert said in delight.
“Harder for you to knock your brains out, too,” Lemp replied. Beilharz was two meters tall, not the ideal height for a submariner.
