Grunting, Pete grabbed a shell and handed it to the loader, who slammed it into the five-inch gun’s breech. Joe Orsatti trained the gun to bear on the enemy planes’ expected track toward the Ranger. Pete stood ready to pass as many fifty-pound shells as might be needed. His shoulder complained every time he did it, but he’d long since quit listening.
Overhead, the Wildcats tangled with a swarm of Japanese Zeroes. Wildcats had a chance against Zeroes, but not usually a great chance. One of the American planes splashed into the ocean as Pete watched. “Shit!” he said.
And the Zeroes kept the Wildcats too busy to do what they should have been doing: going after the dive-bombers that followed the fighters in. Japanese naval dive bombers-Vals was the U.S. code name for them-were ugly and old-fashioned. Like German Stukas, they had fixed landing gear. Also like Stukas, they could put a bomb down on a silver dollar if you gave them the chance.
Four of them pulled away from the main bunch and buzzed toward the Boise. A Wildcat that broke off from the big melee shot one of them down. A moment later, a Zero shot down the Wildcat. The rest of the Vals droned on.
All the light cruiser’s antiaircraft guns, large and small, started going off at once. Pete jerked shells like a man possessed. Bursts blackened the air all around the enemy planes. One took a direct hit and turned into a fireball. The other two dove.
Joe Orsatti frantically swiveled the five-inch gun. “Aw, fuck!” he said, again and again. “Aw, fuck!”
Bombs fell free. One of them hit fifty feet to starboard of the Boise. The other caught the cruiser just abaft the bridge.
Pete flew through the air with the greatest of ease. Next thing he knew, he was in the blood-warm Pacific. He was amazed how far from the ship he’d been thrown. A good thing, too, because the Boise was already starting to settle in the water. Pete looked around for a life ring. He could dog-paddle for a while, but… Off to his left, a dark gray dorsal fin sliced the sea. It was the oldest shipwreck cliche in the world-except when it happened to you. And it was happening to Pete.
Theo Hossbach huddled with the rest of the panzer crew around a little fire in a peasant’s hut in a tiny village whose name, if it had a name, was written in an alphabet he couldn’t read. He wished for hot coffee thick with sweet cream. Yes, he was from Breslau, but Viennese-style would have suited him fine.
They’d found some tea in the hut. Water was boiling in a dented pot over the fire. No sugar. No milk. An Englishman probably would have killed himself before he drank such Scheisse. Theo looked forward to getting outside of anything warm. He would have drunk plain old hot water just then, and been glad to have it.
Hermann Witt took the pot and filled everybody’s tin cup. The loose tea in the bottom of Theo’s cup smelled great when the water hit it. He had to make himself wait before he drank so it would brew some in there.
“The Tommies would laugh at us.” Not for the first time, Adi Stoss’ way of thinking paralleled his.
Everybody swore at the Tommies-everybody except Theo, who as usual kept his ideas to himself. “Lousy bastards ran out on us, same as the French fuckers,” Lothar Eckhardt growled. The gunner scratched without seeming to notice he was doing it. Odds were he was lousy himself. Theo was pretty sure he was, too. You came into one of these places, you’d pick up company whether you liked it or not.
“Next time we see Englishmen, it’ll be through our sights,” Kurt Poske agreed.
Adi said, “Well, the good news there would be, we’d be seeing Tommies instead of Ivans. That’d mean we’d got out of Russia in one piece.”
Theo sipped his tea. By now, it was plenty strong. The caffeine made his heart beat faster. It sure held more than the ersatz coffee that came with German rations. He wondered if that crap had any at all. You could get benzedrine tablets. He’d used them once in a while-who didn’t, when you needed to keep going? — but he didn’t like them. They were too much like squashing a cockroach by dropping a building on it. Caffeine, now, caffeine was just right.
“Two-front war,” Witt said, and not another word. With just Theo and Adi there, he probably would have talked some more. Neither Kurt nor Lothar had ever given the slightest hint they would bring anything to the National Socialist Loyalty Officer, but the panzer commander didn’t take needless chances in combat with the enemy or with his own side.
“That’s what screwed us the last time. I just hope it doesn’t screw us again,” Adi said. Maybe he trusted the two new guys further than Witt did. Maybe he had his reasons, too. If Eckhardt or Poske ever reported him to the powers that be, odds were they wouldn’t do it for anything so trivial as a few ill-chosen words. He had bigger things than that to worry about.
“I wouldn’t mind getting the hell out of Russia. I mean, who in his right mind would?” Eckhardt said, a sentiment that certainly had its points. He went on, “I don’t want to get my sorry ass run out of Russia, though, know what I mean? We get run out of Russia, things aren’t going so good.”
Adi nodded. So did Theo; that was plainly true. But Adi said, “You know what this miserable country is? It’s a swamp with no bottom, that’s what. We throw in panzers and planes and people, and then we throw in some more and some more and some more after that, and the swamp just kind of goes glup! and it’s like we never did anything to begin with.”
“Glup!” Theo echoed. He liked that.
“There’s got to be a bottom somewhere,” Hermann Witt said slowly. “The Ivans have to run out of land and soldiers and machines sooner or later.” He grimaced. “Only thing I wonder is whether the Reich ’s pole is long enough to reach that bottom.”
Sooner or later. People had been saying the Russians were bound to run out of people and stuff ever since the Germans started fighting them in northeastern Poland. Now the Germans (and the Poles and Romanians and Magyars and Slovaks, but-dammit! — not the English or French any more) were halfway to Moscow. All the same, sooner or later was looking more and more like later.
The fire dwindled down toward extinction. Like the other guys in the crew, Theo glanced around for more wood to throw on it. He didn’t see any. There wasn’t any to see; they’d burnt the last of it. Sergeant Witt said, “Lothar, go on out to the woodpile in the square and bring back some more fuel.”
Eckhardt picked up his Schmeisser. Everybody kept a weapon handy all the time. You never could tell when some Reds would sneak past the German pickets and raise hell. But the gunner couldn’t go out without pissing and moaning first: “I just fetched firewood like two days ago. Why don’t you send the Hebe instead?”
It hadn’t been noisy inside the hut before. Now silence seemed sudden and absolute. The wind still howled and whined, but that might have been a million kilometers away. “What did you call me?” Adi asked softly. His machine pistol lay beside him. He wasn’t holding it, the way Lothar held his. All the same, Theo would have bet on Adi if shooting started. And shooting didn’t seem very far off at all. Theo glanced down at his own Schmeisser- just in case, he told himself. In case of what, he didn’t want to think about.
For a wonder, Lothar actually got how far he’d stuck his foot into it. “Hey, take an even strain,” he said, making no quick or herky-jerky moves. “I didn’t mean anything nasty by it. Honest to God, Adi, I didn’t. But, so you know, everybody in the company calls you that when you aren’t around to hear it.”
Theo hadn’t heard anyone call Adi that. Which proved… what? Not much, probably. If self-sufficient Adi had a best buddy, it couldn’t be anybody but Theo. People wouldn’t say anything Adi didn’t fancy where Theo was around to overhear it. If it got back to Adi… Theo wouldn’t have wanted him for an enemy. Nobody with a pfennig’s worth of sense would.