The direction from which enemy fire came told him which way to crawl. The grass smelled all green and growing. A rich scent rose from the black earth, too. Willi might be a city boy, but his nose said the Ivans were missing a bet by not raising wheat or beets or something right here.
Then that nose of his almost ran into the snub nose of a Red Army soldier crawling through the grass toward the German positions. Both men yelped in horror. Neither had had the slightest idea the other was there till the sea of grass parted and they nearly banged heads.
Willi tried to aim his Mauser at the Russian. The Ivan had a rifle, too, but jerked his hand away from it as if it were red-hot. “Kamerad!” he bleated, and “Freund!” After that, he gabbled out a stream of Russian, of which Willi understood not a word.
He could have murdered the Red Army man in cold blood. He had no doubt Awful Arno would have plugged the Ivan without a second thought, or even a first one. But the guy was trying to surrender. Willi supposed he was, anyhow. The Russian didn’t say boo when Willi grabbed his rifle. Then Willi frisked him-he didn’t want to send the guy on his way and end up catching a grenade. Like the English, the Russians used round bombs. They held less explosive than a German potato-masher, but you could throw them farther. Willi confiscated the three on the Ivan’s belt, and his sheathed bayonet, too.
He found the soldier’s identity book. It had a photograph of the guy and a bunch of writing in an alphabet that was just squiggles to Willi. He handed it back to the Ivan. Why not? It wasn’t any use to him. He jerked his thumb toward the southwest, the direction from which the German advance was coming.
The Russian gave forth with what Willi guessed were thanks. He was pretty sure spasibo meant danke, anyhow. “Go on,” Willi said roughly, hoping he hadn’t missed any lethal hardware-or that, if he had, the dirty, scared-looking, sorry son of a bitch in khaki wasn’t inclined to use it.
Off Ivan went. What happened to him afterwards, Willi never knew. He cared very little. The guy didn’t double back on him or have a spare grenade Willi’d missed. That, Willi cared about. He crawled on. The Landsers behind the line could send the Russian to a POW camp. Or they could shoot him, if they decided they’d sooner do that. It wasn’t Willi’s worry. The Red Army men still ahead were.
Out through the Kiel Canal. The abrupt change in the U-30’s motion would have told Julius Lemp when they got out into open water even if he’d been below. But he was up on the U-boat’s conning tower. As soon as the North Sea waves started slapping the boat, she began rolling in the way he’d found so familiar for so long.
One of the ratings up there with him didn’t take the new motion for granted like the skipper. “Fuck me,” the sailor said, gulping. “I’d forgotten how rough it gets out on the open sea.”
“If you’ve got to puke, Hans, don’t puke into the wind,” Lemp advised. “The idea is to get rid of what ails you, not to wear it.”
“Right.” Hans gulped again.
“If you can’t keep scanning, I’ll send you below with a bucket and call up somebody who can,” Lemp said. “Now that England’s turned her coat, we’ve got to worry about the Royal Navy and the RAF again. They aren’t half-assed like the Russians. Give them even a piece of a chance and they’ll sink us.”
“I’ll stay, Skipper,” Hans said quickly. Lemp would have said the same thing in his unhappy place. Up here, the fresh air fought seasickness. Down inside the reeking pressure hull, the boat’s rolling would have a potent, pungent ally.
All the same, Lemp knew he would have to watch Hans as well as the horizon. He hadn’t been joking. Anyone inefficient up here would have to go. You might get away with taking chances against the sloppy Slavs. Against the English? A good thing everyone had a will on file.
Diesels thrumming through the soles of Lemp’s shoes, the U-30 made fifteen knots on a course a little west of due north. The boat would round Norway’s southwestern bulge and then follow the country’s coastline farther north and east. Too many Tommies on the Ostfront had made their way through Soviet lines. The easiest, fastest way to bring them back to England would be to ship them out of Arkhangelsk or Murmansk.
The Fuhrer didn’t want them to come home-and who could blame him? Sooner or later, probably sooner, they’d get back into the war against the Reich. Better to send the freighters or liners carrying them to the bottom. Then Germany wouldn’t need to worry about them any more.
“Perfidious Albion,” Lemp muttered. His breath smoked. Spring might be here, but the North Sea was damned if it wanted to admit it.
“What’s that, Skipper?” Hans asked.
“Nothing. Just swearing at the damned limeys.”
“They’re a pain, all right,” the rating agreed.
“How’s your insides?”
“Not too bad, as long as I don’t think about ’em. Maybe I’ll cuss England out, too.”
Somebody-whether it was Hans or not, Lemp didn’t know-gave back a meal inside the hull before they put in at Namsos on their way north. That made the stink in there worse, but not by so much as an outsider might have expected. It wasn’t the first time somebody’d heaved in the boat, and an overturned bucket meant the nasty stuff had got into the bilgewater. Once that happened, a stench would stay with the U-30 as long as the boat lasted.
The Kriegsmarine had started to fit Namsos out as a U-boat base after the town fell. Then, with the war against England and France suddenly forgotten, the work was forgotten, too. Now the war-or part of it, anyway-was on again, and so was the work.
Namsos probably hadn’t been an exciting place before the Wehrmacht took it away from its defenders. It was a real mess now. German crews with torches went about carving up the English warships and freighters that had gone down in shallow water trying to resupply and evacuate the town. The steel would be useful; whatever could be salvaged intact, even more so.
Namsos itself could have used cutting up and salvaging, too. Bombing and artillery meant hardly a building didn’t have a chunk or two bitten out of it. Lemp saw only a few Norwegians. Most of them looked sullen. If they were delighted to have come under German occupation, they hid it very well.
Two or three men wore the uniform of the Nasjonal Samling, the Norwegian equivalent of the German NSDAP. The head of the NS, a former officer named Vidkun Quisling, helped the Germans govern Norway. The only problem was that his party, unlike the Nazis, enjoyed next to no popular support. German bodyguards accompanied the NS men walking through the harbor.
The head of the base, a Kapitan zur See named Waldemar Bohme, was blunt when he discussed the issue with Lemp as fresh food went into the U-30. “Anybody who doesn’t belong to the
NS figures anybody who does is a traitor,” Bohme said gloomily. “And nobody belongs to the NS.”
Lemp glanced toward one of the uniformed Norwegians. It wasn’t quite a German uniform, but it was in the same general style. “He does,” the U-boat skipper remarked.
“There are a handful of them,” Bohme agreed. “It would almost be easier if there weren’t any. Then we wouldn’t have to waste our own men keeping the rest of the Norwegians from murdering these… people.” Had he known Lemp better, he might have called the NS officials worse. But you never could tell who might report you. Staying innocuous was safer.
“Quisling must have some support,” Lemp said.
“Some, ja.” Bohme still sounded glum. “The Nasjonal Samling got less than two percent of the vote in 1936, down from a hair over two percent in 1933. And as soon as the fighting started here, half their members-more than half-bailed out and picked up rifles and tried to shoot us.”