Sitting there outside of Philippeville not doing anything much finally irritated Hans-Ulrich enough to make him complain to the squadron commander. “We should have stayed in Russia, sir! At least there we’d be flying and blowing up Ivans.”
Colonel Steinbrenner smiled and raised an eyebrow. Hans-Ulrich wondered whether Steinbrenner would point out that, had they stayed in the East, he might still be able to get leave in Bialystok and disport himself with Sofia. But the colonel didn’t. All he said was, “Both sides here have their reasons for not pushing things as hard as they might.”
“Sir?” Rudel’s one-word reply politely declared he didn’t believe it for a minute.
Colonel Steinbrenner’s sigh said he understood as much, and that he thought he was dealing with a classic specimen of boy idiot. “We’re at war with France and England, yes,” he said, coming as close as he could to explaining things in words of one syllable. “But that’s not the war we want, and it’s not a war they want very much. If we don’t push it, maybe, just maybe, the boys with the top hats and striped trousers can make it go away. Then we will see the Ivans again-count on that.”
“Ah.” Hans-Ulrich was an indifferent chess player. Someone else’s clever move often made sense to him-once a man who knew the game better explained it. He never would have seen it or made it himself. He found himself with the same feeling now.
“So that’s what’s happening-I mean, what isn’t happening,” Steinbrenner said. “For the time being, we have to stay ready, that’s all. If the diplomats bugger it up, we’ll get all the flying we want and then some. Or if England and France decide they do mean it after all …” He made a sour face. “Here’s hoping they don’t. Life is complicated enough as is.”
As he’d needed to more than once before, Rudel reminded himself that Steinbrenner had taken over the squadron after the Sicherheitsdienst hauled away the previous CO because he wasn’t loyal enough to satisfy them. So the colonel was politically reliable. And if a man who was politically reliable could go so far …
In that case, life really was complicated enough-and then some.
“Heil Hitler!” Steinbrenner said, which meant he’d had as much of Hans-Ulrich as he aimed to take.
“Heil Hitler!” Hans-Ulrich echoed. His arm shot out in the Party salute. So did Colonel Steinbrenner’s. The junior officer beat it.
Before long, though, not flying started to drive him crazy (or, depending on how you looked at things, crazier). The Stukas remained grounded. He talked himself onto a Fieseler Storch reconnaissance plane for a look-see above the French lines.
It was like piloting a dragonfly when you were used to flying a crow. Sergeant Dieselhorst came along for the ride. Like the Stuka, the Storch carried a rear-facing machine gun. It was almost the only resemblance between the two planes. “I forgot how much fun flying could be,” Dieselhorst said as they buzzed along not far off the ground.
“I know what you mean,” Hans-Ulrich answered. The Storch took off in nothing flat and could land in even less. You could make it hover like a kestrel in any kind of headwind. “What will you use that gun for?”
“Shooting ducks,” Dieselhorst said. “If we can keep up with them, I mean.” He wasn’t kidding, or not very much. The Storch cruised along at 150 kilometers an hour. A Stuka going that slow would have been hacked from the sky in nothing flat. But the Fieseler was so nimble, and could go so much slower than its cruising speed, that enemy planes were almost bound to overshoot it.
Here and there, poilus down below took pot shots at the Storch. When a French machine gun opened up on Hans-Ulrich, he decided it was time to head for home. As he banked out of trouble, Sergeant Dieselhorst fired a defiant burst at the machine gunners on the ground.
“That’s telling ’em,” Rudel said.
“Bet your ass,” Dieselhorst replied. “If they forget we’re a warplane, hell, we’re liable to do the same thing.”
Hans-Ulrich didn’t think that was likely. But the trip in the Storch reminded him there were plenty more ways to fight the war than he was used to.
Chapter 13
At sea. Julius Lemp had forgotten how beautiful those words could be. Yes, the U-30 was still a claustrophobe’s worse nightmare. Yes, it smelled like a rubbish tip crossed with an outhouse. But nobody on the U-boat gave him a hard time on account of his politics.
He made a sour face. He stood on the conning tower, hands raised to hold binoculars to his eyes, so chances were no one noticed. Somebody aboard the boat was bound to report to the people who worried about what snoops aboard submarines said.
His own view was that those people would serve the Reich better if they picked up Mausers and killed Russians till the Russians got lucky and killed them instead. He understood the worst thing he could do was to announce his view. People like that wouldn’t know what to do if they had to fight. Suggesting that they should would only scare them. And if you scared those people, they’d kill you. You couldn’t count on many things in this old world, but you could count on that.
The U-boat rolled. Of course it did. A U-boat would roll in a bathtub, and the North Sea made about the most unruly bathtub there ever was. A faint stink of puke rose from the hatch that led below. But up here, Lemp had some of the freshest, purest air in the world blowing into his face. It was cold, but warmer than it would be in a couple of months-or up in the Barents Sea. Probably warmer than it would be in the Baltic this time of year, too. Which, when you got right down to it, wasn’t saying one hell of a lot.
He wouldn’t have to worry about the Baltic or the Barents this time around. The U-30 was ordered out into the North Atlantic. He looked forward to that the way he looked forward to getting a tooth pulled by a drunken pharmacist’s mate. The Atlantic’s broad, tall swells made the North Sea seem like a wading pool, if not quite a bathtub, by comparison.
Somebody had to sink the ships from America that gave England the food and supplies she needed to keep fighting, though. This time, the Kriegsmarine handed him the job. He’d do it, too, or die trying. Too many officers he’d known at the start of the war had already died trying.
He wished he hadn’t thought of it like that. You felt the footsteps of a goose walking over your grave often enough as things were. When you might as well have invited the damn goose into the churchyard …
“Scheisse!” said one of the ratings up on the tower with him. A moment later, he amplified that with, “Plane-heading our way!” He pointed.
Lemp saw it even without his binoculars-not a good sign. He said “Scheisse!” too, most sincerely. “Go below!” he added, and shouted down the hatch: “Dive! Dive! Crash dive!”
Klaxons hooted inside the steel cigar as the sailors on the conning tower hurtled themselves down the ladder. Air hissed and bubbled from the U-boat’s tanks as she started down. She could submerge in less than half a minute. How much less? Enough to save them from the flying marauder? Well, they’d know pretty soon.
It was a Swordfish, a biplane that should have been obsolete-and was, except for flying off Royal Navy carriers and raising havoc in other people’s navies. The conning tower was already three-quarters of the way underwater when Lemp went below. He slammed the hatch and dogged it shut after him.
Being years out of date, the damned Stringbag couldn’t come on very fast. Not much in the way of good news, but Lemp cherished what he had. “Hard right rudder!” he ordered. “All ahead full!” Eight knots submerged would drain the batteries in an hour, but he didn’t intend to go on anywhere near that long. He guessed the Swordfish would drop its depth charge along his previous course, and wanted to get as far away from that as he could.