“What’s to do, anyway?” Pfaff was more inclined to try to reason with Baatz. “We’re here. The Reds aren’t, not right this minute. We don’t have sentry duty. Why not relax while we’ve got the chance?”
“Lazy fuckoffs, that’s what you are. Both of you.” But Awful Arno went away to inflict himself on someone else.
Once Willi was sure the underofficer had got out of earshot, he said, “Why couldn’t the Russians have shot him in the head, not the arm?”
“Bullet would’ve ricocheted,” Pfaff answered. Willi laughed till he almost pissed himself, a telling measure of how tired he was.
A field kitchen-a goulash cannon, in the Landsers’ slang-made it into the village. The unit was horse-drawn, and not much different from the ones that had served the men who’d fathered this crop of soldiers. A motorized oven probably would have got stuck in the mud fifty kilometers back.
It wasn’t goulash in the big pot. There were Hungarians in the fight against the Ivans. Willi wondered whether their field kitchens really did dish it out, all red and spicy with peppers. What he got was kasha and onions and meat, all boiled together till they turned into something halfway between stew and library paste.
He’d had worse. He’d had nothing, too, and nothing was much worse. “Do I want to know what the meat is?” Adam Pfaff asked the potbellied, gray-mustached Feldwebel dishing out the stuff. It was a standard soldier question.
It didn’t get a standard soldier answer. “Why? Is your sister missing, or something?” the noncom returned.
He didn’t faze Pfaff. Not much did, from what Willi’d seen. All Adam said was, “I think Ilse would cook up greasier than this.”
One corner of the cook’s mouth twitched. Then he chuckled. He made a face, as if he was mad at himself, but he couldn’t help it. “All right. You’re a funny guy,” he said gruffly. He might have accused Adam of carrying a social disease.
“He’s funny like a truss,” Arno Baatz declared.
The Feld just looked at him-no, looked through him. Unlike the men in Awful Arno’s section, he didn’t have to put up with the Unteroffizier’s guff. He outranked Baatz, too, so nothing held him back from speaking his mind, which he did with more than a little relish: “I want to know what you think, sonny boy, I’ll blow my nose and check the boogers on my snotrag.”
A slow flush mounted from Baatz’s thick neck all the way to his hairline. The Feldwebel couldn’t have cared less. He’d seen real action in his career. He wore a wound badge of his own, the ribbon for an Iron Cross Second Class so faded that he might well have won it in the last war, and, on his left breast pocket, an Iron Cross First Class.
Behind Awful Arno, somebody said, “Let’s give three cheers for Booger Baatz!”
The Unteroffizier jumped straight into the air, as if someone had jabbed him in the ass with a hat pin. He whirled around before he came down. Had anyone else done it, Willi might have admired the performance. As things were … Admiring Awful Arno-no, Booger Baatz-was more trouble than it was worth.
“Who said that?” Baatz shouted furiously. “Who said that? Out with it, you gutless son of a bitch!”
Naturally, no one said a word. All the Landsers spooning up their stew might have been little angels. Willi knew Awful Arno would have blamed him had he been standing over there. He only wished he would have been clever enough to stick Baatz with the new handle.
“You bastards! You miserable, stinking turds!” Awful Arno was really working himself up into a first-class snit. “You-”
“Shut up.” The middle-aged cook’s quiet voice cut through his bluster like a hot knife slicing lard. “They don’t hang names like that on guys who haven’t earned ’em.”
Baatz’s jaw dropped. The last thing he’d looked for was a surprise attack from a fellow noncom. The private who served the goulash cannon with the Feldwebel snickered. He could afford to; he wasn’t under Baatz’s orders.
“I’ve run across pukes like you before,” the Feld with the gray mustache went on. “You’re just lucky nobody’s shot you in the back yet. You keep on the way you’re going, you’ll find out.”
Willi looked down at the muddy ground. It wasn’t as if plugging Baatz hadn’t crossed his mind. He didn’t want that to show on his face, though. Next to him, Adam Pfaff was eyeing his scuffed boots, too. Odds were half the men in the section were doing the same thing for the same reason. And odds were, after the field kitchen rolled away to feed the next German detachment, Awful Arno would make more soldiers want to murder him.
Chapter 14
Pete McGill was always happy when the Ranger steamed out of Pearl and headed west. They were going out to give the Japs hell. Giving the Japs hell was what he wanted more than anything else on earth.
Some of the other Marines who served with him were less enthusiastic. “Man, those assholes, they can sink us, too,” a corporal named Barney Klinsmann said at breakfast the morning after they headed out on patrol. He shoveled corned-beef hash into his face as if he thought they’d outlaw the stuff tomorrow. Some guys needed to get their sea legs under them before they started stuffing themselves like that. Not him.
“Fuck ’em,” Pete said flatly. “You don’t think we’ll lick ’em, fuck you, too. In the heart.”
Klinsmann surged to his feet. Pete was big and as solid as he could be after his injuries-he’d worked hard putting muscle back on. The other guy had a couple of inches and twenty pounds on him even so. He didn’t care. He stood, too. “Nobody talks to me that way, you bastard,” Klinsmann growled.
Other leathernecks grabbed them and kept them from going at each other. “Take an even strain, the both of youse,” Sergeant Cullum said. “We’re supposed to be fighting the slanties, remember?”
“I remember,” Pete said. “This bum, he wants to hide under his bunk instead.” He tried to point at Klinsmann, but the Marines holding his arms wouldn’t let go.
“Bullshit,” the bigger man said. “I just said we gotta watch ourselves. And we do, on account of this here is the only carrier in the Pacific what still floats. The only American carrier, I mean. The Japs, they got a shit-pot full.”
“Enough, dammit.” Cullum let his impatience show. “Am I gonna hafta talk to an officer or somethin’?”
That subdued both Pete and Barney Klinsmann, as he must have known it would. Squabbles between noncoms weren’t worth getting excited about-till an officer noticed them or had them brought to his attention. Officers could throw the book at you. Pete often thought the book was the only reason officers existed.
He quit struggling against the men who held him. So did Klinsmann. Cautiously, their fellow Marines turned them loose. They both settled down to their interrupted breakfasts. Sergeant Cullum beamed beatifically at one and all.
As they walked out of the galley, Pete spoke in a low voice: “You know that little compartment aft of the portside heads, the one where they stow the mops and brushes and shit like that?”
“Oh, fuck, yes,” Klinsmann answered, also quietly. “What time you wanna be there?”
“How about 0200 tomorrow?” Pete said. “Not like we need a bunch of busybodies around.”
“You got that right,” the other man said. “See you then.”
When Pete officially slid out of his bunk at 0530, one eye was almost swollen shut. He had a cut lip and a broken bottom eyetooth. His ribs felt as if someone had been kicking them. Well, someone had. They didn’t seem broken, though, so that was okay. He dry-swallowed a couple of Bayer’s finest, not that they’d help one hell of a lot. He didn’t feel a day over ninety-seven.
Sergeant Cullum raised a quizzical eyebrow. “You go and trip over the deck rivets again?” he inquired.