Vaclav laughed. "Swell! You know more about dealing with these people than I do, that's for sure." He sent the quartermaster sergeant a suspicious stare. "Now, will he turn loose of the stuff when I need it, or will he decide he has to keep it because it's too important to fire off?"
Halevy spoke more French. The supply sergeant raised his right hand, as if taking an oath. "He says he'll be good," the Jew reported. Vaclav decided he'd have to take that-it was as good as he'd get. And if the Frenchman turned out to be lying, threatening to blow a hole in him with the antitank rifle ought to get his attention.
Now that Vaclav had enough ammunition for months if not years, he found that he had little to do with it. The Germans had pulled most of their armor out of this sector. They were digging in for all they were worth; it might have been 1916 over again. The French kept promising offensives, then stopping in their tracks whenever the boys in field-gray shot back at them.
Without tanks and armored cars to shoot at, he started doing just what he'd told the snooty young French lieutenant he'd do: he sniped at the Germans from long range. Behind their lines, the Wehrmacht men moved around pretty freely. They didn't think anyone could hit them from the Allies' positions. One careful round at a time, Vaclav taught them they were wrong.
"Congratulations," Benjamin Halevy told him one day.
"How come?" Jezek asked.
"Prisoners say the Nazis really want the son of a bitch with the elephant gun dead," Halevy answered.
It was a compliment of sorts, but it was one Vaclav could have lived without. He hoped he could go on living with it. He was a careful sniper. He never fired from the same place twice in a row. He didn't move from one favorite spot to another. As often as not, he didn't know whether he'd shift to the left or right till he tossed a coin to tell him. If he couldn't guess, the Germans wouldn't be able to, either. He made sure nothing on his ratty uniform shone or sparkled (that was easy enough). He fastened leafy branches to his helmet with a strip of rubber cut from an inner tube to break up its outline.
German bullets started cracking past him more often than they should have even so. Regretfully, he decided the prisoners had known what they were talking about. When one of those bullets knocked a sprig off his helmet camouflage, he realized the Germans had to have a sniper of their own hunting him.
That made for a new kind of game, one he wasn't even slightly sure he liked. It wasn't army against army any more. The Germans didn't think of him as one more interchangeable part in an enormous military machine. They wanted him dead, him in particular. This was personal. He could have done without the honor.
When he complained, Sergeant Halevy said, "All you have to do is put down the antitank rifle and go back to being an ordinary soldier."
"I'm killing a lot more Germans than the ordinary soldiers are," Vaclav said.
"Then you'd better figure they'll do their goddamnedest to kill you," Halevy replied.
Vaclav started hunting the German sniper. He found a brass telescope in an abandoned farmhouse (it wasn't as if the officers on his side would give him field glasses-perish the thought!) and painted it a muddy brown so it wouldn't betray him. He also had to be careful not to let the sun flash off the objective lens and give him away.
The German was good. Jezek might have known he would be. Well, he wasn't so bad himself. That he still prowled and hunted proved it. He took shots at other Nazis as he got the chance. Somewhere over there, a German with some kind of fancy rifle of his own was waiting for a mistake. If Vaclav made one, he wouldn't have to worry about making two-or about anything else ever again. JULIUS LEMP STUDIED HIS ORDERS. He turned to his executive officer. "Well, Klaus, what do you think of these?"
Klaus Hammerstein blinked. He'd served on the U-30 with Lemp since before the war started, but as a lowly Leutnant zur See till the previous exec got tapped for a command of his own. Now, newly promoted to Oberleutnant zur See, and to second in the chain of command, Hammerstein had to deal with his skipper in a whole new way. "They're interesting, that's for sure," he ventured.
"Interesting. Ja." There was barely room for two people in Lemp's curtained-off little excuse for a cabin. You worked with what you had, on the boat and with the crew. "What do these orders make you wonder?" Lemp pressed. If Klaus didn't have what it took to swing it as the executive officer, they both needed to find out right away.
The kid studied them again. "How many other boats are getting orders just like these right now?" he said after a pause only a little longer than it should have been.
And Lemp nodded, pleased. "There you go! That's exactly what I'd like to find out." Naval high command wouldn't tell him, of course. Anything he didn't urgently need to know was something he shouldn't know. What he didn't know, he couldn't spill if things went wrong and he got captured.
"I could ask around," Klaus said.
"Don't," Lemp told him, not without regret. "Anybody who told you would be breaking security. Better not to tempt somebody-and better not to give the Gestapo an excuse to come down on us."
"Oh," Hammerstein said, and then, "Right." Lemp's head went up and down once more, crisply this time. Things went better when you didn't need to worry about looking over your own shoulder… quite so much, anyhow.
Two days later, the U-30 chugged out into the North Sea. The men ate like pigs. You had to get rid of the fresh food first, because it wouldn't keep. They'd go back to sausage and tinned sauerkraut and hard-baked bread soon enough-too soon, really. Boiled beef, stewed chicken, fresh cabbage, even some peaches… Lemp gobbled down his share. He might have eaten a little more than his share. He was the skipper, after all. But his pants still fit all right, so he couldn't have been too much of a greedyguts.
Gerhart Beilharz put the Schnorkel through its paces. Lemp was less nervous about the gadget than he had been when it first got installed. It hadn't misbehaved too badly, and it did come in handy every now and then. Lemp still would have liked it better if the brass had given it to him as a reward rather than a punishment.
The tall engineer said, "It's working the way it's supposed to, Skipper."
"All right." Lemp hoped it was. He was also more willing to believe Beilharz than he had been when the beanpole came aboard with the Schnorkel. Beilharz had to be two meters if he was a centimeter. He needed his Stahlhelm, all right. U-boats weren't built with people his size in mind.
This was a different kind of patrol. Instead of telling him to go out into the Atlantic to torpedo freighters traveling between the Americas and England, the orders over which he and Klaus had puzzled instructed him to stay in the North Sea and patrol north and south between two fixed parallels of latitude. He was to sink anything he saw, and to be especially alert for Royal Navy warships.
That codicil kept him scratching his chin. The Royal Navy wasn't in the habit of pushing into the North Sea. As long as it could keep German surface vessels bottled up-which it hadn't managed with the Admiral Scheer-it kept its distance, leery not only of U-boats but also of land-based airplanes.
So why did his orders talk about enemy warships as if expecting them to rush into the path of his patrol? It made for a nice strategic question, one that gave both officers and ratings something to chew on. Lemp had his own opinion-or rather, his own suspicion. He didn't voice it; even on a U-boat, people were often reluctant to contradict the skipper. He was amused to discover he wasn't the only one to arrive at that suspicion. Amused, yes, but not surprised. If you could read a map and thought a little about how and where the war was going, it was one of the things that seemed likely.
Likely, of course, didn't have to mean true. It might prove nothing but so much moonshine. Lemp knew how much he didn't know. The ratings sounded much more confident than he did. They didn't worry about what they didn't know. From his days in school, Lemp remembered Socrates going on about such things.