Coup d'Etat

Chapter 2

Alistair Walsh had spent his whole adult life in the British Army-which, unlike the Navy and the Air Force, wasn’t Royal. The former sergeant sometimes wondered why not. His best guess, based on long experience, was that no King of England in his right mind wanted to lend his regal title to such a buggered-up outfit.

Almost as soon as Walsh got to France the first time, in the summer of 1918, he stopped a German bullet. The Kaiser’s men had pushed as far as they could then, and soon started getting pushed instead. Walsh was back at the front before the Armistice. He saw enough action to decide he liked soldiering. He certainly liked it better than going back to Wales and grubbing out coal for the rest of his life, which was his other choice when the war ended. He managed to stay in the Army while it hemorrhaged men after peace came.

And he went to France again, this time as a staff sergeant rather than a raw private, when things heated up once more in 1938. Regardless of rank, he knew-he’d had it proved to him-he wasn’t bulletproof. He’d fought in Belgium, and then in France as the Allied armies fell back under the weight of the new German assault. Once they managed to keep the Nazis from sweeping around behind Paris and winning the campaign fast-Wilhelm’s old pipe dream, even if Hitler came equipped with a different mustache-he got shipped off to Norway as part of the Anglo-French expeditionary force that tried to stop the Wehrmacht there.

“That’s when my trouble really started,” he muttered under his breath. A dumpy woman coming the other way on the London sidewalk gave him a funny look. He didn’t care. It wasn’t as if he were wrong.

The Anglo-French force couldn’t stop the Germans. Air power outdid sea power, even if the Royal Navy was Royal. Walsh counted himself lucky for getting out of Namsos before it fell. Plenty of soldiers hadn’t. A Stuka attacked the destroyer that carried him home after sneaking into the harbor under cover of the long northern winter night, but the ship survived to make it back to Dundee.

He’d been on leave, riding a hired bicycle through the Scottish countryside, when… That was when his troubles really started. He’d seen, and recognized, a Messerschmitt Bf-110, a long-range German fighter, buzzing along above Scotland. He’d watched somebody bail out and come down in a field not far from the narrow lane he was traveling.

Why he had to be the one to meet Rudolf Hess and take the Nazi big shot back to the authorities, he’d never worked out. It wasn’t proof of God’s love for him. He was too bloody sure of that. If anything, it was proof the Almighty really and truly had it in for him.

Because Hess was carrying a proposal from Hitler to Chamberlain and Daladier. The Germans were willing to withdraw from France (though not from the Low Countries or Scandinavia, and certainly not from Czechoslovakia, which was what the war was supposed to be about) in exchange for Anglo-French support of the war in the East, the war Germany and Poland were fighting against Stalin.

And Chamberlain and Daladier made the deal. Neither of them had wanted to fight the Fuhrer. They’d even gone to Munich to hand him Czechoslovakia on a silver platter. But he wouldn’t take it peacefully, not after a Czech nationalist took a revolver into Germany and plugged Konrad Henlein, the leader of the Germans in the Sudetenland.

It wasn’t as if Stalin were a nice guy himself. As soon as he saw that Hitler wasn’t sweeping all before him in the West, he demanded a chunk of northeastern Poland from Marshal Smigly-Ridz-a chunk that included the city of Wilno, which not only Poland and the Soviet Union but also Lithuania claimed.

Proud as any Pole, Smigly-Ridz said no. So Stalin invaded. He did not too well for much too long, but finally outweighed the Poles in the area by enough to be on the point of grabbing Wilno. But before he could, Marshal Smigly-Ridz asked Hitler for help. No one ever had to ask Hitler twice about whether he wanted to fight Bolsheviks. That bought him the two-front war from which the existence of Poland had shielded him up till then, but he didn’t care.

Chances were Chamberlain and Daladier preferred fighting Bolsheviks to going after the Nazis. Hitler gave them the bait, and they gulped it with greedy jaws. As Hess had bailed out of the Bf-110, the Fuhrer bailed out of his war in the West. With the Low Countries and Denmark and Norway firmly under his thumb, he had England and France on his side once their leaders pulled the big switch. He might be a vicious weasel, but he was a damned clever vicious weasel.

Some Englishmen couldn’t stomach what their Prime Minister had done. Walsh was one of them, not that anybody cared tuppence about what a staff sergeant thought. But Winston Churchill was another. He hated Hitler and Hess and everything they stood for. He thundered about what an enormous betrayal the big switch was… till he walked in front of a Bentley allegedly driven by a drunk.

No one but Chamberlain and his claque knew whether Churchill’s untimely demise was an accident or something else altogether. No one knew, but plenty of people suspected. Alistair Walsh, not surprisingly, was one of them. He couldn’t stand the idea of fighting alongside the bastards in Feldgrau and coal-scuttle helmets who’d come so close to killing him so often. And he couldn’t stand the idea of fighting for a government that might well have murdered its most vehement and most eloquent critic.

They let him resign from the service. He was far from the only man who couldn’t abide the big switch. Plenty of veterans found themselves unable to make it. But, because he’d seen that parachute open up there in Scotland, he’d acquired better political connections than most of the rest. Churchill might be dead, but other, mostly younger, Conservatives still resisted the government’s move. (It wasn’t Chamberlain’s government any more. Chamberlain was dead, of bowel cancer. But Sir Horace Wilson, his successor, was more ruthless than he had been-and even more obsequious to the Nazis.)

When Walsh casually glanced back over his shoulder, then, he really wasn’t so casual as all that. A nondescript little man was following him, and not disguising it as well as he should have. Someone from Scotland Yard, probably. The police were the government’s hounds. Military Intelligence was split. Some people followed orders no matter what. Others couldn’t stand the notion of being on the same side as the Gestapo.

Walsh rounded a corner and quickly stepped into a chemist’s shop. As the aproned gentleman behind the counter asked “How may I help you, sir?”, the sergeant peered out through the window set into the shop’s front door.

Sure enough, the shadow mooched around the corner. Sure enough, he stopped right in front of the chemist’s to try to work out where Walsh had gone. He came to the proper conclusion-just as Walsh threw the door open and almost hit him in the face with it. The shadow showed admirable reflexes in jumping back. The way his right hand darted under his jacket showed he probably had a pistol in a shoulder holster.

At the moment, Walsh didn’t care. He knew he would later, but he didn’t now. That gave him a startling moral advantage. “Sod off,” he growled. “The more grief your lot gives me, the more trouble I’ll give you. Have you got that?”

“I’m sure I haven’t the least idea what you mean, sir.” The shadow gave a good game try at innocence.

Walsh laughed in his face. “My left one,” he jeered. “You tell Sir Horace to leave me alone. Tell him to leave all of my mob alone. We can make him just as sorry as Adolf can-he’d best believe it, too. Tell him plain, do you hear me?”

He had the satisfaction of watching color drain from the other man’s face. “I don’t speak to the likes of the PM,” the shadow gasped.

“I’ll wager that’s the truth, any road,” Walsh said brutally. “But you talk to somebody who does talk to him, right?” Without waiting for an answer, he went on, “Tell him it’s still a free country, and it’ll go right on being one, too. We aren’t bloody Fritzes. We don’t put up with his kind of nonsense. Think you can remember that?”

“Oh, I’ll remember.” The shadow regained spirit. “And I’ll lay you’ll remember, too-only you won’t be so happy about it. The cheek!” He did walk off then, which surprised Walsh. Was someone else following the follower, and Walsh as well?

If someone was, he wasn’t blatant enough to give himself away. As luck or irony would have it, Walsh hadn’t been going anywhere or intending to meet anyone who would have interested either the shadow or his superiors, up to and including Horace Wilson, in the slightest. He hadn’t tried to tell that to the man he’d confronted. He knew it would have done him no good. England remained nominally free. But its people were starting to learn totalitarian lessons, and one of the first of those was that nobody believed you when you said you were doing something altogether innocent. And the more you insisted on it, the worse off you ended up.

Hans-Ulrich Rudel eyed his Ju-87 like a parent looking at a child just out of surgery. The groundcrew men who’d performed the operation seemed proud of themselves. “There you go, sir,” said the Luftwaffe corporal who’d bossed the crew. “Now you can take off and land your Stuka no matter how shitty the weather gets.”

“Well… maybe,” Hans-Ulrich answered. As far as he was concerned, that maintenance sergeant had just showed why he stayed on the ground.

Not that the fellow didn’t have a point. Putting skis on the Ju-87 in place of wheels let the dive bomber take off and land in conditions it couldn’t normally handle. The Ivans did that kind of thing all the time. If any flyers in the world were used to coping with vicious winters, the men of the Red Air Force were the ones. And Stukas’ fixed undercarriages made the conversion easier than it would have been on planes with retractable landing gear.

Even so, anybody who tried to take off or land in the middle of one of these screaming blizzards would crash and burn. You did want to be able to see when you were getting airborne or coming down. Mistakes at the beginning or end of a flight wrote off almost as many planes as enemy fighters and flak.

Sergeant Albert Dieselhorst ambled up. The radioman and rear gunner considered the skis with enthusiasm hidden amazingly well. His gaze traveled from them to the panzer-busting 37mm gun pods mounted under the wings. “Happy day,” he said. “We’ll be even less aerodynamic than we were already.”

Rudel winced. Those heavy, bulky gun pods did up the drag and make the Ju-87 slower and less maneuverable than it was without them. All the same, the pilot answered, “Take an even strain, Albert. She couldn’t get out of her own way even before they bolted on the skis.”

“Sir!” The groundcrew corporal sounded hurt. Hans-Ulrich half expected him to clap a hand to his heart like an affronted maiden in a bad melodrama.

“Hell, he’s right,” Dieselhorst said. “We count more on our armor than on our guns and our speed-ha! there’s a laugh! — to get us through when we’re in a jam.”

He wore the Iron Cross First Class on his left breast pocket. Rudel wore the Knight’s Cross on a ribbon around his neck. A lowly groundcrew corporal with only the ribbon for the Iron Cross Second Class-a decoration that, in this war, you had to work hard not to win-hooked to a tunic button couldn’t very well argue with either one of them.

Two days later, the weather was good enough for flying. The Stuka’s big Junkers Jumo engine fired up right away when the groundcrew men cranked it and spun the prop. They had a mechanical starter mounted on a truck chassis, but nothing they did would make the truck motor turn over. Muscle power and bad language sufficed. A minister’s son, Hans-Ulrich rarely swore and almost never drank. If not for that Ritterkreuz and all it said about his nerve, he would have been even more a white crow to his comrades than he already was.

Snow and the skis smoothed out the dirt airstrip’s bumps and potholes better than the wheels had. But Rudel quickly found Sergeant Dieselhorst had made a shrewd guess. The Ju-87 flew like a garbage truck with wings. If any Russian fighter found him, even one of the obsolete biplanes the Ivans kept flying, he and Albert were in a world of trouble.

Snowy fields, bare-branched birches with bark almost white as snow, pines and firs and spruces all snow-dappled… The Russian landscape in winter. The sun never climbed far above the southern horizon, not in these latitudes. Because it stayed so low, it cast long shadows. The Reds were better at camouflage than even the thorough Germans dreamt of being, but not for all their ingenuity could they hide shadows. Neither whitewashing them nor draping them with netting did Stalin’s men the least bit of good.

Hans-Ulrich might not have noticed the Russian panzers moving up to the front. They were well whitewashed, and Soviet soldiers trotted in their wake with whisks made from branches to smooth out their tracks so those didn’t show up from the air. They did a pretty good job of that, too. Rudel might not have seen the tracks. Shadows, though… Shadows he saw.

He gave Dieselhorst the number of panzers he observed and their approximate position. The radioman with the rear-facing machine-gun mount relayed the news to the Germans on the ground. Hans-Ulrich added, “You can tell them I’m attacking, too.” He tipped the Stuka into a dive.

Acceleration pressed him against the armored back of his seat. He wondered if the skis would act as small airfoils and change the plane’s performance, but they didn’t seem to. The groundcrew men hadn’t touched the Jericho trumpets mounted in the landing-gear struts. The screaming sirens terrorized the Russian foot soldiers, who ran every which way like ants from a disturbed nest.

Panzers couldn’t scatter like that-and, inside those clattering hulls, even the wail from the Jericho trumpets took a while to register. The machines quickly swelled from specks to toys to the real thing. Rudel’s finger came down on the firing button. Each 37mm gun bellowed and spat flame.

Recoil from those monsters slowed the Stuka even better than dive brakes. Hans-Ulrich yanked back hard on the stick. Things went red in front of his eyes as the Ju-87 pulled out of the dive. If you weren’t paying attention, you could fly a dive bomber straight into the ground. Several Germans in the Legion Kondor had done it in Spain. Stukas got autopilots after that, but the men who flew them unanimously hated the gadgets. Hans-Ulrich had had groundcrew men disable his, and he was far from the only pilot who had.

“You got the bastard!” Sergeant Dieselhorst’s voice through the speaking tube was like sounding brass. “Engine’s on fire, crew’s bailing out.”

“Good.” Rudel couldn’t see behind him, so he had to rely on the radioman’s reports. Experience in France and here had taught him to aim for the engine compartment. Almost any panzer’s armor was thinnest on the decking there. He manhandled the Stuka into a climbing turn. “Let’s see if we can kill another one, or maybe more than one.”

The pillar of greasy black smoke rising from the rear of the panzer he’d struck told him it wouldn’t be going anywhere any more. He nodded to himself in somber satisfaction. He’d killed a lot of enemy armor with the big guns. He must have killed a lot of enemy panzer crewmen, too, but he tried not to dwell on that.

After he’d gained enough altitude, he chose another whitewashed Russian panzer and tipped the Stuka into a new dive. Again, the Jericho trumpets howled. This time, though, they didn’t take the Ivans on the ground by surprise. Hans-Ulrich had a low opinion of Russian brains, but not of Russian balls. The Reds opened up on the Stuka with their small arms. The commander of Rudel’s new target vehicle fired a burst from the turret with a submachine gun.

All that might have made the Ivans happier, but did them no good. You couldn’t shoot accurately at a dive bomber from the ground-it was going too fast. Even if you got lucky and hit it, the engine and the compartment that housed the two crewmen were armored against rifle-caliber bullets.

Blam! Blam! The Stuka’s big guns thundered again, at almost the same instant. Hans-Ulrich pulled out of the dive. He brought his fist down on his thigh in triumph when Sergeant Dieselhorst reported that he’d nailed another one. “Aim to go after number three?” Dieselhorst asked.

“Why not?” Rudel said. “Hardly any Russian panzers carry radios. They won’t call fighters after us.”

“Some do, so you hope they won’t,” the veteran underofficer replied.

That was nothing but the truth. Hans-Ulrich didn’t want to meet fighters, not in his ungainly machine. He got more ground fire in this dive than he had before. At least one lucky round clanged into the Stuka, but it did no harm. And when the 37mm guns belched fire once more, they wrecked another Soviet panzer.

Part of Rudel wanted to go after a fourth Russian machine, but common sense told him that was a bad idea. Sooner or later, fighters blazoned with the red star would show up around here. The best thing he could do was to be somewhere else when they did. He hauled the Stuka’s nose around and flew off to the west.

Ivan Kuchkov counted himself lucky to be alive. He was a short, squat, brawny Russian peasant. The authorities had yanked him off the collective farm where he grew up and put him in the bomb bay of an SB-2 medium bomber. Short, squat, and brawny were ideal qualifications for a bombardier. Smart wasn’t, and nobody, including Ivan himself, had ever claimed he was.

He hadn’t tried to keep track of how many missions he’d flown, for instance. He just knew there’d been a lot of them. He also knew that, if you flew a lot of missions against the Nazis, you were waiting for the law of averages to catch up with you.

And it did. The Tupolev bomber had got hit and caught fire on the way back from a run into German-held Byelorussia. Kuchkov bailed out. He didn’t think either the pilot or the copilot and bomb-aimer made it. He’d flown with Sergei Yaroslavsky ever since they “volunteered” to aid Czechoslovakia against Fascist invaders when the war was new. Unless his brain was totally fucked, he wouldn’t be flying with the lieutenant any more.

He wasn’t sure he’d be flying at all. Red Army men rescued him and got him away from the Germans after he landed. The first lieutenant commanding the company didn’t want to give him back to the Red Air Force. Lieutenant Pavel Obolensky recognized a hard-nosed son of a bitch when he saw one. Obolensky wanted Kuchkov fighting for him.

“The air force? Faggots fight in the air force,” the lieutenant declared. “You’re a real man, right? Real men belong in the Red Army!”

That was nonsense, as Kuchkov had reason to know. “I bet my bombs killed more Fascists than all the fuckers in your cocksucking regiment, sir,” he said. He wasn’t being deliberately disrespectful. He just spoke mat, the obscenity-laced underworld and underground dialect of Russian, as naturally as he breathed. He almost didn’t know how not to swear.

Luckily for him, Lieutenant Obolensky, like Yaroslavsky, recognized as much and didn’t come down on him on account of his foul mouth. “Maybe they did,” the infantry officer said. “But fuck your mother if we don’t get to watch the cunts die when we nail ’em.” Like most Russians, he could use mat, too, even if he didn’t make a habit of it the way Kuchkov did.

“You’ve got something there,” Ivan admitted. He thought it over, then nodded. “Why the hell not?” Remembering such manners as he owned, he saluted. “Uh, sir.”

For the moment, the Red Air Force probably thought he was as dead as the rest of the SB-2’s crew. That made turning into a foot soldier easier. One of these days, his proper service would figure out that he’d kept breathing after all. That was likely to complicate his life. But it wasn’t as if he’d deserted, and he’d never been one to borrow trouble. Plenty came along on its own, thank you very much.

Such calculations had nothing to do with his choice. Along with being short and squat and strong, he was dark and ugly and uncommonly hairy. In the Red Air Force, they called him the Chimp. He hated it. Anyone who came right out and used the nickname to his face, he did his best to deck, and his best was goddamn good. But he knew people called him Chimp behind his back. Maybe joining up with a bunch of strangers would let him escape it.

He might be rugged as a boulder, but he was curiously naive. He could get away from the nickname he despised for about twenty minutes-half an hour, tops. As soon as anybody with even a little imagination got a look at him, he was as sure to be tagged Chimp (or maybe King Kong) as a redhead was to get stuck with Red or Rusty.

Lieutenant Obolensky was making calculations of his own. The main one was that Sergeant Kuchkov would be worth eight or ten ordinary guys in a fight. At least. And so the lieutenant grinned when Kuchkov didn’t make a fuss about staying in the air force.

“Ochen khorosho!” Obolensky exclaimed. As far as he was concerned, it was very good indeed. “Let’s get you kitted out.”

Ivan’s fur-lined flight suit gave him better cold-weather gear than most of his new comrades enjoyed. Thanks to Obolensky, though, he got a white snow smock to put over it. He also got a tunic with collar tabs in infantry crimson rather than air force blue. And he got a submachine gun to replace the Tokarev pistol he carried as a personal weapon. He didn’t ditch the pistol, though. You never could tell when an extra weapon would come in handy.

He’d maintained the machine guns in the SB-2’s dorsal and belly turrets. Next to them, the PPD-34 might have been a kiddy toy. It was plainer and uglier than the Nazis’ Schmeisser, but it had a seventy-one-round drum magazine. That made it heavier than a Schmeisser, but so what? It kept firing a lot longer, too. He knew he’d have to clean the magazine even more often than the weapon itself, which boasted a chromed barrel and chamber. Dirt could foul the clockwork mechanism that fed cartridges into the PPD. A jam was more likely to prove fatal than just embarrassing. No jams, then.

Ivan shifted the three metal triangles that marked his rank from old collar tabs to new. Lieutenant Obolensky gave him a squad right away-infantry units took more than their share of casualties, and Obolensky had had a corporal who barely needed to shave running it. The junior-very junior-noncom didn’t resent losing the position he hadn’t held long. Lucky for him, too; if he had, Kuchkov would have whaled the piss out of him.

One advantage of air force life was sleeping out of artillery range of the enemy, sometimes even in a real cot in a heated barracks. Nothing like that here. There weren’t even tents. You wore as many clothes as you could, rolled yourself in a blanket (if you had a blanket) as if you were a cigar and it the wrapper, and either you slept or you didn’t.

The soldiers in Ivan’s new squad eyed him warily, wondering how he’d cope with living rough. No one came out and said anything about it to him. Not all the infantrymen could read and write, but ignorance didn’t make them stupid. If they pissed him off, he’d make them sorry. He had the look of somebody who wouldn’t worry about regulations when he did it, either.

Three days after parachuting down into the Red Army, he led his squad out on patrol. He picked a skinny little nervous Jew called Avram as point man. Somebody like that was liable to jump at shadows, but he wouldn’t happily amble into a Nazi trap.

Even with his fur-and-leather flying togs on under the snow smock, Ivan was miserably cold. In wool greatcoats, the ordinary Red Army men would be even colder. But, from everything everybody said, the Germans would be colder yet. Russians made jokes about Winter Fritz. Ivan hoped all the jokes were true.

A private trotted back to him. “There’s a field up ahead, and a village out past it,” the fellow reported. “Avram says the Germans are holed up in the houses.”

“Oh, he does, does he?” Ivan still didn’t know how far he could rely on Avram-or anyone else in the squad, come to that. “I’ll fucking see for myself.”

“Be careful going forward, he says,” the private told him. “A sniper in the village can hit you if he sees you.”

“Right.” Kuchkov wasn’t sure if the Zhid was only warning him or trying to find out if he was yellow. He didn’t know all the ground-pounders’ tricks yet. He did know enough to keep his head down and to stay behind trees as much as he could. He made it out to Avram without getting shot at. The point man sprawled behind a stout pine. “So? Nazi cocksuckers in the village?” Ivan asked him.

“ Da, Comrade Sergeant.” Avram nodded. “If you want to look-carefully-you’ll spot them.”

Only his eyes showing under the snow smock, Ivan peered out from behind the pine. The Germans in the village weren’t being nearly so cautious. “They’re fucking there, all right,” he agreed. “Scoot back to the lieutenant. Tell him where the cunts are at. Tell him we can take ’em-bet your ass we can-if the machine gun and mortar help keep our dicks up.”

After another nod, Avram silently disappeared. He made a good point man. Half an hour later, Lieutenant Obolensky crawled up to check things out for himself. The mortar crew and machine gunners set up not far away. Ivan smiled wolfishly. Obolensky didn’t think he had the vapors or was showing off, then. Outstanding.

Other men from the company took places near the edge of the woods. They’d be ready to go forward as soon as they got the word. The lieutenant put a hand on Kuchkov’s shoulder. “You’re right,” he whispered. “We can take them. And we will.”

Soldiers swigged from their hundred-gram vodka rations, borrowing bravery for the fight ahead. Kuchkov drank, too, because he liked to drink. The mortar dropped bombs on the village. The machine gun sprayed death toward it. Obolensky’s brass officer’s whistle squealed like a shoat losing its nuts to the knife. “Forward!” he yelled.

“Urra!” the Russian soldiers roared as they swarmed out of the woods. A few rifle shots answered them, but no machine gun. Either the Germans didn’t have one there or the mortar’d knocked their crew out of action. Ivan pounded forward with the rest. Till he got a lot closer, the PPD was just a weight in his hands.

He never did have to fire it. The Nazis put up only a token resistance. Then they got the hell out of there. A bullet broke one Red Army man’s arm. Another fellow lost the bottom half of his left ear and bled all over his snow smock. The Nazis left two dead men behind. How many casualties they took with them, Ivan couldn’t guess.

The village came back into Soviet hands-not that any peasants remained in it. It had been a dreary little place even before the Germans overran it. Kuchkov didn’t care. He’d proved himself in front of his men. That, he cared about.

Vaclav Jezek found himself even more isolated in Spain than he had been in France. The Czech hadn’t imagined such a thing possible, but there you were. The Spanish Republic might have been the most isolated country, or half a country, in the world. When England and France forgot about fighting Fascism and turned on the Bolsheviks instead, they made a point of forgetting about their erstwhile Iberian ally.

Great Powers had the luxury of doing such things whenever they pleased. Jezek didn’t. He’d battled the Nazis ever since the day they jumped Czechoslovakia. Instead of surrendering after the Germans overran Bohemia and Moravia and Father Tiso led Slovakia into Fascist-backed “independence,” he crossed the border into Poland and let himself be interned.

The Russians hadn’t jumped the Poles then, so Poland remained neutral. Czech soldiers were allowed-even unofficially encouraged-to go to Romania (likewise neutral in those days) and from there by sea to France to take service with the Czechoslovak government-in-exile. Vaclav did all that. His thinking, and the government-in-exile’s, was that keeping the Nazis from conquering France was his own country’s best and perhaps only hope for eventual resurrection.

That best hope looked none too good. The Czech lands (and Tiso’s puppet Slovakia) remained under the Reich ’s muscular thumb. Which was not to say Corporal Vaclav Jezek hadn’t done the Germans as much harm as one man could. From a poilu who’d never need it any more, he’d acquired an antitank rifle: a godawful heavy weapon that kicked like a jackass but could drive a thumb-sized armor-piercing bullet right through the hardened steel plating on a German light tank or armored car.

He also discovered that the antitank rifle made a great sniper’s piece. It shot far and fast and flat. After he mounted a telescopic sight on it, he could pick off a man more than two kilometers away: not always, but often enough to be useful. At half that range, he’d blow off a Nazi’s head with nearly every round.

His countrymen and allies loved him-till the French suddenly turned into Hitler’s allies instead. Just as suddenly, the Czechoslovak government-in-exile and its little army became embarrassments. France somehow did find the courtesy not to intern the men who’d given their blood to help keep her free. She let those of them who so desired cross the Pyrenees to Republican Spain instead.

In France, Sergeant Benjamin Halevy, a French Jew with parents from Prague, had interpreted for the refugee soldiers. Now he was a refugee himself, having no more stomach for fighting on the Fuhrer ’s side than did the stubborn Czechs.

Someone fluent in French like Halevy could follow a word of Spanish here and there, the same way a Czech could understand bits of Russian. Vaclav had learned just enough French to swear with. The only foreign language he really spoke was German. That was of no more use to him here than it had been in France. It was the enemy’s tongue in the Spanish Republic as it had been on the northern side of the mountains, but fewer people in these parts understood it… and most of the ones who did backed Marshal Sanjurjo’s Fascists, not the Republic.

Most, but not all. The fighters from the International Brigades had come to Spain to lay their lives on the line to halt the advance of Hitler and Mussolini’s malignant ideology. Some were from America, some from England, but more from Central and Eastern Europe. An awful lot of them could speak German or Yiddish, even if they were no more native speakers than Vaclav.

By what amounted to a miracle in this bureaucratic age, the powers that be in the Republic realized as much. Instead of sending the Czechs to some threatened border region (and all the Republic’s borders except the one with France were threatened), the Spaniards grouped them with the Internationals defending Madrid.

The Internationals were Red, Red, Red. Vaclav couldn’t have cared less. Just like him, they killed Fascists. They didn’t seem to worry about anything else but a soldier’s universals: ammo, food, tobacco, and pussy. Nobody tried to make him bow down toward Moscow five times a day.

They appreciated the antitank rifle and what he could do with it. “We have a few of those ourselves, but we never thought of using them for sniping,” said a fellow who called himself Spartacus. It was a nom de guerre; he spoke German with a throaty Hungarian accent.

Vaclav loved Magyars hardly more than Germans. He had to remind himself he and Spartacus were on the same side. “It works,” he said. He wasn’t about to let anybody take the man-tall monster away from him.

But that wasn’t what Spartacus had in mind. “I bet it does. That’s the idea,” he said. “Why don’t you start thinning the herd of Fascist officers?” His thin, dark mustache made his smile even nastier than it would have been otherwise.

“I can do that. As a matter of fact, I’ve been doing it, in France and here,” Vaclav said. No one here would have paid much attention to what he’d been up to. That was what you got for being a newcomer, especially if you had language troubles.

“All right. Good. Very good.” The Hungarian International seemed on the stupid side to Vaclav, to say nothing of overbearing. Most Magyars seemed that way to most Czechs. Magyars weren’t as bad as Germans, but they were a devil of a long way from good… if you eyed them from a Czech’s perspective, anyhow.

How Czechs seemed to Magyars was another question altogether-not one Vaclav had ever thought to ask himself, and not one he was likely to ask himself, either.

His biggest complaint was one he hadn’t expected to have in sunny Spain: the trenches northwest of Madrid got as cold as a German tax collector’s heart. Sunny Spain was, even in wintertime. But the central plateau lay some distance above sea level, and the winds seemed to blow straight through him. He’d been warmer up near the Franco-Belgian border.

As long as he didn’t shiver while he pulled the trigger, though, he could do his job. If anything, it was easier here than it had been in France. However much he despised the Germans, he couldn’t deny that they made sensible soldiers. Officers didn’t look much different from their men. Sometimes they’d even turn their shoulder straps upside down to make it harder for a sniper to spy their rank badges.

Marshal Sanjurjo’s soldiers weren’t like that. A man in those ranks who was somebody wanted to show that he was somebody. He prominently displayed the gold stars that set him off from the common, vulgar mob. And he often wore a uniform of newer, finer cloth and better cut than the ragged, faded yellowish khaki the ordinary Fascist soldiers had to put up with.

All of which made it much easier for Vaclav to spot enemy officers. An aristocrat in a neatly pressed uniform, his stars of rank glittering under the bright Spanish sun, sometimes had a moment to look absurdly amazed when he made the acquaintance of one of the antitank rifle’s fat slugs.

More often, the Fascist bastard just fell over. Vaclav wasn’t fussy; nobody gave out style points.