Hitler's war

Chapter 8

Achilly wind whipped snow through the air almost horizontally. A good coal stove heated the officers’ barracks outside of Drisa. All the same, Anastas Mouradian shivered. “I’ll never be warm again,” he said in his deliberate Russian. “Never, not till July and the five minutes of summer they have here.”

Sergei Yaroslavsky and the other men in the barracks were all Russians. They hooted at the effete southerner. They’d all seen plenty of weather worse than this. “Hell, we could fly in this if we had to,” Sergei said.

“And we might, too,” somebody else added. “Is it five o’clock yet?”

After a glance at his watch, Sergei said, “A couple of minutes till.”

“Good,” the other flyer said. “Turn on the radio. Let’s hear the news.”

Mouradian was closest to the set. He clicked it on. It made scratchy, flatulent noises as it warmed up. There were better radios-Yaroslavsky had seen, and heard, that in Czechoslovakia. He didn’t say anything about it. Things weren’t so bad as they had been during the purges the year before, but a careless word could still make you disappear.

Or you could disappear for no reason. Plenty of people had.

“Comrades! The news!” the announcer said. “In the West, the capitalists and Fascists continue to murder one another.” He gave a summary of the day’s fighting-or rather, the claims and counterclaims about the day’s fighting, finishing, “Plainly, by the lies and contradictions on display, neither side in this struggle of reactionary decadence is to be believed.”

“May the Devil’s grandmother eat them all up,” another pilot said. The sentiment was unexceptionable. The way the man put it wasn’t. Russians talked about the Devil and his relations all the time. When the Soviet Union was aggressively atheist, though…Such talk could land you in trouble if someone who didn’t like you reported it.

Anything could land you in trouble. Sergei’d just been thinking about that.

“In the Far East, Japanese imperialists continue to encroach on the territory of the fraternal socialist Mongolian People’s Republic,” the announcer said. “The Foreign Commissar, Comrade Litvinov, has stated that such incursions cannot and will not be tolerated indefinitely.”

“Wonder if that’s where we go next,” Mouradian said. Sergei had wondered the same thing when he was ordered to fly their SB-2 out of the Ukraine. But they’d ended up at the other end of the USSR instead, about as far from the trouble in Mongolia as they could get.

And there might have been reasons for that, because the next words out of the newsreader’s mouth were, “The semifascist Smigly-Ridz regime in Poland has once more rejected the Soviet Union’s just and equitable demands for an adjustment of the border in the northeast. The Poles still cling to their ill-gotten and illegal gains from the war they waged against the USSR in the early 1920s.”

Everybody leaned toward the radio. In portentous tones, the announcer went on, “Comrade Stalin has spoken with grave concern of the way the Polish regime mistreats the ethnic Byelorussians in the area in question. How long the peace-loving Soviet people can tolerate these continued provocations, only time will tell.”

He went on to talk about the overfulfillment of the norms for the current Five-Year Plan. Yaroslavsky listened to all that with half an ear; it didn’t directly affect him. The other did. When Stalin said he didn’t like the way somebody did something, that somebody was commonly very sorry very soon. And hardly anything could make a country sorrier faster than flight after flight of SB-2 bombers.

“I didn’t think we’d go,” Sergei said. “If the Poles yelled to the Nazis for help, that would put German troops right on our border, and-” He didn’t say and that wouldn’t be so good. Most of the men in the barracks had served in Czechoslovakia. They knew what rough customers the Hitlerites were.

Anastas Mouradian picked up where he left off: “If the Nazis get bogged down against England and France, they’ll be too busy to do anything about what goes on here.”

Several flyers nodded. Sergei was one of them; it looked that way to him, too. He would have said it if his crewmate hadn’t. “Soldiers are moving up toward the border. So…” The pilot who said that let his voice trail off. He wasn’t a general, and he wasn’t a prophet. You didn’t want to come out with anything that might be remembered too well.

“We aren’t going to fly right this minute,” another officer said, and produced a bottle of vodka. Despite what Sergei had said before, he was obviously right. The bottle went round. Pretty soon, another one followed it. One more after that and they wouldn’t have been able to walk or see, let alone fly. The Red Air Force ran on vodka as surely as it ran on aviation gasoline.

They got their orders the next day. Sergei still felt the drinking bout. Like the other flyers Lieutenant Colonel Borisov summoned to his office, he did his best not to show it. “We are going to liberate our Byelorussian brethren from the yoke of the Polish semifascist regime,” the squadron commander declared. “Marshal Smigly-Ridz has refused to be reasonable and democratic, and so we must persuade him.”

He’s refused to do what we want, and so we must pound the shit out of him. Sergei had no trouble translating Communist jargon into what went on in the real world. By the knowing grunts that came from several other men, neither did anyone else.

“Red Army units will enter the territory to be liberated at 0700 tomorrow morning,” Borisov declared. His eyes were cat-green but set on a slant; like so many Russians, he likely had some Tatar in the woodpile. “Your assignment will be to strike at Polish troops, and to bomb the rail junction at Glubookoje to prevent the Smigly-Ridz regime from bringing up reinforcements. Questions?”

“What if the weather doesn’t let us fly, Comrade Lieutenant Colonel?” Sergei asked.

“Then we will stay on the ground,” Borisov answered. “But our superiors do not believe that is likely.”

What exactly did he mean there? Did higher-ups in the Red Army and Red Air Force have reliable forecasts of good weather? Or would the SB-2s take off no matter how rotten the weather was? Yaroslavsky suspected the latter. With air-cooled engines, the bombers wouldn’t freeze up the way they might with liquid cooling. And they’d had skis installed instead of landing wheels, so they could deal with snow pretty well. Even so…

Sergei suspected a plan somewhere said, Air support will be laid on at such and such a time in such and such places with so many bombers and so many escorting fighters. Bad weather? Plans like that didn’t worry about such mundane details. Come what might, the air support would be laid on.

“Other questions?” Borisov asked.

His tone said he didn’t really want any more, but Anastas Mouradian raised his hand anyway. Frowning, Borisov nodded at him. “What do we do if the Nazis come in on the Poles’ side, Comrade Lieutenant Colonel?” Mouradian asked.

Several people inhaled sharply. That was a question with teeth, all right. Borisov didn’t look happy. “The hope and expectation are that this will not occur.”

“Yes, sir,” Mouradian said, and he waited.

The contest of wills was silent. The squadron commander didn’t want to say anything else. Mouradian didn’t want to come right out and ask, But what if it does? That silence stretched tighter and tighter. Finally, it snapped. So did Borisov: “We are at war with Germany. If German troops or aircraft operate against us, we are to prosecute the war against them. Is that clear?”

“Yes, sir. Thank you, sir,” Mouradian said.

It was clear to Sergei, too. He didn’t like it. Poland and Romania had been the USSR’s shield against Fascist Germany. If the Poles scream for help to their Western neighbor, that shield was gone. Stalin never would have made demands on Poland if the Germans weren’t up to their eyebrows in war on their other frontier. But if they weren’t quite up to their eyebrows…

Sergei had faced Messerschmitts and German antiaircraft guns in Czechoslovakia. He didn’t relish doing it again. Of course, the next time anyone set over him gave a damn about his opinion would be the first.

Maybe the high command did know something. Sergei was sure stranger things had happened, though he couldn’t think of one offhand. The day was cold, but it was bright and sunny. The SB-2 was fueled up and bombed up and ready to go. Sergei and Mouradian and Ivan Kuchkov climbed in.

Groundcrew men spun the bomber’s props. The engines roared to life. Sergei ran his checks. All the instruments looked good. The SB-2 slid down the snow airstrip. Sergei pulled back on the stick. The nose went up. The airplane left the ground. Anastas Mouradian cranked up the landing gear. The skis retracted almost as neatly as wheels.

Snow down below made navigation a challenge. It would have been harder yet if artillery bursts hadn’t shown the way. Tanks and soldiers were swathed in white, but cast long shadows across the even whiter snow. There was the border, and there were the Soviet troops crossing it to liberate the fraternal, peace-loving people who lived just to the west.

And there were the Polish oppressors: more soldiers in white with shadows stretching over the snow. Antiaircraft guns opened up on the SB-2s. After facing German fire, Sergei didn’t think much of this.

He saw a good concentration of troops and trucks ahead. There was the railroad line, too. If he plastered the neighborhood, he could do what Lieutenant Colonel Borisov wanted done. “Ready, Ivan?” he bawled into the speaking tube.

“Ready, sir!” the noncom answered.

“Khorosho. Mouradian will tell you when to drop,” Sergei said. Anastas was down in the bottom front of the SB-2’s glasshouse cockpit, peering through the bombsight.

“Now!” he shouted, and the stick of bombs tumbled from the plane’s belly. As always, the SB-2 immediately got peppier and more maneuverable. Yaroslavsky took advantage of that by getting out of there as fast as he could. He’d seen a couple of gull-winged PZL fighters in the neighborhood. They weren’t supposed to be anywhere near as dangerous as Me-109s, but any fighter was dangerous if you happened to be a bomber.

Other SB-2s were also hitting that concentration. The Poles down there had to be catching hell. Well, if they wouldn’t give the Soviet Union what it was rightfully entitled to, this was what they got.

Back to the airstrip he flew. He found it, much to his relief. The ski-carrying landing gear descended. Getting down was an adventure, but at last the SB-2 slid to a stop. Groundcrew men wearing white snow smocks over greatcoats rushed forward to refuel the plane and bomb it up again. “How’d it go?” one of them called, his breath smoking in the frosty air.

“Routine,” Sergei answered. “Just routine.”

* * *

“Happy New Year!” Peggy Druce said as the clock struck twelve. “It’s 1939. Oh, boy!” She raised a glass of what was supposed to be scotch. The stuff tasted more like oven cleaner. In wartime Berlin, you took what you could get and you were damn glad you got anything.

A handful of other people sat drinking in the hotel restaurant. They were split about fifty-fifty between neutrals stuck in Berlin and Germans who felt like tying one on even if the world seemed to be going to hell in a handbasket. Some of the Germans were civilians, others in uniform. The other way to tell them apart was that the military men were drinking harder.

The radio blared out war news. Everything was going well in the West-if you believed the announcer, anyhow. “Soon a battle of annihilation will sweep the French and English out of Belgium, which they invaded with flagrant disregard for international law!” the fellow declared. He had a high, shrill, unpleasant voice. Peggy thought so, anyhow; it put her in mind of screechy chalk on a blackboard.

Then he started screaming about what the evil Communists in Russia were doing to Poland. “It is a Jewish-Bolshevist conspiracy to terrorize small nations!” he said.

What about Czechoslovakia? Peggy wondered. What about Holland? What about Luxembourg? What about Belgium? Asking questions like that was pointless here. Even if the Gestapo didn’t haul you away and start pulling out your toenails, the Germans wouldn’t get it. They thought anything they did was okay because they did it. If the other guy did the same thing, he was a dirty, rotten nogoodnik.

And then the newsman came out with something Peggy hadn’t heard before: “Because of the magnitude of the unprovoked invasion, Marshal Smigly-Ridz has asked the Fuhrer for aid against the Bolsheviks. Foreign Minister von Ribbentrop has stated that that aid will be forthcoming. We are already at war with the Soviet Union. Now we have the chance to teach the Reds and the Jews the lesson they deserve.”

Peggy looked around. Nobody she could see looked excited about teaching the Russians a lesson. One of the soldiers, a major old enough to have fought in the last war, knocked back half a tumbler’s worth of something, put his head on his folded arms, and fell asleep at his table. The good-time girl who’d been with him stalked away in disgust.

Another soldier stood up and raised a glass on high. “Here’s to the two-front war!” he yelled.

His buddies dragged him down. They spoke in low, urgent voices. He didn’t want to listen. When they couldn’t make him shut up, they hauled him out into the cold, pitch-black blackout night. Peggy wondered if it was already too late for him. Was somebody in there taking notes? She wouldn’t have been surprised. People said there was at least one informer in every crowd. Peggy didn’t always believe what people said, but it seemed likely here.

Music started coming out of the radio. Saccharine-sweet, it was as annoying as the newscaster. Jazz was one more thing the Nazis wouldn’t put up with. Degenerate Negro music, they called it. No matter what they called it, what they made themselves was sappy and boring.

A naval officer came up to the table where Peggy was drinking by herself. “May I join you?” he asked.

“Sure.” Peggy held up her left hand so the diamonds in her wedding ring sparkled. “Don’t expect too much, that’s all.”

He smiled. His long, weathered face didn’t seem to have room for amusement, but it turned out to. “Thank you for the warning. I may need it less than you think, though.” He set down his drink and showed off the thin gold band on the fourth finger of his own left hand. “If I ask your name, will you think I am trying to seduce you?”

“Probably,” Peggy answered, which startled a laugh out of him. She gave him her name even so, and asked his.

“I am Friedrich Reinberger-a Korvettenkapitan, as you see.” He brushed the three gold stripes on one cuff with the other hand. Then he switched languages: “Lieutenant commander, you would say in English.”

“Okay.” Peggy was feeling ornery, so she asked, “Where’s your wife, Lieutenant Commander?”

“In Dachau, not far from Munich, with the Kinder,” Reinberger nodded. Peggy nodded-he sounded like a Bavarian. “I was called here to report on…certain things when my destroyer came into port. Maria, I think, believes yet I am at sea.”

He finished his drink and waved for another one. The blond girl who came over to get his glass wore a black gown cut down to there in front and even lower in back, and slit up to there down below. Reinberger followed her with his eyes as she sashayed back to the bar. He didn’t slobber or anything, but he did watch. Peggy couldn’t very well blame him; it was a hell of a dress. If she were ten years younger-hell, five years younger-she would have wanted it herself.

The girl brought back a new drink. By then Peggy was ready for a refill, too. That gave the German naval officer another chance to eye the girl’s strut. He made the most of it. When Peggy got the fresh drink, Reinberger raised his glass. “To 1939,” he said.

“To 1939,” Peggy echoed, and drank with him. If he’d said something like to our victory in 1939, she wouldn’t have. She was damned if she wanted to see the Nazis win. But toasting the year was harmless enough.

“What is an American doing in Germany in the middle of a war?” Reinberger asked.

Peggy looked him in the eye. She was tempted to spit in his eye, but he didn’t seem like a bad guy. Still, she didn’t sugarcoat the truth: “I was in Czechoslovakia when you people invaded it.”

“Oh.” He shrugged. “If the Czechs were more, ah, reasonable, it might not have come to that. But they thought England and France would save them, and so…” Another shrug.

“Dachau.” Peggy wasn’t drunk, but she felt a buzz. Her wits worked slower than she wished they did. It wasn’t a big city or anything, but she’d heard of it before. How come? After a moment, she remembered. “Dachau! Isn’t that where they-?” She didn’t know how to go on.

“Yes, that is where they-” Korvettenkapitan Reinberger didn’t finish it, either. He did say, “Every nation has in it people who are not trusted by the government. We keep them there.”

From some of the whispers Peggy had heard, the SS did more to people in Dachau than just keep them there. But she couldn’t prove that. Probably the only way to prove it was to end up on the inside. She had a magpie curiosity, but she didn’t want to know that badly.

“Where in the United States do you live?” Reinberger asked. It wasn’t the smoothest change of subject Peggy had ever seen, but it also could have been worse.

“Philadelphia,” she answered. Homesickness rose up inside her like a great choking cloud. She had to look down at the tabletop and blink several times while tears stung her eyes.

“I know something of the port-I visited before the last war, and again three, no, four years ago now. But all I know of the city is that it is large.”

“Third biggest in the country,” Peggy agreed, not without pride. And we don’t lock people up there even if they aren’t trusted by the government. And we never would, not unless they were niggers or Japs or something.

The music on the radio got a little less syrupy than it had been. “Do you care to dance?” Reinberger asked.

She gave him a crooked grin. “Sure you wouldn’t rather ask the bar-girl? You’ve got a better chance with her.”

“I be not”-he shook his head-“I am not looking for that, not now. How do I expect Maria to stay for me if I do not stay for her?”

A lot of Germans had trouble with Sauce for the goose is sauce for the gander. Meeting one who didn’t made up Peggy’s mind for her. “Okay,” she said.

He danced well enough. He stayed with the beat, and he led firmly. If he lacked the inspiration, the sense of fun, that separated really good dancers from people who were just all right-then he did, that was all. He held Peggy tight without trying to mash himself against her or grope her. He was…correct, a diplomat would have called it.

“Thank you,” she said when the music stopped. “That was nice.”

“Ja.” He nodded. “And thank you also.” As they went back to the table, he added, “Much better than shooting up Russian ships in the Baltic.”

“Well, gee! There’s a compliment!” Peggy exclaimed. Lieutenant Commander Reinberger laughed. He waved for another drink. Peggy nodded to show she wanted one, too. The barmaid in the startling outfit fluttered her fingers to show she saw. Peggy asked, “That’s what you were doing before you got leave? Shooting up Russian ships?”

“Ja,” Reinberger said. “The Baltic in winter is perfectly filthy, too. Storms, fog, waves, ice…and always maybe a U-boat waits to give you a present. Anyone who enjoys combat a Dummkopf is.”

“Hitler did,” Peggy said incautiously. She wondered if she would find out more about what went on in Dachau than she ever wanted to know. Your big mouth, she told herself, not for the first time.

The barmaid came back with the fresh drinks then. She almost fell out of that dress as she bent over to give Reinberger his. He noticed. She wanted him to notice. But he didn’t do anything or say anything about it. She looked annoyed as she walked away.

“From everything I know, the Fuhrer is braver than most men,” Reinberger said. That was the straight Nazi line. From everything Peggy’d heard, it also happened to be true, which was discouraging.

“Did the Russians shoot back?” she asked.

“They tried. Wallowing freighters with popguns have not much chance against warships,” Reinberger answered. “They are brave enough themselves, no matter what the radio says.” So he didn’t think much of Dr. Goebbels’ endless propaganda barrage. That was interesting. “No matter how brave you are, though, you must have the tools to do the job.”

No sooner were the words out of his mouth than air-raid sirens started wailing. The headwaiter shouted, “The basement is our bomb shelter. Everyone go to the basement at once.”

“Have the English and French begun to bomb Berlin, then?” Reinberger asked as people headed for the door.

“Not even once, not since I’ve been here,” Peggy answered. “Do you suppose it’s the Russians?”

The German naval officer looked almost comically surprised. “I never dreamt they could,” he answered, starting down the stairs. “Not impossible, I suppose, but it didn’t once cross my mind.” Somewhere not far away, bombs crump! ed outside. Peggy knew that hateful, terrifying sound much too well.

Even though it was New Year’s Eve-no, New Year’s Day now-some people hadn’t gone dancing into 1939. Grumpy, sleepy-looking men in bathrobes over pajamas and women in housecoats over nightgowns joined the more alert crowd from the party. A mustachioed man who spoke German with a Bela Lugosi accent said, “They told me this could not happen.” Whoever they were, more bomb bursts said they didn’t know what they were talking about.

A woman added, “Goring said you could call him Meyer if the enemy ever bombed Berlin.”

Crump! Crump! Boom! As far as Peggy could see, the fat Luftwaffe boss had just saddled himself with a Jewish-sounding name. As far as she could see, he deserved it. He deserved worse, but he wasn’t likely to get it. People didn’t get what they deserved often enough.

Boom! That one sounded as if it came down right on top of the hotel. The lights in the cellar flickered and went out. People screamed on notes ranging from bass to shrill soprano. The Germans and their friends sounded an awful lot like the international crowd at Marianske Lazne. When you dropped bombs on them, people were all pretty much alike. Peggy would have been perfectly happy never to have learned that lesson.

Everyone cheered when, after about half a minute, the lights came on again. A few minutes later, sirens shrilled the all-clear. “Happy New Year,” Lieutenant Commander Reinberger said dryly.

“Hey, we’re alive,” Peggy answered. “Anybody wants to know what I think, that makes it happy enough.”

* * *

When Joaquin Delgadillo joined the Nationalist army in Spain, he didn’t do it to meet General Sanjurjo. He did it because he couldn’t stand the Spanish Republic. He probably would have done it even if someone as dull and cautious as General Franco commanded his side.

That didn’t mean he wasn’t delighted to get a glimpse of Sanjurjo. The story was that the general’s airplane had almost crashed coming from Portugal to Spain when the revolt against the Republic broke out. People said Sanjurjo didn’t want to leave all his fancy clothes behind. So what if they would have weighed down the plane? A real man, a real Spaniard, didn’t worry about things like that.

Still, Joaquin was willing to admit it was probably good that the pilot had worried about them. The youngster had seen too many men on both sides throw away their lives for no good reason. The Republicans were bastards, but no denying they were brave bastards. And his own side didn’t put up with cowards, not even for a minute.

Now General Sanjurjo stood on a low swell of ground and pointed south. He wasn’t any too impressive to look at. He was old and short and squat and dumpy. But he had a good voice. And he had some of the same gifts Germans said Hitler did: while he was talking, you believed him.

“More than two hundred years ago, Britain stole part of our fatherland from us,” Sanjurjo said. “Ever since, Gibraltar has been a thorn in Spain’s side. Now it is full of Communists and fellow travelers, people who ran away there so they wouldn’t get what was coming to them.”

General Sanjurjo laughed a very unpleasant laugh. “Well, they’re going to get it whether they want it or not. And you, soldados de Espana, you’re going to give it to them. Will you stop before you reach complete victory?”

“No!” Joaquin shouted with everyone else in the detachment.

“Will you teach England a lesson the likes of which she hasn’t had for hundreds of years?”

“Yes!” the men yelled.

“With Italy and Germany and God on our side, can anyone hold us back?”

“No!” Joaquin shouted once more.

“Then strike!” General Sanjurjo cried. “Strike hard for Spain!”

As if on cue-and it probably was-Spanish guns opened up on Gibraltar’s border defenses. Motors thrummed overhead as German and Italian bombers flew off to pound what the British insisted was one of their crown colonies.

Down inside Gibraltar, antiaircraft guns filled the air with puffs of black smoke. Other guns fired back at the Spanish artillery. How many ships did the Royal Navy have inside the harbor? They were vulnerable to air attack-no doubt about it. But they could put out impressive firepower till the bombers silenced them.

Joaquin knew what shells screaming in meant. He didn’t wait for orders before he hit the dirt and started digging. The British shells landed several hundred meters away, but why take chances? He wasn’t the only guy who started scraping a foxhole out of the hard, grayish-brown ground, either. Anyone who’d ever seen any action knew what to do.

“Come on! Get up! Get moving!” Sergeant Carrasquel shouted. Plenty of people did, without even thinking. A good sergeant was one you feared worse than enemy fire. Joaquin stayed right where he was. Then Carrasquel kicked him in the ass. “You, too, Delgadillo? You think the Pope gave you a dispensation?”

However much Joaquin wished his Holiness would do exactly that, he couldn’t very well claim it was true. Running all hunched over-as if that did a peseta’s worth of good-he hurried toward the border. Along with Spaniards in mustard-yellow khaki, he also saw other troops wearing gray uniforms.

Germans! Maybe they were from the Condor Legion, the force of “volunteers” doing what they could for the Spanish Nationalists. Or maybe they were Wehrmacht regulars. The Nazis and the Nationalists had the same enemies these days, after all. Putting Gibraltar out of action would hurt England all over the Mediterranean.

But that wasn’t why seeing those big, fair men in field-gray so heartened Joaquin Delgadillo-and, no doubt, most of the other Nationalist troopers who recognized them. Spaniards on both sides were amateurs at war. The honest ones on both sides knew and admitted as much. Left to their own devices, they probably would have made a hash of the attack on Gibraltar. The British, whatever else you could say about them, weren’t amateurs.

And neither were the Germans. If they were involved in this, it would go the way it was supposed to. That didn’t mean Joaquin couldn’t get blown to cat’s-meat. He knew as much. But he could hope he wouldn’t get blown to cat’s-meat for no reason at all, the way he might with only Spaniards running the show.

Shells made freight-train noises overhead. Some of the trains sounded enormous. And some of the shells, when they burst, were enormous. The ground shook under Joaquin’s feet. Great gouts of earth fountained skyward. And not just of earth: he saw a man, legs pumping as if he were still running, rise fifty or a hundred meters into the air and then plunge earthward again.

“Naval guns!” somebody shouted, as if explaining a thing somehow made it less fearful.

Did the British have battleships tied up at Gibraltar? Were the guns now firing on the advancing Spaniards and Germans designed to fight off battleships trying to batter their way into the harbor? Joaquin neither knew nor cared. He knew only that, whether designed for the job or not, those guns were terrifyingly good at murdering infantrymen.

Up ahead, machine guns started their deadly chatter. Joaquin dove for cover and started digging in again. If you wanted to stay alive in the vicinity of machine guns, you had to do that. Artillery was supposed to have taken out the British murder mills. Joaquin laughed bitterly. They told you that before every attack. They lied every goddamn time. And you were supposed to go on believing them? Sure you were!

Rumble of engines, rattle of tracks…The Condor Legion and the Italians had tanks. These were German machines, even if they carried Spanish markings. Good, Joaquin thought. The Germans handled their tanks as if they were fighting for their own country. The Italians handled theirs as if they’d been given a job they didn’t want to do. The least sign of trouble and they found an excuse for not going forward.

Clang…Boom! That was the sound of an antitank round slaughtering a tank. Joaquin raised his head a few centimeters. Sure as hell, one of the German machines was ablaze, sending up orange flames and a tall column of greasy black smoke. If God was kind, the British round had killed the men in the tank right away. If He wasn’t, they’d burned like a roast when the slut who was supposed to be watching it got drunk and forgot it was on the fire.

Another tank hit a mine. This one didn’t catch fire, but it did throw a track, slewing sideways and stopping in a horribly vulnerable position. If the attack suppressed the guns that could reach it, the men inside might yet live. Joaquin liked those odds…about as little as he liked his own.

“Forward!” an officer shouted. His whistle squealed. Delgadillo looked around again. He didn’t see the man giving the orders. If the bastard didn’t have the guts to stand up himself, who would stand up for him?

Then Sergeant Carrasquel rasped, “Come on, you lazy puto! You think I’m going to do this all by myself?”

He ran forward. The British machine guns didn’t cut him down right away. Joaquin knew why, too: only the good died young. Joaquin thought of himself as good. But he knew the sergeant wouldn’t agree. He also knew Carrasquel would hound him if alive and haunt him if dead. So he got up and loped after the noncom.

Crack! Crack! Any bullet you heard like that came much too close to your one and only irreplaceable carcass. When you heard a bunch of them, you were mighty damn lucky if you didn’t get ventilated.

Tanks were good for taking out machine-gun nests, even the concrete positions the British had built near the border. Gibraltar wasn’t very big. If you could get past the frontier defenses, you could go ahead and overrun the place…couldn’t you?

Down by the harbor, or maybe in it, something blew up with a full-throated roar that staggered Joaquin. Maybe it was an ammunition dump, or maybe a cruiser. Whatever it was, it wouldn’t trouble the Spaniards any more.

More guns poured deadly fire down on them. Joaquin hit the dirt again. He didn’t care if Sergeant Carrasquel pitched a fit. What kind of defenses did England have here, anyway? A cannon or machine gun on every square centimeter of ground, and more buried to pop up and spew death? He wouldn’t have been surprised. This had to be more than General Sanjurjo expected.

Stukas peeled off one by one and bombed enemy positions. One of the dive-bombers didn’t rise into the sky again. It added its funeral pyre to the rest of the stinking, choking smoke in the air. Nobody was using gas, but sometimes it hardly seemed to matter.

Someone not far from Joaquin started shrieking for his mother. That only made him dig harder. More bullets snarled past him. The English seemed to have all the ammunition in the world. As he dug, he realized he had yet to see his first British soldier.