Last Orders

CHAPTER 14

People who fought on the ground said the Germans were easier to push back than they ever had been. They’d pulled so much out of the Soviet Union to hold off England and France in the West that they didn’t always have enough left to keep the Red Army from going forward.

Anastas Mouradian only wished things were like that in the air war, too. The problem was, the air frontier above the Low Countries was narrow. The Luftwaffe had taken some planes out of the USSR to fight over there, but not all that many. Plenty of 109s and 190s still prowled the frigid air over the workers’ and peasants’ paradise.

“It will work out however it works out,” Isa Mogamedov said when Stas muttered about that in the cockpit. With the ground frozen hard, the Pe-2 squadron was back in business. Unfortunately, so were the Messerschmitts and the Focke-Wulfs.

“So it will,” Stas said, and sent the copilot and bomb-aimer a quizzical look. Mogamedov hadn’t quite come out with the Arabic Inshallah, but he’d come about as close as a secular New Soviet Man was ever likely to. A Russian probably wouldn’t have noticed anything out of the ordinary in the reply. Then again, Russians hadn’t spent the past nine hundred or a thousand years living next door to Azeris.

Groundcrew men used a truck-mounted starter-a device borrowed from the Americans-to make the bomber’s engines turn over: first the port, then the starboard. Mouradian studied the instrument panel. Everything looked the way it was supposed to. He waved to the boss sergeant on the airstrip. The noncom waved back.

One after another, the Pe-2s took off. The target today was one of the railroad lines leading west out of Minsk. Stas couldn’t remember hitting targets on the far side of the Byelorussian capital. Not in this phase of the war, anyhow.

He released the brakes and taxied down the dirt runway. The bomber got airborne and climbed over the pale-barked birch trees in the woods past the end of the airstrip. The birches looked as if they’d been whitewashed like the squadron’s planes. Any Nazi fighter pilot would have a hard time spotting the Soviet aircraft against the drifts below them.

As he got closer to the front east of Minsk, more monuments of man’s inhumanity to man made themselves known in spite of the snow. There was a burnt-out tank, with soot spread over whiteness. From this height, he couldn’t tell whose tank it had been. That didn’t matter any more. It was nothing but scrap metal now. Sooner or later, he supposed, the Russians would haul the carcass to a foundry and make something new out of it.

Here was a burning village that had been on the German side of the line for a long time but now found itself in Soviet hands once more. Stas couldn’t see any of the human dramas down there, either, but this scene had played out many times before farther east. Some of the peasants would have cozied up to the Nazis, either because they liked Hitler better than Stalin or just because they thought that was the best way to keep their bellies full and their wives and daughters unraped.

And now they would pay for guessing wrong. Their neighbors would want revenge. The NKVD would want to pay back treason. If the peasants were lucky, they’d go straight into punishment battalions. There, at least, they had a small chance of coming out in one piece. If they weren’t so lucky, they’d go to the gulags instead. Or they’d simply meet a noose or a bullet to the base of the skull.

Their wives and daughters still might get forced. Only the uniforms of the men holding them down would be different.

The squadron didn’t fly over Minsk. The Pe-2s took a dogleg to swing south of the city. The Red Air Force had found out by painful experience that the Fascists had packed the place with antiaircraft guns. German gunners had both skill and enthusiasm. You didn’t want to give them a shot at you if you didn’t have to. For that matter, you didn’t want to give them a shot at you even when you did have to.

But skirting the flak guns took the squadron straight into a swarm of marauding FW-190s. Stas hated the new German fighter. A Pe-2 had a fair chance against a 109. Odds when you ran into 190s were worse. They had more speed, heavier guns, and a cockpit that gave their pilots terrific all-around vision. They were Trouble with a capital T.

“Dump the bombs!” Stas shouted into the speaking tube that carried his voice back to the bomb bay.

“I’m fucking doing it,” Fyodor Mechnikov answered. The bomb-bay doors opened. The explosives would come down on somebody, with luck on somebody German. Mouradian wasn’t inclined to be fussy. Designers always claimed that their brainstorms were fighting bombers. They always lied. Fighters were made for just one thing: shooting down other planes. Bombers had to do other things, too, and couldn’t fight back so well.

Suddenly lighter by upwards of a tonne, the Pe-2 got faster and more nimble. All the same, Stas stayed low and gunned the bomber for every kopek it was worth. The best way to deal with German fighters was not to hang around anywhere close to them.

But then the machine gun in the dorsal turret chattered. “Eat shit, you whore!” Mechnikov shouted at the fighter he was trying to drive off.

Bullets slammed into the Pe-2. There was no fire. The engines kept running. When Stas cautiously tried the controls, they worked. No hydraulic lines punctured. No wires cut. That was all luck, of course-nothing else but. The German pilot who’d put the burst into the Pe-2 had to be cursing his. He’d done everything right. He just hadn’t managed to knock the bomber out of the sky.

Stas fired a burst at the FW-190 as it streaked past. He didn’t do it any harm, either. It zoomed away to go after some of the other planes in the squadron. That suited Mouradian fine. “We scared off the son of a bitch, anyhow,” he said.

“That’s right. Fedya must have taught him respect.” Mogamedov spoke with perhaps less irony than he’d intended.

“If he hadn’t been up there banging away, that burst the Hitlerite hit us with would have been longer. It might have done us a lot of harm.” Stas kept eyeing the gauges. Everything was jammed up hard against the emergency lines. Fair enough. If almost getting shot down didn’t qualify as an emergency, what in blazes would?

Mogamedov kept checking the instrument panel, too. It didn’t seem to satisfy him … or he might have had trouble believing it. “The engines sound good, don’t they?” he said, as if by putting it in the form of a question he didn’t have to sound like someone who believed it.

“Pretty good.” Stas didn’t want to admit any more than he had to. A New Soviet Man ought not to believe in outmoded superstitions like tempting fate. Sometimes, though, the unreconstructed old Armenian peeked out from behind the New Soviet mask he wore.

Behind Mogamedov’s goggles, an equally unreconstructed old Azeri checked to make sure the 190 was really gone. So Stas thought, anyhow. He might have been wrong, but he didn’t think so.

Then bursts of flak, black with angry, fiery cores, began buffeting the Pe-2. In his wild efforts to escape the German fighter, Stas had come too close to the rings of antiaircraft guns girdling Minsk. He swung the plane hard to the south once more, away from the city.

“Where did the rest of the squadron get to?” Mogamedov asked.

“Good question. My guess is, we’re scattered over fifty kilometers of sky,” Stas answered. “As long as we see each other again back at the airstrip, we can worry about the details some other time.” Mogamedov thought that over, then nodded.

Off in the distance, a German stuck up his head to see what the French in front of him were up to. Aristide Demange took a shot at the Boche. He didn’t think he hit the con. He did make him disappear in a hurry, which was what he’d wanted to do.

He also hopped down off the firing step from which he’d fired. A few seconds later, the Fritzes turned loose a burst from a machine gun. Maybe all those rounds would have missed him. It was nothing he cared to find out by experiment.

A poilu coming into the trench from the smashed Belgian village behind it grinned sympathetically. “You were lucky, Lieutenant, getting down when you did,” the fellow said, his southern accent nasal and grating in Demange’s ears.

“Lucky, my left one,” Demange said, focusing his usual scorn for all humanity on one human in particular. “Listen, Marcel, I don’t care how stupid you are. Even a Provençal clodhopper like you should be able to see that, when you try and kill somebody, he’s gonna try to kill you, too. So maybe you shouldn’t give him the chance, eh?”

Marcel pondered that. Demange could see, or imagined he could see, the gears going round in the soldier’s head-going round … very … very … slowly. “D’accord,” Marcel said at last.

Demange suppressed the urge to clap a hand to his forehead in theatrical despair. The only thing that could have made Marcel act any dumber than he did now would have been for him to chew gum like a cow or an American. The worst of it was, Demange couldn’t ride him as hard as he would have liked. When it came to smarts, Marcel wasn’t the highest card in the deck, no. But he was easygoing and he fought all right. You didn’t expect or even want brains in all the privates.

The ruined village in back of them was the one that had been in front of them a few weeks before. They didn’t need to measure their advance in centimeters per day, but they didn’t need to measure it in kilometers per day, either. At this rate, they’d cross the Low Countries and push on into Germany about when Demange died of old age.

Of course, if he stayed at the front, old age was the least of his worries. He didn’t take idiotic chances, the way fools fresh from basic training and hotheads did. He remembered that the sons of bitches on the other side carried rifles and other tools of mayhem. The less they got to use them on him, the better he liked it.

Some chances, though, you couldn’t help. If some fat general’s secretary told him she wouldn’t suck him off one morning, he was liable to order his brigade to attack the Germans out of sheer spite. That kind of shit never got into the history books. It happened all the time, though.

He stuck up his head to see if some frustrated German general whose secretary wouldn’t put out was going to get a regiment’s worth of the Führer’s finest slaughtered on account of pique. The Fritzes seemed quiet. Demange hadn’t come up in the place he’d fired from. He also didn’t stay up longer than a second or two. Yes, he knew the ropes.

Nobody was supposed to go between the lines. They called the battered ground out there no-man’s-land for a reason. But a Belgian farmer in a worn felt hat, baggy corduroy trousers, and stout Wellingtons ambled along as if he had not a care in the world. Little smoke signals rose from the pipe clenched between his teeth.

Demange had seen such types before, in the last war and in this one. They came out of their holes whenever things quieted down. Sometimes they were harmless. They’d arrange to trade your tobacco for the other fellow’s schnapps, or to take a letter from a granny on one side of the wire to her granddaughter on the other.

Sometimes they were anything but harmless. They’d spy for one side or the other or sometimes for both. While they were going through the motions of trading, they’d scout out the other side’s positions and report back to whoever was paying them. Or the sweet letter from grandmother to little girl would be chock-full of coded messages. You never could tell.

And Demange distrusted Belgians on general principles. Half the Flemings wished they were Germans. The Walloons-even the ones who weren’t Rexist bastards-spoke French with a funny accent, even worse than what a Provençal like Marcel used.

“Hey, you!” Demange yelled at this Belgian. The man slowly looked back toward him, as if uncertain he was being addressed. Demange had seen it done better. Hell, he’d done it better himself. “Yeah, you, shit-for-brains! Get your ugly ass back here so I can talk with you!”

The farmer did his best to pretend he was deaf. His best didn’t impress Demange. Up came the rifle. He wasn’t particularly trying to hit the Belgian, but he wasn’t particularly trying to miss, either.

If a rifle bullet cracking past a meter or two in front of your snoot didn’t draw your attention, chances were you’d already bought a plot. The Belgian decided he might do better to come back to the French lines after all. A good thing for him, too. Demange would have aimed the next round with care.

A lot of people would have had trouble getting through the drifts of barbed wire in front of the French lines. The farmer knew the secret ways at least as well as Demange did. Have to change our routes, Demange thought irritably.

Down into the trench slid the Belgian. He wore a bushy gray mustache. He might have fought in the trenches the last time around. Now he’d gone into business for himself.

“What d’you want?” he asked in his peculiar French.

“What were you doing out there?” Demange returned. “And don’t fuck with me, either. You give me crap, I’ll knock your teeth down your throat.” He sounded as if he looked forward to it. Well, he did. It would turn a boring day halfway interesting.

The anticipation in his voice and on his narrow, nasty face got through to the Belgian. Some people, you did better not to mess with. “I was going to sell the Boches some applejack,” the farmer said slowly.

He did not visibly have any. “Where is it?” Demange snapped. “And if you say you were gonna bring it later, you’re in more trouble than you know what to do with.”

“I’ll show you.” The farmer unbelted his pants and let them drop. He wore long johns under them-it was cold out here. He also wore rubber bands around the ankles of the long underwear. He reached into the long johns and pulled out two fat rubber hot-water bottles. He handed Demange one. Demange unscrewed the stopper and sniffed. That was applejack, all right. Demange held out his hand for the other one. Sourly, the farmer passed it to him. He checked. Applejack in both of them, all right.

“Well, it is what you say it is,” Demange allowed. “And since it is, I’ll give you a whole franc for it.”

“A franc!” The Belgian’s mustache quivered with fury. He must have known he’d get screwed, but he hadn’t expected to get screwed that royally.

Because Demange was feeling generous, he said, “Oh, all right-a franc for each bottle.” He tossed the Belgian not one but two coins of yellow aluminum-bronze. “Out of my own pocket, you see.”

“No wonder some of us think the Germans are a better deal,” the farmer said. “You … You …!” Words failed him, which was his good luck.

“Get lost, cochon,” Demange said coldly. “I ever see you again, we’ll talk about it with the undertaker.”

Away the Belgian went. If looks could have killed … But you needed a rifle for that.

“Gather round, boys!” Demange told the soldiers he led. “We’d better destroy the evidence, in case he complains to a brass hat or something.” Destroy the evidence they did, and they had a hell of a time doing it, too.

Hans-Ulrich Rudel understood that Stukas had had their day-literally-as dive-bombers. Without fighter cover, they wouldn’t, and didn’t, last ten minutes. And giving them the cover they needed tied up Bf-109s and FW-190s that could have been doing more useful things.

Logically, the Luftwaffe should have scrapped them all and given their pilots hotter planes to fly, planes that could fight or flee well enough on their own to get by without escorts. But the higher-ups didn’t want to junk any weapons of war that still had use to them. And so some egghead decided to turn the Ju-87s into night raiders.

It made a certain amount of sense. Even Hans-Ulrich had to admit that much. Planes aloft in the dark were hard to spot and hard to shoot down once spotted. That French bombers built before the war, bombers even more spavined than Stukas, kept coming back from night attacks over the Vaterland proved as much.

Finding targets in the dark was also an adventure, of course. But the Ju-87s were no more inaccurate than any other German bombers. You couldn’t dive-bomb when you couldn’t judge when to pull up. You could fly on the level and drop all those hundreds of kilos of explosives where you hoped they’d do your side the most good.

You could, and the Stuka pilots were doing it. They’d struck at ammunition dumps and railroad yards close to the front. They’d also ventured deeper into France. Hans-Ulrich had hit Caen twice and Paris once. He’d bombed them, anyhow. He hoped he’d hit them.

Here he was again, droning along toward Paris. To guide his plane, he had a compass, an airspeed indicator, and a wristwatch with luminous hands. Fortunately, Paris was a big place. Some of the bombers that had been built with this kind of mission in mind-He-111s and Ju-88s, for instance-could be guided toward their target by radio beams. The Stuka carried no such receivers. Maybe groundcrew men would install them one of these days. Hans-Ulrich wasn’t holding his breath.

Before long, he stopped having any doubts about where Paris lay. Flak guns on the ground threw cascades of shells at the Luftwaffe planes above them. Muzzle flashes marked thicker concentrations of guns-and, Rudel supposed, thicker concentrations of targets worth hitting.

Tracers climbed up to and past the Ju-87. Their glowing trails and the shell bursts all around put Hans-Ulrich in mind of fireworks displays. Fireworks displays didn’t fill the sky with sharp fragments, though.

From the rear-facing seat, Sergeant Dieselhorst used the speaking tube: “I think they may have an idea we’re here.”

“Do you?” Hans-Ulrich said. “Well, you could be right. Just in case, I’ll give them something to remember me by.” He yanked on the bomb-release lever. The large bomb under the fuselage and the smaller ones under the wings fell away. Big flashes of light down below said other German bombs were already bursting on the capital of France.

He didn’t stick around to watch them. He hauled the Stuka’s nose around and headed back toward Belgium. The plane was friskier without its load. No Ju-87 would ever be either fast or maneuverable, but it came closer than it had.

Not far off to the side, an enemy night fighter ambushed another Stuka. Machine-gun tracers stabbed at the German plane. It caught fire. Stukas carried good defensive armor, but you couldn’t stop everything. Flame licked across the Ju-87’s wing. The plane began to fall out of the sky. Hans-Ulrich hoped the pilot and rear gunner/radioman were able to use their ’chutes. Hope was all he could do.

No-he could do one thing more. He could mash down the throttle and scoot away from there as fast as he could go. He could, and he did. The farther from the busy French defenses over the capital he got, the less likely he was to meet a shell with his name on it or an enterprising enemy pilot peering into the darkness to spy a shape against the stars or the telltale glow of flames from the exhaust pipes.

Finding the airstrip from which he’d taken off was another adventure. Only dim lamps marked it-anything more would have invited a call from English or French planes. Landing when those lights were all he could see was nothing he’d trained for.

A couple of pilots in the squadron had already had to write off their Stukas. One was still in the hospital with burns and broken bones. Hans-Ulrich got down with no worse than a jolt. Still, this wasn’t a business for the faint of heart.

When he went to the commander’s tent to report on the mission, he was glad to find Colonel Steinbrenner sitting behind his little folding table. Only a paraffin lantern and the colonel’s cigarette coal shed any light on things. They made Steinbrenner’s face look older and wearier than it was.

“Yes, I saw it, too,” the squadron CO said when Hans-Ulrich mentioned the Stuka shot down over Paris. “That was Rolf Wutka and Sergeant Schmidt.”

“Aii!” Hans-Ulrich said, and covered his eyes with one hand. “I went to flying school with Rolf.” They hadn’t got on that well, then or later, but even so … “I feel like a goose walked over my grave. Not many of us left who’ve been going up since before the war.”

“No, not many,” Steinbrenner agreed. He was one-he’d been doing it longer than Rudel. After a moment, he went on, “Things could be worse, you know. We could be bombing our own cities instead of the enemy’s.”

“Have Luftwaffe units started doing that?” Hans-Ulrich asked. He’d always been a man stolidly loyal to those set in authority over him. Past that, he was about as political as an apricot tree. Even someone like him, though, couldn’t help knowing how restive the Reich had got these days.

“If they have, I haven’t heard about it, and I think I would have,” Colonel Steinbrenner said. He might have added more, but stubbed out the cigarette instead. The way he shook his head seemed to tell Hans-Ulrich he’d thought better of whatever it was. Maybe it didn’t matter. Maybe it mattered so much, he didn’t trust Hans-Ulrich with it. Sighing, he went on, “Anything else about your return flight?”

“Only the adventure of landing.” Rudel gave back a lopsided grin. “But you already know about that, don’t you?”

“For a second there, when I was getting my nose up, I wished I were wearing a diaper under my long johns,” Steinbrenner said. “About the only worse thing I can think of would be coming in on an aircraft carrier’s flight deck at night.”

Germany had started building a carrier. When the war broke out, the Graf Zeppelin got shelved. All those tonnes of steel went into other things instead. Hans-Ulrich tried to imagine landing on a rolling, pitching deck with only lanterns to guide him in. “You’re right, sir. That would be worse. I didn’t think anything could be,” he said. “Still, I’d like to try it, you know?”

“From most people, that would be bragging. From most people, it’d be Quatsch, is what it’d be,” Steinbrenner said. “From you, though, from you I believe it. I remember how you won your Ritterkreuz.” Hans-Ulrich touched the medal he wore at his throat. He was the one who’d thought of mounting panzer-busting cannons under a Stuka’s wings. He was the one who’d taken them up and tried them out, too. He shrugged. “I didn’t do it for the Knight’s Cross, sir.”

“I didn’t say you did,” Steinbrenner answered quietly. “That makes it more likely you’d want to fly onto a carrier, though, not less.”

“All I want to do is hit the enemy as hard as I can, however I can, wherever I can,” Rudel said.

“I know that.” Colonel Steinbrenner sighed again. “Life would be simpler if everyone were more like you.” He gestured. “For now, get out of here. Grab some sleep if you’re not too wound up. We’ll go out again tomorrow night as long as the weather’s not too beastly.”

“Zu Befehl, mein Herr!” Hans-Ulrich said. One advantage to following the soldier’s trade was that you could always find the right answer.

Julius Lemp had taken the U-30 east through the Kiel Canal before. This time, though, he had men on the flak gun on the platform at the back of the conning tower. RAF raiders were growing bolder day by day. Yes, there were antiaircraft guns on both sides of the canal. Yes, a couple of Bf-109s buzzed overhead. Chances were he was worrying too much.

He kept men on the gun even so. If an enemy fighter-bomber did come after his boat here, he couldn’t dive to escape it. The canal wasn’t deep enough. He had to try to fight it off, or at least to make the flyer too anxious to be accurate.

No fighter-bombers roared in out of the west. Lemp relaxed when the U-boat came out into the broader waters of the Baltic. Now he could dive. He could dodge, too. Somehow he was sure that, if he hadn’t manned the gun, the English would have strafed him. There was an old joke about snapping your fingers to keep the elephants away. He knew about it. He just didn’t care. A U-boat skipper had better not care about jokes. Suspenders, belt, binder twine, a cummerbund … Whatever could possibly hold up his trousers.

Kiel wasn’t far from the eastern edge of the canal that bore its name. As the U-30 neared the port, Lemp saw smoke from two or three fires rising into the gray, hazy sky. He tugged at his beard in perplexity. “What’s going on there?” he said, pointing to the smoke plumes. “Do you suppose the RAF has started making serious daylight raids?”

Behind him, Gerhart Beilharz shrugged. Before the engineering officer could answer, what sounded like a cannon fired inside the city: once, twice, three times. Another column of smoke started going up. “I think we’re doing it to ourselves, skipper,” Beilharz answered sadly.

“That’s-madness,” Lemp said. But just because it was mad, that didn’t make it any less likely. The uprising that toppled the Kaiser at the end of the last war had started here, when sailors from the High Seas Fleet mutinied against their officers. A lot of them were Reds, but every one of them was sick of the hopeless, losing fight.

Lemp couldn’t imagine a Bolshevik uprising in Kiel today, or anywhere else in Germany. But millions of people all through the Grossdeutsches Reich were sick of this hopeless, losing fight.

When Wilhelm II saw the jig was up, he went into exile in Holland and stayed there quietly for the rest of his life. Of all the things Lemp could imagine Adolf Hitler doing, going quietly into exile stood last on the list. Hitler would hang on to power as long as he could, and then another twenty minutes besides.

Naval infantrymen in Stahlhelms on the wharf aimed an antipanzer cannon at the incoming U-boat. The U-30’s deck gun was bigger and more powerful than that door-knocker on rubber tires, but it wouldn’t be the only piece aimed at the boat. It was just the only one the sailors could spot. And for a U-boat, which had no armor, any fight with artillery was a losing fight.

“Nice to see we’re welcome,” Lemp said, his voice frigid with fury.

“Sir, I think we would have got a friendlier hello if we put in at the quays by London Bridge.” Lieutenant Beilharz sounded disgusted, too.

“One good thing, anyhow,” Lemp said. “That damned SD pigdog with the manners of a wall lizard is still back in Wilhelmshaven-or I hope like blazes he is, anyhow.” Beilharz nodded. He’d spent plenty of time listening to his skipper vent his spleen on the subject of the security-mad Sicherheitsdienst man.

A petty officer with a megaphone bawled, “Continue your slow approach. Make no sudden, dangerous-looking maneuvers. Your crew will be taken off the boat for interrogation and evaluation before being released for liberty.”

Lemp waved to show he heard. Somebody from the boat would get fed up and tell the interrogators where to head in. He could see that coming like a rash. Then the blackshirts would jug the poor, pissed-off fool, and they’d sneak a spy aboard to take his place … assuming they didn’t already have one or several on the boat (an assumption Lemp didn’t hold).

Unless he felt like making a mutiny, he couldn’t do anything about this. What the goons who gave that petty officer and more men like him their orders didn’t understand, though, was that such orders were almost an open invitation to making a mutiny. And when it came-oh, not from the U-30, not now, but from somewhere, and soon-the goons would have the gall to act surprised.

Or perhaps they wouldn’t. Those smoke plumes climbing into the sky argued that the nation had already mutinied against the government, regardless of whether the armed forces had.

One of the armed sailors who boarded the U-30 to take off the crew had an accident. All kinds of fittings on the boat stuck out or hung down where a careless man could bang his head on them and knock himself cold. So Lemp assured the excitable ensign who was thinking more along the lines of felonious assault.

Since the ensign couldn’t prove anything, and since Lemp outranked him and was almost old enough to be his father, he calmed down. He had to. Lemp smiled, but only behind the puppy’s back.

His men went off for their grillings. He expected to face the usual board of senior officers himself. They might not quiet down so fast about the poor naval infantryman’s “accident”-they were harder to con than an ensign not dry behind the ears.

Instead, Lemp found himself escorted into the presence of Admiral Karl Dönitz. He saluted less sloppily than he had in years. “Sir!” he said to the commander of the U-boat force.

“At ease, Commander,” Dönitz answered, his voice mild. His cheeks and forehead were broad, his chin narrow and pointed. But for a blade of a nose, he had flattish features. Most of the time, he was among the calmest of men. He tried to use that now, but in spite of himself his voice held a certain edge as he asked, “And how did you like your reception?”

Because Lemp trusted the admiral, he answered honestly: “Sir, I think the Royal Navy would have been friendlier.” It was Beilharz’s line, but it summed up what Lemp thought.

Dönitz’s narrow, gray-blue eyes assessed him. “The Royal Navy would know what you are,” the admiral said. “At the moment, all we have in Germany are suspicions.”

“Yes, sir. I can see that,” Lemp said. “And if you keep showing them this way, plenty of people will decide they should give you something to suspect.”

“Et tu, Brute?” Dönitz murmured.

Lemp hadn’t trotted out his schoolboy Latin for years. He would have thought he’d forgotten it all, but he understood what that meant, both literally and in the words behind the words. “Sir, if the government is trying to make everyone in the Reich hate it, it’s doing a good job,” he said.

“The government is trying to win the war.” Dönitz sounded as if he’d had this argument many times before, certainly with others and possibly with himself as well. “If treason springs up, the state has to put it down so the fight against the foreign foe can go forward.”

“If the government makes things so bad that no one wants to fight for it, how can it win against England and France and Russia, sir?” Lemp said.

Admiral Dönitz’s arched nostrils flared. “And you’ve been out at sea on patrol,” he muttered, more to himself than to the man standing in front of his desk. What did he think Lemp might have done had he been ashore all this time? Pulled a grenade off his belt and chucked it into the officers’ club? That was what it sounded like, that or something worse. Dönitz went on, “You need to be careful with that kind of talk, you know.”

“Oh, yes, sir,” Lemp replied. “But if you’re going to report me to Himmler’s bully boys, we’re already ruined past the hope of fixing.” Dönitz waved him out of the office. He felt as if he’d just survived a depth-charging.