Two Fronts

Chapter 17

Carlos Federico Weinberg stared gravely at his father. “Papa,” he said. “Yes, I’m your papa,” Chaim agreed. He thought the toddler’s voice held a note of doubt. Maybe he was too sensitive, and imagining things. Then again, maybe he wasn’t. The only times he got to see the kid were when he came into Madrid on leave.

He supposed he ought to be glad La Martellita let him see Carlos Federico at all. It wasn’t as if she’d wanted to have a baby, or to stay married to him one second longer than she needed to give Junior a last name.

Seeing the kid also meant seeing the mother. La Martellita looked tired. Well, anybody bringing up a child by herself had a right to look tired. Chaim knew he looked tired, too. Soldiering was one of the few things on God’s green (at the moment, hereabouts, God’s brown) earth that could make a man as tired as a woman with a baby.

Tired or not, La Martellita also looked gorgeous. Chaim didn’t, never had, and never would. He eyed Carlos Federico again, this time with a new perspective. “He’s lucky,” he remarked to La Martellita.

“How’s that?” she asked.

“He looks like you,” Chaim said. “When he grows up, the girls will all fall at his feet. He won’t be a tough, homely scoundrel like his old man.”

“If you think you can sweet-talk your way back into bed with me, forget it,” La Martellita said. Chaim hadn’t really thought so, even if he had had certain hopes along those lines. She went on, “By the time he grows up, we will enjoy full social equality in the Republic. Looks won’t matter as much as they do in bourgeois society.”

“Puede ser,” Chaim replied. But why did he say maybe to La Martellita instead of bullshit, which is what he would have told anyone else? Why? Because she was beautiful, that was why.

People who looked good had things greased for them. Chaim guessed they always would, come the revolution or not. People like him always had to jump and scramble to get anywhere. A lot of the time, people like La Martellita and Mike Carroll (who would be getting back to the front soon-the docs had done a better job on his leg than Chaim had dreamt they could) didn’t even need to reach out and grab. Things fell into their laps whether they reached or not.

La Martellita’s black eyes sparked. She was about to demonstrate dialectically why looks wouldn’t matter when true Communism arrived. Chaim didn’t feel like getting into a screaming row with her, which was what would happen if he presumed to doubt. Sometimes forearmed was forestalled. Instead of doubting, he said, “How about I take you somewhere for something to eat?”

He still spoke Spanish with the syntax of a New York Jew. Well, he damn well was a New York Jew. The locals could follow him, which was all that mattered when you were a damn furriner. La Martellita decided not to give him an ideological flaying after all. With a nod, she said, “We can do that.”

Soldiers didn’t make much. Neither did Party functionaries. But, unlike her, he gambled with what he did make. What else was he supposed to do with it? Sometimes the dice and cards ran your way for a while. He carried a good-sized wad of banknotes in a front pocket. Only a fool asking to meet a pickpocket carried his cash on his hip.

He pushed the buggy that held his son. He was proud to push it. He beamed when people looked inside and cooed at Carlos Federico. They did that more often here than they would have back in New York City. Whatever prosperity this poor, miserable world had left was concentrated in the place where he’d been born. Maybe that was why, like misers, so many New Yorkers hoarded friendliness as if it were gold.

Some of the Madrilenos gave him odd looks as they went by. He was used to that, and didn’t resent it … too much. It rarely happened when he walked through the city by himself. But when he was a homely guy with a gorgeous woman pushing a baby buggy that proved he’d got the gorgeous woman’s knickers down-oh, yes, he got the odd looks then.

And he would have bet dollars to dog-ends that he’d go right on getting them once true Communism came, assuming it ever did.

He sighed. He wished like anything he were still getting La Martellita’s knickers down. Wish for the moon, too, he thought mournfully.

She wasn’t married to him any more, which didn’t mean she’d given up on trying to improve him. “Don’t get into any brawls, all right?” she said as they walked into a cafe and wine shop not far from her block of flats.

“Who, me? ?El narigon loco?” He brought out the nickname with pride.

“Try,” La Martellita urged. Chaim gave forth with a resigned nod. Spaniards were allowed, even expected, to have a fiery temper. In a foreigner, it seemed an exotic affectation. In a foreigner who also chanced to be a Jew … Well, that was how he’d got the nickname.

He’d been in this joint before. La Martellita had been here a lot more often than he had. The waiter who showed them to their table-a guy with a limp and a gray mustache, which explained why he wasn’t at the front-bowed and scraped over her. You weren’t supposed to do that in the Republic, which was about radical egalitarianism if it was about anything. Maybe it was force of habit, more likely a tribute to La Martellita’s looks. She didn’t ream him out about it, but accepted it as no less than her due. Gorgeous people took such attentions for granted. They might, but Chaim sure didn’t.

He ordered paella for both of them. They drank white wine while they waited for the guy in the kitchen to work his magic. Carlos Federico started to fuss. La Martellita nursed him. Chaim gallantly looked away. He remembered those breasts too well. The little boy fell asleep. La Martellita gently set him back in the buggy.

“Pan is very hot,” the waiter warned as he set it down. Several crayfish sat atop the yellow rice. They were treyf on the hoof, of course, as if he cared. He sucked the meat and the juices out of their shells with as much gusto as if he’d been born in Madrid.

La Martellita sighed when she tasted the rice. “Turmeric,” she said, “not saffron.”

“What do you expect? There’s a war on, you know.” Chaim wasn’t inclined to fuss. Compared to the slop and the monkey meat he ate in the trenches, the paella was terrific, ersatz spices or not.

She gave him a severe look. “Things should be done properly. Rules are there for a reason.”

“If you say so.” He really was trying hard not to fight. He was a Marxist, even a Marxist-Leninist. She was a Marxist-Leninist-Stalinist. It made a difference, all right. She liked telling other people what to do more than he did. He told her what to do anyhow: “Here. Have some more vino.”

She let him pour for her, but she said, “You won’t get me drunk enough to go to bed with you, either.”

“Who, me?” he replied, as if that were the farthest thing from his mind. He never would have got to sleep with her the first time if she hadn’t been gassed to the gills.

They scraped off the rice that had stuck to the iron pan. A lot of Spaniards thought that was the best part of the paella. Chaim didn’t, but it was miles from bad. He set money on the table. Bills over here were a lot fancier than boring American greenbacks. Greenbacks spent better than pesetas, though, even if they weren’t so pretty.

Was that also true of homely people. He thought about it while they walked back to La Martellita’s apartment. He’d had enough wine to make it seem important on the cosmic scale of things.

La Martellita had had enough to let him kiss her in the blackout darkness outside her building. But she slapped his hand away when he tried to slip it into her blouse and cup one of those perfect breasts. “No, I told you.”

A no from her meant no, not maybe or try again later. Swearing in several languages, Chaim mooched dejectedly back to the cafe and got very drunk.

Adi Stoss poured oil into the Panzer III. “This is better shit than they gave us when we first came to Russia,” he allowed, praising the lubricant with a very faint damn. “I don’t think it’ll turn to mucilage when the weather gets really cold.”

“The new and improved-again! — antifreeze won’t freeze up, either … I hope,” Hermann Witt more or less agreed.

“I hope so, too, Auntie Freeze,” Adi said sweetly.

Theo Hossbach bent down and scooped up enough snow for a snowball in his mittened hands. He delivered the editorial to the back of Adi’s neck, so that a lot of it slithered down inside the driver’s coveralls. Adi did an excellent impression of a man with ants in his pants.

A snowball fight was more fun than servicing the engine any old day. The whole crew joined in. They pelted one another with snow till their black panzer outfits might have been winter camouflage smocks. Theo also got a snowball smack in the snoot. Fortunately, whoever threw it hadn’t squeezed it down real tight. Otherwise, he might have needed to see the medics on account of some stupid horseplay. They wouldn’t have liked that, and neither would he.

Of course, the work didn’t go away just because you ignored it for a while. Theo greased the bow machine gun with lubricant that also promised not to turn to sludge when the mercury in thermometers froze solid (which, to any German’s horror, was known to happen during Russian winters). What the manufacturers’ promises were worth … Well, they’d all find out.

If Sergeant Witt was an optimist, he concealed it very well. “The bosses of the companies that make this junk, they’re back in the Reich, drinking champagne and stuffing their faces with roast goose and pinching the chambermaid’s ass.”

“They can kiss my ass,” Adi declared. “And the crap they sent us that first winter almost cooked our goose when it didn’t do what they promised.”

The panzer commander nodded. “They should come up to the front for a while. That would be an education for them, by Jesus!”

“Our field marshals should come up to the front for a while, too,” Kurt Poske put in. “The orders they give, it’s plain enough they don’t know what the hell it’s like up here.”

Adi favored the loader with a crooked grin. “Look out, world! Another one’s going Bolshevik on us!”

He pitched his voice so no one outside the tight-knit crew could possibly hear him. That word made Theo nervous all the same. Did joking Red Army men call their buddies Nazis and give forth with salutes Hitler would have loved? If they did, they had to be as careful as Adi was. Some ways of tweaking authority could prove more dangerous than they were worth.

Stolidly, Kurt answered, “I’m no fucking Bolshie. I just don’t want some numbnuts with gold braid all over his collar tabs getting my dick blown off on account of he thinks we can work miracles.”

“It’s the season for miracles, all right.” Adi launched into “Silent Night.” His baritone came close to professional quality.

Hermann Witt looked up from the radiator. “Where the devil did you learn that song?” The same question had occurred to Theo, but he wouldn’t have asked it.

But nothing seemed to faze Adi today. “Why, in the convent, Auntie Freeze. The nuns taught me all kinds of fascinating things.” The drama critic in Theo said Adi’s leer was overdone.

Sergeant Witt snorted. “Did they teach you how to bolt the carburetor back on?”

“Aber naturlich,” Adi replied. “Where’d the eight-millimeter wrench go?”

After they slammed down the armored engine cover, Adi climbed into the driver’s seat and started the engine. It fired up right away, which said the new lubricants were indeed better than the old-and also said Russian winter hadn’t yet clamped down with full authority. The rest of the crew came aboard. Before long, the heater made Theo as uncomfortably warm as he had been chilly. The happy medium was as extinct for him as it was in the world generally.

Witt’s panzer and the other two runners from the platoon went out to patrol the German lines. Every white lump left Theo worried. Was that a whitewashed T-34, sitting there in ambush waiting for some unwary German crew-this one, for instance-to trundle by?

Half an hour into the patrol, a signal came in from battalion HQ: “Return to your base at once.”

“Acknowledged,” Theo said; his voice sounded rusty in his own ears. He wanted to ask what was up, but figured the guy back there somewhere safer wouldn’t tell him. Instead, he relayed the order to Sergeant Witt. Doing that wasn’t so bad. He was just a phonograph record, passing on someone else’s words. He wasn’t doing anything dangerous, like initiating speech on his own.

Witt swore. “Why are we supposed to do that? We’ve still got a pretty fair stretch of ground to cover.”

“Don’t know.” When Theo did have to speak for himself, he tried to get the maximum from the minimum.

This time, Sergeant Witt swore some more. “Why didn’t you ask them, for Christ’s sake?” He answered his own question before Theo could: “Because you’re you, that’s why.… The other panzers are heading back. We’d better follow them-sure don’t want to stay out here by my lonesome. Go with ’em, Adi.”

“I’m doing it, Sergeant.” Adi Stoss turned the Panzer III toward the west.

When they got back to the battered village that housed their company, it was boiling like a pot forgotten over a big fire. “What the hell is going on?” Sergeant Witt shouted from the panzer’s cupola: or perhaps something rather more pungent than that.

The engine was still growling. Buttoned up inside the iron shell, with earphones on his head, Theo couldn’t make out whatever answer the sergeant got. He did hear Witt come out with some more fancy profanity. He looked a question across the radio set to Adi. Maybe the driver knew what was going on.

Sure enough, Stoss said, “We’re pulling back to make a shorter defensive line.”

“Oh, yeah?” Amazement jerked the words out of Theo. The Wehrmacht had gone toe-to-toe with the Red Army ever since the Germans came to Poland’s rescue. Landsers never gave back any territory unless the Ivans drove them off it. Retreat without orders was a capital crime. And orders like that didn’t come.

Only now they did. What was different? Theo realized he didn’t have to wear the crimson stripes of a General Staff colonel on his trousers to figure it out. When the Reich started its Russian adventure, Hitler had managed to arrange a cease-fire in the West. For a while, English and French contingents even fought side by side with the Wehrmacht.

Now the West was waking up again. Quite a few German units had already left the Soviet Union to make sure the poilus and Tommies didn’t swarm into the Rhineland and the Ruhr. And the Ivans had turned out to be tougher than the Fuhrer ever dreamt they would be. The Nazis like to say the Fuhrer was always right. Well, so he was … except when he wasn’t.

One thing you had to give him: he didn’t make small mistakes. Nobody could say that about Russia. Other things, yes-plenty of them. But not that. And if the Reich didn’t have enough soldiers and panzers and planes hereabouts to hold the line, pulling back to a shorter one did make a certain amount of sense-provided there were enough to hold that shorter one.

We’ll find out, won’t we? Theo thought. Hitler might have done better to patch up some kind of peace with Stalin till he’d whipped France and England for good. Then he could have turned east without worrying about his other flank. But what were the odds of Nazis and Communists ever making any kind of pact? Theo shook his head. No, that just couldn’t happen. Not a chance.

Julius Lemp always went up before boards of his superiors as if he were going to the dentist. He hoped things wouldn’t hurt too much, and that the senior officers would numb him up a little before starting in on the really painful stuff.

So here he was in Wilhelmshaven. His uniform jacket reeked of mothballs, but he couldn’t do anything about that. He hardly ever wore the goddamn thing. Except for that chemical smell, he was as spruced-up as he could get. Well, almost. Not even for a board of his superiors would he put the stiffening wire back into his white-crowned cap. A floppy hat was part of a U-boat skipper’s idea of himself.

He came to stiff attention before all those gold-ringed sleeves and regulation uniform caps. Saluting, he said, “Reporting as ordered!” His voice might have come from the throat of a machine.

But then the highest-ranking big cheese on the board-a rear admiral, no less-replied, “At ease, Lieutenant Commander Lemp.”

At ease? All the starch oozed out of Lemp’s backbone when he heard and understood that. “Lieutenant … Commander?” he whispered. He hadn’t been promoted since the war started. He’d long since assumed he would never see any rank higher than lieutenant, save perhaps posthumously. Discovering he’d been wrong took the wind from his sails, even in a navy of diesels and batteries and steam.

“Yes, yes,” the rear admiral said with a gruff nod. “You’ve lived down your sordid past, shall we say?” He nodded again, more gruffly yet. “Christ on His cross, Lemp, you’ve lived, and too many others haven’t. Might as well let your experience-and the Ark Royal-count for something, hey?”

Even the aircraft carrier had been no lock to win the next higher grade. “Heil Hitler!” Lemp-Lieutenant Commander Lemp-managed, and shot out his right arm. With politics as touchy as they were, showing your loyalty to the regime could never be wrong.

Unless, of course, it could. The Kriegsmarine had never warmed to the Fuhrer and to the Nazis the way the Army had (to say nothing of the parvenu Luftwaffe, run as it was by one of Hitler’s old henchmen). A couple of the men on the board gave Lemp unblinking stares, as if they were old tortoises watching a fox slink by.

No matter what your view of things political was, though, you couldn’t afford to seem lukewarm about the powers that be, not in the Third Reich you couldn’t. Five arms shot out in unison across the table from him, each with more gold at the cuff than he’d ever wear. Five throats chorused, “Heil Hitler!” No one was perceptibly behind anyone else.

The rear admiral produced two small, hinged imitation-leather boxes from his briefcase and shoved them across the table at Lemp. “Here are your new shoulder boards, with the appropriate pips, and here are the new stripes for your sleeves. Congratulations. Belated congratulations, maybe, but congratulations even so-Lieutenant Commander Lemp.”

“Danke schon, mein Herr.” Dazedly, Lemp took the boxes. Each was stamped in gold leaf with the Kriegsmarine’s eagle-which, like the Army’s and the Luftwaffe’s, clutched a swastika in its claws. He stowed them in the jacket’s pockets: pockets he hardly ever used. When he put it on, he’d found a ticket stub in an inside pocket from a film he’d seen before the war started.

“Have we got anything we really need to know about U-30’s latest patrol right this minute, gentlemen?” the rear admiral asked his colleagues. His tone warned that they’d damned well better not. And they didn’t. He nodded once more, with an older man’s dour satisfaction, and gave his attention back to Lemp. “Sehr gut. You are dismissed. I hope you enjoy your liberty while the repair and replenishment crews go over your boat.”

“Danke schon,” Lemp repeated. Liberty! He hadn’t even thought about that. He’d have to go out and get drunk. Not only that, he’d have to get the whole crew drunk, from his exec and the engineering officers down to the lowliest “lords”: the junior seamen who bunked in the forward torpedo room.

How much would the carouse cost? More than the jump in pay from lieutenant to lieutenant commander brought in for a couple of months-Lemp was only too sure of that. Well, you couldn’t make an omelette without chocolate and powdered sugar and whipped cream. And it wasn’t as if a U-boat skipper who spent most of his time at sea got a lot of chances to throw his cash around. He could afford it. Whether he could afford it or not, he knew he had to do it.

He saluted the board again, this time with a proper military gesture rather than the one from the Party. Did the senior officers show a touch of relief when they gave back the same salute? If they did, Lemp didn’t have to notice, not today he didn’t.

His feet scarcely seemed to touch the ground as he walked back to his U-boat. Ratings and junior officers saluted him. He returned their gestures of respect and gave back his own to the handful of men he passed who outranked him. The journey from the board room to the boat was more than half a kilometer, but seemed to take no time at all.

That tall figure on the conning tower could only be Gerhart Beilharz. The Schnorkel expert greeted Lemp with an enormous grin, a salute-most unusual on a U-boat, where such surface-navy formalities went down the scupper-and the words, “Congratulations, Lieutenant Commander!”

Lemp gaped. “How the devil did you know, when I just now found out myself?”

Beilharz’s grin got wider. Lemp hadn’t thought it could. “Jungle telegraph, how else?” the younger man said.

And that was about the size of it. Lemp knew he’d never get anything that came closer to a straight answer. Nothing went faster than the speed of light … except gossip at a naval base. Maybe somebody from the repair crew had heard something and brought word to the boat. Or … Oh, who the hell cared?

The sailors who hadn’t yet headed out for the taverns and brothels of Wilhelmshaven made a point of shaking their skipper’s hand and thumping him on the back. “About time!” they said; several of them profanely embroidered on the theme.

They like me. They really like me, Lemp realized, more than a little surprised that they should. He knew himself well enough to know that he wasn’t an enormously likable man. His focus was too inward; he had next to nothing of the hail-fellow-well-met in him. And he was the skipper, the great god of his small, stinking world. You could respect a god. You could admire one or fear one. Loving one, despite what the preachers claimed and proclaimed, was a lot harder. Gods and mortals didn’t travel in the same social circles.

Except sometimes they did. Lemp gathered up the officers and ratings still aboard the U-30. “Come along with me, boys,” he said. “We’ll see how many crewmates we can gather up, too. I’m buying-till you head for the whorehouses, anyway.”

“Three cheers for Lieutenant Commander Lemp!” Peter shouted, and the sailors lustily followed the helmsman’s lead. Turning back to Lemp, Peter added, “You should get promoted more often, Skipper.”

“Damn right I should,” Lemp replied, which made his men laugh raucously. They hadn’t started drinking yet, so it must have been a good line for real.

Despite flak guns on rooftops and in parks and little squares, Wilhelmshaven had taken bomb damage. Of course a German naval base near the Dutch border would make a juicy target for the RAF. But the air pirates wouldn’t come over while brief winter day lit the landscape (not so brief here as it was up in the Baltic or, worse, the Barents Sea, where the sun stayed below the horizon for a long stretch around the solstice).

The men poured down beer and schnapps. Lemp bled banknotes. Well, he’d known he would. If he got plastered himself, he wouldn’t care … so much. He drank till his head started spinning. When the men sought pleasures even more basic than beer, Beilharz guided him to an officers’ maison de tolerance. Hearing that he was celebrating a promotion, the madam let him go upstairs with a pretty, round-faced young redhead for free.

“I’m a patriot, I am,” the madam declared. “Heil Hitler!”

“Heil!” Lemp echoed. He patted his girl on the backside. Before long, he’d salute her in a way older and more enjoyable than any Party rituals.

These days, leathernecks and swabbies aboard the Ranger walked soft around Pete McGill. It was a compliment of sorts, but one he could have done without. When you showed you could damn near kill a guy with your bare hands, naturally people on the carrier would notice. Just as naturally, they’d go out of their way to make sure you didn’t want to do unto them as you’d done unto Barney Klinsmann.

Barney was out of sick bay at last, and back on light duty. He still insisted he’d fallen down stairs. Nobody believed him, but the polite fiction kept Pete out of the brig.

Two new carriers had steamed to Pearl from the West Coast. They were both makeshifts. Their official title was escort carrier. Everybody called them baby flattops or sometimes jeep carriers, though. They were freighters with flight decks, was what they were. They could hold only half as many planes as a fleet carrier like Ranger, and they couldn’t make better than eighteen knots unless you dropped ’em off a cliff.

That was the bad news. The good news was, they were here now. New fleet carriers were supposed to be in the pipeline, but it hadn’t spit them out yet. They were expensive and complicated and slow to build. You could make baby flattops in a hurry. Okay, they had their drawbacks. Drawbacks or not, they let Uncle Sam fly more planes in the Pacific. Pete was all for anything that did that.

Bob Cullum pointed out another flaw the escort carriers had: “Goddamn things are ugly as sin.”

“Well, so are you, but the government still thinks you’re good for something.” Pete smiled when he said it-the other sergeant was senior to him. And he was just needling Cullum. He didn’t want to get into another fight. No one would have accused him of being a peaceable man, but he aimed as much of his rage as he could at the Japs.

“Ah, your mama.” Cullum also made a point of smiling. He might not be eager to tangle with Pete-after what happened to Klinsmann, nobody was-but he didn’t want to back down to him, either. More to the point, he didn’t want to be seen as backing down.

Pete understood that. He didn’t have a lot of empathy. But he’d served long enough in Peking and Shanghai to understand the idea of face. He could see that making Bob Cullum lose face wouldn’t be good for him. A senior noncom could always come up with ways to make a junior noncom’s life miserable. So he didn’t push things, and neither did Cullum, and they both stayed tolerably content.

Then the Ranger and the two baby flattops-they were the Suwannee and the Chenango-steamed out on patrol, and Pete was more than tolerably content. Hitting back at the Japs still roused a fierce, primal pleasure in him, better than anything this side of sex (and more closely related to it than he understood-he was anything but an introspective man).

Because the escort carriers couldn’t get out of their own way-they cruised at fifteen knots-it also struck him as a patrol in slow motion. The Ranger and all the escorting cruisers and destroyers had to amble along at the same paltry pace. But Wildcats from the converted freighters joined the combat air patrol above the flotilla. If they ran into a Japanese force, two more squadrons of dive-bombers and torpedo planes would tear into the enemy.

That did matter. It might end up mattering one hell of a lot. On the other hand … “We better not let the Japs catch us unawares, like,” Peter remarked to Sergeant Cullum at gun drill one morning. “It ain’t like the baby flattops can get away from ’em. They can’t run, and they can’t hide, neither.” He beamed, pleased at his own wit.

If Cullum even noticed it, he didn’t let on. He broke into an off-key rendition of “Way Down Upon the Suwannee River” and an equally atrocious soft-shoe routine by the dual-purpose five-incher.

Pete was not inclined to strafe him the way Brooks Atkinson or any other critic in his right mind would have. He was too busy being amazed for that even to occur to him. “Fuck me up the asshole!” he exclaimed, and pointed across the blue, blue Pacific at the slowpoke escort carrier. “She is named for that dumb river, isn’t she?”

“Speaking of dumb …” Cullum said pointedly. “You just now noticed, Hercule Poirot?” He pronounced it poi-rot, as if the native Hawaiians’ staple had gone bad.

“Who?” Pete wouldn’t have known who Hercule Poirot was even with his name said the right way. Sherlock Holmes he could have handled. Anyone more obscure? He would have dropped the ball. Hell, he had dropped it. He went on, “I knew the fucking song. Jeez, who doesn’t? But I never figured it was about a real place.”

“Well, it is.” Now Bob Cullum spoke with exaggerated patience.

“Well, ain’t that nice?” Unconsciously, Pete used the line and the intonation of a performer in a Vitaphone Variety-an early stab at a talkie, well before The Jazz Singer-he’d watched when he was a kid. Japanese interrogators could have shoved burning bamboo slivers under his fingernails without getting him to remember the skit with the top part of his mind.

Floatplanes launched from the cruisers’ catapults were the flotilla’s long-range scouts. You had to hope they would spot Japanese ships before the Japs spotted them. And you had to hope that, if they did, they’d be able to relay a warning before some slanty-eyed son of a bitch in the cockpit of a Zero hacked them out of the sky.

Neither of those hopes struck Pete as especially good. American scouts had already missed Japanese naval units more than once in the Pacific. And one of those sedate floatplanes wouldn’t last long against a Zero, much less against a swarm of Zeros. It’d last … about as long as the Suwannee would, say, in a gun duel with a Jap battlewagon.

Not that the Ranger would last one whole hell of a lot longer. But the Ranger could make twenty-nine knots. She might manage to flee from such an unfortunate encounter. The Suwannee and the Chenango couldn’t even do that. A battleship would devour them at its leisure.

Something overhead that wasn’t a Wildcat or a floatplane drew Pete’s nervous glance. Then he relaxed … fractionally. “Gooney bird,” he explained to Bob Cullum, who’d sent him a quizzical stare.

“Ah.” The other leatherneck nodded. “Yeah, they’re all over this stretch of the Pacific, aren’t they?”

“Damn right they are,” Pete said. “They’re just about big enough to shoot down, too.”

“Bad luck!” Cullum said. “No luck’s worse’n that! Fuck, I’d sooner bust ten mirrors than shoot an albatross.”

“Okay, okay. All right, already. Keep your hair on, man. I was just kidding around.” Pete knew about how hurting an albatross was worse than breaking a mirror while walking under a ladder as a black cat sauntered across your path. Anybody who’d ever put to sea in the tropical Pacific did, even if-like Pete-he’d never heard of The Rime of the Ancient Mariner.

But Bob Cullum took the superstition to extremes. No matter how much Pete apologized, the other Marine muttered about curses and misfortunes for days. By the time he finally shut up, Pete was tempted to head for Midway with a machine gun and a flamethrower, to wipe the breeding colony of gooney birds off the face of the earth.

Only one thing stopped him: the Japs held the island. He wondered if they felt the same way about albatrosses as white men did. If not, they might be settling the great big birds’ hash for him. He could hope, anyhow.