Harry Turtledove: Two Fronts

And then he’d go down the hatch, back into the collection of reeks that put your average city rubbish tip to shame. They said you stopped noticing smells once you were stuck in them for a while. They said all kinds of things. Some of them were true. Some were crap. You might not smell the interior of a U-boat so much after a while, but you never had any doubts about where you were, even if you woke up with your eyes still shut.

Every time the boat came in from a patrol, it got cleaned up along with refueling and taking on fresh eels to shoot at enemy shipping and food both fresh and canned. Thanks to the bilgewater, though, getting rid of the stinks was and always would be a losing fight. The only way to do the trick would be to melt the submarine down to raw steel and start over. Even then, cleanliness would last only until the first clumsy sailor spilled something into the bilges.

In due course, Gerhart Beilharz emerged from the smelly steel tube. “I relieve you, Skipper,” the engineering officer said. He smiled broadly as he inhaled. “My turn to breathe the good stuff for a while.”

“Well, so it is. Enjoy it,” Lemp said. “You get to take off your Stahlhelm , too.”

Beilharz’s grin got wider yet. “I sure do!” He was two meters tall. He didn’t fit well into a U-boat’s cramped confines. Men shorter than he was banged their noggins on overhead pipes and valves and spigots.

With a sigh, Julius Lemp descended. It was twilight outside, and twilight in the pressure hull as well. The bulbs in here were dim and orange, to help keep light from leaking out when the hatches were open at night. And the smell was … what it was. It didn’t make Lemp’s stomach want to turn over, the way it did with some men.

“Beast behaving, Paul?” he asked the helmsman.

“No worries, Skipper,” the senior rating said.

“Good. That’s what I want to hear,” Lemp said. If Paul wasn’t worried, there was nothing to worry about.

Lemp’s tiny cabin held-barely-a desk, a steel chair, a cot, and the safe where he stashed codebooks and other secure publications. That made it far and away the roomiest accommodation on the boat. With the canvas curtain pulled shut, he had as much privacy as anyone here could: which is to say, not a great deal.

He filled his fountain pen and wrote in the log. His script was small, even cramped, and very precise. There wasn’t a lot to record: course, speed, fuel consumed. No ships or airplanes sighted, either from his own side or the enemy. No disciplinary problems among his men, either, nor had there been since the patrol began. The crew weren’t rowdies while on the job, and they weren’t especially rowdy in any port even halfway equipped to show off-duty sailors a good time.

Would any of that matter to his superiors? The U-30’s sailors had torn Narvik to pieces twice now. Things wouldn’t go well for them if they tried it a third time. And they were liable to, as Lemp knew full well.

He could listen to what went on in the boat without drawing notice to himself: another advantage of the curtain. Even when he couldn’t make out conversations, he could pick up tone. Everything sounded the way it should. If the men were plotting anything, they were doing it out of his earshot-and there weren’t many places out of his earshot in the U-boat.

After Lieutenant Beilharz came off his watch, he paused outside the tiny cabin and said, “Talk to you for a minute or two, Skipper?”

“Sure. Come on in,” Lemp answered.

Beilharz did, ducking under the curtain rod. He had the Stahlhelm on again. Lemp waved for him to sit down on the cot. Had something gone wrong with the Schnorkel ? They were surfaced in the gloom, so they didn’t need the gadget now. But when Beilharz spoke in a low voice, what he said had nothing to do with his specialty: “Sir, what do we do when the politics start boiling over again?”

That wasn’t what Lemp wanted to hear, even if it was a damn good question. Plenty of high-ranking officers couldn’t be happy to watch the Reich pulled into a full-scale war on two fronts. Some of them had already tried more than once to overthrow the Fuhrer . The ones who had were mostly dead now, which might not stop their successors from taking another shot at it.

“Best thing we can do,” Lemp said slowly, “is hope we’re out on patrol when the boiling starts.”

“ Ja ,” Beilharz agreed. “But if we’re not?”

Now Lemp spoke as firmly as he could: “I’m not going to borrow trouble. I’m going to do my job for the Reich . You do the same. Now get the hell out of here.”

Gerhart Beilharz got. Lemp took a bottle of schnapps out of his desk and swallowed a good slug. He didn’t think Beilharz was trying to trap him into saying anything disloyal about the Reich ’s current leader. He didn’t think so, no, but he couldn’t be sure. After a moment, he tilted the bottle back again.

“Look out, you lug. Here comes the Chimp.” Several soldiers made dice and rubles disappear as if they’d never existed.

Ivan Kuchkov wasn’t sure which one of them had used the nickname he hated so much. The sergeant hated it not least because it fit so well. He was short and squat and dark and hairy. Nobody would ever call him handsome. But he could break most men in half, and he wasn’t shy about brawling. They must have figured he couldn’t hear them.

He didn’t want to tear into all of them at once. Well, part of him did, but he knew it wasn’t a good idea. He wasn’t worried about losing; that never crossed his mind. But he might get into trouble for leaving a fair part of his section unfit to fight the Fascists.

“Come on, you needle dicks,” he growled. “We’re supposed to go out and check what those Nazi cocksuckers are up to.”

“All of us?” one of them yipped in dismay.

“Every fucking one,” Kuchkov said. He raised his voice: “Sasha! Where are you hiding your clapped-out cunt?”

“I’m here, Comrade Sergeant.” Sasha Davidov seemed to appear out of thin air. The skinny little Jew had a knack for that, as he did for most forms of self-preservation.

“Good. You take point. I’m leading these bitches out on patrol.” His wave encompassed the dejected gamblers. He didn’t have anything in particular against Davidov for being a Christ-killing kike. No-he really wanted him along, because Sasha was far and away the best point man in the company, probably in the regiment. With him out front, they all had a better chance to come back in one piece.

It was cold. The Ukraine didn’t get as cold as Russia did (Kuchkov thought with a sort of masochistic patriotism), but it got plenty cold enough. Snow crunched under Kuchkov’s valenki . He wore a snow smock over his greatcoat, and a whitewashed helmet. His mittens had slits through which he could fire his PPD-34 submachine gun at need. He held the slits closed when he didn’t need them.

The Germans, of course, would be similarly swaddled. If his patrol ran into one of theirs, things could get interesting fast, depending on who first figured out the other bunch of sad, sorry, shivering assholes belonged to the wrong side. And, of course, there were the Ukrainians, who had trouble deciding whether they hated Stalin worse than Hitler or the other way round.

Artillery rumbled off to the west. Kuchkov cocked his head to one side, listening. Yes, those were Hitlerite 105s. The shells thudded down somewhere not close enough to worry about. A few minutes later, Red Army cannon answered. “Ha!” Kuchkov said. “Let the butchers blow the balls off each other.” He hated big guns. What infantryman didn’t? You hardly ever got the chance to shoot artillerymen, but they had all kinds of chances at you.