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!