Crunch! The panzer clattered over the antitank gun. For a nasty moment, Ludwig feared the panzer would flip over, but it didn't. When he looked back over his shoulder, he saw the new kink in the gun's barrel. Nobody would use that one against the Reich any more, which was the point.
Here and there, infantrymen with rifles fired at the panzers, trying to pick off their commanders. Every once in a while, they managed to do it, too. But the panzers had a whole slew of advantages. They were on the move. Their commanders could duck behind armor. And they carried a machine gun and a light cannon against a bolt-action rifle.
Staying on the move was the biggest edge. Even if you didn't take out an infantryman, you left him behind in a matter of seconds. Sooner or later, your own foot soldiers could deal with him. In the meanwhile, the panzers charged ahead, flowing around enemy hell in the rear.
But Coucy-le-Chateau was too big and too strong to go around. Some of the soldiers Ludwig shot at in the outskirts wore lighter khaki and steel derbies in place of darker uniforms and domed helms with vestigial crests. Englishmen! They didn't like machine-gun bursts any better than the French (or Ludwig, come to that).
A machine gun chattered from the middle of an apple orchard. The gun moved. Ludwig realized it was mounted on some sort of tank. He gulped, wondering if the enemy machine's cannon was taking dead aim at his panzer. Not nearly enough steel separated him from the slings and arrows of outrageous gunners.
But he realized little by little that the other panzer didn't carry a cannon. All it had was that machine gun-it might as well have been a German Panzer I.
It waddled out of the apple grove. It didn't seem able to do anything but waddle-a man running fast would have had no trouble outdistancing it. He fired three quick rounds from the 20mm gun. Two of them hit the turret, but they didn't come close to punching through. The Matilda might be slow. It might have a laughable armament-even a Panzer I sported a pair of machine guns, not a singleton. But it was damned hard to wreck.
It was if you tried to kill the crew, anyway. If you crippled it, though…Ludwig fired the 20mm at the Matilda's tracks and road wheels. Before long, the ungainly thing slewed sideways and stopped. Ludwig's panzer clanked past it. Now it was nothing but a well-armored machine-gun position. The infantry could deal with that.
Medieval-looking ramparts surrounded Coucy-le-Chateau. The hilltop chateau that gave the town its name had had chunks bitten out of it, probably in the last war. Mortar bombs from the chateau started falling among the German panzers. Half wrecked or not, the place had poilus or Tommies in it.
"Theo!" Ludwig said. "Let the artillery know they're firing from the ruin."
"Right," the radioman answered, which might have meant anything.
He-or somebody-must have done it, because 105s started knocking more pieces off the chateau. Then a flight of Stukas screamed down on it. Their bombs did what guns could only dream about. The enemy mortars fell silent.
More Stukas worked over Coucy-le-Chateau. One of them got shot down and crashed into the town, turning itself into a bomb. The rest roared away. The onslaught stunned the defenders. With narrow, winding streets, Coucy-le-Chateau might have been a nasty place to try to take. But some of the garrison fled west and south, while the rest couldn't surrender fast enough.
Breakthrough? Ludwig didn't know, but he had hopes.
January. The North Atlantic. A U-boat. The combination was not made in heaven, as Lieutenant Julius Lemp knew only too well.
Oh, he could take the U-30 down below periscope depth, and she'd escape the fearsome waves topside. The only trouble was, down below periscope depth she'd be about as useful to the war effort as if she were a five-year-old's toy in a Berlin bathtub.
A five-year-old splashing around couldn't whip up a worse storm in that tiny tub than God was kicking up out here on the broad ocean. One ten-meter wave after another rolled down on the U-30. Because she was so much smaller and had so much less freeboard than a surface warship, it was like taking one soggy right to the chin after another.
Lemp tied himself to the rail atop the conning tower so an extra-big wave wouldn't sweep him out to sea. He wore oilskins, of course. He knew he'd get soaked anyhow. This way, it would take a little longer, though.
He wondered why he'd bothered bringing the binoculars with him. So much spray and stray water splashed the lenses, he might as well have peered through a couple of full beer steins. You had to try all the same. Why else did they send you out in filthy weather like this?
Another wave smashed over the bow. It splashed past the 88mm deck gun and crashed into the conning tower. Lemp got himself a faceful of ocean. "Fuck," he said, spitting salt water. He would have made a bigger fuss had it been the first time, or even the fifth.
He looked at the binoculars. They were good and wet now. Ironically, that might make them easier to look through than when they'd just been spray-splashed. He raised them to his eyes and swept the horizon with a hunter's intent patience.
He or one of the other watchstanders did this as long as there was enough daylight to see by. At night, he did take the boat down twenty-five or thirty meters so the men could cook a little and could rest without getting pitched out of their cramped bunks and hammocks.
Something glided past him on the wind: a petrel, on the prowl for fish, not ships. Stormy weather didn't bother the bird. Lemp wished he could say the same.
The U-boat's bow sank down into a trough. That meant the following wave would be worse than usual. And it was. If not for the fastening-and for his holding on to the rail for dear life-it would have swept him into the Atlantic. Would he have drowned before he froze? That was the only question there.
He wanted to ride on top of a crest, not get buried by one. Eventually, the U-30 did. That gave him those extra ten meters from which to look around. He didn't expect to see anything but the scudding gray clouds that had kept him company ever since leaving Germany. His watch would be up pretty soon. Then he could descend into the U-boat's crowded, stinking pressure hull, dry off, and change into his other, slightly less soaked, uniform.
When you didn't expect to see something, you probably wouldn't, even if it was there. Lemp almost missed the smoke trail to the northwest. His hands were smarter than his head. They snapped back of themselves and gave him another look at it. Without even noticing he'd done it, he stopped shivering. He stopped caring he was wet clean through.
He pulled out the plug on the speaking tube that let him talk to the helmsman and the engine room. "Change course to 310," he ordered. "All ahead full."
Hollow and brassy, the answer came back: "Changing course to 310, skipper. You found something?"
"I sure did," Lemp said as the diesels' building throb told him their crew had got the command, too. "Now we have to see what it is and whether we can run it down."
He thought they had a decent chance. Not many freighters could match the U-30's surface speed. And he could get mighty close before the ship spotted his exhaust: diesel fuel burned much cleaner than heavy oil, to say nothing of coal. The U-boat's low, sharkish silhouette shouldn't be easy to pick up, either.
The other side of the coin was, he couldn't make seventeen knots in seas like this. Now that the U-30 had turned away from taking the swells bow-on, she got slapped in the port side instead. British corvettes-U-boat hunters-were said to roll on wet grass. The U-30 was doing the same thing. As long as she straightened up every time, Lemp couldn't complain.
His stomach could, and did. He was a good sailor, but he seldom faced a challenge like this. He gulped, hoping lunch would stay down. If he was going to sink that ship, he had to get ahead of her before submerging to wait for her to reach him where he lay in wait. A U-boat's greatest weakness was that it was slower submerged than its quarry was on the surface.