The sun was just rising when the bomber jounced to a stop on the runway. The pilot came in slow, just above stalling speed, and braked so hard Fujita could smell burning rubber from the tires. He stopped as short as he could, so the plane had the smallest chance of going into a crater and flipping over. Fujita scrambled out onto the tarmac. He was at sea level again, and sweating hard again, too. He didn’t care. He’d made it one more time.
Benjamin Halévy stuck a cigarette in his mouth and lit it. He offered Vaclav Jezek the pack. Vaclav took one. “Thanks, Lieutenant,” he said.
“Up yours, Sergeant,” Halévy replied. They grinned at each other.
Before the war, Vaclav hadn’t had much use for Jews. But the Jewish conscripts in the Czechoslovakian army had hung in and fought the Nazis along with the Czechs, while Poles and Ruthenians and especially Slovaks either just gave up or went over to the enemy. Jews had even better reasons than Czechs for hating Hitler and his minions, and that wasn’t easy.
Halévy wasn’t, or wasn’t exactly, a Czech Jew. His parents had gone from Prague to Paris after the last war. He’d been a French sergeant and, because he spoke both French and Czech, a liaison between his own armed forces and those of the Czechoslovakian government-in-exile. When France made its temporary truce with Hitler, he’d accompanied the Czech soldiers into exile in Republican Spain. He couldn’t stomach fighting on the German side.
He was a lieutenant here for the same reason Jezek was a sergeant. The Spaniards had an inferiority complex about their own fighting skills. They automatically promoted foreigners one grade. A lot of Vaclav’s pay still came in promises, but they were bigger promises than they would have been otherwise.
After blowing out smoke, Vaclav asked, “Do Sanjurjo’s bastards promote the Germans and Italians on their side, too?”
“I know they do with the Germans,” Halévy said. “I’m not so sure they bother with Mussolini’s boys. I mean, would you promote an Italian?”
“Not unless I wanted him to cook noodles for me,” Vaclav answered, and they both laughed. The German Legion Kondor had good men, picked men, in it. There were more Italians in Spain, but they were mostly conscripts who didn’t want to be here, and fought like it.
Vaclav’s canteen was full of harsh red wine. He swigged from it. He had a better chance of steering clear of the trots with wine than with water. And the trots were something nobody in the trenches needed, much less someone who spent a lot of his time quietly waiting in no-man’s-land. Hard to wait quietly when you had to yank down your trousers and squat.
He hadn’t gone out this morning. He couldn’t have said why. He hadn’t felt lucky when he woke up before sunrise-that was as close as he could come. No one in the little Czech force gave him any trouble about it. They’d all served together for a long, long time. They knew he wasn’t malingering. He’d done plenty to Sanjurjo’s Nationalists, and chances were he would again. Only not today.
Not today. Tomorrow. Mañana. That was one of the Spanish words Vaclav did know. You couldn’t be in Spain long without learning it. When he said it, he commonly meant tomorrow. A Spaniard who said it might mean tomorrow, too. Or he might mean in a few days-I don’t quite know when. Or he might mean go away and quit bothering me. It all depended on how he said it.
Czechs had spent a lot of centuries living next door to Germans. Attitudes rubbed off, even if no one intended that they should. When a Czech said in an hour, that was what he meant. When he said tomorrow, he meant that, too. Discovering how abstract and theoretical time could be in Spain came as a painful surprise.
It cost lives, too. If an artillery barrage came in two hours late-and such things happened all the time here-foot soldiers who should have attacked a softened-up position advanced against one with the defenders ready and waiting. They usually paid the price for it, too.
In the Czech army, as in the Wehrmacht, an artillery officer whose guns didn’t fire when they were supposed to would get it in the neck. He’d wind up a corporal, one posted where the fighting was hottest. Among the Spaniards, Republicans and Nationalists alike, people just shrugged. Such things were sad, absolutely, but what could you do?
Maybe the weather had something to do with it. Jezek drank more wine. “Christ, it’s hot!” he said. You never saw weather like this in Central Europe. This would kill you if you gave it half a chance. Here in Spain, sunstroke wasn’t just a word.
“It is,” Halévy agreed. He’d turned brown as an Arab, brown as old leather, under the harsh Spanish sun. Like most Czechs, Vaclav was much fairer than the Jew. He’d burned and peeled, burned and peeled, over and over again, till he finally started to tan. He knew he wouldn’t tan like Halévy if he stayed here another fifty years.
Before he could say anything else, the Nationalists’ artillery woke up. That didn’t happen every day any more-nowhere close. Marshal Sanjurjo got most of his tubes from Germany and Italy. Since France backed away from her deal with Hitler, the marshal hadn’t been able to get many any more. The ones he had were old and worn. They’d lost a lot of accuracy. Spanish-made shells (on both sides of the line) were much too likely to be duds.
Artillery could still kill you, though. Jezek grabbed his antitank rifle and folded himself up into a ball in the bottom of the trench. Any pillbug that happened to see him would have been impressed. But his bet was that any pillbugs down here were folding themselves into balls, too.
He opened his eyes for a second. Beside him, Benjamin Halévy was also doing his best to occupy as little space as he could. Not all the Nationalists’ shells were duds, dammit. Some of them burst with thunderous roars near the Czechs’ trench line. Dirt fountained up into the air. Clods fell down and thumped Vaclav. He flinched every time one did, afraid it would be a speeding, whining fragment and not a harmless lump of earth.
While he lay there, his hands were busy under him. He stuck a five-round box into the slot on his elephant gun and worked the bolt to chamber the first cartridge. He’d left the monster rifle unloaded. He hadn’t thought he would need to do any shooting from the trench. But if Sanjurjo’s men were shelling like this, what was it but the prelude to an infantry attack?
Halévy had to be thinking the same thing. As soon as the artillery barrage eased off, he bounced to his feet, yelling, “Up! Up, dammit! They’ll be coming after us any second now!”
Vaclav scrambled onto the firing step. Grunting, he heaved up the heavy antitank rifle and rested the bipod on the dirt of the parapet. Sure as hell, soldiers in German-looking helmets and pale yellowish khaki were swarming out of the Nationalists’ trenches and foxholes like angry ants.
He didn’t worry about picking off officers now. He pulled the trigger as soon as he got one of Sanjurjo’s men in his crosshairs. When you hit some poor bastard dead center with a round intended to pierce two or three centimeters of hardened steel, you almost tore him in half. The luckless Spaniard’s midsection exploded into red mist. He didn’t crumple; he toppled.
The thumb-sized cartridge case clinked off the top of Vaclav’s boot after he worked the bolt again. He killed another Nationalist a few seconds later. This one did a graceful pirouette into a shell hole. He wouldn’t come out again, either, not with most of his head blown off.
Ordinary rifles were banging away from the Czech line, too, along with a couple of machine guns. When Republican artillery woke up and started giving no-man’s-land a once-over, the Nationalists decided they wouldn’t be breaking through to Madrid today after all. Some hunkered down in whatever cover they could find while others scurried back to their start line. Even Fascist Spaniards were recklessly brave, but war was a Darwinian business. The longer it went on, the more pragmatists survived.