“Now comes the interesting part,” Lemp said to no one in particular. He turned the boat away from the stricken convoy. Looking back over his shoulder, so to speak, with the periscope, he saw what he knew he’d see: the Royal Navy destroyer rushing up to pay him back. Its pings sounded furious. Maybe that was his imagination, but he didn’t think so.
The destroyer would expect him to dive deep and sneak away at the pitiful pace the batteries gave. It would rain ash cans down on his head and hope to sink him. But he didn’t feel like enduring another depth charging. “Raise the Schnorkel again,” he ordered. “We’ll get out of here twice as fast as he thinks we can.”
He caught the ratings glancing at one another as they obeyed. If this worked, he was a genius. If it didn’t, if the Royal Navy ship’s echo-locater located them …
We can dive deep then, he thought hopefully. In the meantime, that destroyer would be pinging in the wrong place. He was betting his life, and his crewmen’s lives, that it would, anyhow.
He won the bet. Other Royal Navy ships pinged away, too, but all of them well to the east of U-30. The crewmen wrestled fresh eels into those bow tubes. The “lords”-the most junior sailors-would have more room to sleep tonight, because they bunked in the compartment where reloads were stored. And then the U-boat would go hunting again.
Chapter 8
“What the hell have you got there?” Mike Carroll asked, staring at the fat book Chaim Weinberg was reading. “New Hemingway.” Chaim held it up so Mike could see the spine-the cover was long gone. “It’s called For Whom the Bell Tolls, and it’s about the war here before the fighting started all over everywhere.”
“How is it?” Mike asked.
“Pretty damn good. I wish I could get a pretty girl to hop in my sleeping bag as easy as this guy Jordan does, though.”
“I was up on the Ebro when he was in Madrid,” Mike said. “Hemingway, I mean, not the guy in the book.”
“I understood you. So was I,” Chaim said. “I know some guys who knew him while he was here, though.”
“Oh, sure. Me, too.” Carroll nodded. The sun glared down on the trenches. Spring in Spain didn’t last long. It quickly rolled into summer, and summer in central Spain, like summer in central California, was nothing to joke about. Mike went on, “Didn’t Hemingway have that lady war correspondent hopping all over him then? What the hell was her name?”
“Gellhorn. Martha Gellhorn.” To show how he knew, Chaim flipped back to the very beginning of the book. “It’s dedicated to her. They’re married now, I think.”
“Yeah, I think you’re right.” Mike nodded again. “Married and living in Cuba or some such place. That’s the nice thing about covering a war when you’re a reporter. You can leave once you’ve got your story, and then write a book while you’re pouring down rum and Coke thousands of miles away.”
“You got that right. He wrote a good book, though-I will give him that much,” Chaim said. “The stuff about what the Republicans and the Fascists did to each other when the war was breaking out … I’ve talked to enough Spaniards to have a notion of how it was, and what’s in here feels real.”
“Okay. Give it to me when you’re done with it, then,” Carroll said.
“Will do. Just so you know, it’s not one of your cheerful-type books. No matter how much screwing this Jordan guy does, no way in hell he’s gonna live to the end of it,” Chaim warned.
“I’m a big boy, Mommy.” Mike grinned to take away the sting.
Chaim grinned, too. “Fuck you, big boy.” They both laughed. Chaim wiggled his back so the forward wall of the trench didn’t dig into it in so many places-or at least so the trench wall dug into it in some different places-and went back to plowing through For Whom the Bell Tolls.
He was about fifty pages from the end when Nationalist howitzers opened up on the stretch of line the Internationals held. The nerve of the bastards! he thought as he huddled in the almost-bombproof he’d scraped in that forward wall. Couldn’t they even let a guy finish his book? He didn’t remember the Czech sniper’s monster rifle going off, so Sanjurjo’s men weren’t taking revenge for some newly fallen alleged hero.
Or he didn’t think they were. Hemingway had sucked him in deeply enough that he might not have noticed the Czech firing the antitank rifle. The damn thing was hard to ignore, though. Chances were the Nationalists were just being their usual asshole selves.
More 105s came down. How crazy would it be if an American International in Spain who was reading about an American International in Spain who was going to get killed by the goddamn Nationalists got killed by the goddamn Nationalists while he was reading? Well, not at the exact moment he was reading, but close enough to satisfy even the most dedicated coincidence-sniffer.
Chaim didn’t want to get killed. Well, Robert Jordan didn’t want to get killed, either, but that wouldn’t do him any good. The god named Hemingway was one merciless son of a bitch. Jordan could screw till the earth moved for him and Maria; his movie wouldn’t have a happy ending even so.
The earth was moving for Chaim, too, but he couldn’t enjoy it the way Jordan did in the book. The damn shell bursts were making it shake. If one of those shells came down too close, Chaim’s story wouldn’t have a happy ending, either.
Hey, he thought, I did some fancy fucking in Spain, too. I even have a kid to prove it. La Martellita was nothing like Maria. She was as tough as Pilar, if you could imagine Pilar beautiful. And if you could imagine Pilar beautiful, you could imagine just about anything.
After forty-five minutes or so, the shelling let up. No, the Nationalists didn’t mean anything in particular by it. They were throwing some hate around-that was all. Chaim had heard an English International give artillery fire that name. God knew it fit. Whenever Chaim said it himself, the people he was talking to always got it.
Stretcher-bearers carried a moaning wounded man back toward the doctors. Chaim hoped it was one of the Spaniards who filled out the Abe Lincolns’ ranks these days. Not many Americans were left any more. He didn’t want to lose a friend-or even a jerk who spoke English.
For Whom the Bell Tolls had got dirty and a little crumpled when he dove for cover. He figured Hemingway would approve. From things he’d heard, the writer was a blowhard and drank like a fish, but the man could sure as hell put words on paper.
Back behind the line, Republican guns came to life. They started repaying the Nationalists for their bad manners. If only they could take out Sanjurjo’s artillery … But they didn’t seem interested in trying. They inflicted the same kind of misery on the enemy’s forward trenches as the Fascists had sent this way.
Chaim hated artillerymen. He didn’t know a foot soldier who didn’t. He suspected the Roman legionaries had hated the bastards who served the Parthian catapults-and their own as well. How could you not hate someone who could hurt you at a range where you couldn’t hurt him back? There the son of a bitch was, drinking coffee and smoking a cigar, maybe with some cute dancer on his lap, and all he had to do was yank that rope to blow you into the middle of next week. It wasn’t even close to fair. No matter where you were in the world, it had to look the same way.
When storming parties went forward, enemy machine-gun teams had a tough time surrendering. They dished out too much woe to atone for it by throwing up their hands. Artillerymen were the same way, only doubled and redoubled. The trouble was, storming parties rarely got far enough into the rear to give them what they deserved. That took more artillery, dammit.
After a while, the Republican gunners decided they’d done what they could for their benighted brethren in the trenches. Their cannon fell silent. Chaim waited to see if the Nationalist 105s would open up again. They didn’t. Maybe they were short on shells, maybe on outrage.