"Yeah, yeah. That means you're going to shitcan all the rounds that go with it, too, aren't you?"
Sergeant Halevy raised a gingery eyebrow. "Hey, boy, I see where you're going." He translated for the lieutenant yet again.
"Mais certainement," the French officer replied. Again, to him, if the rounds couldn't kill tanks, they couldn't do anything.
Vaclav had a different idea. "Don't throw 'em out. Give 'em to me. I'll be the-waddayacallit?-the official obsolete rifle-toter, and I'll get the guys in my squad to lug what I can't. They know what this baby can do." Even if you don't, asshole. He affectionately patted the antitank rifle's padded stock. With a bit of luck, he wouldn't have to quarrel with stuck-up French quartermaster sergeants any more.
With a bit of luck… How much would the nasty little gods in charge of war dole out? Have to wait and see.
"This is most irregular," the French officer said after the Jew translated one more time.
"Fine. It's irregular," Vaclav said. "But if it's officially irregular…" Maybe that would get through to the lieutenant.
The fellow eyed him. "You go out of your way to be difficult, n'est-ce pas?"
"To the Nazis, sure. Not to anybody else." Vaclav lied without hesitation. He was difficult with anybody who got in his way. The jerks on your own side would screw you over worse than the enemy if you gave 'em half a chance.
After more back-and-forth between Halevy and the Frenchman, the lieutenant threw his hands in the air and strode off. "He says, have it your own way," Halevy reported. "He'll see that you get the ammo. He'll probably see that you end up ass-deep in it-he's not real happy with you."
"I'd rather have too much than not enough," Jezek said.
He wondered if he meant that when he got two truckloads of wooden crates full of the thumb-sized cartridges the antitank rifle fire. No, he couldn't very well burden the Czechs in his squad with that load. Each man's share would have squashed him flat.
That meant dealing with a quartermaster sergeant after all. Fortunately, this wasn't the guy he'd almost murdered a few months earlier. Benjamin Halevy sweetened up the French noncom, and the fellow seemed amazingly willing to hang on to most of the ammo and issue it as needed.
"What did you say to him?" Vaclav asked.
"I asked him how he'd like to be the official"-Halevy bore down on the word-"keeper of what's left of the antitank-rifle ammunition. He jumped at the chance."
Vaclav laughed. "Swell! You know more about dealing with these people than I do, that's for sure." He sent the quartermaster sergeant a suspicious stare. "Now, will he turn loose of the stuff when I need it, or will he decide he has to keep it because it's too important to fire off?"
Halevy spoke more French. The supply sergeant raised his right hand, as if taking an oath. "He says he'll be good," the Jew reported. Vaclav decided he'd have to take that-it was as good as he'd get. And if the Frenchman turned out to be lying, threatening to blow a hole in him with the antitank rifle ought to get his attention.
Now that Vaclav had enough ammunition for months if not years, he found that he had little to do with it. The Germans had pulled most of their armor out of this sector. They were digging in for all they were worth; it might have been 1916 over again. The French kept promising offensives, then stopping in their tracks whenever the boys in field-gray shot back at them.
Without tanks and armored cars to shoot at, he started doing just what he'd told the snooty young French lieutenant he'd do: he sniped at the Germans from long range. Behind their lines, the Wehrmacht men moved around pretty freely. They didn't think anyone could hit them from the Allies' positions. One careful round at a time, Vaclav taught them they were wrong.
"Congratulations," Benjamin Halevy told him one day.
"How come?" Jezek asked.
"Prisoners say the Nazis really want the son of a bitch with the elephant gun dead," Halevy answered.
It was a compliment of sorts, but it was one Vaclav could have lived without. He hoped he could go on living with it. He was a careful sniper. He never fired from the same place twice in a row. He didn't move from one favorite spot to another. As often as not, he didn't know whether he'd shift to the left or right till he tossed a coin to tell him. If he couldn't guess, the Germans wouldn't be able to, either. He made sure nothing on his ratty uniform shone or sparkled (that was easy enough). He fastened leafy branches to his helmet with a strip of rubber cut from an inner tube to break up its outline.
German bullets started cracking past him more often than they should have even so. Regretfully, he decided the prisoners had known what they were talking about. When one of those bullets knocked a sprig off his helmet camouflage, he realized the Germans had to have a sniper of their own hunting him.
That made for a new kind of game, one he wasn't even slightly sure he liked. It wasn't army against army any more. The Germans didn't think of him as one more interchangeable part in an enormous military machine. They wanted him dead, him in particular. This was personal. He could have done without the honor.
When he complained, Sergeant Halevy said, "All you have to do is put down the antitank rifle and go back to being an ordinary soldier."
"I'm killing a lot more Germans than the ordinary soldiers are," Vaclav said.
"Then you'd better figure they'll do their goddamnedest to kill you," Halevy replied.
Vaclav started hunting the German sniper. He found a brass telescope in an abandoned farmhouse (it wasn't as if the officers on his side would give him field glasses-perish the thought!) and painted it a muddy brown so it wouldn't betray him. He also had to be careful not to let the sun flash off the objective lens and give him away.
The German was good. Jezek might have known he would be. Well, he wasn't so bad himself. That he still prowled and hunted proved it. He took shots at other Nazis as he got the chance. Somewhere over there, a German with some kind of fancy rifle of his own was waiting for a mistake. If Vaclav made one, he wouldn't have to worry about making two-or about anything else ever again. JULIUS LEMP STUDIED HIS ORDERS. He turned to his executive officer. "Well, Klaus, what do you think of these?"
Klaus Hammerstein blinked. He'd served on the U-30 with Lemp since before the war started, but as a lowly Leutnant zur See till the previous exec got tapped for a command of his own. Now, newly promoted to Oberleutnant zur See, and to second in the chain of command, Hammerstein had to deal with his skipper in a whole new way. "They're interesting, that's for sure," he ventured.
"Interesting. Ja." There was barely room for two people in Lemp's curtained-off little excuse for a cabin. You worked with what you had, on the boat and with the crew. "What do these orders make you wonder?" Lemp pressed. If Klaus didn't have what it took to swing it as the executive officer, they both needed to find out right away.
The kid studied them again. "How many other boats are getting orders just like these right now?" he said after a pause only a little longer than it should have been.
And Lemp nodded, pleased. "There you go! That's exactly what I'd like to find out." Naval high command wouldn't tell him, of course. Anything he didn't urgently need to know was something he shouldn't know. What he didn't know, he couldn't spill if things went wrong and he got captured.
"I could ask around," Klaus said.
"Don't," Lemp told him, not without regret. "Anybody who told you would be breaking security. Better not to tempt somebody-and better not to give the Gestapo an excuse to come down on us."
"Oh," Hammerstein said, and then, "Right." Lemp's head went up and down once more, crisply this time. Things went better when you didn't need to worry about looking over your own shoulder… quite so much, anyhow.