Lorries growled up to take the troops from the dockside to the train station. Had the Germans sneaked a few bombers across the Channel, they could have worked a fearful slaughter. But everything went off smoothly. No one seemed to give a damn about Pussy. Walsh was probably breaking all kinds of laws by bringing her into the country, but he didn't care.
The train proved less crowded than the one in France that had hauled him away from the fighting there. Tinned rations were passed out. He sighed. They'd keep him full, which didn't mean he loved them.
As the train rattled through the north of England, Jock nudged him and asked, "You won't mind if me and my mates 'op it here, will you, Sergeant?" The Yorkshireman's grin said he didn't expect to be taken seriously.
"Oh, right," Walsh answered. "Desertion in wartime-they'll pin a medal on you for that, they will." He glanced over to make sure the private understood exactly what officialdom would do if he and his mates took off. The twinkle in Jock's eyes showed he did. Walsh gave him a cigarette and fired up one of his own. They smoked in companionable silence.
Scotland. Walsh had expected Edinburgh, but the train pounded on, north and east. "Aberdeen," guessed someone whose clotted accent said he knew the local geography pretty well. It made sense. Norway was pretty far north, and they wouldn't be sailing toward the part the Germans had already grabbed. Walsh hoped like blazes they wouldn't, anyhow.
Aberdeen seemed to come out of nowhere. It was a gray granite city, as if the bones of the countryside were carved into churches and shops and houses and blocks of flats. The North Sea lay beyond. Walsh hadn't seen it before. It looked colder and generally grimmer than the Channel. Who would have imagined anything could?
More khaki lorries waited at the station as the soldiers got off their trains. Some of the drivers smoked. One or two nipped from flasks unlikely to hold water. A raw wind blew down out of the north. Summer? Gray Aberdeen scoffed at summer. What would Norway be like? Walsh half wished he hadn't thought to wonder.
He clumped up the gangplank onto a freighter that had seen better days but didn't reek of livestock, Pussy still in her hatbox. As soon as he found his assigned place, he let her scurry around for a while. The cat had been very good about staying cooped up-she'd slept most of the way north. But she needed to get out while she could.
She rewarded him by dropping a dead mouse on his bunk. Aren't you proud of me? the green eyes asked. Isn't it a lovely present? Will you eat it right now or save it for later? Walsh took it by the tail and tossed it in a dustbin. He made much of Pussy afterwards and chucked her under the chin, but he could tell she was disappointed.
A small convoy pulled out of the harbor: troopships escorted by a destroyer and a pair of smaller warships. Frigates? Corvettes? Walsh was no sailor; he didn't know their right names. He did know he was glad to have them along.
A name began to drift through the freighter. Trondheim. It was somewhere up the Norwegian coast. Just where, Walsh couldn't have said. How far away from the place were the Germans? Somebody in the convoy probably knew. Walsh hoped so. Nobody admitted anything about it where he could hear, though. He did notice that abandon-ship drills came more often and were more thorough than any he'd seen before. He didn't take that for a good sign.
Daylight lingered long, and got longer as the ships zigzagged northeast. Walsh didn't take that for a good sign, either. U-boats and enemy airplanes had most of the clock's face in which to prowl. A sailor told him the last run in to Trondheim was planned for the brief hours of darkness. He hoped that would be long enough to shield them from prying eyes. Past hoping, he couldn't do anything about it but worry.
As twilight neared, an angular biplane with floats under the wings buzzed toward the convoy from the east. The warships opened up on it right away. It flew past them and dropped a small bomb that just missed one of the lumbering freighters. Then it sprayed that troopship with machine-gun bullets and went back the way it had come.
Two more German biplanes attacked the convoy an hour later. Gathering darkness or dumb luck kept them from doing much harm. All the ships made it to Trondheim. As he had before, Walsh filed off the freighter. Pussy meowed inside her makeshift carrier. Off in the distance, artillery rumbled. That answered one thing. The Germans weren't very far away after all. EVERYONE ON HIS SIDE had told Joaquin Delgadillo he would march into Madrid in triumph. Well, here he was, but not the way he'd had in mind. He'd heard the Republicans shot prisoners. That didn't seem to be true: he was still breathing. Maybe they thought he was too insignificant to be worth a bullet. If they did, he didn't want to change their minds for them.
He wasn't even in a proper jail. They housed him and their other prisoners in a barbed-wire enclosure in a park. They gave the captives tents of such surpassing rattiness that he would have thought it a deliberate insult had he not known they used equally ratty ones themselves (so did his side).
They fed him beans and cabbage and occasional chopped-up potatoes. It wasn't very good, and he always craved more than he got. But he wouldn't starve on these rations-not soon, anyhow. He'd been hungry often enough-too often-in the field to get excited about this.
Most of the Republican guards were men recovering from wounds. They couldn't move fast. But they carried submachine guns. If anyone tried to escape, they could send a hell of a lot of bullets after him.
Joaquin wasn't going anywhere, not right away. He was just glad to say alive after the disastrous raid on the Internationals. He was even more relieved to find himself untortured after being taken prisoner. Little by little, he started to realize not everything his superiors had told him about the Republicans was the gospel truth.
He didn't do anything about the realization, not yet. For one thing, it was still a newly sprouted seed pushing up through dead leaves and chunks of bark toward the light. For another, he was in no position to do anything about anything. He ate. He slept. He mooched around the camp, taking care not to get too close to the wire. Coming too close-or anything else out of the ordinary-would have made the guards open up on him without warning.
When flights of bombers droned over his foxhole to drop their deadly cargo on Madrid, he'd cheered. How not? Those bombs were falling on the enemy's heads. Well, so they were. One thing that hadn't occurred to him before he got captured was that those bombs were also liable to come down on the heads of prisoners of war.
The only spades the Republicans allowed inside the wire perimeter were the ones the captives used to lengthen their latrine trenches and shovel lime into them to fight the stink. The guards counted the spades before they doled them out, and made sure they got them all back every time. Joaquin had no trouble seeing why: they didn't want the prisoners tunneling under the barbed wire. But it meant the captured Nationalists had nothing but a few mugs and tin mess kits to dig scrapes in which to shelter when the bombers came by.
Joaquin had borne up when Republican planes bombed his positions. He'd always consoled himself by thinking his side had more planes with which to punish the godless foe. And he'd been right. The Nationalists did have more bombers… and they concentrated them against Madrid.
He'd always thought of bombing as a pinpoint business. That wasn't how Marshal Sanjurjo's flyers went about it. Madrid belonged to the Republicans. As far as the Nationalists were concerned, they could put their bombs anywhere and still hurt their opponents.
They could-and they did. Maybe they didn't aim as well as Joaquin thought they could. Or maybe they just didn't care. With antiaircraft guns shooting at them from the ground, with Republican fighters sometimes tearing into them, the pilots and bombardiers wanted nothing more than to get back to their airstrips in one piece.