"Poles wouldn't like it," another crewman said.
"My ass," the first fellow replied. "They don't like Jews any better'n we do-less, maybe. I bet they'd cheer us on."
"Maybe," the other man said. "But then all the kikes would go over to the Reds. We need that like a hole in the head."
"I guess," the first man said unwillingly. "Their day's coming, though. It's gotta be. I mean, they're like niggers or Chinamen or something, only they don't even live a long piss away from us."
Theo glanced over at Adi. The panzer driver kept his head down and shoveled stew into his face from his mess tin. That meant exactly nothing. Most of the Germans in black coveralls were doing exactly the same thing.
A sergeant with the ribbon for an Iron Cross Second Class and a wound badge said, "The less people who want to shoot me or plant mines or pour sugar in my gas tank, the better I like it."
No one seemed eager to quarrel with that. Theo knew damn well he wasn't. He hadn't liked it when the French shot at him. His own wound badge-and the half a finger he could still feel sometimes even if it wasn't there any more-said he had good reason not to argue. The Czechs could have done the same to him, or even worse. The Russians might yet.
They got another chance the next morning. A Polish cavalryman rode back to warn the crew that enemy panzers lay ahead. The Poles called them pancers, pronouncing it the same way German did. To the Russians, they were tanks; they'd borrowed the word from English instead.
"Big pancers," the horseman warned. The Poles used cavalry as if they'd never heard of machine guns. Their riders had more balls than they knew what to do with. To an outside observer, that often made them nutty as so many fruitcakes. Germans who'd been in Poland longer than Theo talked about horsemen in the square-topped caps called czapkas charging Russian panzers with lances. Maybe that was true, maybe not. That Theo could wonder spoke volumes about what Polish cavalry might be capable of.
"Well, let's see how big they are," Hermann Witt said. "Forward, Adi. Take it slow till we find out what we're up against."
"Will do," Stoss said, and he did. Back in his own armored space, Theo might not find out how big the enemy panzers were till a shell hit the Panzer II and either did or didn't smash the soft-skinned people inside and set the machine on fire. He wondered if getting surprised by death was worse than seeing someone take dead aim at you before you got it. Pretty bad both ways, as a matter of fact.
"Ha!" Sergeant Witt said, and then, "Those damned fast panzers, Theo. Report 'em to division."
Theo did. His gut clenched. No way in hell the Panzer II's armor could hold out a 45mm round. But this machine had teeth, too. Witt fired several short bursts from the 20mm gun. His shouts and whoops and curses said he was doing some good.
Adi's voice came through the speaking tube: "They're running away!"
A couple of other German panzers had come forward with theirs. All the same, Theo wasn't sorry to hear Witt say, "I think I'm just going to let them go. You borrow trouble, half the time you're sorry later on. More than half."
Heinz Naumann would have charged after the Reds. Theo was sure of that. He was also sure Heinz was dead. They still hadn't scrubbed all the former commander's blood off the floor of the fighting compartment; it clung in cracks and crevices. Neither Theo nor Adi had said anything about that to Sergeant Witt. Theo knew he didn't intend to. He didn't know whether Adi Stoss had equal discretion. No, he didn't know, but he thought so. INSHORE WATERS. Julius Lemp didn't like them for beans. He didn't need his Zeiss glasses to see the corrugated Norwegian coastline. The ocean deepened swiftly as you moved away from the outlets to the fjords, but not fast enough to suit him. If you had to dive in waters like these, you couldn't dive deep enough to have good odds of staying safe-and you were liable to dive straight to the bottom. That wouldn't be good, which was putting it mildly.
But this was where the fighting was, so this was where he had to be. The Royal Navy had nerve. Well, that was nothing he didn't already know. The English were ready to take on the Kriegsmarine and the Luftwaffe both if that meant they could screw the German troops in Norway to the wall.
And the limeys were knocking the snot out of the Kriegsmarine's surface ships, too. They'd sunk nearly a dozen German destroyers, and a couple of cruisers, too. They had lost a carrier-overwhelmed and sunk by German battlewagons before she could get away. And they'd lost some destroyers of their own, but mostly to air attack. Ship against ship, the damned Englishmen were better.
On the surface. When it came to U-boats, that was a different story. It had better be, Lemp thought. Like any U-boat skipper, he felt proprietary about these boats. The Kaiser's Reich had come that close to bringing England to her knees a generation earlier. This time, the Fuhrer's Reich would do what didn't quite come off in the last war.
Lemp scanned the fjord's mouth. Smoke rose from the far end of the inlet. That was Trondheim, catching hell from the air and the ground. The town wouldn't, couldn't, stay in enemy hands much longer. The English, the French, and the Norwegians would have to retreat farther north if they wanted to stay in the fight.
RAF bombers didn't have the range to cross the North Sea and hit back at the Germans in Norway. And so the English were using warships to take up the slack. Even destroyers mounted guns usefully bigger than any a panzer carried. Those shells could mash a submarine. Lemp didn't suppose foot soldiers enjoyed getting hit with them, either.
But if you put a warship where its guns could strike ground targets, you also sent it into danger. British warships these days were painted in crazy stripes, the way zebras would have been were God drunk when He made them. It did a good job of breaking up their outlines, especially when seen from the sea against a background of shore. Nothing broke up the outline of muzzle flashes, though.
Before the sound of the guns reached the U-30, Lemp said, "We'll go below." The ratings on the conning tower tumbled down into the U-boat's fetid bowels. The skipper followed. "Periscope depth!" he called as he dogged the hatch.
With any luck at all, it would be an easy stalk. The destroyer's crew would be paying attention to their targets. They'd be watching out for air attack. The Luftwaffe had hit the Royal Navy hard in these waters. How much attention would the limeys pay to submarines? With luck, not much. Yes-with.
Lemp had no intention of leaving things to luck. He swung the periscope in wide arcs to the right and left. He hadn't seen any frigates or corvettes shepherding the destroyer, but that didn't mean they weren't there. Some clever young English officer might be stalking him the way he was stalking the destroyer.
That English officer might be, but the periscope gave no sign of it. Without taking his eyes away from the periscope, Lemp asked, "You there, Gerhart?"
"Yes, I'm here," the Schnorkel expert answered. "What do you need, Skipper?"
"Nothing. I'm just glad we've got the snort, that's all." Lemp wouldn't have believed he'd ever say anything like that when the technicians first saddled his boat with the gadget. But… "We can make our approach a lot faster than we could on batteries. When I write up the action report, I'll log it."
"I've said so all along." Gerhart Beilharz sounded ready to pop his buttons with pride.
"People say all kinds of things," Lemp answered dryly. "Sometimes they're true, and sometimes they're crap. You have to find out. It's a good thing we didn't have to find out the hard way, eh?"
"Er-yes." That took some of the toploftiness out of the tall engineer.