The same unwelcome thought had crossed Lemp's mind. "What can we do? Go back to the U-30 and start shooting things up with the deck gun? We don't even know which side is which. Best thing is to sit tight and wait to see what happens. Or have you got a better idea?"
"Well…" What wasn't Beilharz saying? What were his politics? What did he think Lemp's were? Terrible for a fighting man to need to worry about things like that. The engineering officer sighed and nodded. "Ja, that's probably best. What else is there?"
"Nothing that won't put us in worse hot water," Lemp answered, and they were in plenty. A bullet shattered a window and buried itself in the opposite wall.
"Douse the lights! Get down!" Peter sang out. Somebody hit the switch. The hall plunged into blackness. Thumps and shuffling noises said quite a few men were hitting the deck anyhow. Lemp only wished he knew who was shooting at whom, and why. Wish for the moon while you're at it, he thought as he flattened out himself. WHEREVER PEGGY DRUCE WENT in Stockholm, she kept looking over her shoulder. Would Nazi soldiers suddenly come out of the woodwork like field-gray cockroaches, the way they had in Copenhagen? Germany loudly insisted she had no aggressive designs on Sweden. Of course, she'd said the same thing about Denmark and Norway. If she did end up invading, she would swear on a stack of Bibles that she'd been provoked. An oath like that was worth its weight in gold.
If you listened to the magazines and radio reports coming out of occupied Denmark, all the Danes were happy as could be with their Aryan brothers from Deutschland. If you listened to the people who'd got out of Denmark just ahead of the Gestapo, you heard a different story.
You could hear both sides in Sweden. You could pick up both Radio Berlin and the BBC. Papers printed reports from the Nazis and from the Western Allies (mostly in Swedish translation, which did Peggy no good, but even so…). You could buy the International Herald-Tribune and Signal, the Germans' slick new propaganda magazine. The Swedes took such liberty for granted. Well, so had the Danes. Sweden didn't know how well off it was, or so it seemed to Peggy.
Still, Stockholm wasn't too bad. London or Paris (or Brest or Bordeaux) would have been even better. Peggy soon discovered, though, that the German major in Copenhagen had been right: she couldn't get there from here. Planes weren't flying. Ships weren't sailing. The Germans were driving English, French, and Norwegian forces up the long, skinny nation to the west, but Scandinavia and the North Sea did indeed remain a war zone.
She was so desperate to get out of Europe, she even visited the Soviet embassy to see if she could reverse Columbus and get to the west by heading east. None of the Russians at the embassy would admit to following English, but several spoke French or German. Peggy preferred French for all kinds of reasons. Once they saw she understood it, so did the Russians.
"Yes, Mrs. Druce, we can arrange an entry visa for you," one of their diplomatic secretaries said. "We can arrange passage to Moscow. There should be no difficulty in that. Once in Moscow, you may travel on the Trans-Siberian Railway as far east as, I believe, Lake Baikal. We would gladly ticket you through to Vladivostok, you understand, but the Japanese have a different view of the situation."
"Aw, shit," Peggy said in English. Just so the Russian official wouldn't feel left out, she added, "Merde alors!" Sure as hell, Columbus had got it right: the world was round. And a skirmish on the far side of the immense Eurasian land mass could screw up her travel hopes just as thoroughly as the one right next door. It not only could-it had.
"You have my sympathy, for whatever it may be worth to you," the Russian said.
"Thanks," Peggy answered, and left. His sympathy was worth just as much as the Germans' nonaggression pledge… and not a nickel more.
If you had to get stuck somewhere, plenty of places were worse than Stockholm. The weather was getting chilly, but Peggy didn't worry about any winter this side of Moscow's. There was plenty of food, as there had been in Copenhagen till the Nazis marched in. Plenty to drink, too-she needed that. The town was extraordinarily clean, and more than pretty enough. A lot of the buildings were centuries older than any she could have seen in America. For contrast, the town hall was an amazing modern building; the locals couldn't have been prouder of it. The south tower leaped 450 feet into the sky, and was topped by the three crowns the Swedes also used as the emblem on their warplanes.
Plenty of those flew over Stockholm. Maybe the Swedes were sending Germany a message: if you jump us, we'll fight harder than the Norwegians. Or maybe they were whistling in the dark. They certainly seemed serious. Men in rather old-fashioned uniforms and odd helmets positioned antiaircraft guns on top of buildings and in parks and anywhere else that offered a wide field of fire.
Peggy figured out the placement for herself. She needed no one to explain it to her. And when she realized what was going on, she went out and got drunk. She'd seen too goddamn much of war. She was starting to understand how it worked, the way she could follow a baseball game back in the States.
She woke the next morning with a small drop-forging plant pounding away behind her eyes. Aspirins and coffee-real coffee, not horrible German ersatz!-dulled the ache without killing it. Instead of going out and acting touristy, she went back to her room and holed up with the Herald-Trib.
The war news in the paper was often several days old: it had to clear God knew how many censors, get to Paris, get printed, and get to Stockholm before she read it. She turned on the massive radio that sat in a corner of the room. She wanted fresher stories. If things in Norway calmed down-no matter who won-she was six hours by air from London. And if pigs had wings…
"BBC first," she said. The English sometimes stretched the truth in their broadcasts. They didn't jump up and down and dance on it the way Berlin did. Or she hadn't caught them at it, anyhow, which might not be the same thing.
It was a few minutes before the top of the hour. She put up with the music till the news came on. The Nazis, who hated jazz, wouldn't broadcast it. The English thought they could play it themselves, and insisted on trying. Most of the results argued against them.
Then the music went away, so she could stop sneering at the poor sap who imagined he could make a sax wail. Without preamble, the announcer said, "Reports of a coup d'etat against Adolf Hitler continue to trickle out of Germany."
"Jesus H. Christ!" Peggy exploded.
"Military leaders, dissatisfied with the course the war has taken, are said to have attempted to overthrow the Fuhrer," the suave, Oxford-inflected voice continued. "Whether the coup has succeeded is unknown outside the Reich, as are Hitler's whereabouts and fate. Nor does anyone but the disaffected generals as yet have the faintest notion of how, or whether, they will continue the war in the event they do succeed in overthrowing the German dictator."
"Son of a bitch!" Peggy added, in case her first exclamation hadn't been heartfelt enough.
"In the meanwhile, the fight continues," the BBC man continued. "Anglo-French forces have made new gains against the Wehrmacht north of Paris, while French sources indicate that their armies also continue their drive to the northeast that began east of the capital city. In the fighting in Poland, the two sides' claims and counterclaims appear irreconcilable. The situation there, accordingly, remains in doubt."
Peggy knew what that meant. The Russians were lying just as hard as the Germans and the Poles. "And they said it couldn't be done!" she said. She was mad at the Reds for losing their grip on Vladivostok. One more thing that conspired against her going home.
As if reading her thoughts, the newsreader went on, "Fighting in the Far East is similarly confused. The only things that can be stated with certainty are that the Trans-Siberian Railway remains cut in eastern Siberia, and that Vladivostok is still in Soviet hands. His Majesty's government has offered to mediate in this conflict, but the Empire of Japan unfortunately declined."