Blam! Blam! Blam! Flame burst from the gun’s muzzle as each round went off. Brass cartridge cases clanged on the deck. Columns of seawater leaped into the air as shells burst all around the mine. But the damned thing went right on bobbing in the sea. Lemp waited for a hit with rapidly mounting impatience.
At last, when he was about to shout something sharp to the gunners, he got one. It yielded a much bigger Blam!-one that rocked him and the submarine even though the mine wasn’t close. The gout of water that rose on high was much bigger and much less tidy than the ones the shells had produced.
At the 88, the ratings shouted and pumped fists in the air and capered like lunatics. “We killed it!” one of them yelled. A couple of others dug fingers into their ears. They’d be ringing, all right. Lemp’s rang even though he stood up on the conning tower. That was part of the chance you took when you played with things that went boom.
“Very good, heroes,” he called to the gunners. “You can go below now.”
They pretended not to hear him. Or maybe, since they’d been playing with explosives, they weren’t pretending. Lemp figured they were. Coming topside was a rare treat for a lot of the men cooped up inside his steel cigar. They could breathe fresh air. They could focus their eyes on something farther away than their outstretched hands. Why would they want to go down into the dim red light, the humid air, and the symphony of stinks that characterized any working U-boat? Wasn’t it like descending into hell? Wasn’t it much too much like that?
Lemp had to give the order again before the gun crew obeyed it. They resealed the 88 and climbed from the deck to the conning tower once more: climbed far more slowly than they’d rushed down to start shooting. The fun was over now, and their dragging steps said as much.
They were even glummer about climbing down the hatch and into the U-30. One of them wrinkled his nose. “I wish they could make a U-boat that didn’t smell like a polecat three days dead,” he remarked.
“Well, Martin, if you don’t fancy it, you should have stayed in the surface navy,” Lemp said sweetly.
That did the trick. Martin-bearded, grimy, in a uniform that hadn’t been washed any time lately-vehemently shook his head, as if the skipper had suggested that he engage in some unnatural vice. “Not me, by God,” he declared. “The surface pukes, they fuss about every little thing like they’re on the rag or something.” And he vanished into the U-boat’s fetid bowels. His buddies followed without another word of complaint.
Julius Lemp smiled. It wasn’t that he thought the sailor was wrong. On the contrary. He was a U-boat man himself, after all, not a surface puke. He remembered how horribly out of place he’d felt when Captain Patzig summoned him to the bridge of the Admiral Scheer. Aboard the U-30, he was lord of all he surveyed. On the pocket battleship, he felt like a poor relation, and a damn scruffy poor relation at that, even if he’d put on his best clothes for the visit.
“Skipper?” said the man who’d spotted the mine.
“Eh?” Lemp came back to the here-and-now. “What is it, Sievert?”
“Was that a Russian mine, or one of ours?”
“I don’t know,” Lemp replied after a moment’s thought. “Considering where we are, it could be either. I sure couldn’t tell through field glasses. And I’ve heard the Ivans just copied our model when they started making their own mines, so there might not have been much to tell from.”
“You couldn’t read the ‘Made in Moscow’ plate bolted to the shell, eh?” Sievert asked with a grin.
“Er-no.” Lemp managed a chuckle of his own, even if it took some effort. It wasn’t that he didn’t have a sense of humor, but the poor thing did suffer from lack of exercise.
“Well, it won’t take us out, and it won’t take any of our surface ships out, and we’ll do for any Russian ships we come across,” the rating said.
“That’s right.” Lemp nodded. No jokes lurking in the underbrush there. He felt relieved.
The watchers on the conning tower had gone on scanning sea and sky even while the gun crew played with its big, loud toy. Lemp would have been furious had they let the fireworks distract them. In the Baltic’s close confines, trouble was never far away. It could land on you all too fast even when you were lucky enough to spot it before it showed up. If you didn’t… If you didn’t, some flying-boat crew would go home to paint a U-boat silhouette on the side of their fuselage and then fly off to look for more unwary Germans.
I should have paid more attention, too, Lemp thought. He made a quick scan himself, first with the naked eye and then sweeping his binoculars through a quadrant of the sky. Nothing. His breath smoked as he sighed with gratitude aimed at a God Who didn’t listen enough. He remembered the horror that had coursed through him when he’d spotted a small silver speck in the sky not too long before. He’d been about to shout for a crash dive before he realized the planet Venus probably wouldn’t strafe the U-30.
He made a more careful scan of the sea, looking for periscopes. No matter how much the Kriegsmarine and Luftwaffe harried them, Red Fleet U-boats did get out into the Baltic. Ending up on the wrong end of one of their eels would be embarrassing, to say the least.
Again, nothing. His boat might have had the sea all to itself. He was master of everything he surveyed: gray water and gray sky. A gull winging its way south didn’t acknowledge his supremacy. Gulls never did. They were an ill-bred lot, scroungers and scavengers and ne’er-do-wells. They were quite a bit like submariners, in other words.
His nose flinched when he had to lay below after his watch ended. He logged the incident with the mine. His script was tiny, cramped, and precise. Things could have been better: he might have sunk a Russian battleship. But they could also have been worse: nothing at all might have happened on his watch. Or no one might have spotted an approaching enemy U-boat. He wouldn’t have had to log anything then: he would have been a trifle too dead. The one small detail aside, he couldn’t see anything to like about that.
FDR was coming to Philadelphia. The election was only a few days away. Four more years? Peggy Druce hoped so. At least, she supposed she hoped so. Everything in the world seemed to have turned inside out and upside down since England and France did their spectacular back-flip with Germany.
Before the big switch, Roosevelt had sent England and France as many planes and guns as American factories could crank out, along with a whole fleet of destroyers he said the United States didn’t need any more. Wendell Willkie, the latest Republican to try to boot FDR out of the White House, hadn’t yelled at him for that. He’d yelled at the President for not doing more and not doing it faster. A bunch of Republicans were isolationists, but not Willkie.
Trouble was, all of a sudden isolationism looked a lot better than it had even a few weeks earlier. If England and France were on Hitler’s side against Russia, they weren’t using the American guns and planes and ships against the Fuhrer, the way FDR had had in mind. Nobody in Washington was (or, at least, admitted to being) in love with Stalin, but nobody much wanted to see all those weapons turned against him, either.
Willkie’s trouble was, he agreed too much with Roosevelt. He was Tweedledum complaining about Tweedledee. After the big switch, some Republicans tried to boot him off the ticket and run somebody more in line with how they figured the party ought to think. Their only problem was, they settled on Alf Landon again: a man only a diehard isolationist Republican could love. (And even then, remembering how FDR had trounced him in 1936, it wasn’t easy.) Landon’s campaign mostly amounted to I told you so. He himself had no hope of winning. The more votes he stole from Willkie, the easier the time FDR would have.
“You ready?” Herb called to Peggy. “The rally starts at half past seven.”
“Just about.” Peggy patted each cheek with a powder puff one more time. Looking in the mirror made her sigh. It would have to do, but it was a long way from perfect. Well, too goddamn bad, she thought. She was a long way from perfect. Perfect would have been twenty-five-twenty-nine, tops.
They drove down into the city. Blazing street lamps and headlights and neon signs reminded Peggy she wasn’t in Europe any more. She supposed they’d lifted the blackout in London and Paris. People there were probably happy as could be. You could buy happiness, all right-as long as you didn’t care what you paid for it.
A valet-a kid, maybe still in high school, maybe just out-took charge of Herb’s Packard in the parking lot. As Herb tipped him, Peggy reflected that he would be wearing a different kind of uniform on the other side of the Atlantic. The USA didn’t know how lucky it was.
At the Arena on Market Street, Herb confidently said, “Druce-that’s D-R-U-C-E,” to an important-looking fellow with a clipboard.
The man ran his finger down a typed list. The moving finger suddenly stopped. “Oh, yes, sir!” he said, and then, to a younger fellow standing behind him, “Eddie, take Mr. and Mrs. Druce down front. Make sure they’ve got good seats.”
“Sure thing, Mr. Terwilliger,” Eddie said. “Come with me, folks.”
They couldn’t have got better seats unless he put them up on the podium. Peggy recognized most of the big shots who were sitting up there: Pennsylvania politicos and union leaders. Herb was neither, for which she thanked heaven.
He seemed happy enough with where Eddie put them. Peggy also recognized quite a few of the couples sitting near them. The men of the family were doctors, lawyers, accountants. Clothes and double chins said they’d done well for themselves. Several couples were obviously Jewish. Remembering what she’d seen in Czechoslovakia and Germany, Peggy felt better about being here because of that.
Senator Guffey introduced the President. He spent a few minutes laying into the Republicans before he did. If you listened to him, the Republicans had their nerve for running anybody at all against FDR, and even more nerve for trying to run two people. “The Donkey is always the Donkey,” he said, “but over there it’s like 1912 all over again. They’ve got the Elephant and the Bull-Something.”
Peggy joined the laugh. She was old enough to remember 1912. Taft had run as a regular Republican, and Teddy Roosevelt (FDR’s distant cousin) on the Progressive or Bull Moose ticket. Nobody in his right mind would call starchy, upright Alf Landon a Bull Moose. Guffey had to be thinking of something more like Bullshit.
He didn’t say that, of course. You couldn’t say anything along those lines in a public forum. But letting the audience fill in the dirty word for itself was even more delicious.
The house lights darkened. A tight spot played on Senator Guffey. It gleamed from the frames of his reading glasses. “Now, ladies and gentlemen, I have the great honor and high privilege to present the President of the United States, Franklin Delano Roosevelt!” he said, and stepped away from the lectern.
Next thing you knew, FDR was standing behind it instead. They must have wheeled him on while the only light in the house was the spot on Guffey. Roosevelt was sensitive about being seen-and especially about being photographed-in his wheelchair, and who could blame him? With heavy braces on his legs, he could stand and even take a few stiff steps, but he also didn’t like showing them off. In back of the lectern, he didn’t have to.
Where you could really see him only from the shoulders up, Roosevelt looked strong and vigorous. He waved to the cheering throng in the Arena. The cheers got louder. Then he waved again, in a different way, and they eased off. “Thank you, folks,” he said, his voice booming out of the loudspeakers hooked to the microphone. “Thank you very much. I’m glad to be in Philadelphia. This is where our freedom got its start. This is where the Declaration of Independence was written, and where the Liberty Bell rang out before it cracked.” More cheers. Smiling, the President waited them out. “And I want to tell you, liberty almost everywhere seems a little cracked, or more than a little, today.”
No one applauded that. People leaned forward to listen to whatever FDR would say next. Peggy found herself doing it, and saw Herb was, too. The President didn’t keep them waiting: “Up till very recently, the war in Europe was a war against liberty-liberty there and liberty everywhere. We weren’t fighting, but we were involved, because what happened there was liable to happen to us next. And we acted accordingly, doing what we could for the countries that thought more like we did.”
Sadly, he shook his big, strong-jawed head. “But Europeans are still Europeans. President Wilson, in whose Cabinet I had the privilege of serving as Assistant Secretary of the Navy, found that out the hard way after the last war. And now we discover it all over again. When the so-called democracies make common cause with the Nazis against the Communists, no one cares for liberty any longer. It returns to the same sad old story of the strong trying to steal from the weak for no better reason than that they think they can. And I say, and America must say, a plague on all their houses!”
The Arena went nuts. That has how Peggy put it when she talked about the speech later on. At the moment, she and her husband yelled and stomped and clapped as loud as anybody else. She was as disgusted by England and France’s jump from war against Germany to war against Russia as she’d ever been by anything in her life. (Except, perhaps, her self-disgust at waking up in bed with Constantine Jenkins. But wasn’t waking up in bed with Adolf Hitler a thousand times worse?)
“And so,” Roosevelt went on, “we are sending no more weapons to England or to France. And I have ordered the appropriate authorities to ensure that we sell no more oil or scrap metal to Japan until she ends her aggression against China. Governments must no longer see their neighbors as their prey.”
He got another ringing round of applause. Peggy noticed that he didn’t say anything about Japan’s just-ended war with Russia. Chances were he didn’t want to remind people. Even some of his supporters had been hoping the Communists would lose, as they did.
Roosevelt also didn’t say what Japan-whose home islands didn’t yield much past rice and tough little men-was liable to do when her access to raw materials she needed suddenly got cut off. We’ll all find out, Peggy thought as she left the hall. ondon bubbled like a pot of oatmeal left too long on the fire. No one could prove the government had arranged for that Bentley to run over Winston Churchill. But if Neville Chamberlain did arrange it, he got precious little time to enjoy what he’d done. He went into the hospital for what were described as routine tests… and came out after surgery for cancer of the bowel.
It soon became obvious he could not go on as Prime Minister. He laid down the office and left Number 10 Downing Street for a stay in the country “to recover his strength,” as the papers said. Alistair Walsh could read between the lines. Chamberlain was dying, and would never amount to anything again.