Last Orders: The War That Came Early Read Free

and all you get for it is a kick in the balls,” Baatz said. Since he outranked Pfaff, he got the last word. He wished like hell he’d got that Ivan, too.
    Vaclav Jezek hadn’t known what summer heat was like till he came to Spain. The Czech had thought he did, but now he owned he’d been just a beginner. The sun northwest of Madrid beat down on his head as if out of a blue enamel bowl that focused all its heat right there.
    He lay in a shell hole in the no-man’s-land between the Republicans’barbed wire and the stuff the Fascists strung. He had branches and bits of greenery on his helmet and here and there on his uniform. They didn’t block the heat. They weren’t supposed to. They did help break up his outline, to make it harder for Marshal Sanjurjo’s men to spot him out here.
    His antitank rifle also had its long, straight barrel bedecked with leaves and twigs. The damn thing wasn’t much shorter than he was. It weighed a tonne. The French had made it to fire a slug as wide as a man’s thumb through a tank’s armor. It could do that … to any tank made in the 1930s. It was as powerful a rifle as one man could carry and fire. Even with a muzzle brake and a padded stock, it kicked harder than any mule ever born.
    No matter how powerful it was, it couldn’t kill the bigger, heavier modern tanks the war had spawned. To the logical French, if it couldn’t do the job for which it was made, it was useless.
    French logic, though, reached only so far. The antitank rifle fired a very heavy bullet with a very high muzzle velocity. The round flew fast and far and flat. It might not be able to cope with a Panzer IV, but it could knock over a man at a couple of kilometers. It was, in other words, a perfect sniper’s rifle.
    In France, Vaclav had killed German officers who made the fatal mistake of thinking they were too far behind the line to worry about keeping their heads down. When France hopped into Hitler’s arms for a while, she generously allowed the Czechs who fought for their government-in-exile to cross the border into Spain and take service with the Republic. Vaclav brought the antitank rifle with him. By then, he would have killed anybody who tried to take it away from him.
    After a couple of years here, he knew enough Spanish to get fed. He knew enough to get drunk. He knew enough to get laid. He could cuss some, too. He had the essentials, in other words. Anything past the essentials, no. He spoke pretty good German—a lot of Czechs did—which helped him with the men of the International Brigades but not with the Republicans. Most of the Spaniards who could
Deutsch sprechen
fought on Sanjurjo’s side.
    Like the rest of the Czechs, he’d made himself useful here. He’d actually used the rifle on enemy tanks. Sanjurjo’s men tried sendingsome old Italian tankettes against the Internationals. They had enough armor to laugh at ordinary small-arms fire. Not at what his overmuscled elephant gun could do, though.
    And he’d killed General Franco with the antitank rifle. Not as good as blowing off Sanjurjo’s jowly head, but the next best thing. He’d got a medal for that, and a wad of pesetas to go with it that gave him one hell of a spree in Madrid.
    Marshal Sanjurjo had an even bigger price on his head than his late general had. If the marshal ever decided to inspect these lines and came within 2,000 meters of wherever the Czech happened to be hiding, Vaclav vowed that he was one dead bigwig.
    Meanwhile … Meanwhile, he waited. He spied on the Nationalists’ lines with a pair of binoculars wrapped in burlap. He’d stuck cardboard above their objective lenses so no untimely reflections would give him away. And he’d taken the same precaution with the objective on the rifle’s telescopic sight.
    Careless snipers had short careers. He wanted to go back to Czechoslovakia after the war ended … if the war ever ended, and if there was any Czechoslovakia to go back to once it did. Dying in France