Last Orders: The War That Came Early Read Free Page A

fighting against the Nazis, he would at least have been playing against the first team. Making a mistake that let some Spaniard in a diarrhea-yellow uniform plug him would just be embarrassing.
    No, not just embarrassing. Painful, too.
    Not much was going on now on either side of the line. Here and there, a rifleman would take a shot at somebody in the wrong uniform who was rash enough to put himself on display. Most of the time, the would-be assassin was a crappy shot and missed. His attempted victim would dive for cover.
    Vaclav was anything but a crappy shot. He’d been good when the Czechoslovakian Army drafted him. Plenty of practice in the years since left him a hell of a lot better than good. He could have killed plenty of careless Nationalists at the front line.
    But that would have been like spending a hundred English pounds for a glass of beer. Ordinary privates and noncoms weren’t worth killing with an antitank rifle. If he yielded to temptation and let the air out of one of those bastards, he’d have to find a new hiding place. Shootingtwice in a row from the same spot was more dangerous than lighting three on a match. You were telling the enemy right where you were. You were telling him you were stupid enough to stay there, too.
    So he ignored the jerks who stuck their brainless heads up over the parapet for a look around. He scanned farther back, to the places where most of the time you wouldn’t need to worry about getting shot. Nationalist officers wore much fancier uniforms and headgear than the men they led. Killing a colonel might do more for the Republican cause than exterminating a company’s worth of ordinary soldiers.
    For the moment, though, nobody worth shooting was showing himself. So Vaclav brought down the glasses and surveyed the shattered ground ahead of where he lay. Every once in a while, Sanjurjo’s men sneaked out to hunt snipers. He’d blown big holes in a couple of those guys. He was ruthless about keeping himself in one piece.
    And the Spanish Fascists sent snipers of their own out into no-man’s-land. They didn’t have anybody with a monster gun like his. But a good shot with a good rifle could kill a man a kilometer away—not every time, maybe, but often enough to be dangerous. Vaclav knew what the ground was supposed to look like from here. He knew what it was supposed to look like from almost every centimeter in front of the stretch of trench the Czechs held. Knowing such things was like a life-insurance policy. Any little change might—probably would—mark trouble.
    He didn’t see any little changes, though. The heat made everybody move at half speed. Let the sun kill the bastards on the other side, the thought seemed to be. Shooting them was too much trouble for soldiers.
    After a while, it got to be too much trouble for Jezek. He ate brown bread and crumbly Spanish sausage full of fennel. It could give you the runs, but it tasted good. To kill some germs, he washed it down with sharp white wine from the canteen on his belt. He would rather have drunk beer—he was a Czech, all right. But most Spanish beer tasted like piss, and smelled like it, too. Wine was also easier to come by here.
    He wanted a cigarette. He didn’t light one. Smoke could give you away. He wouldn’t get too jittery before he went back inside the barbed wire among his friends and countrymen. He’d puff away once he did.
    Some days went by without his firing a shot. If he didn’t see anything worth firing at, he just stayed where he was till it got dark. Let the Nationalists think they’d finally killed him while they were shelling no-man’s-land. It might make them careless. Then they’d give him better targets.
    What was this? A truck coming up toward the Fascists’ lines. Canvas tied down over hoops covered the rear compartment. When the truck stopped, soldiers got out. A man hopped down from the passenger side of the front seat, too. That and his uniform told Jezek he was an