The War That Came Early: The Big Switch Read Free Page B

helmsman.
    “
Alles gut
, skipper,” Peter answered. “Course 315, as you ordered. And the diesels are performing well—but you can hear that for yourself.”
    “Ja,”
Lemp agreed. It wasn’t just hearing, either; he could feel the engines’ throb through the soles of his feet. As Peter said, everything sounded and felt the way it should have. When it didn’t, you knew, even if you couldn’t always tell how you knew.
    “You want the conn, sir?” Peter made as if to step away from the wheel. Discipline on U-boats was of a different and looser kind from what it was in the
Kriegsmarine
’s surface ships. Most of the spit and polish went into the scuppers. No officer who was happy pulling the stiffening wire out of his cap missed it. Lemp sure didn’t. The men could fight the boat. As long as they could do that, who gave a rat’s ass if they clicked their heels and saluted all the time?
    He shook his head. “No, you can keep it. I’m going to my cubbyhole and log the last two hours of—well, nothing.” Some of the rituals did have to be fulfilled.
    Peter chuckled. “All right. Sometimes nothing is the best you can hope for, isn’t it? Damn sight better than a destroyer dropping ash cans on our head.”
    “Amen!” Lemp said fervently. If a depth charge went off too close, the sea would crumple a U-boat like a trash bin under a panzer’s tracks. It would be over in a hurry if that ever happened—but probably not soon enough.
    Only a curtain separated his bunk and desk and safe from the rest of the boat. Still, that gave him more room and more privacy than anyone else enjoyed. He spun the combination lock on the safe. When the door swung open, he took out the log book. A fountain pen sat in the deskdrawer. Long habit meant he never left anything on a flat surface where it could—and would—roll away and get lost. He opened the log and began to write.
    WALKING IN A winter wonderland. That was how Peggy Druce thought of Stockholm. It wasn’t that she didn’t know about winter. She’d grown up in a Philadelphia Main Line family, and married into another. She’d skied in Colorado, in Switzerland, and in Austria back in the days when there was an Austria. So it wasn’t that she didn’t understand what winter was all about.
    But Philadelphia put up with winter. Ski resorts seemed intent on making money off it—which, when you looked at things from their point of view, was reasonable enough. Stockholm enjoyed winter.
    Part of that, no doubt, was enjoying what you couldn’t escape. Scandinavia lay a long way north. If not for the Gulf Stream, it would have been as uninhabitable as Labrador. (She remembered a pulp story about what might happen if the Gulf Stream went away. She couldn’t recall who’d written it: only that he was a Jew. Now that she’d seen Hitler’s Berlin, that took on new weight in her mind.) But the Swedes did it with style. And the way they kept houses comfortable and streets clear of snow put Philadelphia—and every other place she’d visited in winter—to shame.
    Not only that, all the lights stayed on through the long, cold nights. After her time inside the Third
Reich
, that seemed something close to a miracle. It had in Copenhagen, too … till the Germans marched in. Now the Nazis’ twilight swallowed up Denmark, too.
    Yes, Stockholm was a wonderful, bright, civilized place. The only problem was, she didn’t want to be here. She had plenty of money. She wouldn’t have been able to come to Marianske Lazne in Czechoslovakia without it, or to maintain herself when the war stranded her on the wrong side of the Atlantic. But, just as all the king’s horses and all the king’s men couldn’t put Humpty Dumpty together again, all her jack couldn’t get her back to the good old US of A, or to the husband she hadn’t seen for well over a year.
    Norway remained a war zone. Because it did, there was no air trafficbetween Sweden and England—no sea traffic, either. She wished