Two Fronts by Harry Turtledove Read Free Book Online Page A

his soldiers had worn out their welcome there was to belabor the obvious.
    Port authorities thought his crew were a gang of hooligans. His men thought Narvik was as dull as embalming—about the worst thing a liberty port could be. As usual in such arguments, both sides had a point.
    The southern sky glowed pink. In a little while, the sun would actually creep over the horizon for a little while. They were well past the solstice now, on the way toward the vernal equinox. Old Sol was heading north again. Darkness didn’t reign supreme here all through the day, as it had a little while ago.
    But it wouldn’t stay light very long. England loved this season of the year. This was the time when convoys bound for Murmansk and Arkhangelsk had the best chance of sneaking past German patrol planes and U-boats from Norway. You couldn’t sink or bomb what you couldn’t find. Darkness was the freighter’s friend.
    Another wave, bigger than most, slammed into the U-30 portside. Frigid seawater splashed over the conning tower. Lemp and the ratings up there with him wore oilskins over their peacoats and wide-brimmed waterproof hats strapped under their chins to keep that raw north wind from stealing them. They got wet anyhow. When you got wet in these latitudes, you got cold. No—you got colder.
    “ Scheisse! ” Lemp said, most sincerely.
    One of the petty officers nodded. “We’ll all end up with pneumonia,” he predicted, his voice gloomy.
    Lemp would have argued, if only he could. The one thing worse than getting splashed up here was going into the drink. You wouldn’t last longer than a few minutes before the sea sucked all the warmth from your body and killed you. People said freezing to death was an easy way to go. Lemp didn’t want to find out for himself if those people were right.
    He tried to clean the salt water off the lenses of his Zeiss binoculars. How were you supposed to look into the distance when everything seemed blurry and smeared? Simple—you couldn’t.
    “In the summer,” the rating said wistfully, “it’s daylight all the time.”
    “And we can see them, and they can see us,” Lemp replied. “Downsides to everything. No sneaking away from the destroyers under cover of night then.”
    Another big wave smacked the U-30. More icy water cascaded over the conning tower. More poured down the hatch, too. As if spawned by the law of equal and opposite reactions, hot language came out of the hatchway. Some of the water would get pumped out of the boat. Some, yes, but not all. Take any U-boat ever made, and she always had water in her bilges. And the water soaked up and redistributed all the manifold stinks that accumulated in a submarine.
    Lemp sighed. Spillage from the heads? Puke? Rotting bits of sausage and tinned herring in mustard sauce? The thick animal fug of a boat full of poorly washed seamen? Diesel exhaust? Lubricating oil? They were all there, along with assorted other sordid but not so easily nameable stenches.
    Pretty soon, the skipper’s watch would end. He’d have to lay below. The air out here was bloody cold, but it was clean and fresh—none cleaner and fresher, in fact. People talked about air like wine. This wasn’t wine: it was more like vodka straight out of the icebox, just as chilly, just as smooth, and just as potent.
    And then he’d go down the hatch, back into the collection of reeks that put your average city rubbish tip to shame. They said you stopped noticing smells once you were stuck in them for a while. They said all kinds of things. Some of them were true. Some were crap. You might not smell the interior of a U-boat so much after a while, but you never had any doubts about where you were, even if you woke up with your eyes still shut.
    Every time the boat came in from a patrol, it got cleaned up along with refueling and taking on fresh eels to shoot at enemy shipping and food both fresh and canned. Thanks to the bilgewater, though, getting rid of the stinks was and