Two Fronts twtce-5 Read online

  “Chilly. Hungry. Not starving, but hungry. Pissed off at the froggies for changing sides again. Pretty much what you’d expect, in other words.” Baatz hesitated, maybe wondering if he’d said too much. He made haste to add, “But everybody’s behind the Fuhrer one hundred percent, of course.”

  “Aber naturlich,” Willi agreed. Pfaff nodded. Both men made sure they didn’t sound sarcastic. Baatz was just the kind of pigdog who’d report you to a loyalty officer for defeatism if you opened your mouth too wide and let him see what you were really thinking-what any soldier with a gram of sense had to be thinking.

  The really crazy thing was, what a Frontschwein thought about Hitler didn’t matter a pfennig. The Ivans would slaughter you whether you thought the Fuhrer was off his rocker or you went around shouting “Sieg heil!” all the goddamn time. You were up against the Red Army any which way. To the Russians, that was the only thing that counted. Which-aber naturlich-made it the only thing that counted to the guys in Feldgrau, too.

  Cannon rumbled, off in the distance. Like Willi and Adam Pfaff, Awful Arno cocked his head to one side, listening. He delivered the verdict: “Ours.”

  “Ja.” Willi nodded this time. “You remember that much, anyhow.”

  “Like I said before, Dernen, fuck you.” With what he might have meant for an amiable nod, Baatz stumped away, boots squelching in the mud.

  Willi sighed. His breath smoked. It wasn’t snowing any more, but it wasn’t what you’d call warm, either. “Why the hell did they have to give him back to us?” he said-quietly, because Awful Arno had ears keen as a wolf’s.

  “Most of the time, putting wounded guys back in the slots they held before they got hurt is a good idea. It helps morale, right?” Pfaff said.

  “Right.” Willi didn’t sound like someone who believed it-and he wasn’t. “Whoever wrote the rule book never ran into Arno Baatz.”

  “I’d like to run into him-driving a Kubelwagen,” Pfaff said.

  “A truck’d be better,” Willi observed. They went on in that vein for some little while.

  Baatz pissed and moaned about the barley-and-meat stew the field kitchen dished out. Nobody else complained. Willi was just glad the stew had meat in it. He didn’t care about what the meat was. He suspected it had neighed while it was alive, but he would have eaten it even if he’d thought it barked. He’d spent too long in the field to be fussy. As long as there was plenty of it, he’d spoon it out of his mess tin. He’d go back for seconds, too. He would, and he did.

  Afterwards, he did a good, thorough job of washing the tin and his utensils. No matter what Awful Arno said, he wasn’t slack about anything important. Eat from a dirty mess tin and you were asking for the shits or the heaves. With what you got in Russia, you always took that chance. Making your odds worse was stupid, nothing else but.

  Baatz also pissed and moaned about the pallet of musty straw where he was supposed to lay his head. “Poor baby,” Willi said. “He’s been sleeping on a mattress too long. He’ll toss and turn all night.”

  “What a shame!” Adam Pfaff exclaimed.

  They both laughed. They had straw pallets, too, and were damn glad to lie on them. Willi wondered how many nights he’d spent rolled in his blanket on hard ground or huddled in his greatcoat in the snow. To be fair, Awful Arno had also passed his share of nights like that, but he seemed to have forgotten about them.

  Next morning, right at sunrise, the Russians launched a volley of Katyushas at the village. Most of the horrible, screaming rockets landed in the fields beyond it. All the same, Willi jumped into a muddy foxhole while they were still in the air.

  Blast knocked Awful Arno off his feet, but he scrambled into a foxhole a few meters from Willi’s. After the volley ended, he stuck up his head and said, “Jesus Christ, I forgot how much fun this is.”

  “Fun,” Willi said. “Ja. Sure.”

  “You know what I mean,” Baatz said.

  “You bet I do-and don’t I wish I didn’t!” Willi agreed with deep feeling. He stuck up his head, too. As he lit a cigarette with shaking fingers, he looked east to make sure a million drunken Ivans weren’t swarming forward shrieking Urra! Not this time, for which he thanked heaven. The Russians just wanted to harass the German positions. The bastards knew how to get what they wanted, too.

  A skinny peasant with white whiskers stared suspiciously at Sergeant Ivan Kuchkov. He seemed to be the only male in the Ukrainian village except for an equally scrawny rooster. He was too old to have fought in the last war, and probably too old to have fought the Japanese. He looked old enough to have marched to war against the Ottoman Turks a generation before that.

  Where were all the younger men who’d lived here? In the Red Army? Carrying rifles with some anti-Soviet guerrilla band? Kuchkov glowered at Comrade Whiskers. “We need bread,” he growled.

  “What?” The ancient cupped a hand behind his ear. “What’s that you say?” He was trying to speak Russian, not Ukrainian, but making heavy going of it. He’d probably had it beaten into him in the Tsar’s army, all right, and not used it much once they finally turned him loose.

  “Bread!” Kuchkov yelled. “Food! Something to eat, you dumb, senile, cocksucking cunt.”

  “Yob tvoyu mat’,” the old man said, very clearly. Fuck your mother.

  Ivan started to draw back a fist to knock the old fart’s block off. Before he swung, though, he started to laugh. He laughed so hard, he had to hold his belly. “All right-you’ve got balls,” he allowed. “But we still fucking well need to eat. So where’s the bread?”

  “What?” The old guy cupped a hand behind his ear again.

  Chances were he heard well enough. He just didn’t feel like coughing up whatever the village happened to have. These people had lived through Stalin’s famine in the thirties, after all. They wouldn’t be jumping up and down to help the Red Army.

  Well, too bad for them. Kuchkov rounded on a stout babushka standing a couple of paces behind the man with the white beard. She was no spring chicken, either, but she didn’t have as many kilometers on her as he did. “C’mon, Granny,” Ivan said in what were meant for coaxing tones. “You can make it easy, or you can make it tough.”

  Granny looked death at him out of granite-gray eyes. Ivan didn’t believe in witches, but that hate-filled stare tempted him to change his mind. The babushka gave forth with a stream of Ukrainian dialect nobody from more than a day’s walk away from this miserable hole in the ground could possibly have understood.

  “Talk Russian, you stinking bitch,” Ivan snarled.

  She did: she told him to fuck his mother, too. It wasn’t so funny the second time around. He knocked her down. He could have done worse. Unslinging his machine pistol warned that he might. Slowly, she got to her feet. The other villagers’ gaze swung from her to Kuchkov and back again.

  “Last chance, assholes,” Ivan said in his slowest, clearest Russian. “Cough up or we’ll go through this shitty dump ourselves and clean you out good.”

  The villagers looked at the Red Army men at his back. Then they started producing loaves of black bread, small crocks of lard, and larger crocks of borscht and pickled cabbage. The whiskery man said, “If you are on our side, no wonder so many here like the Germans better.” He was too old to bother hiding his bitterness.

  But he only made Ivan laugh some more. “What I just gave you is a kiss next to what you’d get from the Nazis, you stupid, drippy prick,” he said. “First they’d take everything you’ve got-and I mean every fucking thing. Then they’d burn every shanty in this pisspot place to the ground. And then they’d shoot everybody here, except the two cunts who aren’t too goddamn ugly to fuck. And they’d shoot them, too, once they got the clap from them.”

  He wasn’t kidding. He’d seen villages the Hitlerites had been through. It must have shown in his voice, because the old man’s rheumy eyes blinked-slowly, like a lizard’s. All he answered was, “You say this,” but his own disbelief was less absolute than it might have been.
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  “Fucking straight I say it, Comrade,” Ivan answered. “If you aren’t so lucky, you’ll find out for yourself.”

  He and his men settled down to eat. He didn’t worry about what the villagers would think as they watched the soldiers go through the supplies they’d taken. If the peasants kicked up a fuss, he’d show them exactly what the Nazis did to a village. His superiors wouldn’t give him any grief about it. They’d figure the locals had it coming-especially if he didn’t leave any survivors to argue about how things happened.

  Some of his men thought more than two girls in the village looked good enough to go after. Not surprisingly, the soldiers got what they wanted. Saying no was liable to be a-what did they call it? — a capital offense. And once the Red Army men’s lust was slaked, they felt mellow enough to let the girls share some of what was really their food to begin with.

  From each according to his abilities-hers, too, Kuchkov thought. To each according to his need. The Red Army men had needed pussy and chow. The villagers supplied both. Maybe Karl Marx wouldn’t have approved of the shape the transaction took. Ivan didn’t care, though he’d sooner have jumped on a grenade than let the politruk even suspect that. As far as he was concerned, Marx was just some kike from Germany.

  He did make sure he set sentries all around the village before his section sacked out for the night. He made sure the rotation consisted of solid, reliable guys who wouldn’t drink themselves blind. He wasn’t worried about the Nazis. As far as he knew, the pricks in the coal-scuttle helmets weren’t close.

  If the villagers slithered out and went wailing to the Ukrainian nationalist bandits, though, that might not be such a whole bunch of fun. The Nazis clumped around, especially at night. They might beat you, but they probably wouldn’t catch you by surprise.

  Those nationalist bandits, though, knew the countryside better than Ivan and his buddies did. You didn’t want to wake up and try breathing through a throat some funny-talking bastard had just slit. Forewarned was forestalled. Nobody sneaked out of the place, and nobody sneaked in to avenge the village girls’ virtue, assuming they’d ever had any.

  Things heated up the next morning. Off to the west, German and Soviet big guns started going at each other for all they were worth. Ivan cocked his head to one side, gauging the way the artillery duel was going. Except it wasn’t going. It was coming this way.

  “Dig, you cocksuckers!” he shouted to his men. “Dig like you’re moles going after a kopek you dropped somewhere!”

  His own entrenching tool made the Ukraine’s black earth fly. Nothing would save you from a direct hit, but you could protect yourself against anything short of that pretty damn quick. His soldiers worked hard at their holes, too. The villagers gawped at them. They’d never seen anybody work so hard-so their eyes said.

  Then the shellbursts started. At first the enemy rounds came down near the western edges of the fields, a couple of kilometers away. But they walked forward with Germanic precision and thoroughness. Some of the villagers jumped into their huts. Some tried to run off to the east.

  Too late for either of those to do much good, though. Artillery scared ground-pounders worse than anything else. It caused more casualties than rifles and machine guns put together. And you couldn’t hurt the sons of bitches who were slaughtering you. They sat there a few kilometers behind the line, eating sausage and swatting girls on the ass. Every so often, one of them would pull a lanyard and blow up some more guys who never did anything to them. That was how it seemed to infantrymen, anyhow.

  The village was in flames by the time the shelling eased off. The old fart who hadn’t wanted to feed the Russian soldiers lay dead in front of a wrecked shack, gutted like a mutton carcass. A babushka held him in her arms and wailed.

  Only a couple of soldiers had got hurt. Neither wound looked serious. And Ivan was sure of one thing: no matter what Stalin had done to these people, now they understood Hitler was no bargain, either. The ones still alive did, anyhow. He wouldn’t fret over the rest.

  Chapter 7

  Stas Mouradian eased back on the stick, just a little, as the Pe-2’s landing gear touched the ground. The bomber’s nose came up by a corresponding fraction. That made the landing a bit smoother than it might have been otherwise. Beside him in the cockpit, Isa Mogamedov nodded. The copilot and bomb-aimer didn’t like biting his tongue every time he came down any better than anyone else would have.

  Riding the brakes hard, Stas steered the Pe-2 to a revetment and then killed the engines. As the props spun their way back into visibility and then stopped, he let out a long sigh. “Another one down,” he said.

  “Da.” Mogamedov nodded. “Not too bad this time around.”

  “We’ve been through worse,” Mouradian agreed. But that wasn’t the point, or he didn’t think it was. He’d long since lost track of how many missions he’d flown. How many more would he have to tackle?

  He didn’t know the answer, not in numbers. Numbers weren’t what counted. He’d keep it up till the war ended or he got killed, whichever came first. And he knew which was more likely to come first. He’d known for a long time. He was living on borrowed time. Well, who in the Soviet Union wasn’t? The thing to remember was, the Germans were stealing sand from the hourglass, too.

  He and Mogamedov scrambled out of the cockpit. Sergeant Mechnikov opened the bomb-bay doors and dropped to the ground. That was so far against regulations, there weren’t even any regulations against it. None of the fancy commissars had dreamt a lousy bombardier could imagine such a thing, much less do it. Well, it wasn’t as if Stas hadn’t noticed the commissars’ failures of imagination before.

  Noticing was one thing. Letting them notice you’d noticed … That put you into more danger than flying your Pe-2 into all the flak the Wehrmacht owned. You might escape the German guns. The NKVD would get you every goddamn time.

  Groundcrew men in greasy coveralls trotted up to drape the bomber in camouflage netting. “How’d it go?” one of them called to Mouradian.

  What were you supposed to say to something like that? Stas stayed strictly literal, which seemed safest: “We dropped our load. I think they came down about where we wanted them to. Then we turned around and got the devil out of there. As far as I know, the plane didn’t take any damage.”

  “No Messerschmitts this time,” Mogamedov agreed. “The ground fire could have been worse.”

  “Well, you like ’em easy once in a while, don’t you?” the groundcrew man said. “We’ll tend to the engines and the guns and the tires, and the armorers will bomb you up for the next run.”

  “Khorosho.” Stas left it right there. What could you say but fine? Nothing, not unless you wanted the Chekists to get their hooks into you.

  All the same, he and his copilot and his bombardier exchanged a quick glance the groundcrew men wouldn’t see-and wouldn’t understand if they did happen to see it. Easy? Everything was easy after the fact. Going in, your mouth was always dry. You had to clench your asshole tight by main force-same with the sphincter that kept you from pissing yourself.

  Because you didn’t, you couldn’t, know ahead of time how things would go. The 109 you imagined was even scarier than any actual Nazi airshark. The flak burst that shook your plane for real went off right in the cockpit in your fears, and those were your guts it splattered over the instruments.

  It wasn’t cowardice. It was nothing like cowardice. You went ahead and did your job. But you had to have had your soul surgically removed not to think of all the things the enemy or simple mechanical failure could do to you. A few stolid pilots did seem to have undergone that depsyching. Even among Russians, though, not many men were so nerveless. And, of the ones who were, not many flew.

  “I want my hundred grams,” Fyodor Mechnikov declared, in tones that warned somebody would get hurt if the sergeant didn’t get his vodka ration right away.

  Most of the time, the way Russians drank appalled Stas. Most of the time, but not always. Right after he came back from
a mission, alcoholic oblivion often looked good-better than those imaginary Messerschmitts and the flak burst that could have butchered him, anyhow.

  More Pe-2s landed at the airstrip. One by one, they sheltered in revetments and were hidden from above. On a dirt road north of the runway, tanks rumbled west. So did big, square-shouldered American trucks full of big, square-shouldered Red Army men.

  Every one of them would get his hundred grams. And then, maybe, they’d link arms, grab their submachine guns, and swarm toward German entrenchments yelling “Urra!” at the top of their lungs. A few lucky ones might get to sober up and try to carry out their superiors’ next brilliant orders.

  From everything Stas had seen and heard, the Red Army’s approach to putting out a fire was smothering it with bodies. The trucks kicking up dust on the road argued that they still had plenty of bodies to throw. Whether they could develop a better approach … They were Russians, after all.

  He stumped over to the officers’ tent. Sweat sprang out all over him as he walked. In winter, the furs and leather in which he flew also kept him warm on the ground. It wasn’t winter any more. He didn’t quite want to run around naked, but changing into a more comfortable outfit was definitely on the list.

  So was vodka. For now, loosening snaps and zippers and shedding his jacket would do. He ducked inside. He wasn’t the first flyer inside, or the first drinker. There were gherkins and slices of sausage to eat with the vodka. Pelmeni-meat-stuffed dumplings-were even better when you were setting out to tie one on, but they also took work to make. Pickles and sausage didn’t.

  “To blowing the cocks off the Fascist hyenas!” another pilot said. He raised his glass, then knocked back the shot.

  Stas and his comrades followed suit. The vodka snarled down his throat. He felt as if he’d swallowed a lighted spirit lamp, then had a grenade go off in his stomach. “Bozhemoi, that’s good!” the other pilot said. Stas wondered if they were drinking the same stuff. They were.