Bombs Away Read online

  What would the Hitlerites have done if they’d had atomic bombs? Ihor didn’t need to think about that one much; the question answered itself. The Germans would have dropped as many of them as they could on the Soviet Union. Hitler didn’t just want the Russians and Ukrainians and Byelorussians and Poles conquered and subdued. He wanted them exterminated. He hadn’t had the tools for the job. They were here now.

  “To smashing all of Germany!” the next man up said, and drank the toast. Ihor followed suit. It matched his mood and his worries. It also gave him the license to numb himself up some more.

  Olga Marchenkova—Volodymyr’s wife—turned on the radio. After a couple of minutes of music, a familiar voice said, “Attention, Moscow is speaking.” Yuri Levitan had broadcast the news from Moscow all through the war. He was still doing it, even though he was a Jew, and Stalin had cooled on them in recent years. Levitan went on, “Here is the latest from around the world on Friday, February 15, 1951.”

  The more sober kolkhozniks started shushing their drunk comrades, some of whom were singing and shouting and carrying on. When the news was over, they could start making a racket again. Now? No. The news suddenly mattered once more, mattered the way it had when Moscow teetered on the brink of falling to the Nazis. Listening to Yuri Levitan then had been a capital crime—the Ukraine already lay under the Germans’ harsh yoke. People did it anyhow. Some died for doing it.

  “I regret I must inform you that the forces of imperialist aggression have struck new and harsh blows against the European states helping the Soviet Union to advance the socialist vanguard of humanity,” Levitan said in somber tones. “The United States uses as a pretext for its murderous onslaught the Soviet Union’s destruction of Elmendorf Air Force Base in Alaska. They choose to forget that the cleansing of Elmendorf came in direct response to their unprovoked attack against the harmless village of Pechenga.”

  Why would the Americans drop an atom bomb on a harmless village? Ihor wondered. Even with vodka fuddling him, he could see that that didn’t add up. But it was one of those questions you thought of without asking. You did if you aimed to stay out of the gulags, anyhow.

  “American atomic bombs have leveled Zywiec in Poland, Szekesfehervar in Hungary, and Ceske Budejovice in Czechoslovakia,” Levitan continued gravely. He was a professional; he didn’t stumble over any of the difficult names. “The United States claims these cities were chosen because they are transport hubs through which Soviet troops and those of the fraternal socialist people’s republics flow westward toward the frontier between the socialist world and its reactionary opponents. Simple blood lust seems the more likely explanation.”

  When Ihor was a little boy, his parents would sometimes cross themselves on hearing grim news. It was a dangerous habit in the God-fighting USSR. They trained themselves out of it, and trained Ihor out of it, too. He couldn’t remember the last time he’d slipped. But his hand started to move that way now.

  Some of the soldiers from the Kiev Military District, the men he’d talked to not so long ago, probably would have gone through one of those towns or another. If not for his own lamed leg, he might have been summoned back into the Red Army himself. In that case, he might have gone through one of those towns. And if he had…what? Chances were, little pieces of him would be making a Geiger counter chatter right now.

  He reached for a vodka bottle and swigged. No one had proposed a toast, but he didn’t care. He wanted not to think about that kind of fire blossoming above his head. If he’d had a bottle of ether and a rag, he would have used them instead of the hooch. When you thought of permanent oblivion, temporary oblivion was the only foxhole you had.

  He expected Yuri Levitan to go on talking about the American atrocities. Instead, the suave newsreader told of Stakhanovite shock workers in Voroshilovgrad who produced twice as much aluminum as their quota required. “Even then, they refused to leave their posts,” Levitan said. “They insisted on doing everything in their power to aid the revolutionary proletariat on the march and on dedicating themselves to glorifying our beloved Comrade Stalin.”

  That was laying it on with a trowel. With a shovel, even. Or Ihor thought so. And, despite Volodymyr’s toast, Stalin wasn’t widely beloved, not in the Ukraine. Too many people here had died. He was respected. Anyone who’d beaten Hitler had to be respected. Besides, Hitler had proved himself what seemed to be impossible: an even worse bargain than the Soviet leader. And Stalin was feared. People feared him the way chickens feared the chopping block, and for the same reason. But beloved? No.

  All the same, at least half the kolkhozniks in the common room were nodding at Levitan’s words. Maybe they wanted to be seen agreeing with what he said. Maybe they were just patriots. Love of country was the biggest part of why people didn’t abandon Stalin in the Great Patriotic War’s blackest days.

  Whatever their reasons, they were nodding. And Ihor decided he had better nod, too. You didn’t want to stick out from what everyone else was doing, no matter what that happened to be. If you stuck out, you got noticed. And if you got noticed, you commonly regretted it.

  —

  One of the guys in Tibor Nagy’s squad came from Szekesfehervar. He was as sure as made no difference that the American atom bomb had incinerated his whole family. Part of the time, he didn’t want to do anything but roll himself in his blanket and weep and wail. The rest, he wanted to grab his rifle, charge across the border between the Russian and American zones in Germany, and kill all the Yankees on the far side singlehanded.

  Right now, Tibor had drawn the short straw in talking him out of taking warfare into his own hands. “You can’t, Ferenc. You just can’t, no matter how much you wish you could,” he said, as reasonably as possible. “Come on—don’t be stupid. Give me your piece.”

  Ferenc clung to the rifle the way a little kid would cling to a velveteen rabbit. “Won’t,” he said, as if he were about to stick a thumb in his mouth.

  Tibor wouldn’t have minded if he did—it might have calmed him down. “Hand it over, dammit.” He let his patience show. “I know what happened. I’m sorry about what happened. But you can’t go shooting up the countryside on account of that.”

  “Why not? The Americans did.” Ferenc just wanted to hit back.

  “But they’re a country. You’re just one fellow. You aren’t even a general or anything. You’re just a fucking private like me. You’d get yourself killed for nothing. And if anybody you’re related to is still alive, they’d roast ’em over a slow fire to pay you back for going off the rails.”

  Ferenc’s eyes filled with tears. “It isn’t fair,” he whimpered. “It isn’t right.”

  That was undoubtedly true. What it had to do with the price of beer was liable to be a different story, though. As far as Tibor could see, very little that had happened since he and Ferenc were born was either fair or right. Fair and right were for big countries, like Russia and America. Germany had been big enough to make Hungary dance to its tune—but, as things turned out, not big enough to keep playing it. Otherwise, the Germans wouldn’t have rival foreign armies stationed on their soil.

  And if Ferenc was getting weepy…Tibor reached out and grabbed his squadmate’s Mosin-Nagant. “There you go, pal,” he said. “Just take it easy for a while. Sooner or later, things’ll look better.”

  “Later,” Ferenc said, in tones that might have come from the Mask of Tragedy brought to life.

  Tibor didn’t care, or not very much. He had the rifle. That was what counted. Unless the Russian generals masterminding this operation sent their Hungarian allies over the border in the next couple of hours, Ferenc didn’t need it. He’d be as soppy as that “Gloomy Sunday” song for a while. The other soldiers just had to make sure he didn’t hang himself or do anything else stupid that he couldn’t take back.

  Sergeant Gergely noticed Tibor carrying the rifle. “That’s not yours,” the noncom barked. He might be—he was—a son of a bitch, but he was one goddamn observant son of a bitch.


  “No, Sergeant.” Tibor agreed to what he couldn’t very well deny. “It’s Ferenc’s. He was talking about going after the Americans again.”

  “I wouldn’t mind if they shot him. It would serve him right.” The milk of human kindness was sour cream in Gergely. Shaking his head, he went on, “But he can’t go starting a war all by himself, can he? And Schmalkalden is close enough to the border to give him a chance of doing it.”

  He pronounced the name of the German town perfectly. Tibor would have, too; they both spoke German well, even if they didn’t always want their allies to know it. Hardly anyone in the world but Hungarians knew Magyar. German was Hungary’s window to what the rest of Europe was saying, and had been for as long as Hungary had been joined to Austria at the hip.

  “Well, he won’t now, not till he gets the rifle back,” Tibor said.

  “You do a good job of handling him,” Gergely said. Tibor gaped; the noncom wasn’t in the habit of doling out praise. Gergely went on, “Well, you do. I’ve noticed. You know who else does?”

  “No, Sergeant.” Tibor wasn’t used to the older man in a talkative mood. It unnerved him.

  “Szolovits,” Gergely said. “Yeah, the sheeny. Ain’t that a kick in the nuts?” A twisted smile on his face, Gergely bobbed his head and went about his business, almost as if he thought he’d been talking with a fellow human being.

  After a little thought, Tibor was less surprised than the sergeant that Isztvan Szolovits might have a better idea than most about what Ferenc was going through right now. When the Nazis overthrew Admiral Horthy and used the Arrow Cross as their puppets, lots of Jews had headed for death camps.

  That didn’t happen till 1944, late in the war. More Jews survived in Hungary than in countries where the SS had got to run wild sooner. Even so, how many relatives had Szolovits lost? Chances were he understood Ferenc’s misery better than most of the other soldiers.

  The company got a night’s pass. They piled into a couple of ancient buses and went into Schmalkalden to see if German beer was as good as people said. The town had been bombed in the last war, but there weren’t a whole lot of towns between the Atlantic and Moscow that hadn’t been. It was shabby but orderly. The civilians on the street wore clothes that were mostly old, but well-tended. Tibor hardly noticed that; it was the same as he was used to at home.

  “Bier, bitte,” he told the barkeep as soon as he found a tavern (it didn’t take long).

  “Here you go.” The man gave him a curious look as he served him. “You’re not Russian, are you?”

  “No, I’m Hungarian,” Tibor answered. “How did you know?” His German would have an accent different from a Russian’s. His uniform was of a greener khaki than the Red Army used, and of what he thought was a smarter cut.

  But the bartender told him, “You said please. Next Ivan who does that in here will be the first. And because you did, that one’s on me.”

  “Danke schön!” Tibor exclaimed. He sipped. It wasn’t great beer, but it was pretty good. That it was free made it taste even better.

  “You didn’t fight in the last war, did you?” The German shook his head as he answered his own question: “Nah. Of course you didn’t. You’re too young—you’re just a kid.”

  Since Tibor was just a kid, he couldn’t even resent that. He said, “My sergeant did.”

  “That a fact?” The bartender paused to light a cigarette. By his harsh, rasping chuckle, he went through a lot of them. After blowing out smoke, he continued, “So he’s one of those sock people, is he? Hell of a lot of ’em around these days.”

  “Sock people?” Tibor echoed. He wasn’t sure he’d heard straight. If he had, he feared he’d tripped over an idiom he didn’t understand.

  But the bartender nodded. “Sockeleute, ja. You know the kind I mean. I call ’em that ’cause they fit on either foot just as easy.”

  “Oh!” Tibor giggled like a girl when he got it. He wondered what Sergeant Gergely would have to say if he came out with that. Something interesting and memorable, he had no doubt. He might try it—on a day when he was feeling more suicidal than poor Ferenc did right now. Taking his courage in both hands, he asked, “Did you fight in the last war?”

  The bartender looked about forty-five, not that Tibor was any too good at guessing ages. But every German too young to wear a long white beard was likely to have carried a Mauser or a Schmeisser at some time between 1939 and 1945.

  “Ach, you bet I did, sonny,” the man answered. “You can’t see, but my left leg is gone a little below the knee. I get around all right, even if I’m not what you’d call quick any more. Shell fragment nailed me when we were pulling back from Kiev at the end of 1943. And after I was on my feet—well, my foot—again, I got to sell drinks to the Russians who blew me up. Life is full of shit sometimes, you know? But what are you gonna do?”

  “What is there except the best you can?” Tibor said. His own country lay under Stalin’s heavy thumb. It had lost a city, lost it utterly and forever, because it did. Here he was in Germany, about to go to war for Stalin’s cause, which mattered not at all to him. Doing the best he could, he finished his beer and slid the seidel across the bar for a refill.

  —

  Days were starting to get longer now. The sun went to bed later and got up earlier at the end of a week than it had at the beginning. But night still stretched plenty far enough for the Red Army tankmen to peel the camouflage netting off their machines, to make sure they had plenty of fuel, and to do all the checks they could in the dark.

  Konstantin Morozov didn’t know what would happen to a soldier who flipped the switch on a flashlight or even struck a match to get some extra light by which to examine something. The Chekists wouldn’t shoot the poor imbecile. That would be too merciful. No, they’d take him away to dispose of him at their leisure. Better the attack should go in short one tank than that a fool or a traitor should give everything away.

  He hadn’t slept all night. Little white tablets made sure he wouldn’t. He still had most of them left. He didn’t expect to sleep for the next couple of days. His heart thumped in his chest. His eyes opened very wide. Every time he blinked, his eyelids reminded him how dry and sandy they were. The pep pills were on the job, all right.

  He checked his watch again. It was 0454. The last time he’d looked down at his left wrist, it had been 0451; the time before that, 0447. He expected to check a couple of more times in the next six minutes.

  “You’re ready to go, right, Misha?” he demanded of Mikhail Kasyanov.

  “Da, Comrade Sergeant!” The driver sounded absurdly confident. Only somebody who had no idea what war was all about could seem so relaxed at a time like this. Kasyanov figured it would be a walkover. He couldn’t imagine anything going wrong.

  Konstantin Morozov, unfortunately, could. At the end of the Great Patriotic War, the Red Army had massively outnumbered its Hitlerite foes. It had tanks and planes and men and fuel and ammo falling out of its asshole. And attacks still got screwed up. The Germans would fall back a couple of kilometers so artillery barrages fell on empty ground. Then they’d hit you when you came forward expecting them to be knocked flat. Or they’d open up a lane in their defenses to invite you through, then jump you from the flanks and rip up your striking column. They had more tricks than a trained circus dog.

  If Misha thought the Americans didn’t and wouldn’t, he was using his dick instead of his brain. Well, he’d have sense knocked into him soon enough. 0457 now. Beside Konstantin, Pavel Gryzlov was a wide-shouldered shadow. Lower and farther back, Mogamed Safarli hardly seemed there at all.

  0459. Any second now, unless his watch ran fast. Any second, any second, any…

  0500. Nothing happened. “Yob tvoyu mat’, you stupid watch,” Morozov snarled. He stared at the luminous tip of the second hand crawling around the dial.

  Ten seconds past 0500. Still nothing. Fifteen seconds past 0500. Still nothing. He wanted to smash the watch against the breech of the 100mm gun. Tha
t would teach the cheap, worthless thing a lesson.

  Seventeen seconds past 0500…and the world exploded. It might not have been as loud as the roar of an atomic bomb, but it was the loudest thing Konstantin had ever heard. He’d been there when the final assault on the Seelow Heights kicked off, just east of Berlin. That had been so loud, it beggared words like thunderous. This, he thought, outdid it.

  He had no idea how many Katyusha batteries and big guns the Red Army had right here. He had no idea how many covered the whole length of what the imperialists called the Iron Curtain. Lots was a pretty fair guess for the first of those, lots and lots for the second. Even with the tank buttoned up, the noise was a palpable blow against the ears.

  Konstantin had to remind himself to shout, “Gun it, Misha!” over or through the impossible din. Either Kasyanov heard him or he remembered they were supposed to get moving as soon as the bombardment started. They were at the very tip of the point of the Soviet spear.

  Rockets and shells were still flying west as fast as the crews who served the weapons could send them. The artillerymen had to be as happy as clams right now. They were laying Germany waste, always the dream of any Red Army soldier. The T-54 began to vibrate: the motor was running. Normally, it made a considerable racket. Now, the cannons and the rocket launchers ensured that Morozov knew he was going only through the seat of his coveralls.

  The tank clattered west, along with the rest of the machines from Captain Gurevich’s company, the rest of the machines from the regiment, the rest of the machines from the Guards Tank Army…the rest of the machines from whatever large fraction of the Red Army Stalin had committed to the attack against Western Europe.

  “Next stop, the Rhine!” Morozov whooped. That wasn’t literally true, but it was the operational goal of this enormous onslaught. Once they’d cleared out the western zones of Germany, they would decide whether the Low Countries and France deserved a dose of the same medicine.