Armistice Read online

  He tried again: “We’re going to kill your sorry asses. “You know that, right?”

  “I think you’re trying to bore us to death,” the Russian soldier—officer? yeah, probably, Rolf judged—replied.

  “Think whatever you want.” Rolf hopped up, fired in the direction from which the Russian’s voice had come, and ducked before any of the Ivans could ventilate him with those fancy AK-47s. Bullets cracked over his head. Others spanged and whined off the stonework that sheltered him.

  He crawled away. He’d been playing soldier a long time. He’d pissed off the Red Army men. If they had anything that could do for a stone wall, they’d use it in the hope that smashing the wall would also mean smashing him.

  Not three minutes later, an RPG round pulverized the part of the wall where he wasn’t waiting any more. The Russians had borrowed the idea of the RPG from the German Panzerfaust, as they’d borrowed the idea of the AK-47 from the Sturmgewehr. As with the AK-47, they’d improved the RPG. Its shaped charge could burn through better than twenty centimeters of hardened steel. A stone fence, then, didn’t stand a chance. Rolf was glad he’d got too far away for any of the sharp slivers of rock to bite him.

  Behind him, somebody said, “Nice to see you still make everyone love you so much wherever you go.”

  “Yob tvoyu mat’, Max,” Rolf answered. Yes, he had Russians and Russian on the brain.

  Max Bachman only chuckled. He’d spent enough time on the Ostfront himself to follow that. But he’d been a conscript in the Wehrmacht. When you wore the SS dagger whose blade said My honor is called loyalty, you really meant it. You weren’t just doing what they told you to do so they wouldn’t give you grief.

  Rolf was proud of his years in Leibstandarte Adolf Hitler. The only thing he regretted was losing. Germany against the whole wide world turned out not to be—quite—an even fight. Max, on the other hand, was a democrat and probably a socialist. But he was also a pretty good man with a rifle, so Rolf cut him some slack.

  “Arguing against an RPG is a bad bet,” Max said. “Even for a panzer, it’s a bad bet.”

  “Yes, Granny,” Rolf said. Max gave back a gesture that, to the Amis, meant everything was perfect. Among Germans, it carried a rather different weight. Rolf returned it.

  He kept making allowances for Max. The two of them knew what was what, no matter where Max bought his politics. They’d saved each other’s bacon a time or three. The Russians were another story. They’d spent two wars trying to get rid of Rolf. They hadn’t done it yet. He’d hurt them, though. He intended to hurt them some more, first chance he got.

  First chance he got came that night. He liberated a jerrycan of gasoline, which he slung on his back as if it were a pack. He also festooned himself with a sack of grenades and an American machine pistol: the ugly, functional one the Amis called a grease gun. The heavy pistol cartridges it fired did hellacious damage at close range.

  Of course the Ivans had wire and sentries. On a black night, that didn’t mean so much, not if the guy doing the sneaking knew what he was up to. Rolf had learned how in the toughest school in the world. The proof of his high marks was that he remained in business.

  He had a fair idea where the Red Army men in front of his outfit denned: in the ruins of what had been Ansberg’s biggest, or maybe only, furniture store. For all he knew, they were sleeping in the battered beds. He had one bad moment when a soldier back from taking a leak caught a glimpse of him. But the American helmet, unlike a Stahlhelm, had about the same shape as a Russian model. The soldier waved vaguely and went back inside.

  Rolf waited till his heart stopped thuttering before he moved again. Nerves could kill you. They would kill you if you let them. When he was sure everything in the wreckage was quiet, he ghosted forward and set the jerrycan at the front entrance. He slipped the lid off—he’d put Vaseline on it beforehand so it wouldn’t squeak. Then, even more carefully, he eased back into a firing position he’d found about twenty meters away.

  He squeezed off a short burst with the grease gun. As he’d hoped, one or two slugs slammed into the five-liter can of gasoline. Fire spilled out the holes and burst from the opening at the top.

  Well, that got their attention, he thought. Russians inside the furniture store started yelling. As soon as the first one came out, the blazing gasoline gave Rolf plenty of light by which to shoot him. The Ivan fell with a groan. Rolf shot the next one, too. That one squealed like a stuck pig.

  But the soldiers couldn’t stay in there, not with the fire spreading fast. Just to encourage them, Rolf started chucking grenades. They were American pineapples, not the potato-mashers he’d used the last time around. He liked the German grenades better, but these would do in a pinch. They seemed to pinch the Russians pretty hard, in fact. He fired more bursts from the grease gun.

  He threw a couple of grenades in random directions to give his new acquaintances something else to think about. Then he slipped away, suspecting he’d worn out his welcome. No more than a couple of minutes had passed since the fun started.

  As he slithered back toward his own lines, a Russian sentry dashed right by him without the slightest idea he was lurking in a gutted doorway. Rolf could have put a burst into the Ivan’s back. He refrained. What point to telling the Red Army soldiers which way he’d gone?

  They’d used some of their heaviest weapons against him, and hadn’t hurt a hair on his head. His own choices had been much simpler, and had worked much better. Simple was great, as long as you knew what to do with it.

  —

  Bruce McNulty stared glumly at the cards still in his hand. The contract stood at five diamonds, and he feared he’d bitten off more than he could chew. The dummy laid out on the table in front of him (like an etherised patient, he thought, remembering his Eliot: the right thing to do when you were in the UK) wasn’t as good as he’d expected it to be.

  He played a heart off the dummy to cover the opening lead from his copilot. The queen came out. He used the king from his hand to take the trick. Then he pulled trumps. He got lucky—they split evenly. Then he managed a crossruff between hand and dummy. He took his eleven tricks before he finally had to lead a low spade.

  Bam! Down came the ace and king. “Last two are ours,” Wally Hickman said.

  “They sure are,” Bruce agreed. “But I made it.”

  “Had ’em all the way,” Phil Vukovich said. The navigator was his partner. Vukovich rose and stretched. “Hang on for a sec before the next deal, guys. I gotta go take a leak.”

  That’ll be the first time all night when I know what you’ve got in your hand, Bruce thought unkindly. The line wasn’t his; it came from George S. Kaufman. But he’d appreciated it since the first time he heard it. And it fit his current partner only too well. Phil believed in optimism more than he believed in Goren—one of his few, and more expensive, deviations from legal rectitude. If he’d navigated the way he bid, he would have said the bomber was over Moscow before it really got to Berlin.

  Ezra Jacobs looked at his watch. “Just about eight o’clock,” the radioman remarked. “Shall I turn on the Beeb and see what kind of trouble we’re liable to get into next?”

  “Sounds good to me,” Bruce said. They hadn’t flown the B-29 against Russia since the mission where they wiped Petrozavodsk off the map—and that other crew did the same thing with Joe Stalin. Truman kept saying he wanted peace with whoever the new Soviet leaders turned out to be. Keeping the big bombers on the ground for a while was one way to show he meant it.

  Bruce didn’t mind. He knew how lucky he was to be alive. He knew how many men who’d started the fighting with him weren’t alive any more. And neither was Daisy. He tried not to think about that, or to tell himself it was a silly wartime romance that didn’t mean anything. The only trouble was, he couldn’t make himself believe it. He’d never been any good at lying to himself.

  “Good evening. This is the news.” The BBC announcer’s suave accent and the utter certainty in his voice made you wan
t to believe him. This was the news, and in some odd way anything he didn’t choose to mention hadn’t really happened.

  Vukovich came back from the head. He looked at the card table, saw it was still empty, and swung his head toward the radio. When he reached for a pack of Camels, Bruce made a small, beseeching noise. He got a cigarette. After the hand he’d just squeezed out, he thought he deserved one.

  “Radio Moscow has announced that Vyacheslav Molotov has replaced Lavrenti Beria as General Secretary of the Communist Party—effectively, as ruler of the USSR,” the newsreader said. “No comment was made in the broadcast as to Mr. Beria’s whereabouts or safety. Mr. Molotov states that, in principle, he accepts President Truman’s terms for peace between the warring sides.”

  “What does that mean, exactly?” Bruce asked.

  As if in conversation with him, the BBC man continued, “The precise meaning of Mr. Molotov’s statement remains to be diplomatically explored. Radio Peiping, however, has issued a statement of its own, one furiously denouncing the new Soviet leadership as backsliders and imperialist running dogs. No comment on this statement has yet come out of the USSR.”

  “Oh, boy,” Wally Hickman said. “What fun! Now they’re gonna fly us halfway around the world so we can whale the snot out of good old Mao Tse-tung, too. Yeah, I’m really looking forward to that.”

  “Won’t be as rough as what we’ve been doing up till now.” Bruce McNulty spoke with great conviction. “The Russians keep the good stuff for themselves. The Chinks get their sloppy seconds.”

  “Wet decks, they say over here,” Hickman said. “But even a second-line plane can knock us down these days. MiG-15s are real good at it, but a MiG-9 or an La-11 prop night fighter with radar will do the job just fine.”

  “Maybe we should start playing cards again,” Vukovich said. “Give us something to think about besides the goddamn news.”

  “And it’s better than it has been. That’s the scary part,” Bruce said. “Whose deal is it, anyway?”

  “Despite Molotov’s tentative agreement to peace terms, fighting goes on in Germany and near the Franco-Italian border,” the newsreader said. “No Red Army units have yet received orders to cease fire, much less to withdraw. Rebel radios from within the Communist bloc claim the Russians also continue their efforts to put down local uprisings. And there are unconfirmed reports of serious unrest in the Baltic Soviet Socialist Republics, whose annexation the Western democracies have never recognized.”

  “Good luck to those poor, brave, sorry sons of bitches,” Hickman said. “And they’ll need it, too.”

  “The more troubles the Russians have at home, the less they’ll go out and make trouble farther away,” Bruce said. “Even now, all bombed to hell and gone, they’re still a going concern. Let ’em worry about Estonia and Latvia and Lithuania instead of invading Germany.”

  Vukovich started shuffling the cards. Bruce didn’t think it was his turn, but his partner didn’t seem to care. You could argue about politics till the cows came home, but you’d never convince the guy you were arguing with. You’d only piss him off.

  In democracies, every so often they saw who’d convinced the most people. Then the ones who disagreed had to sit on the sidelines for a while. Sooner or later, the other side would screw up. Then they’d get their chance.

  Hitler and Lenin and Stalin and their chums had other ideas. Instead of taking turns with the people who thought they were wrong, they jailed them or exiled them or just went and killed them. Then they carried out their own programs with no inconvenient opposition.

  And how did that work out? Bruce thought sourly. Not so real great, as a matter of fact. Hitler did his level best to drag the whole goddamn world into the fiery abyss. His best barely missed being good enough: his physicists weren’t smart enough to make A-bombs. (Some of the men he’d exiled were Jewish physicists who did find out how.)

  That gave Stalin his big chance. He did an even better job of smashing everything to hell and gone than Hitler had. And they said it couldn’t be done! Bruce thought. That only showed what they knew. Of course, Stalin had had some excellent help from the USA. Since the USA dropped the first bombs, maybe it had excellent help from Stalin. Any which way, even more of the world was screwed up this time than the last.

  As such cheerful thoughts spun through Bruce’s head, he automatically sorted his hand into suits, each arranged in rank order. Assessing it came just as automatically. Nine points, no suit longer than five cards…Good enough to support with, maybe, but nowhere near strong enough to open the bidding.

  “Pass,” Phil said.

  “Pass,” Ezra Jacobs said.

  “Pass,” Bruce agreed. He glanced over at Hickman. “You got anything worth opening with, Wally?”

  “Not even close.” The copilot threw his cards on the table, face down. Everybody else did the same. They’d passed out the hand. If that wasn’t a fitting metaphor for the wider world, Bruce couldn’t guess what would be.

  —

  Another tank: a T-54, which warmed Konstantin Morozov’s heart. Another new driver. This one was a Jew named Avram Lipshitz. Another new loader, too, a Georgian with a name less pronounceable than Stalin’s had been before he took a Russian nom de guerre. The bastard knew barely enough Russian to understand the difference between high-explosive and armor-piercing.

  This is how we’re supposed to win a war? Morozov wondered as a hand shook him awake. He twisted inside his rolled-up blanket and opened his eyes. There was Lipshitz’s thin, beaky, badly shaved face, not fifteen centimeters from his own. Behind steel-framed spectacles, the driver’s dark eyes were big and scared.

  “What’s gone wrong now, Avram Samuelovich?” Konstantin knew only too well that something had.

  “Comrade Sergeant, did you send Corporal Eigims anywhere?” Lipshitz asked.

  “No, dammit!” Morozov scrambled out of the blanket as fast as he could. “Why? Isn’t he here like he’s supposed to be?”

  “No, Comrade Sergeant.” Avram Lipshitz sounded as scared as he looked, which was saying something.

  “Oh, fuck his mother up the ass with a board full of nails!” Konstantin exclaimed. “The stupid cunt’s liable to have run off to play rebel.”

  “He’s got to be meshuggeh if he has,” Lipshitz said. “How does he think he’ll go across Germany and Poland to wherever he wants to wind up?”

  “Good question,” the tank commander said. “If you don’t have any more good questions, class is dismissed.” He had a good question of his own, too. How the devil was he supposed to fight his tank when his gunner’d deserted?

  He knew the book answer. Till they gave him a replacement, he’d have to command the tank and lay the gun himself. The tank commander’d had to do that in the early model of the T-34, the one with the 76mm gun. The Germans couldn’t come within kilometers of matching its firepower when the Great Patriotic War was young, but they shot three or four times as fast.

  And he didn’t outgun Yankee and English tanks the way the T-34 had with the Fritzes. The fighting had slowed. Maybe it would stop. Maybe.

  Avram Lipshitz turned out to have another good question after all: “What do we do now, Comrade Sergeant?”

  Morozov lit a papiros and sighed out a cloud of smoke. He didn’t offer the Zhid a cigarette. After another fierce puff and another visible sigh, he said, “I’ll go talk to Major Zhuk. He’s got to know.”

  He went with the air of a schoolboy heading to the master’s office for a switching. His heart thumped. His feet dragged. If Genrikh Zhuk decided he’d looked the other way while Eigims disappeared, or just decided to make an example of him, he was dead meat.

  The regimental CO seemed pretty reasonable. Like so many, he’d been wounded in the last war and brought back to service for this one. He ought to know what was what. Just because he ought to, though, didn’t mean he did. And even if he did, he might feel the need to stay safe himself by throwing someone else to the wolves.

  He was gud
dling around in the guts of a T-54’s diesel powerplant when Konstantin approached. When he straightened, his right arm was greasy halfway to the elbow. He eyed Morozov. “What is it?” he said sharply. Yes, he could read faces. “It’s something, isn’t it?”

  “I’m afraid so, Comrade Major,” Konstantin said. “My gunner, the damned Balt, he’s gone and taken a powder.”

  “Oh, fuck his mother!” Zhuk said. Crucially, he didn’t say Fuck your mother! He wasn’t blaming Morozov. Not yet, anyhow. He went on, “You just now found out?”

  “That’s right, Comrade Major.” I’m not moron enough to sit on news like that. “My driver woke me up to ask if I’d sent him anywhere. I hadn’t, naturally. I’ve come straight to you. I hope you can get me another gunner with some idea of what he’s up to.”

  “I’ll try.” Major Zhuk pulled on his lower lip. “But that’s the least of your worries, I’m afraid. You’re going to have to talk to the MGB. So will I. I’m not looking forward to it.”

  “Now that Comrade Beria is, ah, indisposed, sir, who’s running the MGB?” Morozov asked. That was as close as he could come to asking Are the Chekists still as horrible as they’ve always been? Trusting your life to a man in battle was easier than trusting it to him on account of words.

  “I may have heard the new man’s name, but damned if I remember it,” the major said. “I’m sure they’ll still be as strong for security as they have been since the glorious Revolution.” That told Konstantin everything he needed to know.

  The secret policeman who interviewed Morozov—and, for all he knew, Major Zhuk as well—was a young first lieutenant named Svyatoslav Sverdlovsk. “Did your corporal show signs of disaffection before he deserted?” Sverdlovsk asked.

  “Not that I ever saw, sir.” Konstantin lied without hesitation. Juris Eigims was already in plenty of trouble. Why pile on more, especially when that meant taking on danger for himself? After a moment, he added, “He’s always been a good gunner. If not for him, the imperialists would have killed me a dozen times over.”