Bombs Away Read online

  Hitler’d given it to them. And Hitler’s forces, not quite eleven years ago, had been nothing, nothing at all, next to the swarm of steel and soldiers roaring west now. The defenders might be more ready to do their jobs than they had been in 1940, but Konstantin didn’t dwell on that. Forward! was all he cared about.

  Go as fast as you can and blow up anything in your way. That was what the attack orders amounted to. Bogging down was the worst thing that could happen. The Germans had in 1941, when mud and then snow made them fight in ways they hadn’t planned for. It ended up costing them victory.

  There were worse dangers now to bogging down and bunching up than there had been during the last war. If you concentrated like that, you gave the enemy a perfect chance to drop an atom bomb on your head. That would slow up your advance like nobody’s business.

  Captain Gurevich had said the Americans wouldn’t do that to territory they were supposed to be defending. No: he’d said he hoped they wouldn’t do that to such territory. Konstantin hoped the same thing. Oh, did he ever! After all, he was betting his life on that hope.

  Misha steered the tank around the burning carcass of one that had stopped something. It happened, however much you wished it wouldn’t. Not even the most overwhelming barrages knocked down all the enemy’s defenses and gave you a walkover. Konstantin had seen that too many times against the Fritzes. Defenders were like cockroaches; you couldn’t kill them all.

  A lance of flame brewed up another Soviet tank. Konstantin nudged Pavel Gryzlov as he traversed the turret with his other hand. “Give them a burst of machine-gun fire there,” he told the gunner. “That’s a goddamn bazooka team.”

  “I’ll do it,” Gryzlov answered, and he did. Brass cartridge cases clattered down onto the floor of the fighting compartment. “We’re over the frontier, then, Comrade Sergeant?”

  “We must be,” Morozov said. “It’ll get light pretty soon. Then we’ll be able to see what we’re doing.”

  Before long, enough fires were blazing so he didn’t need to wait for sunrise to have a pretty fair notion of what was going on. A lot of those fires came from smashed T-54s, T-34/85s, and heavy Stalin breakthrough tanks. The Soviet theory was that you couldn’t make an omelet without breaking eggs. Tanks were as disposable as machine-gun rounds. So were tank crews, something Konstantin didn’t like to think about.

  But enemy tanks blazed, too. The American machines were taller than their squat Soviet counterparts. Their armor wasn’t so well sloped, either. As the Nazis did before them, though, they had excellent fire control. They scored hits from ranges a T-54 was unlikely to match. Only one thing to do about it: get in close and slug. Along with the rest of the Red Army, Morozov’s tank did it.

  FOR ONCE, GUSTAV HOZZEL was sleeping like a rock. Nothing bothered him—not lumps in the mattress, and not nightmares going back to his days on the Eastern Front. He simply lay there, forgetting the world and by the world forgot.

  At five o’clock in the morning, the world remembered him—and everybody else anywhere close to the border between the western and eastern parts of Germany. For a few confused seconds, he thought a thunderstorm was hitting Fulda. But no rain drummed on the roof, and all the noise came out of the east.

  Beside him in the warm, soft bed, Luisa sleepily said, “Gustav? What’s going on?”

  “The Russians are coming.” His own voice sounded like the tolling of an iron bell. “You’d better get down to the cellar, dear.”

  “What? They’re kilometers away from here. Even if those are guns, nothing’s going to happen here for a while.” His wife had woken up enough to think straight, anyhow.

  Straight, maybe, but not straight enough. “The shells can’t get us yet, no,” Gustav answered. “And the Amis will fight hard to keep the Russians from breaking through here. This is one of the key places where they stand a chance of doing that. But the bombers should be here any minute.”

  “Bombers?” Luisa started to scramble to her feet. “You don’t mean dropping one of those atomic things, do you?”

  “No, or I don’t think so,” Gustav answered. “They want to go through Fulda, not make it so nobody can. But that doesn’t mean they won’t shoot up the place or drop regular explosives on it. So get moving!” He smacked her on the backside, hard enough to make her jump and yip. The noise sounded like a rifle crack—if you’d never heard a rifle crack.

  For a wonder, Luisa didn’t argue with him. She just threw her hands in the air and hurried downstairs. Gustav put on dungarees, a sturdy wool shirt with lots of pockets, and the stoutest shoes he owned. They weren’t marching boots—no hobnails in the soles or anything—but they would have to do.

  He started down the stairs himself. He hadn’t got to the ground floor before American antiaircraft guns started their percussive hammering. Through the quick-firing guns’ racket, he heard a rising roar of aircraft engines. Sure as the devil, the Russians were coming to town.

  A split second later, he recognized which aircraft engines those were. They were Il-2s or, more likely, Il-10s: Shturmoviks. Just the sound made his balls want to crawl up into his belly. The attack planes’ Russian designers called them Flying Tanks. Fearful Landsers tagged them with names like the Meatgrinder and the Black Death. The Shturmovik was heavily armored and carried much too much forward-facing firepower. Though it wasn’t very maneuverable, all that steel plating made it a bitch and a half to shoot down.

  Explosions rocked the outskirts of Fulda, marching closer and closer. Shturmoviks carried bombs, too. They’d zoom in just above the treetops or roofs, shoot and bomb everything in sight, and get the hell out.

  Cannon rattled in the air. More bombs burst. The upstairs windows shattered. A noise like a car hitting a wall and a cloud of plaster dust pouring down the stairs after Gustav said a round from one of those airplanes had ventilated the bedroom.

  “Go on!” he shouted at Luisa, who still hesitated near the top of the cellar stairs. “You want the next one to tear through you?”

  “What are you going to do?” she asked—he showed no signs of taking shelter with her.

  “Whatever the Americans let me. Whatever I can,” he answered with a shrug. “Remember, sweetheart, I know how to play this game. I had to quit in 1945, but it looks like things have started up again.”

  “They’ll kill you!” Luisa said.

  Gustav shrugged again. “If they do break through here, we’ll have to live under them. That’s not living. You don’t believe me, ask the Poles or the Czechs or the Hungarians. Ask the Germans in their zone. Now go on down there. Stay safe. I love you.” He hurried out the front door, not looking back to see whether she did what he told her to.

  Out in the street, the air smelled of more plaster dust, of woodsmoke, and of high explosives. It also smelled of shit, and of the sour sweat of human fear. Gustav nodded to himself. It smelled like a battlefield, all right.

  Another Shturmovik buzzed past, guns blazing. Gustav threw himself down behind a chimney that hadn’t been lying in the middle of the alley half an hour earlier. A bullet spanged off the bricks, struck sparks, and whined away. He laughed as he picked himself up again. Damned if his reflexes didn’t still work.

  American jeeps and halftracks added the familiar note of exhaust fumes to the symphony of stinks. They were heading east, toward the fighting, not bugging out. That was good. Gustav supposed it was, anyhow. At least they meant what they said about keeping this part of Germany out of Soviet hands.

  Gustav didn’t speak more than fragments of English. He’d picked up some Russian during the war—no, during the last war—but didn’t think that would do him any good. In fact, it seemed more likely to get him shot.

  He went looking for Max Bachman. Max could palaver with the Amis for both of them. And he found his boss and friend sooner than he’d expected. The printer was heading toward his house.

  “Here we go.” Max sounded surprisingly chipper. “Takes me back, it does, to hear the Iron Gustavs buzzing in.”
>
  That was another German nickname for Shturmoviks. Gustav had got into a brawl about it when a Dummkopf in his section tried to pin it on him. From Max, he didn’t mind hearing it. And he felt surprisingly chipper himself. “Same here,” he agreed. “Come on. Let’s see if the Americans will give us guns for that militia thing.”

  “Guns and uniforms.” Max wore the same kind of clothes Gustav did. “If the Russians catch us armed and we’re dressed like this—” He made a death-rattle noise. Of course, the Ivans might do in prisoners even in uniform. It was one of the things that happened. Gustav knew it had happened a good bit in the Wehrmacht. They played for keeps in the east. And what the Waffen-SS had done…

  Battle brought new noises now. Jet fighters bansheed overhead. Some, with the American white star, went after the Shturmoviks. Others, with the Soviet red star, did their best to keep the Americans off the attack planes. The American and Russian jets tangled with one another, too. Gustav pumped a fist when a MiG fell out of the sky trailing smoke and with a big chunk of one wing bitten out. The crash had a dreadfully final sound. A plume of fire and greasy black smoke marked the fighter pilot’s pyre.

  “Hey! You Yanks!” Max shouted to a couple of Americans going by in a jeep.

  He made them stop, anyway. One of them said something to him. He answered in English. He sounded fluent to Gustav, but what did Gustav know? Max and the Ami went back and forth. Then the guy driving the jeep put it in gear and roared away.

  “What did he say?” Gustav asked.

  “They’re passing out rifles and jackets with armbands and helmets over by the Rathaus,” Max told him. “We have to promise to give the stuff back when the emergency’s over. They’ll use us, but they still don’t trust us very far.”

  “I don’t care,” Gustav said. “No matter how bad the Americans are, Stalin will be worse.” Max nodded. They hurried over to the town hall.

  Pom-pom guns in the square did their best to hold marauding Shturmoviks at bay. The rifles a grizzled American sergeant doled out were bolt-action Springfields, not the semiautomatic M-1s his countrymen carried. Gustav didn’t fuss. They were close cousins to the Mauser he’d lugged for so long. The jackets stank of mothballs. They’d probably been in storage somewhere since 1945. Again, so what? The band on the left sleeve read German Emergency Volunteer. Volkssturm men had worn such armbands the last time around. Sometimes they helped, sometimes not. The helmet was an American pot with a separate fiber liner, not a German coal-scuttle. Gustav didn’t think it covered enough of his noodle, but, like the rifle, it was better than nothing.

  And he was soldiering again. All he needed was a tinfoil tube of liver paste to convince him he’d never been a civilian, not even for a minute.

  —

  “Walk!” the MGB man barked, the snap of accustomed command in his voice.

  “Tak. I’m walking, Comrade, I’m walking.” Ihor Shevchenko took a calculated risk when he said yes in Ukrainian rather than using the Russian da. He spoke Russian fine. But he wanted the Chekist to think of him as a dim country bumpkin. And if he exaggerated his limp…Well, his mother hadn’t raised him to be a fool.

  Maybe he laid the limp on too thick. “Come over here!” the MGB man ordered. “Let’s have a look at that leg, dammit.”

  “Tak,” Ihor repeated. He remembered not to lose the limp as he walked over to the unwelcome visitor to the kolkhoz.

  When he pulled up his trouser leg, the MGB man’s face changed a little. It was an ugly wound, with a scar like a crab’s spread claws and with a good-sized cavity in the muscle where the surgeon had taken out flesh so it wouldn’t rot and poison him. “Put yourself in order,” the fellow said grudgingly. “You really did stop something there, didn’t you?”

  “Afraid I did.” Ihor wanted to ask him, And what did you do in the Great Patriotic War, pussy? Odds were the bastard had spent his time in a heated office a thousand kilometers from the front. His only worry would have been whether he could scare the pretty file clerk into sucking him off. But you couldn’t remind him of that, or he’d make you sorry. He had as many ways as beer had bubbles.

  “All right,” he said now, and made a tickmark on a sheet of paper in his clipboard. “We’ll leave you here, then. I don’t think that leg will let you go back into the infantry.”

  “I serve the Soviet Union, Comrade!” That one never let you down. Here, it meant Whatever you say is fine with me. Ihor was lying through his teeth, of course. Had the Chekist tried to recall him, he would have done his level best to arrange an accident for the man before they left the collective farm.

  As things were, the son of a bitch was taking four men from the kolkhoz. Radio Moscow bragged about Soviet victory after Soviet victory, but how many men were going into the sausage machine to win those victories (if they were victories)? Enough so the Red Army needed more bodies. That was as much as Ihor could say.

  Would the authorities adjust the collective farm’s production norms to take into account the workers it suddenly didn’t have? That was so funny, Ihor almost burst out laughing. They would pretend it had as many workers as ever. After all, they had their larger, oblast-wide production norms to consider.

  The chances that the kolkhoz’s crops would be as large with fewer people to tend them were slim and none. The chances that anyone would get in trouble for failing to meet production norms, though, were also slim and none. Somehow or other, the norms would be met…on paper, anyway. If the actual grain brought in from the actual fields didn’t quite match what got set down on paper, well, what could you expect in a world full of unreliable human beings?

  On paper, the USSR set production records every year. People in the actual world went hungry? Chances were they were socially unreliable elements. How could you get excited about riffraff like that? No one had got excited when Stalin starved the Ukraine into submission. Ihor knew that only too well. No one had cared at all, no one except the Ukrainians. And they were too busy starving to give the matter their full attention.

  “Volodymyr was a good fellow,” Anya whispered when she and Ihor were in bed together—one of the few places they could talk without much risk of being spied upon.

  “They were all good fellows,” he whispered back. “We won’t be the same without them. You know it. I know it. Everybody knows it. Even the pricks in the MGB know it.”

  “The pricks in the MGB don’t know anything,” his wife said.

  He shook his head, there in the darkness. She’d feel the motion even if she couldn’t see it. “They know. Oh, they know, all right. You bet they know. Those sons of bitches know damn near everything. Knowing isn’t the trouble. The trouble is, they don’t care.”

  “That’s worse,” Anya said, still in a voice no one farther than thirty centimeters from her head could have heard.

  “I guess it is. But what can anybody do about it? Not a stinking thing.” Ihor was no louder. You learned the tricks that kept you alive when you were small, and you got better and better at using them as time went by. He continued, “Why, darling, the MGB even knows if I do this.” He slid a hand under her flannel nightgown.

  Her squeak was a little louder than the whispers she’d been using, but not a lot louder. She didn’t slap the hand away, either. She turned toward him instead. After all, he was still there to be turned toward. There were MGB men and MGB men. A really nasty one, or one who didn’t think he could make his own quota any other way, would have hauled him back into the army in spite of his wound. Unless he could have come up with one of those convenient “accidents” for the Chekist, he would have had to go, too. His other choices would have been worse.

  So he fell asleep happy, and he woke up the next morning pretty happy, too. By the way Anya had snuggled up against him, she was also happy. That was good. If you weren’t happy with the person you’d married, you’d married the wrong person. And you would start looking for fun somewhere else, which meant you weren’t likely to stay married.

  He stayed happy halfwa
y through his first glass of sugared breakfast tea from the communal samovar. Then someone turned on the radio, just in time to catch Yuri Levitan going, “Attention, Moscow is speaking.” He was on in the morning. He was on at night. Did he ever sleep? Ihor would have wondered whether every male broadcaster on Radio Moscow called himself Yuri Levitan, only the man’s voice was so distinctive, it could have come from but one throat.

  “What’s gone wrong in the world now?” Ihor said. He assumed something must have. What else was the news but stories about things that had gone wrong somewhere in the world?

  After further reports about Soviet triumphs ever deeper in Germany, Levitan went on in grave tones: “In their frantic and futile efforts to interfere with the inexorable advance of the ever-victorious Red Army and its socialist allies, imperialist forces have struck again at the homelands of the workers and peasants’ vanguards on the march. American bombers with ordinary explosives hit Warsaw and Krakow, Prague and Bratislava, and Budapest last night, the evening of the twenty-fourth.”

  He paused. An ordinary human being would have taken a sip of water or tea or vodka, or a drag from his cigarette. Machinelike Yuri Levitan was probably having his neck oiled or something. When he spoke again, he sounded more somber yet: “And the imperialists also struck at the heartland of the proletarian revolution. American conventional bombs fell on hero city Leningrad, on Minsk in the Byelorussian SSR, on Rovno in the Ukrainian SSR, and on Vladivostok in the Soviet Far East.”

  Another pause from the broadcaster. Ihor listened for the squeak of the oilcan, but didn’t hear it. “Civilian casualties from these terror bombings have been heavy,” Levitan said when he resumed. “They include innocent children playing in a park in Leningrad. Comrade Stalin has vowed that repayment will be heavy.”

  What were innocent children doing, playing in a park in the middle of a nighttime air raid? You could ask yourself questions like that. If you asked them of anyone else, you put yourself in deadly danger. Ihor knew better. He knew better even than to look as if such questions might occur to him. That was dangerous, too. Me? Just a dumb Ukrainian peasant, that’s all. There lay safety.