Two Fronts twtce-5 Read online

  He got called on the carpet a couple of days later. He’d expected he would. “That was quite a scrum in the estaminet,” remarked the mustachioed colonel who commanded the regiment.

  “Yes, sir,” Demange said woodenly, and not another word.

  “The civilians are hopping mad,” the colonel observed. Demange stood mute, at stiff attention. The colonel’s right eyebrow quirked. “You were there, n’est-ce pas?”

  “Yes, sir,” Demange repeated, with, again, no more.

  “Have any idea what touched off the riot? That’s what it was, or near enough.”

  “No, sir.”

  “I’ve heard-just heard, mind you-you might have had something to do with it.”

  After a few seconds, Demange decided merely standing mute wouldn’t do. He grudged the regimental CO a shrug.

  The colonel snorted. “All right. Get the hell out of here. And stay out of trouble for a while, you hear me? If you’d kicked that one bugger any harder, you might have broken his neck, and then I’d have a tougher time sweeping all this merde under the rug.”

  With mechanical precision, Demange saluted. He did a smart about-turn and walked out of the colonel’s tent. He didn’t crack a smile till he got outside. It had all gone about the way he’d figured. They wouldn’t do anything to an officer who hadn’t committed murder, not in wartime they wouldn’t. Chuckling, Demange lit a fresh Gitane.

  Anastas Mouradian eyed with undisguised admiration the planes that shared the airstrip with his squadron of Pe-2s. He whistled and silently clapped his hands. “Now those babies,” he said, trying to sound slangy in Russian, “those babies mean business.”

  “The Stormoviks?” another pilot said. “Bet your dick they do.” Only Russians could bring out mat as if born to it, because they damn well were.

  What the Il-2 ground-attack planes really reminded Stas of were Stukas. They weren’t just the same. They didn’t have that vulture-like kink in the wing. They did boast retractable landing gear. They lacked the Stukas’ dive brakes, which let the German aircraft put their bombs right where they wanted them to go. Instead, the Stormoviks carried a cannon and lots of forward-facing machine guns, plus one that the rear gunner used, Stuka-style, to fire at enemies coming up from behind.

  Like the Stuka (and like the Pe-2, come to that), the Il-2 looked as if it meant business. Maybe that was the long in-line engine Stormoviks and the German dive-bombers both used. Those gave both airplanes a sharklike profile. But the Ilyushins weren’t purpose-built dive-bombers, though they could carry bombs. Their main mission was to roar along at just above treetop height and shoot anything that moved.

  “They did something sneaky with them.” The Russian flyer waved toward the closest Stormovik.

  “Ah? Tell me more,” Stas said. The other fellow obviously wanted to do just that.

  “You see the rear-firing machine gun?” the other pilot asked.

  “Da.” Mouradian nodded.

  “Well, what I hear is, when they first started flying against the Fritzes, when the rear gunner got it, he’d slump down onto the breech of the gun, and his weight would make the barrel point straight up. The fucking Germans aren’t dumb, damn them to hell. When they saw that, they knew they could attack from behind without worrying about getting shot at. Cost some of our pilots their necks. Now there’s a gearing mechanism in the gun mount so it won’t tell everybody in sight when the poor asshole in the back seat stops one.”

  “How about that?” Stas said, which was a safe thing to come out with almost any old time. The gearing system was clever: coldbloodedly clever. It struck him as a very Russian-or perhaps very Soviet-way to solve the problem. Protect the rear gunner better? That would add weight and degrade performance. But if a Nazi in a Messerschmitt couldn’t be sure the guy was wounded or dead, he might not bore in and shoot down the Il-2.

  Yes, clever. Clever in a way that made Mouradian want to shiver. However much he wanted to, he didn’t. The Russian pilot wasn’t a man he knew well. He had no way to be sure the fellow didn’t report to the NKVD. (For that matter, you had no way to be sure your best friend, the guy who’d had your back since you were both four years old, didn’t report to the NKVD. The gulags were full of people whose best friends had sold them down the river. And some of those best friends had ended up in camps themselves. What went around came around, all right.)

  “Pilot’s got good armor, though,” the Russian said.

  Stas nodded again. The rear gunner might be expendable. the pilot wasn’t. He could bring back a Stormovik with a dead rear gunner … as long as the Fritzes didn’t realize the rear gunner’d bought his plot. Armor for the pilot. A gear mechanism for the gunner. Priorities. Russian priorities. Soviet priorities.

  He figured the Il-2 pilots would have high morale. Why not? Their planes were made to chew up Germans, and looked as if they could do what they were made for very well.

  How about the rear gunners? How enthusiastic would they be about flying into places where the Luftwaffe was strong? Mouradian snorted softly. If they didn’t like it, some Chekist would give them a bullet in the back of the neck and then go to supper without a backwards glance. You had a chance in a plane, which was more than you could say if you wound up in the infantry and got told to charge that machine-gun emplacement over there.

  The Russian figured angles as if he were playing pool: “With these cocks flying low and us up high, Fritz’ll have to split his planes in half. That gives us a better chance to come home again, y’know? Anything that does that, I’m all for it.”

  “Me, too.” Mouradian nodded one more time. Even in the Soviet Union, you were allowed to want to live. You weren’t always actually allowed to live: if the Germans didn’t do for you, the regime very well might. But it didn’t begrudge your wanting to. Such generosity! A lesser country would be incapable of it.

  Thus encouraged, Stas listened to Lieutenant Colonel Tomashevsky’s next mission briefing with more than a little detachment. Tomashevsky was anything but detached. “The strategic situation is starting to look up,” he declared. “The war in the West is on again. It’s not boiling yet, but it’s on. The Fascist hyenas have to split their forces. They can’t concentrate on us the way they could before. But we can concentrate on them. We can, and we will. We’ll show them what they get for messing with the workers and peasants of the Soviet Union!”

  When the other pilots whooped and cheered, Stas did the same. His heart might not have been in it, but informers couldn’t read his heart. They had to content themselves with his actions. So long as he was seen to be conspicuously loyal, he couldn’t get in too much trouble … unless, of course, he did. Sometimes, like unexpected bad weather, bad things just happened.

  The squadron would be supporting an armored column that was counterattacking against the latest German push toward Smolensk. That the Red Army could counterattack during the summer rather than merely defending showed how Stavka was learning its trade in the harsh school of war. As Tomashevsky had said, it also showed how the Nazis were fighting a two-front war again.

  Stalin was not a lovable man or a reliable ruler. Stas knew that, and knew where he’d wind up if he were ever foolish enough to show what he knew. All of Western Europe’s bourgeoisie and upper classes hated and feared Communism. Yet Hitler hadn’t been able to keep England and France on his side against the USSR. They’d looked at Stalin, they’d looked at him-and, despite going over to him for a while, they hadn’t been able to stomach him in the end. Stalin seemed better to them.

  And if that wasn’t a suitable measure of Hitler’s damnation, Mouradian couldn’t imagine what would be.

  People who hadn’t flown talked about looking down on the chessboard of war. As usual, people who hadn’t done something but talked about it anyway didn’t know what they were talking about. The whole point to chess was being able to know all the rules and see everything on the board.

  This wasn’t like that. The opposing sides didn’t take turns. They didn’t
follow any real rules, either. They hid whatever they could wherever they could hide it. They bushwhacked. And they made mistakes that would have been impossible on the gameboard. A white pawn couldn’t take a white knight. But it would be all too easy for the Pe-2s to drop their bombs on their own tanks instead of on German machines. Stas hoped he’d never done anything like that. He hoped he hadn’t, but he wasn’t sure.

  Football had its own goals. And everything on the pitch happened at once. So that came closer. But your foes in a football match weren’t trying to kill you. Somebody’d told Stas that the Japanese played a variant of chess where you could use captured pieces against the fellow who’d once owned them. That fit reality all too well.

  He ordered Isa Mogamedov to drop the plane’s bombs when the squadron commander declared that they were over the Fritzes’ lines. He had to believe Tomashevsky knew what he was talking about. All those explosives coming down on the Germans’ heads would make them very unhappy-which was the point of the exercise, if it had any point at all.

  The other point was going back and landing without getting shot down or crashing. Along with bombing your friends, you could kill yourself playing the game of war. Several men Stas had known had done just that. Then the game ground on without you. It didn’t care. You’d better.

  A Russian bomb went off much too close to Theo Hossbach’s Panzer III. The ugly steel machine shuddered. Fragments of bomb casing clattered off the armored sides. A direct hit from a 250kg bomb, or whatever that bastard had been, and you were dead. The Krupp works didn’t make enough armor to withstand the force of a direct hit.

  On the far side of Theo’s radio set, Adi Stoss grinned toothily. “Boy, that was fun!” he said, for all the world as if he meant it.

  Theo couldn’t let that go unchallenged, even if rising to it meant spending a couple of words. “Well,” he said, “no.”

  Adi’s grin only got wider. He’d made Theo talk. Making him talk, or trying to, was sport for all his crewmates. Adi put his mouth to the speaking tube that led back to the turret. “Two!” he announced, triumph in his voice.

  “Lucky,” Hermann Witt came back. “Hell, we’re all lucky that one didn’t land right on top of us.”

  That meshed too well with what Theo’d thought right after the bomb burst. But the Panzer III was a tough beast. What didn’t kill it might not make it stronger-Nietzsche’s famous ideal-but usually wouldn’t harm it much. The Ivans were fighting back harder than usual, but summer was Germany’s time in the East.

  So Theo thought, anyhow, till the panzer closest to his blew up. That wasn’t a bomb hit-it was a round from a T-34 or a KV-1. The murdered machine was one of the new Panzer III Specials, too. It had a long-barreled 50mm gun that gave it at least a chance of piercing a T-34’s frontal armor. But nobody had a chance if the other guy’s first shot hit.

  Theo peered out through his vision slit. Was that T-34 drawing a bead on his panzer now? “Jink, Adi!” Sergeant Witt yelled.

  Jink the driver did. He threw the Panzer III this way and that as if he were racing a Bugatti at Monte Carlo. Theo grabbed on to anything he could to keep from getting pitched out of his seat. The inside of the panzer was full of sharp, hard steel edges and projecting pieces of ironmongery. Whoever’d designed it must have assumed the crew would have a smooth, easy ride all the time. He’d been a cockeyed optimist, in other words.

  Witt fired the main armament: once, twice. Firing on the move was a mug’s game. You had about as much chance of hitting your target as you did if you spat at it. The 37mm gun wasn’t stabilized. Your rounds might go anywhere, and probably would-not where you wanted them to go, though. Witt was a thoroughly capable, highly experienced panzer commander. So what the hell was he doing?

  “Jink right, Adi, and then halt!” he ordered now.

  The panzer swung in the direction he wanted. As soon as it had halted, Theo saw a T-34 not nearly far enough away. Its turret traversed toward the Panzer III. The gun on that turret looked big as death-which, for all practical purposes, it was.

  But Hermann Witt already had his gun pointing the way he wanted it to. Two armor-piercing rounds slammed into the T-34, one right after the other. Had they hit the thick, cleverly sloped frontal plate, they would have bounced off like rubber balls-Theo’d seen that only too often. Instead, they slammed into the side plate, just above the road wheels. The armor there was thinner and more nearly vertical. Both rounds holed it.

  Smoke and flame burst from the T-34’s hatches. Everyone in the Panzer III-Theo very much included-whooped like a scalping party of Red Indians. The T-34’s turret hatch flew open. Out scrambled the panzer commander, his coveralls on fire.

  Before he could drop down and use his machine’s wrecked carcass as cover against the Panzer III, Theo picked him off with a burst from the hull machine gun. One of the Ivan’s arms jerked despairingly. Then he slumped back into the inferno from which he’d almost escaped.

  “You might have done him a favor there,” Adi said seriously.

  “Maybe.” Theo grudged another word. The same thought had crossed his mind. If you were burning, you might want somebody to end your agony. But that wasn’t why Theo had punched his ticket for him. The Soviet panzer commander had been good enough to murder at least one Panzer III. Leave him alive and he’d get himself another T-34 and cause more trouble. Next time, it might be me wasn’t what you’d call a charitable thought, but if you didn’t look out for yourself who would do it for you?

  “The Ivans are as busy in the turret as a one-armed paperhanger with the hives any which way,” Adi said. “The guy who commands the panzer handles the gun, too. That prick had to know his business if he could kill one of our machines single-handed.”

  Theo nodded. The driver’s thought closely paralleled his own. That Russian-or Armenian, or Azeri, or Kazakh, or Karelian, or whatever the hell he was-needed killing exactly because he knew his business. And because he would have smashed this panzer like a cockroach if it hadn’t got him first.

  “Good job, everybody,” Witt said. “Panzers are just like fucking, y’know? You don’t have to have the biggest one around. Knowing what to do with what you’ve got counts for more.”

  That was good for several minutes’ worth of filthy banter. The panzer commander must have known it would be. And letting it out relieved the tension of nearly stopping one of the T-34’s big rounds-and big they were.

  After the chatter died away, Adi turned to Theo and said, “Catharsis.” Theo nodded again. He must have raised an eyebrow, too; that wasn’t a word you heard every day, no matter how well it fit here. Looking slightly shamefaced, Adi said, “My old man taught ancient history and classics for a while.”

  As far as Theo could remember, that was the first time Adi’d ever said anything at all about his family. As far as Theo’d known, the driver might have been born, or possibly manufactured, in a replacement depot. Some kind of response seemed called for. “Is that a fact?” Theo ventured.

  “Too right, it is,” Adi answered ruefully. “He wanted me to follow in his footsteps, too, the way a father will.” Acid tinged his laugh. “Tell me, man-do I look cut out to do ancient Greek?”

  He looked cut out to be a blacksmith or a professional footballer or a soldier. He wasn’t stupid-nowhere close. But he had instinctive excellence with his body, not with his head. Things must have worked the other way for his father. Carefully, Theo asked, “What does he think of you being here?”

  “He was at the front last time.” Now Adi sounded proud. “Wounded, too. Walked with a limp as long as I can remember. Sometimes this is the best place to be.”

  “Could be,” Theo allowed. Considering some of the other places where Adi might have been, he was bound to have that one right. Theo did something unusual then-he asked another question: “What’s he doing these days?”

  “Street labor.” Adi made a face, as if regretting he’d opened up as much as he had. He pointed a blunt, grimy forefinger with dirt and grease under the na
il (a finger a lot like Theo’s, in other words) at his crewmate. “That’s for you to know, understand? Not for blabbing. Too goddamn much blabbing in this outfit.” He looked very fierce.

  “I don’t blab,” Theo said, which was such an obvious truth that Adi not only nodded but even chuckled. As long as Theo was running his mouth, he decided to run it a little more: “If there was too much blabbing here, you’d’ve been gone a long time ago.”

  “Huh.” Perhaps to give himself a chance to think, Adi lit a cigarette. He offered Theo the pack. Theo took one with a grunt of thanks, then leaned across the radio so the driver could give him a light. Adi blew a long stream of smoke out through his hatch. “Keep your mouth shut about that one anyway, you hear? It makes things kind of obvious.”

  Theo nodded. There was only one likely reason for a scholar of classics and ancient history to end up in a labor gang. Oh, Adi’s father might have been a Communist. He might have been a queer-but, since he had a strapping son, he damn well wasn’t. No, what he was was … probably lucky to be alive at all. Well, so is Adi, and so am I, Theo thought, and tapped ash off the end of his coffin nail.

  Chapter 10

  The politruk was haranguing the company. Ivan Kuchkov wished he could turn off his ears. He didn’t need political indoctrination to understand that he was supposed to kill as many Germans as he could. The fuckers would sure do for him if he didn’t kill them. Or, if he tried to bug out, the Chekists would take care of the job instead.

  You couldn’t win. Sooner or later, somebody’s fragment or bullet would have your name on it. (Kuchkov could neither read nor write, but he understood what people were talking about when they said things like that.)

  “Now is the time to press on to victory!” Lieutenant Maxim Zabelin shouted. “Even the degenerate bourgeois capitalists of the West have finally realized that the Fascist jackals are beyond the pale. The Hitlerites will be pressed from both directions, smashed like bugs between two boards!”