Armistice Page 18

  “We’re in one piece,” Aaron said. “I tell you, though, I won’t need coffee before I go in to work this morning.” He laughed again, as if he were kidding.

  JET ENGINES SCREAMED, high overhead. Cade Curtis looked up into the sky. The bombers were barely visible silver points flying from east to west. But the contrails they left behind told where they’d been and suggested where they were going.

  “Red China’s gonna catch it,” Howard Sturgis said happily. “We finally got enough B-47s in Japan to give it to the Chinks but good.”

  “I bet the guys who’ve been flying B-29s are just brokenhearted to let somebody else carry the ball for a while,” Cade said.

  “Yeah, they’re crying in their beer, all right,” Sturgis agreed. The Superforts had done yeoman duty this time around, as they had in World War II. But things weren’t the same now. The B-29s rapidly discovered they couldn’t bomb North Korea by day. Even at night, they were vulnerable to radar-guided or -equipped fighters. They’d landed some heavy punches all around the world, but they’d paid a hellacious price.

  “We bombed the snot out of the Commies with obsolete planes. And we’re fighting ’em on the ground with obsolete men.” Sturgis thumped his own chest. He’d slogged his way up the Italian boot the last time around and won a battlefield commission in these other mountains on the far side of the world. “Anybody wants to put me out to pasture or send me home, bet your ass I won’t bitch about it.”

  “Me, neither, but speak for yourself when you talk about obsolete men.” Cade had just turned twenty-one. He could legally buy booze now, which hadn’t kept him from getting shitfaced before whenever he felt the need. He was a veteran of as much war as anyone was ever likely to want to see. Unlike Sturgis, though, he wasn’t a grizzled veteran.

  A few Red Chinese antiaircraft guns opened up on the B-47s. Howard Sturgis laughed. “Dumb fuckers’re only wasting ammo. Those bombers are way the hell up there. They ain’t got a prayer of hitting ’em.”

  “That’s how it looks to me, too.” Cade lit a Raleigh. They weren’t his brand, but with the supply chain fubar’d the way it was you took whatever you could get when you could get anything. Thoughtfully, he went on, “I wonder if they’re up too high for the MiG-15s.”

  “If they aren’t, they’ll be sorry pretty damn quick.” Sturgis scratched his head. “Or maybe not. They’re jets, too. Maybe they can outrun ’em.”

  “If it’s bombers against fighters, always bet the fighters,” Cade said. “Bombers are made for load, so they can carry bombs. Fighters have to be fast and twisty enough to run down bombers and shoot ’em out of the sky.”

  “Makes sense, Captain. But I always knew you were a smart guy,” Sturgis said. “Bum a butt off you?”

  “Sure.” Cade gave him the pack of cigarettes. He knew Sturgis wasn’t altogether praising him by calling him smart. The Army didn’t want or know what to do with people who stuck out for brains. It needed guys who could get along with other people, follow orders, and not look too far ahead. If you looked ahead, you were too likely to see your own death staring back at you.

  Cade tried not to stick out. Sometimes he felt as if he were trying to sneak the sun past a bunch of roosters. Things would have been harder yet for him without the solid reputation he’d earned by coming back from the Chosin Reservoir after the Red Chinese cut off and killed or captured almost the whole UN force up there. They also would have been harder if the Army hadn’t needed even halfway capable officers so badly.

  When his frozen, frightened platoon was falling back from the reservoir, he’d ordered two soldiers with a light machine gun to cover their retreat for as long as they had to. Basically, he’d ordered the dogfaces to let themselves be killed so the rest of the men had a better chance to get away. He sometimes dreamt about that order, about giving it and about being on the receiving end.

  He worried about it, worried over it, while he was awake, too. He suspected he’d go right on doing that if he lived to be eighty. It was the hardest order he’d ever given. None of the others came close.

  What did the Bible say? Greater love hath no man than this, that a man lay down his life for his friends. But those two scared, grubby guys didn’t lay down their lives for love. They did it because he told them to.

  He lit another Raleigh and smoked furiously. If the machine gunners hadn’t loved their buddies, at least some, wouldn’t they have told him to go fuck himself and bugged out? It looked that way to him. That still didn’t keep his sleep free from nasty dreams.

  Did Howard Sturgis have regrets like that? Did he have dreams like that? He must have given some orders he wished like anything he hadn’t had to. How much did they bother him afterwards, though? That was the real question. Cade couldn’t ask it. It was too private, too secret, too intimate.

  Sturgis had a question of his own: “Sir, you figure bombing the living shit out of the Chinks’ll make ’em say uncle?”

  “I wouldn’t bet on it,” Cade said. “If the Russians keep their end of the bargain and quit sending ’em weapons, that would help.”

  “Don’t hold your breath!” Sturgis laughed a scornful laugh.

  “Yeah, tell me about it. But if we’re not fighting in Europe any more, we can pay some attention to this miserable place. We’ve had about a hand and a half tied behind our back for a long time. If we show Red China we mean it—”

  “If we do mean it.” Sturgis had a veteran’s cynicism, all right.

  “There is that,” Cade allowed. “But all we’ve been fighting for since the end of 1950 is a lousy draw. We ought to be able to get that much, anyway.”

  “We’re the United States, dammit. We’re supposed to kick ass all over the place, not settle for a draw. When did we ever settle for a stinking draw?” Sturgis said.

  “The War of 1812, I think,” Cade answered.

  “Christ. They might’ve taught me about that one in school, but fuck me if I remember anything.”

  They probably hadn’t taught him much about it because it was a draw. It had embarrassed Cade’s teachers, too. They went on about American victories on the high seas, and about Andrew Jackson and the Battle of New Orleans. They mentioned the writing of “The Star-Spangled Banner.” The burning of Washington and the failed invasion of Canada, by contrast, got short shrift.

  In “The Star-Spangled Banner,” Francis Scott Key wrote about “the rockets’ red glare.” The Red Chinese chose that moment to fire a couple of cases of Katyushas at the American lines. The flames that propelled them were yellow, not red. Key didn’t say anything about the English rockets’ screaming like a pack of banshees, either.

  “Hit the dirt!” Cade yelled as soon as he heard those rising screams in the air. He suited action to word.

  Down slammed the rocket salvo. Something hard and sharp bit him in the leg. He let out a yowl before he quite knew he’d done it. Then he twisted to try to bandage his wound. His left trouser leg was all over blood from just below the knee on down. He felt woozy and sick.

  “Shit! The captain’s hit!” Howard Sturgis shouted. “Medic! The captain’s down!”

  Sturgis cut away the soggy trouser leg and slapped on not one but two wound bandages. That can’t be good, Cade thought vaguely. Sturgis stuck a morphine syrette in his thigh and pushed the plunger down. The pain started receding.

  “Here. I take him back.” That was Jimmy. He slung Cade over his shoulder like a sack of rice. He was big for a gook, but Cade was big for an American. It didn’t seem to bother Jimmy. He carried Cade as if he came from a long line of stevedores.

  Cade grayed out a few times. Next thing he knew, he was back at an aid station. “We’ll fix you up, Captain,” a doc said through a surgical mask. “You’re gonna be just fine.”

  “You tell him, Hawkeye,” another doctor said. Cade grayed out again.

  —

  There was a truce in Germany, one that looked to be holding. Ihor Shevchenko watched trains carry troops and tanks and artillery pieces fr
om west to east, out of Germany and back toward the Soviet Union.

  Those trains had to cross Poland, of course. There was no truce here. The Americans and Englishmen might not be fighting the Red Army any more, but the Polish bandits sure were. Sometimes, as long as the troop trains looked like they were going through without stopping, they left them alone. They had to figure more Soviet soldiers stopping in their country were the last thing they needed.

  Sometimes, though, they fired on them, with rifles or machine guns or whatever light artillery they could get their hands on. To a lot of Poles, killing Russians was an irresistible temptation.

  Ihor’s section was guarding a stretch of track between Wroclaw and Czestochowa. They had one machine gun and their personal weapons: a motley mix of AK-47s, submachine guns, and bolt-action rifles. They were stretched very thin. Any serious force of Poles would have made them wish they’d never been born.

  One of the guys who served that machine gun said, “I was around here in the Great Patriotic War. Only it wasn’t Wroclaw then—it was Breslau, and it still belonged to the Hitlerites. We put it under siege, but they didn’t surrender till a couple of days before they quit everywhere. The day before they did, the fuckers, I got hit.” He held up his left hand, which was missing the little finger and half the ring finger.

  “That’s the way it goes, Feofan,” Ihor said. “Probably everybody in this outfit who served in the last one has that kind of story. Only difference with me is, I got a leg wound.”

  “Sure, Comrade Corporal, but if the damn Fritzes in Breslau had seen the jig was up two days earlier, I’d still be in one piece.”

  “Uh-huh. And then they would have called you back sooner, and you might have stopped something bigger this time.”

  Feofan blinked. “Well, fuck me in the mouth if you’re not right. Y’know, I never thought of that.”

  The admission didn’t exactly take Ihor by surprise. Feofan wasn’t long on brains. He was brave enough, though, and he stuck to any post you put him in. Plenty of smarter soldiers were trying to melt away from the Red Army now. Ihor wouldn’t have minded melting away from it himself. He didn’t want to be in it to begin with, and he really didn’t want to be in it for no better reason than knocking a bunch of Poles over the head. Feofan lost no sleep over such things. As far as he was concerned, an order was an order.

  Then one of the pickets Ihor had set farther from the railhead let out a yell. Somebody yelled back, maybe in Russian, maybe in Polish—the shout came from too far away to let Ihor be sure. A few minutes later, the picket came back with a man carrying a flag of truce. That made the fellow a Pole.

  “What do you want?” Ihor called to him.

  “A parley,” the Pole said. He was in uniform, or pieces of different uniforms: worn Feldgrau pants, a Red Army tunic, and an old Polish helmet, close to the German Stahlhelm but not quite there.

  “You’ve got one,” Ihor told him. “If you didn’t, you’d be dead by now.”

  “Funny man, aren’t you?” The Pole spoke fluent Russian with the rhythmic accent his people gave it. He had a thin, pale face and a blade of a nose. He looked like an aristocrat, which was plenty to make Ihor dislike him on sight. He went on, “If you clear out from this stretch of track, my men won’t have to kill all of you when we advance.”

  “And when’s that gonna be?” Ihor asked.

  “As soon as I get back to them. If I’m not back in two hours, they’ll advance anyway, and avenge me. The other thing is, if they’re avenging me they won’t bother to take any prisoners.”

  “Hey, I honored German flags of truce the last time around. I’ll honor yours, too,” Ihor said.

  “Will you let us do what we need to do to set our people free, or will you act like a motherfucking Russian?”

  “I’m a motherfucking Ukrainian, dickface, and don’t you forget it,” Ihor said. “You want to get your chicken thieves shot up, come ahead.” He knew how big a bluff he was running. With luck, the Polish aristo didn’t.

  “That’s what you say, Corporal.” The fellow had no trouble reading Soviet shoulder boards. He looked to the soldiers with Ihor. “How about the rest of you? Is helping Molotov rape his next-door neighbor worth your necks?”

  They could have deserted Ihor. They could have plugged him and then deserted him. That way, he wouldn’t rat on them to the Chekists (he wouldn’t have anyway, but how could they be sure of that?). They just looked silently back at the Pole till Feofan said, “We’re soldiers. We do what we’re supposed to do. We’ll keep doing it as long as we can. And we’ll fucking massacre you pussies.” He patted the sheet-metal curve of the machine gun’s cooling jacket as if it were his girlfriend’s behind.

  “All right. You asked for it. Now you’ll get it.” The Pole turned and stalked away.

  As soon as he disappeared behind some bushes, Ihor said, “Quick, guys. Move the machine gun to the second position. Five gets you ten they’ll dump as much as they can right here.”

  “We’ll do it, Comrade Corporal,” Feofan said. Between them, the Maxim gun and its mount weighed just about fifty kilos. But the mount had two iron wheels. As long as the ground wasn’t too rough, you could shift the machine gun without rupturing yourself.

  “Dig your foxholes deeper, boys!” Ihor yelled to as many soldiers as could hear him. “The shit’ll start any minute.”

  Sure enough, the first mortar bombs whispered in about fifteen minutes later. The Pole would have got back to his men and told them they had some stubborn Russians to deal with. Ihor had hoped they would just carry small arms, but no such luck. He huddled in his own hole and hoped for the best. With mortars, what else could you do?

  The bandits concentrated the vicious little bombs right where the Red Army machine gun had been. Ihor gave himself a small mental pat on the back, but only a small one. They’d still come forward, and they’d still want to kill him. The snooty guy who’d parleyed would want to kill him double for not giving in.

  The pickets opened up with their PPSh’s within seconds of one another. The incoming fire was mostly Mausers, either captured German weapons or Polish-made copies. But the submachine guns that punctuated the rifles’ work were Soviet models, not Schmeissers.

  Ihor popped up and down in his hole like a nervous rabbit. When you were up, they could shoot you. But if you stayed down, they could sneak close and then shoot you the next time you did come up. He saw something moving in the weeds, perhaps three hundred meters away. He couldn’t have hit it with a PPD or PPSh. He fired a three-round burst from his AK-47. Frantic thrashing told him that was one bandit he didn’t need to worry about any more.

  Then the Maxim gun opened up. The Poles shouted in dismay. They’d hoped to have knocked out its crew. No such luck, assholes, Ihor thought. They concentrated their fire on the machine gun, but the men who served it were well positioned. They’d been through the mill before. They knew how to make fieldworks that gave them the best chance of staying alive.

  Advancing against a machine gun was asking to get ventilated, especially if the crew had friends to help protect them. They did here. Had the Poles tried to outflank Ihor’s section, they might have managed it. Coming straight at it, they showed how brave they were but played into his hands.

  Another white flag came forward. “Can we pick up our wounded?” a bandit shouted—not, Ihor noted, the aristocrat who’d tried to get him to give up.

  “Go ahead,” he called back. “Twenty minutes—that’s it.” He liked Poles even less than Russians. That, by God, was saying something!

  —

  Rolf Mehlen watched a train flying a flag of truce and a Soviet hammer-and-sickle banner pull into Arnsberg. Soldiers climbed into passenger cars—and into boxcars as well. He watched Red Army panzers mount heavy ramps and fart their way onto flatcars, where their crews chained them in place. Some of the panzers flew white flags from their radio aerials.

  “This is what victory looks like,” Max Bachman said. “We were all out of those
by the time I put on Feldgrau last time around. I went out to the front, and it was all falling back toward the Vaterland from then on.”

  “Not all of it,” Rolf said. “We drove the Ivans back plenty—we just couldn’t make it stick.”

  “We’re saying the same thing two different ways,” Max said.

  “No, we aren’t. We—” Rolf broke off, shaking his head. “Ah, screw it. But if this were the kind of victory it ought to be, we’d be blowing up those dipshits instead of letting them go home.”

  “I’ll take it any way I can get it,” Max said. “When I find out the Russians have pulled out of Fulda, I’ll see if I can get some leave and go home and find out how my wife’s doing.”

  “Take French leave,” Rolf suggested.

  “I’ve thought about it, Lord knows. But I’ve been away this long. Another week or ten days won’t matter.”

  “If you say so.” Rolf had a couple of lady friends in the small town where he’d settled after the last war. As far as he knew, he’d kept them ignorant of each other. He’d sort things out there sooner or later. No hurry, not when getting some while you wore a uniform and carried a rifle was so easy.

  The Ivan driving the flag-bedecked locomotive waved in the direction of the German soldiers watching from their side of the barbed wire. Rolf wanted to fire at him, or at least to send back a filthy gesture. He refrained. Orders were to let the Russians go and not to provoke them as long as they behaved themselves. Here, they seemed to be.

  Even mild Max was thinking along with him. “That clown in the engine, he’d be an easy shot,” he said.

  “Bet your balls he would,” Rolf agreed. “Shame we can’t knock him over and say it was an accident.”

  “Naughty, naughty.” Max clucked like a mother annoyed at her child. “The bastards are actually leaving. Do you want to give them an excuse to stay?”

  “I guess not,” Rolf said unwillingly. “They should be leaving all of Germany, not just the west, damn them.”