Armistice Read online

  Ihor pushed his section forward fast enough to keep Sergeant Gordeyev happy. Pavel Gordeyev was a decent guy, even in charge of the company. Like Ihor, he kept his head down, did as much of what he was told as he had to, and tried hard not to get himself or his men killed. Ihor had made a bastard of a sergeant have an unfortunate accident once upon a time. He had no impulse to do anything like that to Gordeyev. He hoped like hell none of the clowns he was in charge of had the impulse to do anything like that to him.

  —

  Once upon a time—not so long ago, as those things went, but in a past vanished, shattered, forever—Rolf Mehlen had been proud to wear Feldgrau. He’d been proud to put on the Stahlhelm with the SS runes on the side. He’d been a Hauptsturmführer, a captain, in the Leibstandarte Adolf Hitler, the outfit that started as the Führer’s bodyguards and wound up one of the Reich’s crack panzer divisions.

  He’d fought till he—and Germany—couldn’t fight any more. Then he’d got a doctor to cut out the blood-group tattoo under his left armpit so the victorious Ivans wouldn’t give him a bullet in the back of the neck. They hated his kind as much as he hated theirs. He made it to the American occupation zone and got on with his life.

  Now here he was, fighting the Red Army all over again. His uniform was of American olive-drab fabric; he had a Yankee pot on his head instead of the familiar German coal scuttle. The uniform was fine. The old helmet had protected better than the new one did, but the Russians killed out of hand anyone they caught in a Stahlhelm. That made him not bitch about the American headgear…too much.

  He didn’t bitch about his rifle at all. The Springfield he’d been issued was identical to his old Mauser except for its caliber. The Amis kept their fancy semiautomatic M-1s for themselves. Some guys in the West German army wanted them, but Rolf was happy with the familiar.

  No wonder I joined up as soon as the war started over, he thought, using a cleaning rod to pull an oiled cloth through the Springfield’s barrel. What’s more familiar to me than fighting Russians?

  Beside him in a smashed house in Liebenau sat Max Bachman. Max was also cleaning his weapon. He’d served in the Wehrmacht last time, not the Waffen-SS, but he was also an old Frontschwein who’d done a long hitch on the Eastern Front. He knew a clean piece was one of the things that’d keep you breathing if anything did.

  Sometimes nothing would, of course. The Germans had dug bunches of graveyards in Russia. Chances were the Reds bulldozed and desecrated them all, first chance they got. “Can I bum a smoke off you, Max?” Rolf didn’t want to think about graveyards.

  “Why not?” Max handed him a little five-pack of Old Golds, the kind that came with American-made rations. One cigarette was already gone. “Keep it,” the other veteran said. “I’ve got a couple more.”

  “Danke schön.” Rolf lit one and stuck the rest in his pocket. He sucked in smoke, then blew it out again. “I burned through the last of mine this morning.” He took another drag. Like his own people, the Amis preferred mild tobacco. French cigarettes, Gitanes and especially Gauloises, felt like sandpaper and blowtorches in your lungs. The cheap junk the Russians smoked tasted as if it were stretched with horseshit. For all Rolf knew, it was.

  He inhaled again. He’d scavenged plenty of that nasty makhorka from dead and captured Ivans, in this war and the last. Even nasty tobacco beat the snot out of no tobacco at all, which was what the Reich’s crumbling supply services had delivered more and more often as the war went down the crapper.

  Sure enough, Bachman pulled another American pack, this one with Pall Malls inside, from his breast pocket. He tapped one on the palm of his hand to tamp down the tobacco a little, then put it in his mouth and leaned toward Rolf to light it off the one that was already going.

  “If you were prettier, I might’ve kissed you,” Rolf said.

  “If you were prettier, I might’ve wanted you to kiss me,” Max retorted.

  Their chuckles were about equally wry. Neither one of them smelled good or had washed his face any time lately. Rolf hadn’t shaved in a couple of days. Max hadn’t shaved in a couple of days longer than a couple of days.

  “You’ve got gray streaks on your chin,” Rolf said. When he used his index and middle fingers to show where on his own jaw, his sprouting beard rasped his fingertips.

  “I know.” Max shrugged. “Nothing much I can do about it, though. I wonder if I’ll live long enough to go gray all over.” He tilted his head back and tried to blow a smoke ring, but made a mess of it. Shrugging again, he continued, “Right this minute, the odds don’t look so hot, do they?”

  “I said the same thing in 1945, but I’m still here,” Rolf answered. “I figure I’m like a cockroach—I always skitter away before anybody can stomp on me.”

  “That DDT stuff the Amis make takes care of cockroaches whether they skitter or not,” Max said.

  Rolf nodded. “Gotta hand it to ’em. That’s good shit. I haven’t had a medic spray me in a couple of weeks, but I’m still not lousy.”

  “Me, neither,” Bachman agreed. “Back on the Ostfront, we always got gnawed. Lice and fleas and mosquitoes and bedbugs…” He mimed cracking something between his thumbnails. But then he added, “Nowadays, the Amis and the Reds both have atomic DDT to get rid of pests like us.”

  “Hasn’t happened yet.” Rolf didn’t care to dwell on that, either. He stubbed out the cigarette, peeled off the paper, and dumped the last centimeter-and-a-half of tobacco into the little leather bag he wore on a thong around his neck. He didn’t have much in there now—he’d gone through it—but he wasted as little as he could.

  Max Bachman had one of those little bags, too. For a couple of years after the last war ended, tobacco had been money in the ruins of Germany. Losing his tattoo had cost Rolf two cartons of cigarettes: a small fortune. You smoked only what you didn’t need to spend. The reflexes from that time left slowly, if they left at all.

  A jeep clattered past, picking its way up the rubble-filled road toward the edge of town. Every so often, the clatter would turn to a bang as a tire climbed over a rock or some bricks and then hit the frame when it slammed back down to the cratered paving. But Rolf never heard the machine stop. The driver might piss blood after he slid out, but he’d get where he was going.

  The same thought must have crossed Max’s mind, for he said, “Those things are horses with wheels. They’ll go anywhere. I’d rather have one than a Kübelwagen any day.”

  “Maybe.” For once, Rolf didn’t want to argue. The German utility vehicle wasn’t bad, either, but he’d feel stupid saying it could outdo a jeep.

  “Horses…” Bachman’s mind took a new twist. “I saw an American cartoon once—I was a printer in Fulda, you know, for us and for the occupying power.”

  “Ja, ja,” Rolf said impatiently. He knew Max spoke English. Sometimes these days, it came in handy. But Max liked to hear himself talk, too. Rolf tried to make him get to the point: “So what was the cartoon?”

  “A jeep had a broken axle, with one wheel all askew. A sergeant was going to put it out of its misery by shooting it in the hood with his pistol. He was looking away and had his other hand over his eyes, the way you would if you were putting down a favorite horse.”

  “Heh.” But Rolf realized something more was called for. He went on, “That’s pretty good, all right.” He’d had to shoot some horses in his time. The LAH was a mechanized outfit, but infantry divisions and even Wehrmacht panzer units used a lot of animal transport. During Russian winters, his superiors didn’t sneer at horseflesh. Panje wagons drawn by Russian ponies could get through drifted snow where nothing else could. And…“You get hungry enough, you can eat horsemeat. You can’t chop up a jeep and make goulash out of it.”

  “Nope. That doesn’t work,” Max agreed. “Some of the horses I ate when times were hard, though, I might as well have been gnawing on old inner tubes.”

  “I wonder if we were eating out of the same pot of stew,” Rolf said with a chuckle. “But you mostly
fought farther north than I did, right?”

  “Uh-huh.” Max paused as Russian guns rumbled off in the distance. As soon as he realized the shells wouldn’t come down anywhere close by, he relaxed. He lit a new cigarette. After a moment, so did Rolf.

  —

  Bruce McNulty paused at the edge of the churchyard in the English village with the quaint name of Great Snoring. His dark blue U.S. Air Force captain’s uniform didn’t contrast too harshly with the black suits and dresses most of the mourners had on.

  He didn’t know whether or not to go sit in one of the wooden folding chairs they were using. There were plenty; not many people had come to Daisy Baxter’s funeral. Most of her friends and relatives in Fakenham—a few miles from Great Snoring—had died when the Russians A-bombed the base at next-door Sculthorpe that the USAF and RAF shared.

  Daisy’d almost died herself then. But she got over her radiation sickness. And she caught me instead, Bruce thought. They’d been parked on a quiet country lane in the middle of the night when a Russian bomber got shot down right above them. They’d jumped out of the car, run in opposite directions—and a flaming chunk of debris came down right on top of her.

  He looked down at his hands. He had bandages on both of them. They still hurt from his trying to pull her free, burn ointment or no. Even if he could have done more than he had, it wouldn’t have mattered. That chunk of aluminum and steel would have killed her even if it hadn’t been splashed with blazing jet fuel.

  His heart hurt worse than his hands. They’d been in love. She was a widow; her tankman husband hadn’t come back from World War II. For Bruce, it was the first time, or near enough. Everything would have been wonderful. It would have been, and now it wouldn’t be.

  One or two of the Englishmen and -women had looked back and seen him now. How much did they blame him? Not so much as he blamed himself, surely. If he hadn’t been a horny SOB who’d stopped on that black, silent lane for the most obvious of reasons, she’d still be alive.

  The coffin, which sat by the open, waiting grave, was closed. No doubt it had been closed inside the church, too. He knew how pretty Daisy’d been. He also knew, too well, that what was left of her wasn’t.

  The Church of England priest or minister or preacher or whatever you called him was finishing the service for the burial of the dead, mouthing words he must have used countless times before: “Into thy hands, O Lord, we commend thy servant, uh, Daisy, our dear sister, as into the hands of a faithful Creator and most merciful Savior, beseeching thee that she may be precious in thy sight. Wash her, we pray thee, in the blood of the immaculate Lamb that was slain to take away the sins of the world; that, whatsoever defilements she may have contracted in the midst of this earthly life being purged and done away, she may be presented pure and without spot before thee; through the merits of Jesus Christ thine only son our Lord. Amen.”

  “Amen,” Bruce murmured. Somehow, the almost-biblical language from the Book of Common Prayer did ease his heartache, at least a little and at least for a little while. He wished he could have come on time and got the full dose inside the old church. But he’d had to pull more strings and do more paperwork to liberate his motor-pool jeep than he’d expected. So he was late. But, late or not, he was here.

  On and on the priest droned. It was almost as impressive as the Latin of a Catholic service would have been. It took you out of yourself. When someone you loved died, what more could you ask for?

  The churchyard crew or gravediggers or whoever the quietly waiting men in dark work togs were lowered the coffin and what was left of Daisy Baxter into the new hole in the ground with straps. Then, tugging and grunting, they pulled the straps up from under the coffin and out of the grave. Daisy’s mortal remains stayed behind.

  After the clergyman murmured a final prayer whose words Bruce couldn’t catch, he turned and started back to the church at a slow walk. The people who’d come to the service stood up. A woman dabbed at her eyes with a tissue. An older man with a hook where his left hand should have been used a handkerchief for the same reason.

  One by one, the mourners left the churchyard. Most of them filed past Bruce as if he didn’t exist. If they knew who he was, they didn’t fancy what they knew. But the man with only one hand paused. “You’d be Daisy’s Yank, wouldn’t you?” he said.

  Bruce nodded. “That’s right. I saw you a few times at the Owl and Unicorn”—the pub Daisy’d run till the Russians bombed Sculthorpe—“but you’re gonna have to remind me what your name is.”

  “Wilf Davies.”

  “That’s right! Daisy always said what a nice guy you were.” Bruce glanced down at his bandaged mitts. “You’ve got to forgive me for not shaking hands.”

  “I wasn’t worried about it.” Davies touched the hook with the index finger of his good hand. “I got me this at the Somme, more than thirty-five years ago now. Could’ve been the other just as easy.” He eyed Bruce’s bandages, too. “You did whatever you could, that’s plain.”

  “I couldn’t do anything, not—one—damned—thing.” Bruce bit the words off one by one. If he let himself think about that, he’d start screaming.

  “You tried. It shows what she meant to you.” After another swipe at his eyes, Wilf Davies went on, “She was a peach, Daisy was. If I was half my age and single, and if I hadn’t caught a packet of my own in the first war, I might’ve given you a run for your money there.”

  “I’m not surprised,” Bruce said. Plenty of fliers from Sculthorpe, Americans and Englishmen, had tried to get the pretty widow to notice them. Bruce was glad he’d been the lucky one—glad and sorry at the same time. If Daisy’d ignored him the way she’d ignored the rest of them, she’d still be alive.

  “You’re a bomber pilot, aren’t you? She told me you were,” Davies said.

  “That’s right.” Bruce nodded again. “I fly a B-29. I’ll go back to it once I finish healing up.”

  “You do to the Russians what they done to Sculthorpe and Norwich and all them places, isn’t that right?”

  “Officially, I’m not supposed to say anything about what I do,” Bruce answered. “Security, you know.”

  That seemed to be enough to satisfy the mutilated veteran. “I know I shot me a Hun or two before I caught me this,” he said, raising the hook. “Have you the faintest notion about how many people you’ve killed? D’you mind my asking you like that?”

  “No-oo, not really,” Bruce said, which wasn’t exactly a lie but wasn’t exactly the truth, either. He spread his hands. “Daisy asked me the same question. I’ll tell you what I told her: I don’t know. I couldn’t even begin to guess.”

  During the last war, a few Nazi extermination-camp commandants might have got more blood on their hands than he had. Some other American flyers now, and maybe some Russians with them, also might be in the same ballpark. Maybe, back in the day, Genghis Khan had come pretty close. Bruce couldn’t be sure. He couldn’t say how many he’d killed, not to the nearest hundred thousand. All he could say was, it was a big number.

  Wilf Davies clicked his tongue between his teeth. “Do you ever have nights where you can’t sleep for thinking about it?”

  “A few,” Bruce admitted. “Not so many as you’d expect, though. When you fly a bombing mission, any kind of bombing mission, you don’t think about the people down below. You can’t, not unless you want to lose your marbles. You think about hitting the target, that’s all. Once the bombs go, you think about getting the hell out of there.”

  “Well, all right,” Davies said. “I can see that. I didn’t think about killing Germans every time I pulled the trigger, but I bet I got a few I don’t know a thing about. It’s a rum old world, ain’t it?”

  “Mr. Davies, you said a mouthful there.” Bruce wondered how much he’d sleep tonight. Not much, unless he missed his guess.

  BORIS GRIBKOV NODDED in relief as Alexei Vavilov said, “Well, we’ll let you out of this metal cigar pretty soon.”

  “Can’t be soon enough!” Gri
bkov exclaimed: a sentiment straight from the heart.

  The skipper of the S-71 mimed being cut to the quick. “What, Comrade Pilot? You don’t care for our elegant accommodations?”

  “Now that you mention it, Captain,” Gribkov answered, “no.” Vavilov was only a commander, but Boris gave him the title every officer in charge of a vessel enjoyed. Boris admired the technical skill that went into making and using the submarine (it was a close copy of a German boat, just as the Tu-4 he’d flown was an even closer copy of an American plane). The sub had picked him and his ten crewmen out of the Atlantic after he bombed Washington. It had eluded the U.S. Navy and the Royal Navy and brought the bomber crew back to the White Sea.

  It was only a few kilometers from port now—and Boris couldn’t wait to escape it. It had been overcrowded even before the Tu-4 crew came aboard. The air inside the stogie-shaped steel tube reeked of unbathed sailors, stale food, diesel oil, puke, and backed-up heads. The chow went from bad to worse. Gribkov scratched his beard. It was coming in nice and thick, even if he’d have to shave it off as soon as he got onto dry land and to a place where he could shave.

  He’d shave it off if Kem had any places like that, anyhow. He’d never heard of the Karelian town before Commander Vavilov told him they were going there. As Karelian towns went, Kem was fair-sized. It held about 10,000 people.

  Murmansk? Archangel? As ports, both cities far outdid Kem. Or they had outdone it. No more. The Soviet Union’s only two harbors ice-free the year around, children of the dying Gulf Stream, had both gone up in atomic fire. The S-71 had stayed underwater, breathing through a snorkel, as she entered the White Sea near Murmansk.

  Commander Vavilov got back to work. He ordered the submarine to the surface. The crew carried out his commands almost before he gave them. Boris Gribkov watched the skipper in action with a fascination he’d felt since the moment he’d clambered out of his rubber life raft and aboard the odorous sub.