Armistice Page 4

  Now, to its sorrow, the whole world knew. Western Europe, which had just been getting back on its feet after the horror of World War II, had worse horrors visited upon it. So did Eastern Europe and Russia, which took even more terrible beatings in the last war. So did northeastern Red China. Two A-bombs had fallen on South Korea.

  And the United States discovered it wasn’t immune. Both coasts had got hammered. No one had the least idea how many people were dead. As far as Cade could see, no one much cared. After so many, what were another half-million deaths?

  With so much slaughter all around the poor suffering world, it had done its best to forget about the fight in Korea. Everyone not involved in this fight had, anyhow. But it ground on whether anybody else was looking or not. The Red Chinese had an easier time supplying their men than the USA did—all the more so with most West Coast ports and the Panama Canal smashed. Mao’s troops held better than half of what had been South Korea before all the fun started.

  They wanted more. The artillery fire got louder and closer. It was coming west across the front. Cade looked for the nearest dugout to dive into. He had the feeling he’d need it any minute.

  Belatedly, American guns answered the Reds’ barrage. That was good, as far as it went. It didn’t go far enough. A ripple of fire on the northern horizon, a rising, demented shriek in the air…

  “Katyushas!” Cade yelled, and threw himself flat where the trench floor met the forward wall.

  No time for anything else, not when the rockets were already in the air and screaming down fast. A few launch trucks’ worth of them could level most of a square mile in moments. The Nazis had fled in terror the first time the Red Army used them, and Cade didn’t blame those krauts one bit. He wanted to do the same. All that held him in place was the certain knowledge that running wouldn’t help.

  “Up!” he yelled as soon as hell stopped falling from the sky. “Get up and fight, God damn it to hell!” He wondered how many of his men—how many of his uninjured men—could hear him. He had trouble hearing himself. He felt his ears, wondering whether blast from the Katyushas had made them bleed…again. Not this time—and that was snot under his nose this time, not type A Rh-negative.

  He jerked the charging handle and chambered a round in his PPSh. The Russian-made submachine gun was a better weapon than the M-1 carbine most U.S. officers carried. For street fighting or cleaning out a trench, it was better than an M-1 rifle. All it lacked was range.

  Howard Sturgis carried a rifle in spite of officer’s rank. He jumped up on the firing step beside Cade. They both started banging away at the oncoming Red Chinese. The Chinks howled in dismay. After so many rockets, you always hoped you’d killed or maimed everyone in front of you.

  Another rifle stuttered death at the Reds. Yeah, that was Jimmy. For a stray puppy, he was mighty handy with an M-1. Machine guns and mortars also bit chunks out of the enemy. When the Red Chinese first entered the war, they would have kept coming no matter what. Not any more. Firing as they went, they resentfully pulled back. Made it through another one, Cade thought, though cries from his own trenches and from the Red Chinese wounded in no-man’s-land reminded him that not everyone had.

  —

  Konstantin Morozov and Juris Eigims worked side by side on the T-54’s V-54 diesel. It was a pretty reliable, pretty straightforward piece of machinery. Konstantin had learned on the smaller powerplant the T-34/85 used in the last war. This was Eigims’ first fight, but he’d shown he knew what he was doing. And the more maintenance you took care of ahead of time, the fewer emergency repairs you needed later.

  “Hand me that eight-millimeter wrench, will you, Juris?” Morozov said.

  “Here you go, Comrade Sergeant,” the Latvian or Lithuanian answered, passing him the tool. His accent turned Russian to music. At first, he’d resented Konstantin for taking over his tank when he wanted to command it himself. They worked well together now. Working well together kept them both alive.

  Morozov used the wrench to tighten a bolt and secure a couple of wires, then gave it back. “Spasibo,” he said.

  “Any time.” Eigims wiped sweat on the sleeve of his coveralls. Camouflage netting concealed their tank and several others near the center square in the little German town of Dassel. Eigims leaned away from the V-54 to light a cigarette.

  He offered Konstantin one. Glad for an excuse to take a five-minute break, the tank commander took it. “Spasibo,” he repeated.

  “Sure.” Eigims blew smoke up toward the netting. Then he said, “Ask you something, Comrade Sergeant?”

  “Be my guest,” Morozov said expansively.

  “Now I thank you,” Eigims told him. “Suppose we get the order to go east and turn our tank against our fraternal socialist allies in Poland or Hungary or Czechoslovakia—one of those places. What do we do then?”

  Konstantin had heard things about what was going on in the satellites, and how American-backed Fascists were trying to take them out of the peace-loving people’s camp and bring them around to favor the reactionaries and imperialists. He didn’t know how much of that was true, but he figured some of it was. In the last war, he’d seen that not all the people who filled the smaller countries between the USSR and Germany loved Russians. For that matter, he’d seen that not all the people who lived inside the USSR loved Russians. Just for instance, Latvians and Lithuanians sure didn’t.

  A puff on his Belomor bought him time to think. At last, he said, “You disobey orders, your story doesn’t have a happy ending.”

  “I understand that, Comrade Sergeant,” the gunner said. “But…you never grew up in a country that got grabbed when all it wanted to do was mind its own business.”

  With a theatrical gesture, Konstantin dug his index finger into his right ear. When he pulled it away, there actually was some earwax stuck on his grimy fingernail. He brushed it off on the leg of his coveralls. “Did you say something there?” he asked. “Gun must have gone off by my ear too often. I didn’t hear a thing.”

  The Balt reached out and softly hit him in the shoulder. “I didn’t like you for hell when you got this tank, but you’re all right, you know that?”

  “I don’t have any idea what you’re talking about,” Morozov said. Juris Eigims had put his life in Konstantin’s hands when he asked that question. Plenty of tank commanders would have hotfooted it to the company political officer to report him. Konstantin wondered why he didn’t aim to do that himself. Probably because Eigims was a pretty damn good gunner, and because he’d quit giving grief. Konstantin went on, “Follow orders, don’t make anybody notice you while you’re here, and you can worry about all the rest of the crap after the Red Army lets you go.”

  “You make it sound so easy,” Eigims said.

  “Bozhemoi, it is easy!” Konstantin exclaimed. “All the bastards who’ve got an emblem that isn’t the red star are the enemy. If we don’t kill them first, they’ll kill us. Long as you remember that, it doesn’t get complicated.”

  “But what if they’re on the right side and we’re on the wrong one?”

  “What if they are?” Konstantin said. Eigims gaped at him. Despite the gape, he continued, “Does that make us any less dead if they do kill us?”

  “No, Comrade Sergeant,” Eigims said in a small voice.

  “Damn right it doesn’t,” Konstantin agreed. “C’mon, then. Smoke break’s over. Let’s get this son of a bitch running as good as we can so things don’t break down when we need ’em most.”

  A resupply column made it up to Dassel in spite of everything American planes could do. Some of it got to Dassel, anyhow. The drivers swigged vodka and smoked and shook and told stories about the trucks full of ammo and fuel and food that air attacks had torched. But the survivors brought enough shells to fill most of the stowage slots in Konstantin’s T-54 and enough diesel oil to bring the fuel tank closer to three-quarters than half. Rations? Those didn’t do so well. But Morozov was a Red Army veteran. He was sure he could always scrounge enough to kee
p going.

  He was glad the convoy got there when it did. American eight-inch and 240mm shells started falling into Dassel. They could fire those from thirty kilometers away, far beyond the range at which any reasonable artillery could reply. Not many rounds came in, but a hit from one would bring down a couple of houses and spray shrapnel across several hundred meters. You didn’t want to be anywhere near one when it blew up, in other words. You also didn’t want one of those gigantic shells to burst on top of a tank, especially if you happened to be inside it. The chances were slim. Seeing it happen once was twice too often for Konstantin.

  The regimental CO was a canny young major named Genrikh Zhuk. As soon as the first T-54 made a fireworks display of itself, he ordered the rest out of Dassel, up to within a kilometer of the front line west of town. “No closer,” he told Morozov. “We don’t want enemy troops spotting us. If they do, those horrible guns will shift their aiming point.”

  “I got it, sir,” Morozov said, saluting more sincerely than usual. To make sure the move stayed secret, they carried it out at night.

  Demyan Belitsky found a patch of bushes three meters high that screened most of the tank from view from the west. He stopped behind it. Then he and Vazgan Sarkisyan got out and cut more bushes to finish camouflaging the machine. Driver and loader were the junior crew positions. The men who filled them got more than their share of nasty work.

  Every so often, another enormous shell would smash down on Dassel. Konstantin pitied the foot soldiers left behind. A few skinny, raggedy Germans still skulked through the town and lurked in the cellars, too. Konstantin had scant pity to spare for the Fritzes. As far as he was concerned, they could take their chances. They’d come too close to killing him too damn many times.

  All of Major Zhuk’s cleverness turned out to be for nothing. The next morning, not too long after sunrise, American bombs and guns started pounding the front about twenty-five kilometers south of where Morozov’s T-54 sat. It was just distant rumbling to him, but not to the man in charge of the regiment.

  Zhuk came on the all-tanks circuit: “We are ordered to pull back toward the southeast. The imperialist aggressors are attempting to force a breakthrough.”

  By the order, they weren’t just attempting it. They were doing it. Konstantin said nothing of that. When he got the tank moving, Juris Eigims gave him a look. Morozov only shrugged. If the gunner wanted to—and if he kept doing his job here—he could dream about living in a pisspot-sized free country as much as he pleased. Because that would be all it was—dreaming.

  ISTVAN SZOLOVITS QUEUED UP for lunch. The Frenchmen behind the counter at the POW camp’s mess hall couldn’t have looked any more bored if they were dead. He shoved his tray along and found himself with a tin of applesauce, another tin of green beans, and a slab of Spam.

  The Magyar behind him in line poked him in the ribs. “Hey, Jewboy, you oughta complain about that,” he said.

  “Oh, shut up, Miklos,” Istvan told him.

  Miklos only laughed. He had a Turul, a mythical bird that symbolized Magyar nationalism, tattooed on the back of one hand and the Arrow Cross, the emblem of the Fascist party that had run Hungary during the last few months of World War II, on the other. He’d tried to knock the shit out of Istvan the minute he came into the Hungarian barracks. Since Istvan had walloped him instead, now—like a surprising number of Fascists—he had his very own pet Jew.

  Since he’d literally marked himself as a Fascist, Istvan was faintly surprised that the Communists who’d taken power in the country after the war had let him serve in the Hungarian People’s Army instead of shipping him off to a reeducation camp or just shooting him. Along with being Communists, quite a few of the new bosses—including Matyas Rakosi, the head man—were also Jews.

  But Istvan was no more than faintly surprised. Miklos was a Rottweiler of a soldier. Point him at something and he’d do his best to kill it for you. What it was hardly mattered. He just needed a target.

  Now, as the bored worker gave him some Spam of his own, he said, “They’re discriminating against you. You gonna let ’em get away with that kind of shit?”

  More than faintly surprised Miklos knew a word as long as discriminating, Istvan answered, “Yeah. Why not? Not like our own army didn’t feed all of us pork—when it bothered to feed us anything.” He took a mug of coffee and headed for a table.

  Hungarians sat with Hungarians, Poles with Poles, Czechoslovakians and East Germans with their own kind. German was the language most likely to be understood throughout the camp.

  Miklos swigged from the mug of coffee he’d got, then sat down by Istvan. “This is better chow than the horrible slop we got from our own side, sure as shit,” he said. “They give us more of it, too.”

  “I noticed the same thing,” Istvan said.

  “Pisser, ain’t it?”

  “Oh, maybe a little bit,” Istvan answered. Along with fighting an atomic war and a ground war against the Soviet Union and its allies, the USA was taking care of the prisoners of war who came in. Most of the guards and cooks and such here were French, but the supplies—everything from cots to canned food—came from America. The rations and the bedding the Yankees gave to POWs were better than the ones the People’s Republic of Hungary issued to its own soldiers. If that wasn’t daunting, Istvan didn’t know what would be.

  Miklos made what was on his tray disappear in nothing flat. “I’m going back for seconds,” he said. “How about you?”

  “I’m all right,” Istvan answered. Miklos walked back to the tail of the queue. As long as he was willing to wait to get more, they’d give it to him. They didn’t care. They had plenty of everything. Istvan remembered how lucky he’d felt when he stole a pack of cigarettes from a dead American. Now he had all of those flavorful smokes he wanted.

  After he dumped his tray and utensils, he put on his cleats and went over to the football pitch. The Hungarian POW team was practicing on one half of it; the East Germans, whom they’d face Saturday, were kicking the ball around on the other. Istvan was a central defender, longer on size, muscle, and the occasional discreet elbow than on speed.

  He also used his elbows on his teammates, not too hard most of the time. He wasn’t trying to hurt them, just to keep them from getting past him and in on goal. “Watch it, you fucking clodhopper!” one of them shouted.

  “I am watching it, Ferenc,” Istvan answered evenly. “You’re supposed to go around me, not through me.”

  Ferenc said something about the whorehouse Istvan’s mother had worked in. The next time the attacking midfielder tried to dribble the ball by him, Istvan kicked it away. No at all by accident, the studded sole of his boot came down on Ferenc’s instep, hard. Ferenc squalled and went down in a heap, clutching at his foot.

  “What did you go and do that for?” one of the other players said, waving his arms. “You might have put Gabor out of the match!”

  Istvan stared back stonily. “Like I give a shit. You talk about my mother and I’ll rack you up, too.”

  There were two kinds of Jews in Hungary—the ones who bent before every slight in the hope that putting up with anything meant they wouldn’t have to put up with so much, and the kind who wouldn’t put up with anything in the hope that would make bigots worry about giving them grief. Some of the first kind ended up with stomach ulcers. Some of the second kind ended up dead.

  Well, actually there was one other kind. Rakosi and the rest of the Jews in his regime did their best to pretend they’d shed their religion the way a snake sloughed off its skin. Maybe they even believed they weren’t Jews any more. The trouble with that, as Istvan knew from all the sour jokes he’d heard, was that none of the Magyars believed any such thing.

  He waited to see if he’d have a brawl on his hands. But the other footballer must have remembered what he’d done to Miklos. He’d got knocked around himself in that fight, but he’d proved the old adage that it was better to give than to receive. Anyone who could flatten Miklos was someone yo
u didn’t care to tangle with yourself.

  They had to drag Ferenc off the pitch. The East Germans stopped kicking the ball to watch. Istvan didn’t mind that one bit. If they saw he was somebody who paid back any little presents he got, they wouldn’t try to give him so many. Or he could hope they wouldn’t, anyhow.

  No sooner had he got back to the barracks than Imre Kovacs walked in. Despite his name and perfect Hungarian, he was a U.S. Army captain. Like Istvan, he was also what the Communists called a rootless cosmopolite. “So you smashed one of your football buddies, huh?” he said by way of greeting.

  How did he know? He knew, that was how. Istvan just shrugged. “Anyone who says dirty things about my mom, he’s no buddy of mine.”

  “I can see that,” Kovacs allowed. “Why don’t you come on over to the administration building with me? Couple of things I want to ask you.” He talked as if the two of them were equals. Maybe that was an American way of doing things. It didn’t make what he said any less an order.

  “I’m coming,” Istvan said. They walked over together as if they were the best of friends.

  Once they got inside the administration building, the American captain asked, “How much do you know about the unrest in Hungary right now?”

  “Only what I hear from the guys who’re coming in now,” Istvan answered truthfully. “Nobody talked about any of that stuff while I was still fighting.” Nobody would have dared, he thought.

  “Nobody talked about it, huh?” Kovacs was good at hearing what you didn’t say. “Did anybody know about it?”

  “I sure didn’t.” Istvan paused to think. “If anybody I knew would have, it was my sergeant. His name was Gergely. He was like Miklos—he went straight from the old Honved to the People’s Army without skipping a beat. But it wasn’t because he was mean. He was mean, but he was good, too. Best noncom I ever knew, and it wasn’t close.”