Last Orders: The War That Came Early Page 5

  They spoke to each other in Russian, the only language they had in common. Each flavored it with a different accent. Their home towns lay only a hundred kilometers or so apart, but neither knew or wanted to know a word of the other’s native tongue. Mouradian was an Armenian, Mogamedov an Azeri. Their peoples had been rivals and enemies for a thousand years, ever since the Turkic Azeris invaded the Caucasus. Mouradian had been born a Christian, Mogamedov a Muslim. Now they both had to do their best to be New Soviet Men.

  “Comrade Pilot, everything seems normal,” Mogamedov said formally when they got to the end of the checklist.

  “Thank you, Comrade Copilot. I agree,” Mouradian replied with equal formality. New Soviet Men had no business quarreling with one another, especially when the Fascist enemy remained on Soviet soil.

  Part of Stas Mouradian wanted to believe all the Soviet propaganda that had bombarded him since he was very small. Part of him simply thought some personnel officer had played a practical joke on him by sticking an Azeri in his cockpit. But Mogamedov was plenty capable. With that being true, Mouradian could ignore the rest.

  He could, and he had to. Russians didn’t officially dominate the Soviet Union the way they had in the Tsar’s empire. The leader of the USSR, after all, came out of the Caucasus himself—Stalin was a Georgian. But, even though he spoke the country’s chief language with an accent thick enough to slice, Stalin often acted more Russian than the Tsars. Any of the blackasses—Russian slang for the mostly swarthy folk of the southern mountains—who wanted to get ahead needed to do the same.

  Mouradian not only wanted to get ahead, he wanted to get airborne. He shouted into the speaking tube that led back to the bomb bay: “Everything good for you, Fetya?”

  “Everything’s fucking wonderful, Comrade Pilot,” Sergeant Fyodor Mechnikov replied. The bombardier was a Russian, all right: a foulmouthed thug dragged off a collective farm and into the Red Air Force. He was as strong as an ox—another reason his station was back there with the heavy packages of explosives—and not a great deal brighter.

  But if everything looked good to him, too … Stas waved through the bulletproof glass of the windscreen to the waiting groundcrew men. They waved back and spun first one prop, then the other. Smoke and flames burst from the exhausts as the engines bellowed to life. Mouradian eyed the jumping needles on the instrument panel. Fuel, oil pressure, hydraulics … Again, everything seemed inside the normal range.

  He waved to the groundcrew men once more. They pulled the chocks away from the Pe-2’s wheels. Mouradian eased up on the brake and gave the plane more throttle. It bounced down the dirt runway west of Smolensk. The runway was barely long enough to let a fully loaded bomber take off. Stas pulled back hard on the yoke. The Pe-2’s nose came up. If anything went wrong now, he’d be dead, and the bombs would make sure there was nothing left of him to bury.

  But nothing went wrong. The Pe-2 climbed into the air. The ground fell away below it. The SB-2, the plane this machine replaced, had been a typical piece of Soviet engineering: homely but functional, at least till it went obsolete. Comrade Petlyakov’s bomber, by contrast, was slim and elegant. It had started life as a two-engined fighter, and still wasn’t helpless against Nazi 109s.

  Mouradian took his place in the V of planes winging west to pound the Hitlerites’ positions somewhere east of Minsk. The Germans had fallen back a good deal since England and France started up the war in the West again. They didn’t have enough men or machines to do everything the Führer wanted.

  A man’s reach should exceed his grasp, or what’s a heaven for? Some foreign poet had said that. Stas couldn’t remember who. Hitler’s reach had exceeded his grasp, and a lot of Germans were going to hell on account of it.

  Now I have to make sure they don’t send me to the Devil to keep them company, Mouradian thought. If you flew long enough, your number was bound to come up. He hadn’t flown long enough yet, the proof of which was that he was still flying. If I make it through the war, I won’t go any higher than the top floor of a three-story building.

  He felt faintly embarrassed thinking about the Devil or making a wheedling bargain with God. There wasn’t supposed to be room for either in a New Soviet Man’s philosophy. But plenty of others acted the same way. When things went wrong, you’d hear Russians screaming about the Devil’s uncle over the radio. Their fathers would have let out the same curses in the last war, and their great-great-great-grandfathers while fighting Napoleon.

  Antiaircraft fire came up at the Pe-2s. Stas did some cussing of his own: they hadn’t crossed the front yet, so that was their own side shooting at them. It happened about every other mission. Maybe the Pe-2 looked too slick—the dumb bastards down on the ground figured it had to be German. Or maybe that had nothing to do with anything. Red Army men had fired on Stas in an SB-2, too. Too many soldiers thought any airplanes flying over them had to be dangerous.

  “Approaching the target!” The squadron commander’s voice blared in Stas’ earphones, and in Mogamedov’s as well. “Prepare for the bomb run.”

  “Acknowledged,” Mouradian answered. Mogamedov slid down to the glassed-in bottom of the nose to man the bombsight.

  There it was, all right: a big supply dump by a railroad spur, with trucks and wagons hauling munitions up to the troops who banged heads with their Soviet counterparts. Mouradian pushed the yoke forward, and the bomber’s nose went down. He used the dive brakes to control and steepen his descent. The Pe-2 couldn’t stand on its nose like a Stuka, but it was a far better all-around aircraft.

  “Bombs away, Fetya!” Mogamedov yelled.

  “Bombs away!” Mechnikov echoed. “The whores are fucking gone!” And they were. Mouradian heard them tumble out of their racks and felt the plane, suddenly a tonne lighter, get friskier under his hands.

  He needed all the friskiness he could find, too. Bf-109s tore into the squadron, pouncing from on high and pounding the bombers with heavy machine guns and cannon shells. A pair of Pe-2s tumbled out of the sky, both burning, one with half a wing shot away. Stas didn’t see any parachutes open. He hoped the flyers died fast and without too much pain.

  He hoped he didn’t die in the next few minutes. The machine gun in the dorsal turret spat out a long burst, and then another one. Mechnikov was on the job. He probably wouldn’t shoot down a 109 attacking from above and behind. He might make the pilot pull up and spoil the bastard’s aim.

  He must have, because the Pe-2 didn’t crash. Half the needles on the gauges were at the edge of the red, but that was because Stas had mashed the throttle hard against the panel wall. The needles didn’t leap crazily into the danger zone, the way they would have if the Nazi had shot the engines full of holes.

  Most of the time, Stas would have tried to gain altitude. Now he stayed down on the deck, hoping the German fighters would have a hard time spotting his brown and green plane against the ground below. It must have worked—no Messerschmitt shot him down.

  Isa Mogamedov climbed back into the copilot’s seat. “Well, we got through another one—I think.”

  “I do, too, now.” Stas allowed himself the luxury of a nod. “Only five thousand to go till peace breaks out.” He laughed, pretending to be joking. So did Mogamedov, pretending to think he was.

  A nurse cut off the latest set of bandages that swaddled Chaim Weinberg’s left hand. Dr. Diego Alvarez leaned forward to get a better look. Chaim didn’t, but then the hand was attached to him. He tried to remember how many times Alvarez had carved him up, working to repair the damage a mortar round did. He tried, but he couldn’t be sure if it was seven or eight.

  When the bandages came off, the hand stopped looking like one from Boris Karloff in The Mummy and started looking like one from Karloff in Frankenstein. It had more scars and sutures and what-have-you than a merely human hand had any business possessing.

  But when Chaim said, “It looks good, Doc,” he wasn’t being sarcastic. He counted himself lucky not to be auditioning for Captain Hook in a r
oad company of Peter Pan. That mortar bomb had smashed his hand to hell and gone—and had killed his longtime buddy, Mike Carroll. When the other Internationals from the Abe Lincoln Brigade brought Chaim back to the aid station, the surgeon there almost decided to amputate on the spot. Then he remembered Dr. Alvarez, back in Madrid. Alvarez specialized in repairing such wounds.

  “How does it feel?” the doctor asked now. His English, though flavored by Castilian Spanish, was more elegant than Chaim’s. A street kid from New York City, Chaim quit school after the tenth grade to go to work. Dr. Alvarez, by contrast, had studied medicine in England. Except for his lisp and the occasional rolled r, he sounded like a BBC newsreader.

  “Not … too bad,” Chaim answered after a pause to consider. He’d found out more about pain the past few months than he’d ever wanted to know. He’d also found out more about morphine than he’d ever dreamt he’d learn. He was off it now, and hoped he wouldn’t need to go back on.

  “Can you move your thumb so the tip touches the tip of your index finger?” Dr. Alvarez asked. He’d concentrated his work on Chaim’s thumb and first two fingers. The other two would never be good for much, no matter what he did. But those—especially the thumb and index finger—were the ones that mattered most.

  “Let’s see,” Chaim said. He hadn’t been able to do it yet. That hand was one hell of a mess before the surgeon got to work on it. Christ, it was still a hell of a mess. But it wasn’t—quite—a disaster any more.

  Moving his thumb hurt. So did moving his first finger. Too much in there had been repaired too many times for any of it to work smoothly now. But he could move both digits. A good Marxist-Leninist, he didn’t believe in miracles. If he had, he would have believed in that one.

  Not only did they move, but, after effort that made sweat pop out on his forehead, the tip of his thumb met the tip of his forefinger. “Kiss me, Doc!” he exclaimed. “I did it! Look! I did it!” Those seven or eight operations had finally led to this: a hand that might work half as well as it had before it got smashed.

  And damned if Dr. Alvarez didn’t kiss him on both cheeks. Chaim hardly even resented it, though he would have liked it better from the nurse. She wasn’t gorgeous, but she was definitely cuter than the surgeon.

  “Now you need to gain strength,” Alvarez said.

  “No kidding,” Chaim agreed. He thought he might be able to pick up a dime with his reconstructed thumb and first finger, but a half-dollar would be too much for him.

  “You are not my first case of this sort, though I think your injuries are among the most extensive I have succeeded in repairing,” the doctor said. “I have developed a series of exercises that will help your digits approach the power they had before you were wounded.”

  “Approach it, huh?” Chaim said. Dr. Alvarez nodded. After a moment, so did Chaim. “Okay, Doc. You level with a guy. I give you credit for that. You never promised anything you didn’t deliver. How long do I have to do these exercises, and how bad will they hurt?” He assumed they would hurt. It was a pretty safe bet. Everything that had happened to his left hand since the mortar bomb whispered down had hurt like hell.

  “You will have to do them for several weeks. Your muscles need strengthening. Your tendons need to work more freely. I have done everything I could to assist that process, but time and practice are also necessary.”

  “And after that, I go back to the Internationals?” Chaim asked.

  Dr. Alvarez looked unhappy. “After we have spent so much time and effort getting you to this point, it seems a shame to send you back to where you are liable to be wounded again.”

  “Doc,” Chaim said, as patiently as he could, “if I hadn’t wanted to take those kind of chances, I never would’ve come to Spain to begin with.”

  “I suppose not.” Alvarez sounded unhappy, too. He didn’t want all his hard work gurgling down the drain if Chaim stopped a slug with his face.

  “You can take it to the bank I wouldn’t have,” Chaim said. “And you can take it to the bank that there’s a bunch of Sanjurjo’s putos who wish I would’ve stayed in the States. You with me so far?”

  “Oh, yes,” Alvarez said dryly. What were his politics? He’d never said much about them. He was here in Madrid, on the Republican side of the fence. If he preferred the Nationalists, the only way he could hope to stay alive was to keep his big mouth shut.

  Chaim wasn’t about to push him, not when he’d been gifted with an almost-working hand instead of a hook. “When I get as strong as I’m gonna get, will I be able to handle a rifle, or at least a Tommy gun?” he asked.

  “I think it is possible,” the surgeon said carefully. “I also think it is on the very edge of what you will be able to do. For your thumb and those two fingers, the exercises will get you back most of your fine motor skills. The hand has had too much damage to be as strong as it was. I’m very sorry, but that seems to be the situation.”

  “Well, it gives me something to shoot for.” Chaim grinned crookedly. He was short and squat and not too handsome. That kind of grin suited him, in other words. “Shoot for! Get it, Doc? It’s a joke.”

  Dr. Alvarez, by contrast, was slim and elegant. “Amusing,” he said. A slight twitch of one eyebrow delivered his editorial verdict. With a verdict like that, Chaim was lucky Alvarez wasn’t a judge.

  The exercises hurt, all right. As far as Chaim could tell, everything that had anything to do with getting wounded hurt. Funny how that works, isn’t it? he gibed to himself. At first, he couldn’t do everything with the hand that the surgeon wanted him to. Everything? He could barely do anything, and the effort left him more worn down than hauling a sack of concrete should have.

  “Patience. Patience and persistence,” Alvarez told him. “You must have both.”

  To Chaim, they sounded like a couple of round-heeled Puritan girls. Patience and Persistence Mather: something like that. He imagined himself in bed with both of them at once, because he had an imagination like that—especially after he’d been stuck in the hospital for so long without any friendly female company.

  A few days later, as he healed more, he started being able to do things he couldn’t at first. That made him feel better. It also made him think—again—that the doctor might know what he was talking about after all. And, a couple of days after that, La Martellita paid him a rare visit.

  The Little Hammer—that was what his ex-wife’s nom de guerre meant. Communist activist, drop-dead gorgeous woman with a mane of blue-black hair, mother of his son … Even a glimpse of her made his dreams of wicked Puritan maids pop like pricked soap bubbles.

  “I heard you might be able to take up arms again for the cause after all,” she said gravely. “That’s good news—better than I expected when they brought you here.”

  “Better than I expected, too, querida.” Chaim’s Spanish wasn’t smooth or grammatical, but it got the job done. “Wish I could take you in my arms.”

  “No.” Her voice went hard and flat. “It’s over. Don’t you see that?”

  “I see it. Doesn’t mean I have to like it.” Chaim sighed. “How’s Carlos Federico?” He’d never expected to have a son named for Marx and Engels, especially not in Spanish.

  “He’s well. Maybe I will bring him here again. It is good to see you are doing better, too. Now I must go.” And La Martellita did. Five chilly minutes—that was all he’d got. He could count himself lucky … or he could go back to daydreaming about Patience and Persistence.

  German 105s pounded the trench line in which Staff Sergeant Alistair Walsh crouched—well, cowered, if you wanted to get right down to it. In the last war, the Germans would have—had—shot 77s at him. Those were a lot less dangerous; they didn’t fly as far, and, because they came from flat-shooting guns rather than higher-trajectory howitzers, they had a smaller chance of coming down into the trench with you and going off.

  He hadn’t thought in the last war that he’d still be soldiering in this one. But the other choice was going back into the Welsh
coal mine from which the Army had plucked him. A soldier’s life, especially in peacetime, seemed better than that. So did anything else, hell very possibly included.

  So he’d stayed in. He’d risen in the ranks, as far as a lad plucked from a Welsh coal mine could hope to rise. Staff sergeants saluted subalterns and first lieutenants. They called them sir. But, with their years of experience, they mattered more than the junior officers nominally set over them. A smart regimental colonel would sooner trust a senior sergeant than any lieutenant ever hatched, and would back him against quite a few captains, too.

  All of which was fine when there were choices to be made and courses to be plotted. When Fritz was throwing hate around, all you could do was hunker down and hope it missed you. No, you could do one more thing besides. Walsh fumbled in the breast pocket of his battledress tunic, pulled out a packet of Navy Cuts, and stuck one in his mouth. The shelling hadn’t made his hands shake too much to keep him from striking a match.

  He sucked in smoke. Logic said that couldn’t make anything better. Logic be damned, though. A cigarette relaxed him to some small but perceptible degree. He wasn’t the only one, either. Nobody in the front-line trenches ever quit smoking. Plenty of people who’d never had the habit before picked it up when the Germans started trying to kill them, though.

  Sure as hell, the Cockney who’d pushed up against the muddy front wall of the trench next to him nudged him and said, “ ’Ere, Sarge, can I bum a fag orf yer?”

  “Here you go, Jack.” Walsh handed him the packet.

  “Fanks.” Jack Scholes took one and gave it back. He was young enough to be the staff sergeant’s son. He had close-cropped blond hair, a tough, narrow face with pointed features, and snaggle teeth. He looked like a mean terrier. He fought like one, too. He was the stubborn sort of soldier who took a deal of killing.