Bombs Away Page 9

  “Put it in gear, Misha!” he called to the driver through the speaking tube. “We’re going forward.” The T-54 had an intercom system connecting the three men in the turret and the driver farther forward. The tank had the intercom, but Konstantin didn’t trust it. Electrical systems could fail when you needed them most, but what could go wrong with a brass tube?

  “Going forward, Comrade Sergeant,” Mikhail Kasyanov answered. Like the gunner and the loader, he was too young to have fought in the Great Patriotic War. Morozov was the only one here who knew what battle was like. He had the bad feeling the others would find out pretty damn quick, though.

  The growl from the engine compartment got louder as the T-54 began to move. How much noise did all these tanks make as they advanced? What kind of maskirovka could you use to muffle it or drown it out? As with the black, stinking exhaust, Konstantin could see something would be useful, but didn’t know enough to work out what it might be.

  He peered out through the periscopes set into the cupola. Not much to see: a tank ahead, another behind. He swore under his breath. He’d be breathing those stinking fumes till they got where they were going.

  His station was on the right side of the turret. The gunner’s seat was a little lower, to the left of the cannon’s breech. The loader’s was farther back and farther down still. It was crowded in there, especially with the T-54’s low, rounded turret, made to deflect shells coming from any direction. The ideal tankman for one of these beasts should have been no more than 170 centimeters tall. Konstantin was a little too big, and had to be extra careful when he moved around. So did Pavel Gryzlov, the gunner. Mogamed Safarli, the loader, was about the right size.

  There’d been only a commander and a loader in the original T-34’s turret. The commander aimed and fired the cannon along with everything else he had to take care of. The Nazis, who’d separated commander and gunner from the start, could shoot rings around those T-34s, even if the tanks themselves outdid anything Germany made.

  When the Red Army upgunned the T-34 from 76 to 85 millimeters, the engineers stole a page from the Hitlerites’ book. The new, bigger turret held three men. It also had a cupola for the commander to use. All Soviet tanks from then on kept that same system.

  One difference between the T-54 and its ancestors was that Misha had no company up front. The T-34 carried a bow machine gun as well as one coaxial with the main armament. T-54s got along with just the coaxial machine gun. You could fill that many more tanks with four-man crews than if they took five.

  After a while, Konstantin opened the hatch atop the cupola and stood up to look around. You could see so much more if you did that than if you stuck with the periscopes. Of course, you also made a far juicier target. Sometimes you had to do it, though, even in combat, if you were going to get the most out of your tank.

  Now all he got was a smelly breeze in the face. The noise was far louder than it had been with the tank buttoned up. They wouldn’t just hear it on the far side of the border. They’d hear it on the far side of the Rhine.

  He worried about that, which was the only thing he could do about it. What were the Americans up to, there on the other side of the plowed ground and barbed wire and tank traps that marked the frontier between the two main conquerors of the Third Reich? How ready were they?

  Tank against tank, man against man, Konstantin was ready to fight them. He wasn’t eager—few people who have seen once what war is like are eager to see it again. And anyone who has seen it once knows that anything that can happen can happen to him. Anything, no matter how horrible. So no, Morozov wasn’t eager. Willing, yes.

  He thought the Red Army could overrun the rest of Germany and stand on the Rhine in a matter of days. It could…unless the Americans started dropping those atomic bombs. Not all the steel in the T-54’s hull and turret would save him from one of those.

  Something pale ghosted by the tank on silent wings, close enough to make Konstantin jump. Then he realized it was only a barn owl. He wondered why it would fly so near the noise and the smells of a tank column on the move. Then he wondered how many mice and rats and rabbits the tanks were scaring out of their nests. Maybe the owl knew what it was doing after all.

  Foot soldiers waved the tanks of Captain Gurevich’s company into position just out of sight of the frontier. More foot soldiers draped them with netting covered with grass and with white cloth to create from above the impression of snowy ground. Things probably wouldn’t look the same as they had before the tanks got here, but they wouldn’t look so very different, either.

  Konstantin got out of his T-54 after it went under the camouflage. He carefully checked the ground on which the machine sat. It was hard and firm—indeed, frozen here and there. The tank wouldn’t sink in very far. The crew could sleep under it. They’d be almost as safe as if they’d stayed inside, and much more comfortable.

  “It’s cold out here,” Mogamed Safarli whined.

  “You’ve got your greatcoat and a blanket. What else do you want?” Morozov said. To a Russian, the kind of cold you got in Germany, even at the start of February, wasn’t worth getting excited about. But Safarli was a blackass from Azerbaijan or one of those other places that didn’t know what winter was all about.

  They ate. They smoked. They drank a little vodka. They talked in low voices. Then they wrapped themselves up and slept. The Red Army taught everybody—even blackasses—to get through a really cold night with nothing but a greatcoat. It wasn’t all that cold tonight. And they had blankets along with their coats. Nothing to it.

  Nothing to it tonight. Tomorrow…Tomorrow was liable to be a different story.

  —

  Max Bachman nodded when Gustav Hozzel walked into the print shop. “Morning,” he said.

  “Morning,” Gustav said. He glanced toward the east. Any German who’d served on the Russian front had developed that kind of anxious, wary glance. When you looked east like that, you wondered what would be coming your way in the next few minutes or the next few days. Whatever it was, it wouldn’t be anything you wanted.

  His boss grunted. He’d served on the Eastern Front, too. Most German men their age had. Some lucky guys had just fought in Italy or France. A few even luckier ones had sat out the war on garrison duty in places like Norway or Crete. But the Russians had been the big show—too big a show, as things turned out.

  “Remember how you asked whether the Amis would want a hand against Stalin if things heated up?” Bachman asked.

  “Ja.” Gustav lit a cigarette. Yes, he still felt rich every time he did it, as if he were smoking hundred-dollar bills like a fat cat in a cartoon. Silly, but there you were. After blowing a ragged smoke ring, he went on, “They won’t get much hotter than they did in Augsburg.”

  “Or Bremen, or the other places the Russians fried,” Bachman agreed. But Augsburg was the closest one, less than two hundred kilometers away. Some people in Fulda who were out in the middle of the night claimed to have seen a flash on the southern horizon when the city that had stood there since the days of its namesake, the Roman Emperor Augustus, abruptly ceased to be. Were they lying? How big did an explosion have to be for you to see it from so far away? Big—that was the only answer Gustav could come up with.

  “So what about the Americans?” Gustav asked. If the Russians felt like it, they could drop one of those bombs on Fulda, too. What would hold them back? Needing to go through here was the only thing he could think of. They might not be able to do that if the place glowed in the dark.

  “Well, you know how we print things for the town and for the Burgomeister,” Bachman said. Gustav nodded. Willi Stoiber was a fat blowhard, which made him ideal to run the city. How he’d got through the denazification trials, Gustav couldn’t guess, but he had. Max Bachman continued, “So he likes to run his mouth. The Americans are talking about setting up what they want to call a national emergency militia.”

  “Is that anything like an army?” Gustav’s voice was dry.

  “Of course
not. We’re Germans. We don’t deserve an army. Besides, it has a different name.” Bachman was as cynical as he was.

  Gustav remembered his nightmares, something he usually tried not to do while he was awake. “Haven’t we paid our dues?” he said. “I fought the Ivans as much as I ever wanted to, thanks. If the Amis are so hot to have a go, let them take their crack at it this time. They didn’t want to when we could have done it together before, so to hell with them.” He made as if to spit on the floor, but didn’t.

  His boss clicked his tongue between his teeth. “Only one thing wrong with that.”

  “What?” Gustav Hozzel didn’t see anything wrong with it.

  “If the Americans fight the Russians here and they lose, they won’t have commissars telling them what to do and spying on them from now till the end of time. We will, worse luck,” Bachman said.

  “Oh.” In spite of himself, Gustav grimaced. “Well, when you’re right, you’re right, dammit.”

  Plenty of people had fled from the Russian zone to freer lands farther west. The tales they told would curl anyone’s hair. More than a few of them lived in Fulda now. And, among those refugees, chances were that some played a double game. Cursing Stalin’s name at the top of your lungs didn’t necessarily mean you weren’t also whispering things in the MGB’s ear.

  But those horror stories rang true to Gustav. Counterattacks that briefly won back some ground showed what the Russians did when they took over German soil. They didn’t play the game by the rules; as far as they were concerned, the game had no rules. Of course, the Wehrmacht and the SS hadn’t had clean hands when they were going forward, either. On the Eastern Front, no one’s hands were clean.

  Noise outside the print shop distracted him from his gloomy memories, but not from his gloom. That noise was of big, snorting engines and of caterpillar tracks grinding on asphalt and cobblestones. American panzers and self-propelled guns had smoother lines than the slab-sided vehicles the Wehrmacht used, but they sounded pretty much the same.

  “Are you going to sign up for this emergency militia, Max?” Gustav loaded the name with a certain sour relish.

  “Probably. My guess is it’s already too late, though. With the bombs dropping, they won’t have time to get us shaken out into units and give us uniforms and weapons. Too bad. I wouldn’t mind getting myself an M-1. That’s a pretty good rifle.”

  “My old Mauser carbine would do fine,” Gustav said. “Getting ammo for it might be tricky, though.” The standard German caliber had been 7.92mm. Some of that was bound to be floating around, but Gustav didn’t know where to lay his hands on it. He hadn’t worried about it from the time he surrendered till this new trouble blew up.

  The Americans used what they called .30-caliber rounds, which were 7.62mm to the rest of the world. They did a perfectly respectable job of killing people, and they were easy to get hold of.

  Max said, “Shall we do some work?”

  “Why not?” Gustav answered. “That way, Saint Peter can see we were busy until the bomb blew us to smoke.”

  His boss smiled a twisted smile. Gustav had seen that expression before, on the faces of Landsers trying to show they weren’t scared when a swarm of drunken Russians were howling and screaming and getting ready to roll over their trenches. The Ivans often acted as if they didn’t care whether they lived or died. Considering the kind of country they had to live in, who could blame them?

  Even getting through the day wasn’t easy. Max kept the radio running, which he didn’t do most of the time. A newsman said that Stalin said he had as much right to blow up those European cities as Truman did to blow up Chinese cities. He might even have been right, not that that did the people in those cities any good. The dead had to number in the hundreds of thousands.

  “The guy on the news is going on like that’s a big number,” Gustav said after music replaced word of the latest disasters. “For Stalin, it’s nothing but pocket change.”

  “Maybe the asshole didn’t fight on the Ostfront,” Max answered. “Or maybe he wants people to think he didn’t.”

  The first thing Luisa asked Gustav when they both got home was, “Will it start for real?”

  He sent that hooded look toward the east again. Then he sighed. “Probably,” he said. “Well, we had five or six good years, anyhow. What’s for supper?”

  She took a pot out of the oven. It had simmered in there all day, since she went off to her own job. Savory steam rose when she took off the lid. Turnips, cabbage, a cheap cut of pork to add some body and some flavor, dill, caraway seeds…

  Gustav opened a couple of bottles of Black Hen from the local brewery. The malty beer would go well with what his wife had made. They clinked glasses after he poured. Everything tasted especially good to him. He was about halfway through the meal when he realized what that meant. He was savoring flavors more than usual because part of him believed this might be the last time he ever got the chance to do it.

  Not too much later, he took Luisa to bed. She squeaked, but only a little. Again, it seemed extra good to Gustav. He hadn’t been able to do this before a Russian attack in the last war. Now he could, so he made the most of it.

  WHEN CADE CURTIS woke up in the drafty little shed, two bowls were waiting for him. One held rice, the other kimchi. Neither was big. He thought it was a miracle these people gave him anything at all. They had so little themselves. Why would they spare some for a foreigner, a stranger, passing through?

  Why? Because they were Christians, and took the name and the duties that went with it seriously. That was the only answer that occurred to Cade. It was also one that shamed him. Almost all the people back in the States called themselves Christians of one flavor or another. Damn few lived up to the label, though.

  Things here in Korea were different. Christians, Catholic or Protestant, were a small minority. Folks from one denomination didn’t sneer at those who belonged to another. They presented a united front against their persecutors. In Kim Il-sung’s regime, that meant against just about everybody. Things were easier in the south, but only relatively.

  Cade grabbed the chopsticks laid across the bowl of rice. He wasn’t so smooth with them as the natives were, but he managed. You got better at everything with practice. He gulped the rice and the fiery pickled cabbage. He’d dropped a lot of weight since getting cut off, but he didn’t care. He was getting close to the American lines. Fried chicken and bacon and apple pie and scrambled eggs and hash browns lay around the corner. He’d plump up just fine.

  The sun had gone down. Moonlight slipped between the battered planks of the shed wall and painted thin, pale zebra stripes across the dirt floor. The village, like most Korean villages after sunset, was quiet as the tomb. No electricity, no kerosene for lamps. People had candles and oil lamps, but didn’t like to use them. Whatever oil and tallow you burned, you couldn’t eat later if you got hungry enough.

  A dog howled, off in the hills. Some people hereabouts had kept dogs as pets before the war. Now dogs that hung around people turned into meat. A couple of villages back, somebody’d fried a little bit of dog flesh for him, stirred together with rice. It tasted wonderful; it was the first meat he’d had in a long time. Whether he’d like it so well if he were less hungry…was a question for another day.

  Farther away, still several days’ travel to the south, artillery rumbled on the edge of hearing. Getting through the lines would be the tricky part. Cade didn’t aim to worry about how he’d do it till he had to try. After getting cut off, he hadn’t really believed he would come close enough to the front in the south to need to worry about it.

  He’d slept through the day, his felt hat doing duty for a pillow. Only that bare ground under him? He didn’t care, not even a little bit. He figured he could have slept on a swami’s bed of nails. Now it was nighttime, so, like a cat or a rat or a bat, he was awake.

  Soft footfalls outside the shed said a couple of Koreans were awake, too. Silently, he took hold of the PPSh. He didn’t think anythin
g here had gone wrong. If he turned out to be mistaken, though, a blaze of glory seemed preferable to letting Kim’s or Mao’s soldiers take him. Especially Mao’s. They’d be even less happy with Americans now than they had been before fire fell on Manchuria.

  Low-voiced mutters in Korean outside the door. Cade wouldn’t have been able to follow even if he’d heard them clearly. He’d picked up only a handful of words from the local language.

  The door opened. A man stuck his head inside. “Ave,” he whispered, and then, “Veni.”

  “Sic.” Cade didn’t have a whole lot of Latin, either. But what he did have was worth its weight in gold for talking with Catholic Koreans. When Protestants helped him on his way south, he was reduced to sign language.

  He scrambled to his feet. His knees and something in the small of his back crackled as he did. He had to duck to get through the doorway. He also had to lift his feet: like the Chinese, the Koreans put a plank across the bottom, maybe to help keep out chilly drafts.

  One of the Koreans outside cradled a PPD, the PPSh’s older cousin. The other man had a shotgun that looked only a short step up from a blunderbuss. Well, if they got into a fight, it would be at close quarters. If they got into a fight, they would also die.

  The guy with the PPD gestured toward the south. “Vade mecum,” he said.

  “Sic,” Cade repeated. What else would he do but go with the Koreans?

  They wore felt boots like his, possibly stolen from dead Red Chinese soldiers. Cade did wonder how much damage the atom bombs had done to the Chinese logistics system. Not enough to make the Chinks already in Korea quit fighting. Not yet, anyhow. They were like the Russians—they were expected to live off the countryside. All they really needed was ammunition.

  Those felt boots were quieter than ordinary footgear would have been. Cade was at least a head taller than one of his guides, but the other was about his own six-one. Some of the Koreans ran surprisingly tall. Some of them could grow surprisingly thick beards for Orientals, too. Not a one, though, came equipped with a long, pointed nose or round blue eyes.