Hitler's War (26 page)

He went on to talk about the overfulfillment of the norms for the current Five-Year Plan. Yaroslavsky listened to all that with half an ear; it didn’t directly affect him. The other did. When Stalin said he didn’t like the way somebody did something, that somebody was commonly very sorry very soon. And hardly anything could make a country sorrier faster than flight after flight of SB-2 bombers.

“I didn’t think we’d go,” Sergei said. “If the Poles yelled to the Nazis for help, that would put German troops right on our border, and—” He didn’t say
and that wouldn’t be so good
. Most of the men in the barracks had served in Czechoslovakia. They knew what rough customers the Hitlerites were.

Anastas Mouradian picked up where he left off: “If the Nazis get bogged down against England and France, they’ll be too busy to do anything about what goes on here.”

Several flyers nodded. Sergei was one of them; it looked that way to him, too. He would have said it if his crewmate hadn’t. “Soldiers are moving up toward the border. So…” The pilot who said that let his voice trail off. He wasn’t a general, and he wasn’t a prophet. You didn’t want to come out with anything that might be remembered too well.

“We aren’t going to fly right this minute,” another officer said, and produced a bottle of vodka. Despite what Sergei had said before, he was obviously right. The bottle went round. Pretty soon, another one followed it. One more after that and they wouldn’t have been able to walk or see, let alone fly. The Red Air Force ran on vodka as surely as it ran on aviation gasoline.

They got their orders the next day. Sergei still felt the drinking bout. Like the other flyers Lieutenant Colonel Borisov summoned to his office, he did his best not to show it. “We are going to liberate our Byelorussian brethren from the yoke of the Polish semifascist regime,”
the squadron commander declared. “Marshal Smigly-Ridz has refused to be reasonable and democratic, and so we must persuade him.”

He’s refused to do what we want, and so we must pound the shit out of him
. Sergei had no trouble translating Communist jargon into what went on in the real world. By the knowing grunts that came from several other men, neither did anyone else.

“Red Army units will enter the territory to be liberated at 0700 tomorrow morning,” Borisov declared. His eyes were cat-green but set on a slant; like so many Russians, he likely had some Tatar in the woodpile. “Your assignment will be to strike at Polish troops, and to bomb the rail junction at Glubookoje to prevent the Smigly-Ridz regime from bringing up reinforcements. Questions?”

“What if the weather doesn’t let us fly, Comrade Lieutenant Colonel?” Sergei asked.

“Then we will stay on the ground,” Borisov answered. “But our superiors do not believe that is likely.”

What exactly did he mean there? Did higher-ups in the Red Army and Red Air Force have reliable forecasts of good weather? Or would the SB-2s take off no matter how rotten the weather was? Yaroslavsky suspected the latter. With air-cooled engines, the bombers wouldn’t freeze up the way they might with liquid cooling. And they’d had skis installed instead of landing wheels, so they could deal with snow pretty well. Even so…

Sergei suspected a plan somewhere said,
Air support will be laid on at such and such a time in such and such places with so many bombers and so many escorting fighters
. Bad weather? Plans like that didn’t worry about such mundane details. Come what might, the air support
would
be laid on.

“Other questions?” Borisov asked.

His tone said he didn’t really want any more, but Anastas Mouradian raised his hand anyway. Frowning, Borisov nodded at him. “What
do we do if the Nazis come in on the Poles’ side, Comrade Lieutenant Colonel?” Mouradian asked.

Several people inhaled sharply. That was a question with teeth, all right. Borisov didn’t look happy. “The hope and expectation are that this will not occur.”

“Yes, sir,” Mouradian said, and he waited.

The contest of wills was silent. The squadron commander didn’t want to say anything else. Mouradian didn’t want to come right out and ask,
But what if it does?
That silence stretched tighter and tighter. Finally, it snapped. So did Borisov: “We are at war with Germany. If German troops or aircraft operate against us, we are to prosecute the war against them. Is that clear?”

“Yes, sir. Thank you, sir,” Mouradian said.

It was clear to Sergei, too. He didn’t like it. Poland and Romania had been the USSR’s shield against Fascist Germany. If the Poles scream for help to their Western neighbor, that shield was gone. Stalin never would have made demands on Poland if the Germans weren’t up to their eyebrows in war on their other frontier. But if they weren’t quite up to their eyebrows…

Sergei had faced Messerschmitts and German antiaircraft guns in Czechoslovakia. He didn’t relish doing it again. Of course, the next time anyone set over him gave a damn about his opinion would be the first.

Maybe the high command
did
know something. Sergei was sure stranger things had happened, though he couldn’t think of one offhand. The day was cold, but it was bright and sunny. The SB-2 was fueled up and bombed up and ready to go. Sergei and Mouradian and Ivan Kuchkov climbed in.

Groundcrew men spun the bomber’s props. The engines roared to life. Sergei ran his checks. All the instruments looked good. The SB-2 slid down the snow airstrip. Sergei pulled back on the stick. The nose
went up. The airplane left the ground. Anastas Mouradian cranked up the landing gear. The skis retracted almost as neatly as wheels.

Snow down below made navigation a challenge. It would have been harder yet if artillery bursts hadn’t shown the way. Tanks and soldiers were swathed in white, but cast long shadows across the even whiter snow. There was the border, and there were the Soviet troops crossing it to liberate the fraternal, peace-loving people who lived just to the west.

And there were the Polish oppressors: more soldiers in white with shadows stretching over the snow. Antiaircraft guns opened up on the SB-2s. After facing German fire, Sergei didn’t think much of this.

He saw a good concentration of troops and trucks ahead. There was the railroad line, too. If he plastered the neighborhood, he could do what Lieutenant Colonel Borisov wanted done. “Ready, Ivan?” he bawled into the speaking tube.

“Ready, sir!” the noncom answered.

“Khorosho
. Mouradian will tell you when to drop,” Sergei said. Anastas was down in the bottom front of the SB-2’s glasshouse cockpit, peering through the bombsight.

“Now!” he shouted, and the stick of bombs tumbled from the plane’s belly. As always, the SB-2 immediately got peppier and more maneuverable. Yaroslavsky took advantage of that by getting out of there as fast as he could. He’d seen a couple of gull-winged PZL fighters in the neighborhood. They weren’t supposed to be anywhere near as dangerous as Me-109s, but any fighter was dangerous if you happened to be a bomber.

Other SB-2s were also hitting that concentration. The Poles down there had to be catching hell. Well, if they wouldn’t give the Soviet Union what it was rightfully entitled to, this was what they got.

Back to the airstrip he flew. He found it, much to his relief. The ski-carrying landing gear descended. Getting down was an adventure, but at last the SB-2 slid to a stop. Groundcrew men wearing white snow
smocks over greatcoats rushed forward to refuel the plane and bomb it up again. “How’d it go?” one of them called, his breath smoking in the frosty air.

“Routine,” Sergei answered. “Just routine.”

“
HAPPY NEW YEAR!” PEGGY DRUCE
said as the clock struck twelve. “It’s 1939. Oh, boy!” She raised a glass of what was supposed to be scotch. The stuff tasted more like oven cleaner. In wartime Berlin, you took what you could get and you were damn glad you got anything.

A handful of other people sat drinking in the hotel restaurant. They were split about fifty-fifty between neutrals stuck in Berlin and Germans who felt like tying one on even if the world seemed to be going to hell in a handbasket. Some of the Germans were civilians, others in uniform. The other way to tell them apart was that the military men were drinking harder.

The radio blared out war news. Everything was going well in the West—if you believed the announcer, anyhow. “Soon a battle of annihilation will sweep the French and English out of Belgium, which they invaded with flagrant disregard for international law!” the fellow declared. He had a high, shrill, unpleasant voice. Peggy thought so, anyhow; it put her in mind of screechy chalk on a blackboard.

Then he started screaming about what the evil Communists in Russia were doing to Poland. “It is a Jewish-Bolshevist conspiracy to terrorize small nations!” he said.

What about Czechoslovakia?
Peggy wondered.
What about Holland? What about Luxembourg? What about Belgium?
Asking questions like that was pointless here. Even if the
Gestapo
didn’t haul you away and start pulling out your toenails, the Germans wouldn’t get it. They thought anything they did was okay because they did it. If the other guy did the same thing, he was a dirty, rotten nogoodnik.

And then the newsman came out with something Peggy hadn’t
heard before: “Because of the magnitude of the unprovoked invasion, Marshal Smigly-Ridz has asked the
Führer
for aid against the Bolsheviks. Foreign Minister von Ribbentrop has stated that that aid will be forthcoming. We are already at war with the Soviet Union. Now we have the chance to teach the Reds and the Jews the lesson they deserve.”

Peggy looked around. Nobody she could see looked excited about teaching the Russians a lesson. One of the soldiers, a major old enough to have fought in the last war, knocked back half a tumbler’s worth of something, put his head on his folded arms, and fell asleep at his table. The good-time girl who’d been with him stalked away in disgust.

Another soldier stood up and raised a glass on high. “Here’s to the two-front war!” he yelled.

His buddies dragged him down. They spoke in low, urgent voices. He didn’t want to listen. When they couldn’t make him shut up, they hauled him out into the cold, pitch-black blackout night. Peggy wondered if it was already too late for him. Was somebody in there taking notes? She wouldn’t have been surprised. People said there was at least one informer in every crowd. Peggy didn’t always believe what people said, but it seemed likely here.

Music started coming out of the radio. Saccharine-sweet, it was as annoying as the newscaster. Jazz was one more thing the Nazis wouldn’t put up with. Degenerate Negro music, they called it. No matter what they called it, what they made themselves was sappy and boring.

A naval officer came up to the table where Peggy was drinking by herself. “May I join you?” he asked.

“Sure.” Peggy held up her left hand so the diamonds in her wedding ring sparkled. “Don’t expect too much, that’s all.”

He smiled. His long, weathered face didn’t seem to have room for amusement, but it turned out to. “Thank you for the warning. I may need it less than you think, though.” He set down his drink and showed
off the thin gold band on the fourth finger of his own left hand. “If I ask your name, will you think I am trying to seduce you?”

“Probably,” Peggy answered, which startled a laugh out of him. She gave him her name even so, and asked his.

“I am Friedrich Reinberger—a
Korvettenkapitän
, as you see.” He brushed the three gold stripes on one cuff with the other hand. Then he switched languages: “Lieutenant commander, you would say in English.”

“Okay.” Peggy was feeling ornery, so she asked, “Where’s your wife, Lieutenant Commander?”

“In Dachau, not far from Munich, with the
Kinder,”
Reinberger nodded. Peggy nodded—he sounded like a Bavarian. “I was called here to report on…certain things when my destroyer came into port. Maria, I think, believes yet I am at sea.”

He finished his drink and waved for another one. The blond girl who came over to get his glass wore a black gown cut down to there in front and even lower in back, and slit up to there down below. Reinberger followed her with his eyes as she sashayed back to the bar. He didn’t slobber or anything, but he did watch. Peggy couldn’t very well blame him; it was a hell of a dress. If she were ten years younger—hell, five years younger—she would have wanted it herself.

The girl brought back a new drink. By then Peggy was ready for a refill, too. That gave the German naval officer another chance to eye the girl’s strut. He made the most of it. When Peggy got the fresh drink, Reinberger raised his glass. “To 1939,” he said.

“To 1939,” Peggy echoed, and drank with him. If he’d said something like
to our victory in 1939
, she wouldn’t have. She was damned if she wanted to see the Nazis win. But toasting the year was harmless enough.

“What is an American doing in Germany in the middle of a war?” Reinberger asked.

Peggy looked him in the eye. She was tempted to spit in his eye, but he didn’t seem like a bad guy. Still, she didn’t sugarcoat the truth: “I was in Czechoslovakia when you people invaded it.”

“Oh.” He shrugged. “If the Czechs were more, ah, reasonable, it might not have come to that. But they thought England and France would save them, and so.…” Another shrug.

“Dachau.” Peggy wasn’t drunk, but she felt a buzz. Her wits worked slower than she wished they did. It wasn’t a big city or anything, but she’d heard of it before. How come? After a moment, she remembered. “Dachau! Isn’t that where they—?” She didn’t know how to go on.

“Yes, that is where they—”
Korvettenkapitän
Reinberger didn’t finish it, either. He did say, “Every nation has in it people who are not trusted by the government. We keep them there.”

From some of the whispers Peggy had heard, the SS did more to people in Dachau than just keep them there. But she couldn’t prove that. Probably the only way to prove it was to end up on the inside. She had a magpie curiosity, but she didn’t want to know
that
badly.

“Where in the United States do you live?” Reinberger asked. It wasn’t the smoothest change of subject Peggy had ever seen, but it also could have been worse.