Hitler's War (46 page)

Other hands reached out to pull the wounded man off him. The German groaned as they got him down into the trenches. Luc had never been so glad to get under cover again himself. “Whew!” he said. “I felt naked out there.”

“You did good, kid,” Sergeant Demange said, and handed him a Gitane.

“Thanks.” Luc leaned close for a light.

“You didn’t go out there pretty damn quick, I was gonna plug the motherfucker,” Demange said.

“Yeah, I figured. That’s why I went.” Luc’s cheeks hollowed as he sucked in harsh smoke.

“Maybe they’ll learn something off him,” the noncom said. “He’ll sing like a goddamn canary, and sergeants, they know stuff.” Not without pride, he tapped his own chest.

“Was he a sergeant? I didn’t notice,” Luc said. Demange rolled his eyes. Grinning, Luc added, “If I’d known that, I would’ve shot him for sure.”

“Funny man,” Demange said scornfully. “You got that crappy hash mark on your sleeve, so you think you’re entitled to be a goddamn funny man.”

“Sergeant, if it meant I’d come through the war without getting shot, I’d never make another joke the rest of my life,” Luc promised.

“Oh, yeah?” Sergeant Demange said. Luc’s head bobbed up and down as if it were on springs. Demange spat out a tiny butt, crushed it underfoot, and lit a fresh Gitane. Then he returned to the business at hand: “Well, you don’t need to worry about that, on account of it doesn’t.” Luc already knew as much. All the same, he wished Demange hadn’t spelled it out.

ANASTAS MOURADIAN WAS DRUNK.
Yes, a blizzard howled outside. Even so, a proper Soviet officer wasn’t supposed to do any such thing. Sergei Yaroslavsky knew that perfect well. He would have been angrier at Mouradian if he weren’t drunk himself.

They couldn’t fly. They had plenty of vodka. What were they going to do—
not
drink it? Try as he would, Sergei couldn’t come up with a good reason for leaving it alone.

Ivan Kuchkov was bound to be drinking with his fellow enlisted men. If the Chimp got smashed, the rest of the aircrew should, too. It showed solidarity between enlisted men and officers. It also showed
that neither enlisted men nor officers had anything better to do when they couldn’t get an SB-2 off the ground to save their lives.

“If Hitlerite bombers show up now, if we have to take shelter outside, we’ve got plenty of antifreeze in our blood,” Sergei said.

“Never mind Hitlerite bombers. What about Hitlerite soldiers?” When Mouradian was sober, he spoke excellent Russian. He stayed fluent when he got drunk, but his Armenian accent turned thick enough to slice.

Sergei laughed and laughed. When he got drunk, everything was funny. “Where would Hitlerite soldiers come from?”

“Out of the sky. With parachutes. Like they did in Holland and Belgium.” Anastas looked around the inside of the tent, his eyes big and round like an owl’s: he might have expect Nazi parachutists to pop up any minute now.

That owlish stare only made Sergei laugh harder than ever. He looked around the inside of the tent, too. Enough of the wind outside got in to make the flame from the kerosene lamp flicker. That wasn’t why his wide, high-cheekboned face registered dismay. “We’re out of pelmeni!
And
pickled mushrooms! Where’d they go?”

Mouradian patted his stomach. “Good. Not spicy enough, but good.” Being a southerner, he liked everything full of fire. As far as Sergei was concerned, the mushrooms and the meat dumplings were fine this way. Russians had all kinds of snacks that went with vodka. Even a half-skilled cook at a forward airstrip could do a decent job with some of them.

“We had a big plate of them,” Sergei said sadly. The plate was still there. But for a couple of crumbs from the pelmeni, it was bare. Sergei sighed. He pointed at Anastas. “Not even the fucking Germans would be crazy enough to drop parachutists in this weather.”

“God shouldn’t have been crazy enough to make this weather.” Mouradian must have been very drunk, or he wouldn’t have talked
about God so seriously. It gave Sergei a hold on him, which wasn’t something anybody in the USSR wanted to give anyone else. Of course, there was something close to an even-money chance neither of them would remember anything about this come morning.

Even without dumplings or mushrooms, Sergei raised his tumbler.
“Za Stalina!”

“To Stalin!” Anastas echoed. They both drank. The vodka was no better than it had to be. It went down as if Sergei were swallowing the lighted kerosene lamp. The really good stuff slid down your throat smooth as a kiss, then exploded in your stomach like a 500kg bomb. But this got you there, smooth or not.

Sergei sighed. If it was harsh now, he’d feel it worse in the morning. The good stuff didn’t make you think elephants in hobnailed boots were marching on top of your skull.

“We have aspirins?” he asked.

“Somewhere,” Mouradian said vaguely. Then he brightened. “We’ll have more vodka.”

“Da.”
That cheered Sergei up, too: at least a little. Another dose of what made you feel bad could make you feel better. He reached for the bottle again. If he drank it now, he’d feel better right away.

“Leave me some,” Anastas said.

“Leave me some,
sir,”
Sergei said. The drunker you got, the more important military discipline seemed…unless, of course, it didn’t. He passed Mouradian the bottle. They drank till there was very little left to drink. They would have drunk till nothing was left to drink, but they both fell asleep first.

Getting up in the morning was as bad as Yaroslavsky had known it would be, or maybe a little worse. The first thing he did was drink half the remaining vodka. He would have drunk all of it, but Anastas snatched the bottle out of his hands. “To each according to his needs,” the Armenian croaked, and no one in the USSR, no matter how hung over, dared quarrel with unadulterated Marx.

Fortunately, the aspirins turned up. Sergei dry-swallowed three of them. Mouradian took four. As sour as Sergei’s stomach already was, the aspirins felt like a flamethrower in there. If he belched, he figured he could incinerate the whole airstrip.

Mouradian didn’t look or sound much happier. “Breakfast,” he said. The mere thought made Sergei groan. Then Anastas added, “They’ll have tea—coffee, too, maybe.”

“Well, maybe.” Sergei peeled back the tent flap and looked out. The sun shone brilliantly off snow. He squinted at the alarming landscape. “Don’t want to bleed to death through my eyeballs,” he muttered.

“Tell me about it!” Mouradian said fervently.

Both being brave men, they made it to the field kitchen.
Shchi
—cabbage soup—seemed safe enough to Sergei. Anastas stuck to plain brown bread. The cooks had one battered samovar full of tea, another full of coffee. After getting outside of some of that—and after the aspirins took hold—Sergei decided he’d live. Eventually, he would decide he wanted to.

The radio blared out music. Mouradian turned it down. Sergei would have loved to turn it off, but he didn’t dare. People might think you didn’t want to listen to the news. If you didn’t want to listen to the splendid achievements of the glorious Soviet state, people would wonder why not. Some of the people who wondered would have NKVD connections, too. And you’d be heading for a camp faster than you could blink.

Nobody complained about turning down the radio, though. Several other men eating breakfast had red-tracked eyes, sallow skin, and a hangdog expression. When it was snowing at an isolated airstrip, what were you going to do besides drink?

The song ended. An announcer gabbled about the overfulfillment of production norms at factories in Smolensk, Magnitogorsk, and Vladivostok. Not easy to imagine three more widely separated places. “Thus, despite the efforts of Fascists and other reactionaries, prosperity
spreads throughout this great bulwark of the proletariat!” the announcer said.

Sergei had nothing against the bulwark of the proletariat. In his present fragile state, though, he didn’t much want to hear about it. He made himself seem attentive even so, as he would have during a dull lecture in school. The penalty for obvious boredom then would have been a rap on the knuckles, or maybe a swat on the backside. He might pay more now.

Music returned. He didn’t have to seem to be listening to that so closely. He couldn’t ignore it altogether, however, or show he didn’t like it. It wouldn’t have gone out without some commissar’s approval: without the state’s approval, in other words. And if the state approved, citizens who knew what was good for them needed to do the same.

At the top of the hour, a different announcer came on the air. This fellow sounded better educated than the joker who’d been bragging about production norms. “And now the news!” the man said.

Several people with Red Air Force light blue on their collar tabs perked up. News from around the world mattered. “Soviet forces continue to punish the Polish reactionaries and the Nazi bandits who support them,” the announcer crowed. “Over the past several days, Soviet infantrymen have driven another twenty kilometers deeper into Poland. Knowledgeable officers report that enemy resistance is beginning to crumble.”

Nobody said anything. Nobody even raised an eyebrow. Sergei didn’t think anyone actually fighting the Poles and Germans believed their resistance was crumbling. He knew damn well he didn’t. That particular item had to be aimed at bucking up civilian morale hundreds if not thousands of kilometers from the front.

“Foreign Commissar Litvinov has protested to the Japanese government about its troop buildup between puppet Manchukuo and progressive Siberia,” the announcer went on.

Hearing that made Sergei’s headache get worse. This borderland between
the USSR and Poland was nowhere in particular. He tried to imagine fighting a war at the eastern edge of Siberia. That was Nowhere in Particular with capital N and P. The only reason either the Soviet Union or Japan cared about it was because of strategy. Other than that, the whole area could go hang.

Vladivostok was the USSR’s window on the Pacific. It was a window frozen shut several months a year, but never mind that. Vladivostok also sat on the end of the world’s longest supply line: it was the place where the Trans-Siberian Railroad finally stopped. It wasn’t a million kilometers from Moscow—it only seemed that way.

What would happen if the little yellow monkeys who lived in Japan tried to seize the railroad and cut the town’s lifeline? How long before Vladivostok withered? How long before the Japanese could just walk in? Sergei was too young to remember the siege of Port Arthur and the Russo-Japanese War as a whole, but he knew about them. Few Soviet citizens didn’t. Even though the Tsar’s corrupt regime was to blame for the Russian defeat, it still rankled.

Brooding about it made him read some of what the radio newscaster was saying. When he started paying attention again, the man was saying, “And the French government has declared that the front is Paris. The French say they are determined to fight in the capital itself, and to fight on beyond it even if it falls. They did not have to do this during the last war. Whether they will live up to their promises, only time will tell.”

“If they’d done better by Czechoslovakia when the war started, they might not be in this mess now,” Anastas Mouradian said. “They’ll probably expect us to pull their chestnuts off the fire for them, too.”

“Too fucking bad if they do. We’ve got enough worries of our own,” Sergei said.

“German radio reports that Adolf Hitler has indignantly denied any military coup was attempted against him,” the announcer said. “Reliable sources inside Germany report that at least four prominent German generals have not been seen for several weeks, however.”

No one eating breakfast said anything to that. No one imagined anything could be safe to say. No one even wanted to look at anyone else. The look on your face could betray you, too.

Soviet generals—far more than four of them—started disappearing in 1937. Like some of the Old Bolsheviks who started getting it in the neck at the same time, a few confessed to treason in show trials before they were executed. Others were simply put to death, or vanished into the camps, or just…disappeared.

It wasn’t only generals, either. Officers of all ranks were purged. So were bureaucrats of all ranks, and so were doctors and professors and anyone who seemed dangerous to anyone else.

Now the same thing was happening in Germany? Sergei had sometimes thought that Communists and Nazis were mirror images of each other, one side’s left being the other’s right and conversely. He’d never shared that thought with anyone; had he tried, he would put his life in the other person’s hands. He wished the idea had never crossed his mind. Just having certain notions was deadly dangerous. They might show up on your face without your even realizing it. And if they did, you were dead.

Or maybe worse.

So did the enemy have to worry about the kinds of things that had convulsed the Soviet Union for the past couple of years?
Good
, Sergei thought. If both sides were screwed up the same way, the one he was on looked to have a better chance.

LUDWIG ROTHE LIT A GITANE
he’d got from a German infantryman who’d taken a pack from a dead French soldier. It was strong as the devil, but it tasted like real tobacco, not the hay and ersatz that went into German cigarettes these days.

“Have another one of those, Sergeant?” Fritz Bittenfeld asked plaintively.

“You look like a hungry baby blackbird trying to get a worm from its mama,” Ludwig said. Fritz opened his mouth very wide, as if he really were a nestling. Laughing, Ludwig gave the panzer driver a Gitane.

“Chirp!” Theo Hossbach said, flapping his arms. “Chirp!” He got a cigarette, too.

They’d all smoked them down to tiny butts when a blackshirt who’d been prowling around the panzer park finally got to them. “Can I talk to you boys for a minute?” he asked, a little too casually.

His shoulder straps were plain gray, with two gold pips. That made him the SS equivalent of a captain. How could you say no? You couldn’t. “What’s up, sir?” Ludwig tried to keep his voice as normal as he could.