Hitler's War (54 page)

“Poor sorry fuckers,” Kuchkov said. Sergei started to nod, then caught himself. He’d already said more to Ivan than to any of his fellow officers, even Anastas Mouradian. If Ivan was a fellow with a pipeline to the NKVD, he’d said more than enough to hang himself.

He eyed the bombardier’s broad, rather stupid face. Ivan Kuchkov was a Russian peasant of purest ray serene. Surely he didn’t have the brains to inform on anybody…did he?

You never could tell. That was the first rule. There was that iron-jawed commissar who looked even more like a village pig butcher than Kuchkov did. What was his name? Khrushchev, that was it. Yes, he sure seemed the type who’d take off his shoe and pound it on the bar if he got into an argument. And if that didn’t work, he’d pound it on your head.

But, regardless of what he looked like, he was nobody’s fool. He’d lived through the purges, after all, when so many hadn’t. So maybe dear Ivan wasn’t as dumb as he let on, either.

Their SB-2 got off the ground to fly a mission against a
Luftwaffe
airstrip in eastern Poland. As Sergei guided the bomber into formation
with the others, he wondered when the
rasputitsa
would close down operations. Muck had flown from the Tupolev’s tires as it roared down the strip, but it got airborne. Make the mud a little thicker, a little gooier, and it wouldn’t.

One way to deal with the problem would have been to pave runways. That never crossed Yaroslavsky’s mind. Soviet authorities didn’t pave highways between towns, not least because invaders could have used paved roads, too. But if the highways weren’t paved, airstrips weren’t likely to be, either.

“Here’s hoping we give the Nazis a nice surprise,” Anastas Mouradian said.

“That would be good,” Sergei agreed.

“Better than good,” his copilot said. “If we don’t surprise them, they’re liable to surprise us, and getting surprised by a bunch of Germans doesn’t sound like a whole lot of fun.”

“Er—right.” Sergei gave the Armenian a funny look. Did Mouradian talk that way because he was making a joke or because his Russian was slipping? Maybe it was both together; Anastas did like to make jokes, but they didn’t always come out the way he wanted.

Maybe that was why Stalin and Beria and Mikoyan and the other formidable fellows from the Caucasus cut such a swath through Soviet politics—the Russians who were trying to deal with them couldn’t figure out what the devil they were talking about till too late. Yaroslavsky didn’t say that to Anastas. One more time—you never could tell. If the Armenian took it wrong, it might end up as a one-way ticket to a labor camp.

And then Sergei forgot about it. Me-109s tore into the Soviet bombers. The plane just in front of his spun down toward the dappled ground trailing flame from its left engine. Another SB-2, fortunately farther away, blew up in midair. That felt worse than a near miss from an antiaircraft shell; Sergei’s bomber staggered as if bouncing off a wall.

One of the rear machine guns chattered. Kuchkov’s voice came through the voice tube: “These pricks are all over everywhere like crabs on cunt hair! Do something about it, for Christ’s sake!”

Off to Sergei’s left, a Soviet bomber dropped its load over nothing in particular, broke formation, and scooted for Byelorussia. That looked like cowardice. Another SB-2 went down, and then another. However the Fascists had found out about this attack, they were all over it. What had seemed cowardice a moment before began to look more and more like good sense.

Sergei fired the forward machine gun at a 109. Tracers didn’t come close. The German fighter flipped away with almost contemptuous ease. During the Spanish Civil War, the SB-2 outran and outclimbed Nationalist fighters. Everybody said so. But those German and Italian biplanes must have been mighty clumsy. As Yaroslavsky had first seen in Czechoslovakia, the bomber was no match for a Messerschmitt.

One more SB-2 tumbled in flames. That was enough—no, too much—for Sergei. “Dump the bombs, Ivan!” he yelled into the speaking tube. “We’re heading for home!”

“Now you’re talking, boss!” Kuchkov said. Grating metallic noises said he was opening the bay and pulling release levers as fast as he could. Half a dozen 220kg bombs whistled toward the ground. “They’re bound to come down on some mother’s head,” Kuchkov called cheerfully.

He wasn’t even wrong; Sergei could console himself with that thought. He hauled the SB-2 around and roared east at full throttle. Maybe it could outrun an Italian Fiat. Next to a 109, he might have been piloting a garbage scow. The airspeed indicator said he was making better than 400 kilometers an hour. All the same, he felt nailed in place in the sky. When a Messerschmitt could get up over 550, how could anybody blame him, either?

Kuchkov’s ventral machine gun barked again. The bombardier let
out a shout of triumph—or was it surprise?
“Nailed
the fucker!” he roared.

“Damned if he didn’t.” Anastas Mouradian certainly sounded surprised. As bomb-aimer, he had a better view below than Sergei did. “The pilot managed to get out and hit the silk.”

“Too bad. Only means he’ll be flying against us again before too long,” Sergei said. He tried to look every which way at once, including in his rearview mirror. German fighters were bad enough when you knew they were around. If they took you by surprise, you were dead. It was about that simple.

He flew over the Poles and Russians. Soldiers from both sides fired at the SB-2. That always happened. They weren’t likely to hit anything.

“Won’t it be wonderful,” Mouradian said in his Armenian-accented Russian, “if we lead the Fascists to our airstrip and they shoot us up after we land?”

“Fucking wonderful,” Sergei half-agreed. His superiors wouldn’t love him for leading the
Luftwaffe
back to the field. But what could you do? His only other choice was putting down on the first open ground he saw. And if it was rough or muddy—and odds were it would be one or the other if not both—he was asking to go nose-up or dig a prop or a wingtip into the dirt. His superiors wouldn’t love him for that, either.

There was the airstrip. Groundcrew men could get the plane under cover in a hurry. Sergei landed in a hurry, too—as much a controlled crash as a proper descent. His teeth clicked together when the landing gear smacked the ground. He tasted blood—he’d bitten his tongue. Anastas said something flavorful in Armenian that he didn’t translate.

“You all right, Ivan?” Sergei asked the bombardier.

“I’m here, anyway,” Kuchkov answered darkly.

That would do. Right now, anything would. They scrambled out of the plane. The groundcrew men hauled it towards a revetment. They’d drape camouflage netting over it. In minutes, it would be next to impossible
to spot from the air. No 109s circled overhead or swooped low. All the same, Sergei decided he could hardly wait for the
rasputitsa
to kick in full bore.

THE FRONT WAS PARIS.
Alistair Walsh would have known as much even if papers didn’t scream it, even if posters weren’t pasted to everything that didn’t try to pick you up. Bomb craters and, now, shell hits from Nazi heavy artillery told their own story. When the 105s started reaching the City of Light, that would be real trouble.

No
, Walsh thought.
When the
Boches
drive their tanks down the Champs-Élysées
, that’s
real trouble
. Till it happened, he’d damn well enjoy Paris instead of fighting in it.

Or he hoped he would. This time, he didn’t exactly have leave. His unit had fallen back into the eastern outskirts of town. Maybe they were supposed to be setting up somewhere, getting ready to hold back the next German push. If they were, though, nobody’d bothered to tell him about it.

In a way, that wasn’t so good. It said orders from on high weren’t getting where they needed to go. He would have been more upset were he less surprised. If the Germans kept pushing everybody else back, of course things would go to hell every so often. God only knew they had in 1918.

A lot of Parisians had already run away. On the other hand, a lot of provincials from the north and west had fled into Paris one step ahead of the invaders. You couldn’t be sure whether the face that peered out a window at you belonged to a homeowner or a squatter who’d picked a lock or broken a window. If you were a Tommy, what the hell difference did it make, anyhow?

Plenty of bars stayed open. Most of the men who filled them were soldiers—French, English, or from heaven knew where. Walsh had run into Czechs before. Maybe the hard-drinking fellows who spat incomprehensible
consonants at one another were more from that lot. Or maybe they were Yugoslav adventurers or White Russians or…But what the hell difference did that make, either?

One of the
poilus
had a concertina. When he started playing it, several other Frenchmen sang with more enthusiasm than tune. Walsh knew just enough of the language to recognize a dirty word or two every line. The barmaids pretended to be shocked. Their acting might have been even worse than the soldiers’ singing.

Half a dozen military policemen stormed into the joint. The concertina squalled to a stop. The French MPs started hauling
poilus
out into the street. Then they grabbed one of the maybe-Czechs. He was in French uniform. He said something to them. It didn’t help—they dragged him toward the door. Then he hit one of them in the face. The Frenchman went down with a groan. His buddy, unperturbed, hauled out a blackjack and coshed the Slav, who also crumpled. He might not have wanted to go wherever they were taking people, but he would.

Walsh’s hand tightened on his mug of piss-sour, piss-thin beer. They wouldn’t haul him off without a fight.

They didn’t haul him off. One of them nodded his way, shrugged Gallically, and said,
“Eh bien, Monsieur le Anglais?”
He pointed to the flattened MP and soldier, as if to say,
Well, what can you do?

“Just leave me alone, that’s all.” Walsh didn’t loosen his grip on the mug. He didn’t want to provoke the military police, but he also didn’t want them taking him anywhere.

By the time they got through, they’d more than half emptied the dive. “Wot’ll it be, mate?” the barman asked Walsh in English he might have picked up from an Australian in the last war.

“Another mug of the same.” For what Walsh felt like spending, the wine would be urine, too, and the whiskey or brandy loaded with enough fusel oil in them to make him wish he were dead come morning.

“Right y’are.” The barman was opening a bottle when Walsh heard
the scream of a big shell in the air. Two wars’ worth of reflexes threw him flat on the floor a split second before the shell burst in the street outside.

Plywood covered the plate-glass windows. But how much did that help when a 150—maybe even a 170—blew up far too close? Blast shoved in the plywood—and brought down part of the roof. Fist-sized chunks of jagged metal slammed through wood and glass. Not so many knifelike glass splinters spun through the air as would have without the plywood, but one as long as a pencil buried itself in the side of the bar about three inches in front of Walsh’s nose.

More shells screamed in. He rolled himself into a ball, not that that would do him any good if his luck was out. Maybe it wasn’t. None of the others hit close enough to do the tavern any more harm. After an eternity of ten or fifteen minutes, the bombardment stopped.

Walsh had to make himself unroll. He felt like a sowbug that had just escaped an elephant. As he dazedly picked himself up, he realized not everybody in the little bar had been so lucky. If he wanted that beer, he would have to get it himself. The barman’s blood splashed broken bottles behind the bar. The stink of the spilled potables almost drowned the butcher-shop odor of blood.

Other soldiers were down, too. Walsh did what he could for them, which mostly consisted of pulling tables and chairs off them and using their wound dressings. He hoped he helped a little.

The door had been blasted open. The door, not to put too fine a point on it, had been blasted off its hinges, and lay in the middle of the floor. He stepped over it and out into the street, which now had a crater big enough to hold a horse. It was filling up with water from a broken main.

Staggering away, Walsh realized one thing was absolutely true—and absolutely terrifying. The front
was
Paris.

•  •  •

THE FRONT WAS THE USSURI RIVER.
Northeastern Manchukuo was about as different from the Mongolian border region as anything Sergeant Hideki Fujita could imagine. Gone were waterless wastes with camels and wild asses running through them. Great forests of pine towered toward the sky here. Rain—and sometimes snow—poured down out of the sky. Japanese soldiers who’d been here longer than Fujita said tigers prowled these woods. He didn’t know about that. He’d seen no sign of them himself. But he wouldn’t have been surprised.

He did know there were Russians on the far side of the Ussuri. That was the same here as it had been 800 kilometers to the west.

Not far east of the Ussuri, the Russians’ Trans-Siberian Railroad ran south toward Vladivostok. If Japan could get astride the railroad, the USSR’s eastern port would fall into Japanese hands like a ripe fruit.

Fujita crouched in a log-roofed dugout artistically camouflaged with dirt and pine boughs and, now, the latest snowfall. He peered across the Ussuri toward the Red Army positions on the far bank. He couldn’t see as much as he would have liked. The other side of the border was as thickly wooded as this one—and the Russians, damn them, were at least as good as his own people at hiding what they were up to.

“What do you see, Sergeant?” Lieutenant Kenji Hanafusa asked.

“Trees, sir. Snow,” Fujita answered. “Not much else. No tigers. No Russians, either.”

“They’re there,” the lieutenant said.

“Oh, yes, sir,” Fujita agreed. “They’re everywhere. The Mongols would have fallen over years ago if the Russians weren’t propping them up.”

“No, the Russians are
really
everywhere,” Hanafusa said. “A quarter of the way around the world, they’re fighting the Poles and the Germans. And that’s why we’re here. When things get cooking on this front, they’ll be too busy in the west to do anything about it.”