Last Orders: The War That Came Early (19 page)

Ten minutes later, the
Landsers
tramped past an SdKfz 251 that was buried in mud past the axle of its front wheels. The armored personnel carrier’s two-man crew and the half-dozen glum Panzergrenadiers it had carried were all clumping around in the oozy muck, trying to excavate it or to get enough wood and brush under its power train to let it move again. Shelter halves or not, they were filthy and soaked.

“I take it back,” Adam Pfaff said. “I don’t want to be a Panzergrenadier after all.”

Baatz eyed the struggling, cursing soldiers and their disabled mount. “Maybe you aren’t as dumb as you look,” he said.

“Hey!” shouted one of the profanely unhappy men wrestling with the SdKfz 251. “How about a hand, you clowns?”

Pfaff clapped and clapped, as if applauding a great save on a football pitch. Arno Baatz guffawed. The Panzergrenadier called them every name in the book, and a few that would have scorched the pages had anyone tried to set them down.

“I don’t think he likes us,” Pfaff said in tones of mild surprise.

“Too bad,” Baatz answered. For once, the
Obergefreiter
didn’t seem to want to argue with him.

A military policeman with a gorget on a chain around his neck—he wore it outside the shelter half he used for a rain cape—stood at a crossroads directing traffic. “Which regiment?” he demanded whenever another group of soldiers came up from the east.

Baatz told him when he barked the question yet again. “Which way do we go?” the
Unteroffizier
asked.

“Your lot heads southwest.” The military policeman importantly pointed down the proper muddy track. He must have had the assignments memorized. Any list, except maybe one printed on a tin cup with crayon, would have turned to mush in short order.

“Damn chainhound,” Pfaff said as soon as they got too far from the man to let him hear. The military policemen’s emblem gave them the scornful nickname.

“He’s just doing his job.” Arno Baatz automatically respected authority. That was what authority was there for, wasn’t it? It was to Arno. But, as soon as the words were out of his mouth, he saw he’d lost points with Pfaff. Any combat soldier with anything kind to say about the military police turned into a white crow.

Everybody in the squad was grousing by the time they got to a large village an hour and a half later. Another
Kettenhund
with a gorget stood at the edge of it. “What’s your unit?” he growled. Again, Baatz told him. The military policeman looked disgusted. “Well, you buggered it up good and proper, didn’t you? You clowns were supposed to take the other fork.”

“What kind of
Teufelsdreck
is that?” Baatz said. He pointed back the way they’d come. “The fool with a gorget at the crossroads sent us down here.”

“I don’t care if the fucking Holy Ghost sent you,” the military policeman said. “You’ve got to go back and do it right.”

Baatz and Pfaff and the rest of the weary soldiers called him so many names, the Panzergrenadiers with the bogged-down halftrack would have listened hard. Back for an hour and a half and then on again for nobody knew how long? No wonder they swore!

For a little while, it rolled off the chainhound the way water rolled off the rubberized fabric of his shelter half. He was more patient than some military policemen Baatz had seen. Before long, though, that patience frayed. “Get moving,” he said, a new sharpness in his voice. “Do you want me to call for an officer? You won’t like it if I do, I promise.”

Miserably, hopelessly, the
Landsers
turned away and headed back
toward the crossroads. “What do you want to bet that other asshole tries to send us this way again?” Baatz said. No longer did he show any sympathy for military policemen.

“I hope the Ivans bomb the crap out of that place,” Adam Pfaff said, jerking a thumb at the village they’d just left. “The chuckleheads there deserve it.” Several of the other soldiers nodded. Even Baatz didn’t reprove the
Obergefreiter
. Mud kept slopping into his boots.

Getting back to the crossroads took longer than going the other way had. The tired soldiers had to keep stepping off the road while men and vehicles moving the other way went by. Many of the vehicles were horse-drawn, local
panje
wagons the Germans had impressed into service—that being a fancy turn of phrase for
stolen
. The wagons had tall wheels and boat-shaped beds. They dealt with mud better than anything from the
Vaterland
.

A different
Kettenhund
stood at the crossroads when Baatz and his men returned. He didn’t ask questions. He just waved them onto the other fork of the road. On a day without any large favors, Baatz gladly accepted the small one.

By the time he and his men made it to where they were supposed to go, night was falling. Other German troops filled every hut in the village. The weary
Landsers
ate their iron rations, fastened shelter halves together to make tents, and rolled themselves in blankets on top of more shelter halves to give themselves a quarter of a chance of staying dry. Baatz slept like a rock even so.

Ivan Kuchkov didn’t mind the
rasputitsa
, not even a little bit. He was happy to sit on his ass any old time, to roll cigarettes from
makhorka
and from newspapers he couldn’t read, to eat black bread and sausage, and to drink his daily Red Army vodka ration and as much homebrew as he could get his hands on besides. He was happy to do that any old time, sure. But when the mud time slowed all motion to a crawl, he got the perfect excuse to stay lazy.

Officers got their dicks all excited about patrolling no matter what, about keeping the pressure on the Hitlerite hyenas. Well, they could get their knickers in as big a twist as they wanted. Yes, Red Army men were able to keep moving no matter how muddy it got. Yes, they were better at it than the damned Nazis. Just because you were able to do something, though, didn’t mean you wanted to.

His section was holding a village somewhere in the western part of the Ukraine. The peasants who lived there disliked the Red Army less than a lot of Ukrainians Ivan had run into. For one thing, they’d found out that the Germans weren’t such a hot bargain. For another, they
could see that the NKVD would be calling the shots around here, and the
Gestapo
wouldn’t. They might not be jumping up and down about it, but they could see their bread had lard smeared on the one side, not on the other.

This particular village had in it a wide-faced blond gal named Feodosiya. She gave Ivan one more good reason not to go out there and get his dick shot off when he didn’t absolutely have to. She’d probably sucked some
Feldwebel
’s cock when the Germans held this place, but that didn’t bother him. One lesson he’d had hammered into him was that you did what you had to do to get by. That went double for women.

For now, Feodosiya had latched on to him. She didn’t worry about anything past whether what she did felt good and what she could get out of it. She could almost have been a man, in other words.

She saw the same directness in him. “You’re all right,” she told him one time after he slipped out of her. He thought that was what she said, anyhow. No, Ukrainian wasn’t the same as Russian. When Feodosiya wanted to, she could talk so he couldn’t follow her at all. She could get him to understand, though, too, when she felt like it. She did now: “You don’t mess around the way a lot of guys do.”

“Fuck, no, sweetie. Not me.” They lay near the fireplace, on a couple of blankets and under a couple of more. Rain dripped through the thatching on the roof in a few places. A teacup caught a little one, a pot a bigger one. Over in the far corner of the hut, a mud puddle was forming because nothing caught that leak. All the dripping and splashing noises made Ivan want to take a leak himself.

He got out from under the blankets and, naked, walked over to a small birchwood table somebody in the village must have made—somebody who wasn’t much of a carpenter. On the table sat a jar of
samogon:
homebrew, moonshine, unofficial vodka. Ivan knocked back a slug.
Samogon
came in every quality, from literal poison to stuff better than you could buy from the state distilleries. This was pretty good, and plenty potent.

“Here.” He carried the jar back to Feodosiya. She sat up to take it. Her tits sagged a bit when she did; she had to be around thirty. Ivan didn’t care. That just meant she knew how, as far as he was concerned.
“Here’s some hot water for you,” he said. Except for his cock, he couldn’t think of anything that had as many nicknames as vodka.

She drank. She smiled.
“Tak!”
she said. That was one of the Ukrainian words Ivan understood. It meant
yes
. He would have said
da
—in Russian,
tak
was an out-loud pause for thought, something like
you know
—but it wasn’t worth fussing over. Then she said something more, but he had no idea what.

He spread his hands. “C’mon, bitch,” he said. “Talk so an ordinary fucker can follow you.”

“I said, this tastes like the stuff Volodymyr makes.” Feodosiya came closer to ordinary Russian. But the
samogon
-cooker’s name reminded Ivan he wasn’t in Russia. It should have been Vladimir, dammit.

“Tall, skinny guy with a pointy nose? Kinda looks like a German prick?” he asked. Feodosiya nodded. So did Ivan. “Yeah, that’s who I got it from. Gave him some shchi from the stewpot.” Shchi—cabbage soup—and borscht were Red Army staples. You took cabbages or beets: things you could get almost everywhere. You threw some spices or whatever else you could liberate into the pot with them. You boiled it. If you had any sour cream, you plopped that into the borscht. If you didn’t, you managed without. Either way, you ate.

Feodosiya asked him something else. He frowned—he didn’t get it. She tried again: “Aren’t you cold, standing there with no clothes?”

“Oh,
cold
. That’s what you meant. Nah, I’m fine,” he answered.

She smiled again. “Probably because you’re so hairy,” she said. Ivan’s frown darkened into a scowl. He knew how hairy he was: hairy enough so people called him the Chimp. They didn’t do it much where he could hear them, though, because he walloped the shit out of them when they did. But then Feodosiya added, “I like my men hairy. That way, I’m sure I’m not messing around with another girl.”

He got back under the blankets with her and guided her hand to his crotch. “Here’s something else to give you a hint,” he said, his good humor altogether restored as her grip tightened on him. They went on from there.

Every so often, he did have to go out on patrol. He didn’t like squelching through the mud any more than anyone else would have.
And the Red Army helmet didn’t do one damn thing to keep rain from dripping down the back of his neck. The German model, with its greater flare, had to be better for that.

“German pussies,” he muttered as he slipped from one bush to the next. A squad of Germans, or a company, or a regiment, would still keep some survivors after taking on a like number of Russians. Everybody on both sides knew that. The Germans had better weapons and better tactics. But a German regiment couldn’t knock out three Red Army units the same size, or five. There simply weren’t enough Germans to win the war here.

By now, everybody on both sides knew that, too. Why else would the Fritzes be pulling back? Sooner or later, the Romanians and the Hungarians would jump ship on them. Ivan could see that, so he supposed Hitler also could. Then they’d get stretched even thinner.

Would the Poles bail out on them as well? There, Kuchkov wasn’t so sure. Poles hated Germans. Who didn’t, after all? But Poles hated Russians just as much. The bastards would have to be desperate before they cut a deal.

Motion. “Halt, fucker!” Kuchkov exclaimed, swinging the business end of his PPD toward … a stray dog. The skinny, dripping yellow beast looked even more miserable than he felt himself. But it ran away when he called it, which said it wasn’t such a dumb son of a bitch.

The only sign of Hitlerites Ivan saw was a Nazi helmet with a bullet hole through the side. The Fritz who’d been wearing that helmet would be holding up a lily now—unless that sorry dog had fed on him. Ivan doubted it had; it would have been fatter in that case. Not even a German helmet would keep out a rifle round.

A carrion crow flew off, yelling at Ivan. Maybe it had got its share of carrion from the German who’d used that helmet. Ivan hoped so. He also hoped the crow wouldn’t feast on him any time soon.

Not for a while
, he thought. The
rasputitsa
meant his odds were better, anyhow. He slogged on for a while, then headed back to the village. Feodosiya would be waiting. Even if he didn’t feel like flipping her legs up in the air as soon as he walked into the hut, keeping company with a friendly woman was something he hadn’t done enough of
for way too long. In the field, you almost forgot about such things. Almost, but not quite.

Plopped down in the Pacific between Kauai and Midway were assorted little rocks and atolls. In most of the ocean, they would have been nothing but menaces to navigation. For all Pete McGill knew, they remained menaces to navigation right where they were.