Last Orders: The War That Came Early (21 page)

If you aimed irony at the Soviet government, though, it would aim something back at you. One of those bullets in the back of the neck, maybe, in a Lubyanka basement. Or a twenty-five-year term at a camp north of the Arctic Circle. They rarely bothered with mere tenners any more. A term like that would also kill you, and might not take much longer to do the job than a pistol shot would. If they sent you off to Kolyma for twenty-five, you’d never see Armenia again—that was for sure.

“I want to bomb Berlin, that’s what I want to do,” Mogamedov said.
“They’ve dropped plenty on us. I want to pay them back, let the sons of bitches see what it’s like.”

“There you go!” Stas clapped his hands. “Blow that stupid, ugly toothbrush mustache right off Hitler’s lip!” He’d started the war flying out of an airstrip in Slovakia, bombing the German invaders of Bohemia and Moravia. That was as close to hitting Germany as he’d come.

Some Russian flyers had bombed Berlin, as the English and the French had. But Soviet long-range bombers were slow and lumbering. No one talked about it in tones much above a whisper, but only a fraction of the ones that took off to strike the German capital made it back to the
Rodina
again.

Mogamedov lit a
papiros
. He offered the pack to Stas, who took one with a word of thanks. The Azeri said, “If we keep dropping shit on the Germans’ heads here, sooner or later we’ll push them back far enough so our Pe-2s can reach Berlin.”

“After the mud dries out,” Stas said. Isa Mogamedov nodded.

If there was a more backbreaking, filth-making job than replacing a thrown panzer track in Russian mud and rain, Theo Hossbach couldn’t imagine what it might be. The job, in fact, was nasty enough to have pried several swear words out from between his usually tight-buttoned lips.

And what he said sounded like love poetry next to the fusillade of curses that poured from Adi Stoss. Most of what the driver said was aimed at himself. His tight left turn, after all, was what had made the Panzer IV shed the track in the first place.

“Himmeldonnerwetter!”
he fumed. “A seeing-eye dog right out of driving school could have done that better than I did! I mean, a fucking
blind
seeing-eye dog could have.”

“Take it easy, Adi,” Hermann Witt said. “I told you to turn left, and you turned left.”

“And this piece of shit went and came off,” Adi snarled. “If I’d been a little smoother, it wouldn’t have.”

He gave a savage tug on the rope attached to one end of the thrown track. Little by little, the crew were wrestling the links over the return
rollers and back toward the drive sprocket. Once they got the track onto the sprocket—if they ever did—they could reattach it to the other end, adjust the tension, and ride off into the sunset like cowboys in an American Western.

Sergeant Witt, perhaps incautiously, said as much. Adi clapped a muddy hand to his muddy forehead—he’d already used the gesture before, more than once. “Sure we can,” he said. “If we don’t bog down completely in the meantime. If the Ivans don’t jump us. If—”

“If you don’t quit pissing and moaning,” Witt broke in. Just like the track, the panzer commander’s patience had come apart.

Adi Stoss stared at him. Witt hardly ever barked like that. When he did, he had good reason to. Adi, luckily for him, owned enough mother wit to see as much. “Sorry, Sergeant,” he said, his voice sheepish.

One of the things that made Witt a good panzer commander was not staying mad at the other guys in the crew. “All right,” he said. “Let’s get back to work, then.” Another thing that made him a good commander was working hard and getting filthy like everybody else.

As they yanked and strained and swore, they all kept their Schmeissers where they could grab them in a hurry. Theo didn’t think any Red Army men were in the neighborhood, but he wouldn’t have sworn an oath in court. The Germans called their Russian foes Indians not least because of how they popped up where you least expected them. And thinking about riding off like cowboys naturally called Indians to mind.

In the distance, artillery grumbled and machine guns chattered. When you were cooped up inside your steel box, you never heard things like that. All you heard was the engine’s growl and the rattle and clank of the suspension. Enemy bullets hitting the panzer sounded like gravel on a tin roof. Odds were you wouldn’t hear the round that got through your armor. You’d just hear yourself scream—but not for long.

After a couple of hours of scraped knuckles and broken fingernails and a cut or two, they had the track back in place. Kurt Poske surveyed their handiwork and delivered the verdict: “Boy, that was fun.”

“My ass!” Adi said.

The loader eyed him, then shook his head. “Sorry, sweetheart,” he lisped in falsetto, “but it’s not
your
ass I crave.”

“Well, that’s a relief,” Adi told him. “If you talk that way, though, you’re probably after Theo’s instead.”

Theo jumped. He hadn’t expected to get dragged into the raillery. To make sure Kurt had no doubt where he stood on such things, he clapped a battered, protective hand to the seat of his grimy black coveralls. Everybody laughed.

“Come on, girls.” Sergeant Witt lisped and shrilled, too. “Let’s get back to business, shall we?” His voiced dropped into its normal register. “No chocolate-stabbers in this crew. That’s one thing we don’t have to worry about, anyway.”

As Theo clambered into the panzer again, he was chewing on Witt’s comment. By Adi’s expression, so was he. Also by his expression, he wasn’t so sure he fancied the flavor.

But Witt was all business after Adi fired up the Maybach engine and the panzer got moving again. At the sergeant’s order, Theo radioed the company commander and regimental headquarters to let them know the crew had got the track back on. They both acknowledged the report. If they were delighted at the news, they hid it very well.

As the panzer chugged along, Adi glanced toward Theo and said, “I’m trying to drive like I’m on eggs. I don’t want to have to do that again any time soon.”

“I believe you,” Theo said.

Adi smiled, as people often did when they got Theo to talk. Then he said, “I hope we stop in one of those Russian villages with the bathhouse where you throw the water onto hot rocks and you steam till you can’t stand it any more—then you get a bucket of cold water in the kisser or jump in the snow if it’s wintertime and whack each other with the birch-twig bundles. I’ve got all the dirt in the world on me right now.”

“Not all of it.” Theo spoke again. He held up his hands so Adi could see he was wearing a good bit of the world himself.

“Well, maybe you’re carrying some, too.” Adi dropped his voice so Theo could still hear but the three crewmates back in the turret wouldn’t be able to: “You haven’t been carrying yours for the past two thousand years, though.”

Theo wondered what he was supposed to say to that. He said what he usually said: nothing.

“You know what the real bastard is?” Adi hadn’t expected anything different, and went on without waiting for any kind of reply: “The real bastard is, if they come for me, it won’t matter that I’ve spent a couple of years blowing up Ivans with you clowns. They won’t care. And all of you are liable to wind up in deep shit if they decide you knew about me but didn’t say anything.”

“Knew what?” Theo asked, as if he hadn’t the faintest idea what the driver might be talking about.

“
Ach, so
. Funny, Theo. I’m laughing, see?” The noises that came out of Adi’s mouth might have sounded like laughter to him, but they wouldn’t have to any normal human being. After those noises, he said, “Knew why—or one of the reasons why—I don’t go to soldiers’ brothels. The girls’d be too likely to remember me afterwards.”

All this was as close as he ever came to naming his real—and serious—problem. Theo didn’t think it was that big a worry. The girls German authorities dragged into soldiers’ whorehouses in these parts rarely had a long
afterwards
in which to remember anybody, or any body part. Of course, that in itself was another reason both Theo and Adi stayed away from such establishments.

When they bivouacked, it wasn’t in a village with a bathhouse. It was in the middle of a muddy field with the grass and weeds all torn up by panzer tracks and starting to yellow. There was a field kitchen in amongst the other panzers. Because their Panzer IV got there late, the stewed grain and turnips and sausage in the boiler were getting cold. Theo and his crewmates filled their mess tins anyhow. The stew spackled over the empty places between their ribs.

You hated to get under your panzer in weather like this. It was liable to sink down into the mud and squash you. If you used shelter halves to make a tent, you’d put your blanket on the mud. If you used the shelter halves for ground sheets, you’d get rained on. Theo slept sitting up inside the panzer. He was so tired, he didn’t care about being uncomfortable. The other guys fought the rain. To him, that was their problem.

During the summer, Spain got hotter than Czechoslovakia ever did. Vaclav Jezek bitched about that. During the winter, the cold of the central Spanish plateau pierced him to the root. He bitched about that, too.

During the fall, it rained. He really bitched about that. Any soldier hated being in the field while God pissed on him. A sniper, who had to stay in one place for hours at a stretch, hated it even more.

Benjamin Halévy was as sympathetic as usual: “You can always throw away your elephant gun and go back to being an ordinary soldier, you know.”

Vaclav hated the antitank rifle’s weight and clumsy length. He clutched the monster as if it were his beloved just the same. “I’ve lugged this fucker all over Western Europe,” he said, exaggerating a little but not all that much. “I’ll be damned if I get rid of it now. It’s part of me.”

“Like a wart. Or a tumor,” Halévy said.

He might have been right. Vaclav was too stubborn to care. If he weren’t, he wouldn’t have wound up in the army of the Czechoslovakian
government-in-exile to begin with. He gave Halévy a gesture that, to the American Internationals, meant everything was fine. To someone from Central Europe, it implied something else. Halévy chuckled. He never got stuffy about rank. And if he weren’t a stubborn anti-Fascist himself, he wouldn’t have ended up in Spain, either.

Out Vaclav went before dawn the next morning. If he caught pneumonia lying in a shell hole that slowly filled with water … then he did, that was all. He hadn’t yet. He’d come down with the trots from eating bad food a few times, but that was about all. He didn’t know anybody who’d fought for a while without having that happen to him.

On a day like this, he could get closer to the Nationalists’ lines than he did most of the time. They wouldn’t be able to spot him through the rain. How much he’d be able to see was another interesting question, though. He’d replaced the cardboard overhangs on his binoculars and rifle sight with ones he carved from scraps of wood, but he’d still be peering through the rain himself.

Strips of torn burlap and bits of foliage attached to his uniform and helmet and rifle broke up his outline. When he found a good hiding place, he’d rub mud on his cheeks and on his hands so he wouldn’t show up against the background.

Nobody had taught him any of this business. He’d learned it or made it up as he went along. He wondered why no sharp-eyed German had killed him in France before he figured out what was what. A couple of them had tried—he knew that. He was still here, while the Fritzes’ kin back in the
Vaterland
must have got wires to let them know their loved ones had died for the
Führer
.

Come to think of it, this morning he might need to do his face, but his hands would get plenty filthy crawling to his hidey-hole. He found a good one, and improved it with his entrenching tool so the water ran down to the bottom and didn’t pool right under him.

By the time the gloomy day broke, he was ready for whatever might happen. He lay very still: he might almost have been a forgotten corpse himself. A sparrow certainly thought he was. The stupid little bird landed less than a meter from his face and started hopping around looking for seeds or bugs or whatever else it could pop into its beak.

“Hey, bird!” he said. “What d’you think you’re doing, bird?” He
spoke quietly. He thought it was the motion of his lips rather than the noise he made that scared the sparrow. Whatever it was, the bird let out a horrified chirp and took off as if it had a 109 on its tail. God tracked falling sparrows, didn’t He? Well, here was one going up for Him to watch.

A few Nationalists started shooting at the Republican line. Each of them fired slowly, taking a long time to work the bolt on his rifle and load a fresh round. They had orders to shoot, but they weren’t happy about them. Or, more likely, they hadn’t had their first slug of espresso yet, so they were only half awake.

He could have killed them. They were spending way too long up on the firing step, too. But they weren’t worth wasting ammunition on, not for a sniper like him. They weren’t worth giving away his position for, either.
The small change of war
, Vaclav thought.