The War That Came Early: Coup d'Etat (30 page)

Vaclav was anything but thrilled about
going back into the line when his leave ended. He was even less thrilled when he got there. Spanish spring packed the punch of Central European summer. The sun blazed down out of a sky a brighter, less washed-out blue than you ever saw in Prague. Dust was everywhere. It even smelled baked. And the stink of dead flesh seemed nastier than he’d ever known before. Meat spoiled in nothing flat in weather
like this.

When Vaclav complained about the reek, Benjamin Halévy said, “You notice it more because you got away from it for a while, you lucky son of a bitch.”

“Ahh, your mother,” Jezek replied without rancor. “That’s part of it, but I don’t think that’s all. The heat really does make everything smell worse. And how much hotter will it get in the summertime?”

“We’ll find out,” the Jew said.
“The Internationals talk about salt tablets and heatstroke.”

“Some of that’s probably just bullshit to make us turn green.” Vaclav wished he’d phrased it differently. The way he made it sound, some of what the Internationals said probably wasn’t bullshit. Well, they’d been
here longer than he had. Chances were they knew what they were talking about, dammit.

Shouldering his antitank rifle convinced
him the monster had got heavier while he was on leave. He couldn’t blame that on the warm Spanish spring. Pretty soon, though, he got used to listing to the right whenever he slung the rifle on his shoulder.

He started looking for targets well behind the Nationalists’ lines. He blew the head off some bigwig just getting out of a Mercedes. Remembering what Halévy had said a while earlier, he hoped
it was Marshal Sanjurjo, but evidently not. The Republic didn’t claim Sanjurjo’s scalp, and the Nationalists didn’t go into mourning—or hysterics—because they’d lost him.

They did try to pay back the Czechs and the Internationals. Artillery and mortar fire rained down on their positions. The bastards might have been saying
You want to play that way, we’ll make you sorry
. In fact, that had to
be exactly what they were saying.

A lot of the artillery rounds were duds, which saved some lives. Vaclav had noticed that a lot of the rounds the Republicans fired were duds, too. Which meant … what? That Spanish munitions factories weren’t everything they might have been? Evidently.

Vaclav was a careful, thorough sniper. He didn’t let himself fall into routines. He didn’t keep coming back
to the same hideouts day after day. Snipers who made stupid mistakes like that didn’t last long. When deciding to go right or left along the line, he’d toss a coin and do what it told him. If he didn’t know what he’d do till he did it, the shitheads trying to slaughter him couldn’t outguess him.

He potted another Nationalist officer a few days later. It was a hell of a long shot, going on two
kilometers. He was proud as hell when he watched the fellow grab at himself and slowly crumple. The Nationalist seemed much closer through the telescopic sight, but not
that
close.

Everybody on his own side congratulated him when he reported the kill. Only later, when he drank some Spanish peach brandy with Benjamin Halévy, did he think about what he’d actually done. “Mother of God!” he said.
“Everyone thinks I’m the best thing since sausage because I can murder people farther away than the other guys can.”

The Jew looked at him. His eyes were bottle-green. “You just figured this out?”

“Nooo.” Vaclav let the word stretch. “But it kind of hit me more than it usually does.”

“Well, if it makes you feel any better, maybe that was the son of a bitch who ordered the artillery barrage
after you nailed the last big shot,” Halévy said. “Even if he wasn’t, he was no friend of ours. You think he’d worry if he’d just shot you?”

“Who knows? Who knows anything these days?” Vaclav said. Maybe the brandy was hitting him harder than he’d thought it would. Or maybe he was looking at what he really did in the war, something few front-line soldiers could ever be comfortable trying. “This
is a fuck of a way to decide who gets to do what.”

“What would you rather do? Roll the dice?” Halévy said. “Suppose the other guy doesn’t go along with losing? Then what? You bash the asshole over the head with a rock, that’s what.”

That
was
what, all right. Force had a brute simplicity nothing else could match. If the other guy was dead, he couldn’t stop you. If he feared you’d kill him, he
wouldn’t have the nerve to try to stop you. “How does that make us any better than wildcats and wolverines?” Vaclav asked.

Halévy reached out and tapped the antitank rifle’s long barrel with the first two fingers of his right hand. “Wildcats and wolverines have to get close to do their dirty work,” he said. “We’re civilized. We can kill from a long way off.”

“Lucky us.” Vaclav’s voice sounded
hollow, even to himself. He picked up the brandy bottle and tilted it back. Sometimes
not
thinking was better. Nice, civilized brandy took care of that, all right.

Chapter 13

O
nce upon a time, Hans-Ulrich Rudel counted every mission he flew. That didn’t last long. As soon as the German wheel behind Paris failed—as it had in 1914—it became obvious the war would be long. In a long war, you’d keep going till you got killed or till your side finally won, whichever came first. Why
keep track of how often you went up, then?

He and Sergeant Dieselhorst were up again now, hunting Red panzers somewhere west of Smolensk. Down below, shellbursts and fires marked the front and the region west of it, the region through which the
Wehrmacht
had just advanced. The Russians were brave and determined; that much had been obvious from the start of the campaign against them. What had
also been obvious was that neither Soviet soldiers nor—especially—their officers were skilled fighting men.

The trouble with that was, the Ivans could learn. The longer they stayed in the ring, the more likely they would. And Russia was a big place. Hans-Ulrich had known as much going in—known in his head, anyhow. One glance at a map told you how enormous Russia was. But you had to fly over it,
you had to come hundreds of kilometers through
it and realize how many more hundreds you still needed to go, you had to see the swarms of foot soldiers and panzers and, well, everything the commissars could throw at you, before you began to
feel
the enormousness of the place.

You also had to wonder whether Germany was taking on more than she could handle. The Kaiser’s armies had smashed the Ivans
again and again. They’d knocked the Reds out of the war. But they hadn’t conquered Russia, beaten her and occupied her and held her down. Could the
Führer
’s forces manage that now?

If we can’t, what are we doing here? What am
I
doing here?
Rudel wondered. But he knew what he was doing: looking for panzers, KV-1s by choice. The
Landsers
had a devil of a time knocking out those monsters. A strike
from the air could do it.

Hans-Ulrich saw Russian panzers down below. A heartbeat later, he saw a biplane fighter pop out of a cloud and buzz straight at him. If it was a biplane, it just about had to be Russian. Had he entertained any lingering doubts, the muzzle flashes from its twin machine guns would have given him a hint.

“We’re under attack!” he shouted to Sergeant Dieselhorst, who of
course faced the other way. “It’s a
Chato
!” The name came from the war in Spain, and meant
flat-nosed. Chatos
were officially obsolescent, which didn’t make this one any less dangerous to him. It was faster than his Stuka, tough, and far more maneuverable. Which meant … It meant he was in trouble, dammit.

“What are you going to do?” Dieselhorst asked.

Instead of answering, Hans-Ulrich did it:
his right index finger came down hard on the firing button that worked the 37mm guns under the Ju-87’s wings. He’d shot down a French fighter with them, and a Russian job more modern than this one. The
Chato
was almost on top of him by then. Maybe he’d get lucky one more time.

And damned if he didn’t. As recoil staggered the Stuka in the sky, one of the armor-piercing rounds smashed into the
enemy fighter’s flat nose—the front of the engine cowling. It probably plowed all the way through the engine, and maybe through the pilot, too. Instantly a mass of flame, the
Chato
tumbled toward the ground.

“I got him!” If Hans-Ulrich sounded surprised, it was only because
he was. As he had in France and earlier here, he’d mostly been trying to scare off the enemy with the 37mms’ ferocious muzzle
flashes. Hitting him was an unexpected bonus.

“Way to go! You’re more than halfway to making ace,” Sergeant Dieselhorst said. They both laughed. And well they might have. A Stuka, especially a Stuka burdened with the heavy panzer-busting guns, was a most unlikely candidate for an ace’s mount.

That Russian was stupid
, Rudel thought. If he’d attacked from behind, especially from below, the Stuka
would have been as near defenseless as made no difference. But he’d decided to rush straight in, and he’d walked into a haymaker. War seldom forgave mistakes. The Ivan would never make another one. That was for sure. Hans-Ulrich hoped the AP round had killed him. Going down trapped in a flaming crate was a fate he didn’t wish even on his enemies.

His own heart still hammered in his chest. Combat
grabbed you by the throat in an instant. It was much slower letting go.

It wasn’t as if he and Dieselhorst were out of danger for this mission, either. Those panzers down below hadn’t gone away. If he didn’t do for them, they’d do for some of his countrymen. He swung the Stuka’s wing over and tipped the plane into a dive.

He thought a small sigh came through the speaking tube. Did Dieselhorst
think they’d done their duty for the day by shooting down the fighter? Hans-Ulrich didn’t ask him.
He
was the pilot; responsibility for what they did lay with him. Besides, he might have been wrong.

Those were KV-1s, all right. Even from a good height, they were noticeably bigger than the other Russian panzers—and noticeably bigger than even the biggest German machines. Embarrassing that the
Slavic
Untermenschen
could come up with such formidable monsters.

As he had when the
Chato
filled his windscreen, he hit the firing button. A split second later, he pulled back hard on the stick, yanking the Stuka out of its dive.

“You got him!” Sergeant Dieselhorst yelled jubilantly. “He’s burning like a crazy son of a bitch!”

How many men inside the panzer? Five, if it was crewed like the
larger German models. They were probably burning inside the chassis. Hans-Ulrich felt less sympathy for them than he had for the
Chato
’s
luckless pilot. The flyer had been a member of his guild, even if he was on the wrong side. These guys? Maybe somebody down on the ground would waste time feeling sorry for them. Rudel didn’t. He climbed again to attack another KV-1.

As he dove this time, big
muzzle flashes greeted him from the ground. Black puffs of smoke appeared around the Stuka. “Jesus fucking Christ!” Dieselhorst said. “They brought their flak up toward the front with them.”

The blasphemy made Hans-Ulrich frown, but all he said was, “I noticed, thanks.” Some Soviet officer had had a rush of brains to the head. If the Germans were going to attack your armor from the air, why
not
try your best to shoot them down while they were doing it?

Blam! Blam!
The 37mm guns thundered again. He mashed the throttle down, clawing for altitude as hard as he could. Sergeant Dieselhorst’s whoops told him he’d hit another panzer. That didn’t make him as happy as it might have. He felt as if the Stuka were just hanging in the air, waiting for the Ivans to bite chunks off it.

And they did.
Fragments tore into the back of the fuselage. “You all right, Albert?” he called.

“Ja,”
Dieselhorst answered. “We’ve lost some of the tail assembly, though. Does she still answer?”

Rudel cautiously tried the controls. The plane responded—more slowly than he would have wanted, but it did. The airflow felt rougher than it should have, too. He made up his mind—he wasn’t going to take on any more
Russian panzers today. He wasn’t going to take on any more Russian flak guns, either, not if he could help it. He turned southwest: the shortest way back to his own side’s lines.

“Good thing this beast can take it,” Dieselhorst said fondly.

“It sure is,” Hans-Ulrich agreed, but then he added, “Don’t jinx it, Albert. We aren’t back yet.” If another
Chato
dove on them, he didn’t know what he’d
do. No, as a matter of fact, he did know. He’d crash, that was what.

He drew small-arms fire crossing the line, nothing worse. Some of the small-arms fire came from the
Landsers
down there. He took the Lord’s name in vain himself, something he did only when badly provoked.

The controls got mushier. Dieselhorst said, “I’m looking back at it, and it won’t hold together much longer.” He didn’t
sound so fond any more.