The War That Came Early: Coup d'Etat (42 page)

Later Polikarpov monoplanes also had flat noses, but the Spaniards and
Legion Kondor
flyers called them
Ratas
—Rats—to distinguish them from the biplane fighters. They were no match for a Bf-109. When you flew a Ju-87, though, that seemed much less comforting.

Bullets slammed into the Stuka from behind. The
Rata
flashed past and swung into a tight turn, obviously intending to make another
pass, this time from dead ahead. No matter how grossly inferior to a 109 the Polikarpov fighter was, it could outrun and outmaneuver a dive-bomber as if the Junkers plane were nailed in place in the sky.

Rudel did everything he could. He fired bursts from his twin
forward-facing 7.92mm machine guns. He tried to turn away from the ugly little monoplane with the big red stars on its green-painted
fuselage. The
Rata
looked as if it were homemade, possibly by someone who didn’t know much about airplanes. But Hans-Ulrich might have been trying to fly a rooster against a hawk.

A bullet scarred the Stuka’s windscreen. If that hadn’t been made of thick armor glass, the round would have scarred Rudel, too, or more likely left him too dead to heal and scar. More rounds hit the armored engine
compartment and the wing. Even if the engine was armored, the instrument panel screamed that the Ju-87 was losing fuel at a hideous rate and overheating even faster. Some of those rounds got home despite the protection.

The engine coughed, farted, ran smoothly for a few seconds, and then coughed again. Smoke started pouring out of it.

“You there, sir?” Sergeant Dieselhorst sounded worried, and
with good reason, too.

“I’m here,” Hans-Ulrich answered. “I was hoping you were.”

“We going to have to bail out?”

“Well …” Hans-Ulrich didn’t want to say yes. German parachutes left a lot to be desired, even if merely having a parachute would have made a pilot from the last war jealous. The idea of coming down near—or maybe among—the Ivans didn’t thrill him, either. But the engine coughed one
more time, then crapped out altogether. A Stuka glided better than a brick, but not a whole lot better. Sometimes the outside world answered questions for you. “Yeah, Albert, we’ve got to bail out.”

Dieselhorst tried to make light of it. “Not like we’ve never done this before, right?”

“Right.” Rudel’s voice sounded hollow, even to him. They’d been shot down once before, over France. Had the
poilus
caught them, they probably would have been taken prisoner. No guarantees with the Ivans, none at all.

But if they didn’t get out now, they were guaranteed dead. Pilot and rear gunner had separate sliding cockpit canopies. Maybe that wasn’t such a terrific design feature. If one of them got stuck …

They didn’t, not this time. And neither Hans-Ulrich nor Dieselhorst mashed himself to strawberry
jam by hitting the tail as he scrambled
free of his enclosure. Nothing left to do but fall, yank the ripcord, and hope. Later, Rudel realized he should have done some praying while all that was going on. He consoled himself by remembering he was just a trifle busy at the time.

Whump!
When the chute filled with air, it felt as if a mule kicked him right in the chops. His vision grayed out for
a moment. Then color and motion came back to the world.

He floated downward. Off to his left, Sergeant Dieselhorst waved to him from under another silk canopy. Hans-Ulrich waved back. He yanked on the lines to spill wind from one side of the canopy and steer himself away from the Red-infested woods. He also anxiously looked around for that
Rata
. Russian fighter pilots had the charming habit of
machine-gunning helpless parachuting German flyers. It wasn’t sporting, but they didn’t care. To his relief, the
Rata
was nowhere in sight.

Russian soldiers on the ground did fire at him and Dieselhorst. A bullet thumped through the taut silk above him. If the hole turned into a tear … He’d regret that all the way down, but not afterwards. He didn’t worry about a bullet thumping through him till
he’d almost reached the ground. He wondered why the devil not. Stupidity came to mind.

As the ground rushed up below him, he had to worry about his landing. He’d sprained an ankle—only luck he hadn’t broken it—the last time he came down in a chute. He didn’t want to be out of action for weeks now. He bent at the knees and at the waist, as training suggested. Another Russian bullet cracked past
him, too close for comfort. Training never talked about distractions like that.

Thud!
He made it. Not a pretty landing, but the moving parts all seemed to work. He cut himself free of the parachute, then grabbed for his Luger—soldiers were loping toward him. But his hand fell back: they wore
Feldgrau
, and helmets of a familiar shape.

Now—did they realize
he
was a countryman? “Good job!” one
of them yelled, waving. Hans-Ulrich grinned and waved back—they did. He looked around. Albert Dieselhorst was free of his chute and on his feet, too. They’d be flying again as soon as they got a new bus.

Chapter 18

S
tas Mouradian’s latest airstrip lay not far in front of Smolensk. The Germans and their allies kept coming forward, despite everything the Red Army and Air Force could do to stop them. If Smolensk fell … Stas wasn’t a member of Stavka, the Soviet General Staff, but he could see how bad that would be. Smolensk
was the great bastion on the road to Moscow.

If Moscow fell, the game would be up. He could see that, too. Maybe Stalin would find refuge somewhere beyond the Urals. Having traveled the width of the USSR, Stas knew how vast the country was. But could you keep fighting with your capital gone? Would anyone follow your orders if you tried?

But that was a worry for another day, probably a worry
for another year. The red flag with the gold hammer and sickle still flew over Smolensk. The swastika was still hundreds of kilometers from Moscow. That Stas could wonder what would happen if the capital fell said things weren’t going the way Soviet authorities wished they would.

It wasn’t that serious yet. Maybe it wouldn’t get that serious. But if Stalin hadn’t been greedy, if he hadn’t decided
he could take Wilno away
from Poland on the cheap, the war between the USSR and the
Reich
might well have stayed a war in name only. Till Smigly-Ridz asked Hitler for help, the Soviets and the Nazis couldn’t get at each other without violating some buffer state’s neutrality. That would have been more dangerous than it was worth.

Would it have been more dangerous than thinking that Stalin’s greed
had led him into an enormous mistake? Now there was an interesting question for any Soviet citizen to contemplate! As long as you kept your mouth shut, you had a chance of staying safe (from the NKVD, anyhow; the
Luftwaffe
was a different story). But Mouradian had heard—as who in the Soviet Union had not?—of people arrested for no better reason than an expression some Chekist didn’t fancy. Those
people went into a camp as readily as the ones brave or crazy enough to criticize the regime out loud. They came out of the camps as readily, too: which is to say, just about never.

The distant rumble of artillery distracted Stas from such gloomy reflections. He cocked his head to one side, listening. Those were Russian guns. That was good. No—it was better. He would really have had something
to worry about if he heard German guns from here.

But the squadron had been flying out of this airstrip for only about a week. When the Pe-2s got here, you couldn’t hear anybody’s guns. Stas had been used to fields farther forward. He’d been used to, if not happy about, the sound of guns. Once or twice, he’d had to fly off a runway enemy artillery was suddenly able to reach. Being out of earshot
of the front had felt relaxing.

Now he wasn’t any more. He wasn’t so relaxed, either.

At the edge of the airstrips, a technician wearing earphones manned a sound detector that looked like nothing so much as half a dozen enormous hearing trumpets. They could pick up approaching enemy planes at distances greater than the naked eye could reach. They could some of the time, at any rate. When everything
went just right. When other noise didn’t distract or confuse the technicians.

There has to be a better way
, Stas thought. If he knew what that way was, they’d pin a Hero of the Soviet Union medal on him in a flash. At a guess, it had something to do with radio. Everything modern and scientific
seemed to. His guesses stopped right there. He was a pretty good pilot, but he’d never make an electrical
engineer.

The technician jerked off the earphones and ran to a bell mounted on a nearby post. He rang the bell as if his life depended on it. And his life was liable to, for he shouted, “They’re coming! They’re coming!”

A kicked anthill would have shown more chaos, but not a lot more. People ran every which way. Antiaircraft gunners manned their cannons and pointed them west. The technician
was pointing in that direction, but Stas couldn’t tell whether the gunners followed his lead or simply knew German planes were most likely to appear from that direction. Pilots and groundcrew men jumped into zigzagging trenches to shelter from the expected attack. Some of them had rifles. If they fired at the
Luftwaffe
planes, it might make them feel better. It was unlikely to do anything else.

Stas realized he was the only man just standing there. He wasn’t running. He wasn’t jumping. He wasn’t training an antiaircraft gun in the desired direction or chambering a round in his Mosin-Nagant.

Now he could hear the ominous drone of German airplane engines without the fancy sound detector. Their note was different from that of Soviet powerplants. It seemed deeper, and somehow imbued with
sinister purpose. Maybe that was Stas’ imagination. On the other hand, he knew he was far from the only Soviet fighting man who imagined the same thing.

“What the hell are you doing there, you stupid fucking idiot? Growing roots like a beet?” a groundcrew sergeant shouted. “You don’t get your cock in gear, they’ll plant you, all right!”

Where the rising drone from those bombers hadn’t unfrozen
Stas, the sergeant’s profanity did. That might have been because it was aimed at him personally, unlike the bomb loads that would come whistling down any second now. He sprinted toward the closest trench.

He hadn’t even got there before the antiaircraft guns started pounding away for all they were worth. He jumped in. Somebody down below caught him and steadied him. “Thanks,” he said, without
noticing who.

“Any time.” Lieutenant Colonel Tomashevsky didn’t even sound sarcastic. Squadron commanders caught on the ground in a bombing raid
needed to run for their life like anybody else. When they jumped into a trench, they had to hope somebody would grab them and keep them from falling on their face. It was, of course, simply an application of the Golden Rule, no matter how much scorn
a good Marxist-Leninist would heap on the book from which that Rule came.

During the last war, someone had claimed there were no atheists in the trenches. Stas didn’t know if he would have gone that far. He did know he had to make a conscious effort to keep from crossing himself when the
Luftwaffe
bombers came overhead. You didn’t dare reveal too much. His hand twitched, but that was all it did,
even when the bombs started bursting on and around the strip.

“Lord, have mercy! Christ, have mercy!” A man in mechanic’s coveralls was too scared to worry about what he gave away. He crossed himself again and again, as if possessed. He was only a corporal. Maybe he thought he was too small a fish for the NKVD to care about. If so, he was an optimist. Or maybe he believed none of the other frightened
men in the trench with him would betray him to the NKVD. Well, he had a chance of being right about that. How good a chance? Stas wasn’t willing to risk it.

Something not far enough away blew up. “The ammunition store for one of our guns—maybe for a battery,” Lieutenant Colonel Tomashevsky said.

Mouradian nodded. That was what it had sounded like to him, too. Something else was on his mind:
“Where are our fighter planes, Comrade Colonel?”

He didn’t think they could possibly be where Tomashevsky suggested. For one thing, he’d always supposed the Devil was male. But wherever they were, they weren’t here. And that was a crying shame. Of all the German bombers, only the Ju-87 had anything close to the Soviet Pe-2’s performance. The Do-17s and He-111s overhead would have been easy meat
for even biplane Polikarpov fighters, let alone their monoplane cousins or the hotter, faster new MiGs. Would have been … Some of the saddest words in Russian or any other language.

At last, after doing what they’d come to do, the Germans went away. Soviet fire had brought down one of them. The shattering roar when its
whole bomb load blew as it hit the ground almost shook Stas’ fillings loose.
But when he stuck his head up to look around, he grimaced. For all the destruction the Nazis had worked, they hadn’t paid much of a price. Most of the buildings around the airstrip were either gone or burning. The strip itself was cratered like photos of the moon. And four columns of greasy black smoke marked Red Air Force bombers’ funeral pyres. Stas hoped none of them was his. Without revetments,
it would have been worse. Even with them, it was plenty bad enough.