We Install (6 page)

A ground-attack plane roared low overhead, firing cannon and rockets into the crowd of men. Just above Sack, it also let go with its chaff cartridges. But instead of strips of aluminized foil to baffle radar, the cartridges were filled with leaflets. They fluttered down on the Germans like warnings of doom from the heavens themselves.

Sack snatched one out of the air almost in front of his own nose. He read it quickly, before the cheap paper it was printed on turned soggy in the rain. THERE'S MONEY IN WAR … FOR SOME, the headline read. Sack snorted. “Not for me,” he said aloud. He collected 108 Deutschemarks a month, including his combat pay bonus.

He read on:
For others, this war can only mean death and mutilation. Maybe you think Berlin is fighting for the European values your propaganda so loudly proclaims. The hard fact is that you are carrying out Berlin's vicious orders, and those of Mercedes, Siemens, I.G. Farben, and other capitalists who drink your blood to fatten their dividend checks. Where will that get you? Your armies are marked down for defeat; all your sufferings are futile. Your blood is worth marks on the stock exchange—but what cost to your folks at home?

Sack's folks had been bombed out of their homes a few weeks before. With rising anger, he finished the leaflet:
We have common enemies. Every member of the People's Liberation Army hereby guarantees: if you lay down your arms, you will not be harmed or humiliated. Your personal belongings will not be touched. You will receive any medical treatment you need. You will surely get home. Come on over, soldier. Just put down your weapon and say—

Growling, Sack crumpled the paper and stuffed it into his pocket. He didn't care how the Reds said “surrender.” But one of the other
panzergrenadiers
gave him a half-curious, half-suspicious look. “Why are you keeping that
Scheisse
?” the fellow asked.

“
Scheisse
is right,” Sack answered. “How many better arsewipes have you seen lately?”

“None around here,” the other fellow admitted. “Last time I dumped, I scraped my backside raw with dry grass.”

The attack run of another Red fighter-bomber ended abruptly when a
Gepard
self-propelled antiaircraft cannon shot off its left wing. The plane slammed into the Dnieper with a tremendous splash. The Germans on the bank and on the boats cheered like wild men.

Little by little, Sack drew nearer the concrete stairway that led down to the embarkation point. As he filed down to the river, he fearfully watched the heavens—hemmed in as he was, he couldn't hope even to duck if shells or rockets started coming in or if another plane strafed the landing. He saw other faces also turned up to the rain. Knowing comrades shared his fright made it easier to bear.

Down by the river, military police with submachine guns kept the troopers boarding the boats in order. When a man in camouflage gear tried to shove his way onto an already crowded boat, they did not argue with him. One of them fired a short burst from point-blank range, then rolled the corpse into the Dnieper with the toe of his boot. After that, the line stayed orderly.

“This way! This way! This way!” a big fellow with a metal gorget shouted. Sack was among those whom he directed “this way”: aboard the
Yevgeny Vuchetich
. The men packed the boat's four decks so tight no one had room to sit down. Combat engineers had mounted a 20-millimeter antiaircraft gun at the bow and another on the third deck at the stern, but the lance-corporal doubted their crews had room to serve them.

The old boat's overloaded diesel roared flatulently to life. Slowly, so slowly, it pulled away from the riverbank. The
Sovietskaya Rossiya
was a couple of hundred meters ahead. It had drawn close to the colonnaded mass of the river station when a bomb or a big rocket struck it amidships.

The excursion vessel seemed to bulge outward, then broke apart and sank like a stone. Hundreds of soldiers must have gone down with it. More hundreds thrashed in the chilly water. Many of them quickly sank, weighted down by their gear.

The
Yevgeny Vuchetich
slowed to throw lines to survivors and pull aboard those they could. Sack stared in horror as men drowned within easy reach of a line because they were too stunned to reach out and grab it. The boat did not save as many as it might have under other, more peaceful, circumstances, both because it was already overloaded itself and because stopping would have left it even more vulnerable to an attack like the one that had sunk its sister.

At the Pochtovaya Ploshchad river station, more military police lined the docks. Like their fellows on the east bank, they screamed, “This way! This way! This way!” As he followed their pointing arms into the station, Sack wondered if they knew how to say anything else.

Milling men in grimy uniforms filled the main hall. Still more men in dog collars profanely urged them on their way. One of the herd, Sack shambled sheeplike past wall panels depicting big blond men in chain mail (Varangians, he supposed), men with guns under red and gold hammer-and-sickle banners entering Kiev in triumph, and factories pouring smoke into the sky under the same Soviet emblem. The lance-corporal deliberately looked away from those. He had seen all the red flags he ever cared to look at.

The German military police
did
know how to say more than “This way!”—the ones at the rear of the station were shouting, “To the subway station! To the subway station!” That was an order Sack obeyed gladly; the farther underground he went, the safer he felt from Red air attacks.

More crowds of wet, stinking, dazed soldiers jammed the platform. When he'd been here last, the station had been immaculate. It was a long way from immaculate now. The trains did not run on time, either. Advancing as much from the pressure of the men behind him as by his own will, Sack moved toward the track.

After a longish while, he boarded a train. It rumbled through the darkness of the tunnel, then came to a jerky stop at Kreshchatik Station, only two stops south of Pochtovaya Ploshchad. The few Ukrainian flags that draped the inside of the station were faded and stained; he'd have guessed they were the identical banners he'd seen when he came through Kiev heading east to the front. Now he was back, and the front with him.

When he walked outside into the rain, he met only silence. He looked around in confusion, then turned to the soldier nearest him and said, “Where the devil are the boys in the dog-collars? I figured they'd be screaming at us here, same as everywhere else.”

“Do you miss them so badly, then?” the other fellow asked, tugging at the straps of his pack. He and Sack laughed. They both knew the answer to that.

The lance-corporal started to say something more, but a public address system beat him to the punch and outshouted him to boot: “German soldiers detraining at Kreshchatik Station, report to Dynamo Stadium in Central Recreation Park. The stadium is north of the station. Signboards will direct you. German soldiers detraining at Kreshchatik Station—”

The recorded announcement ran through again, then shut off. Sack turned to the other soldier. “There, you see what they've done? They've gone and automated the bastards.”

Sure enough, signs with arrows pointed the way up Zankovetskaya Street. Sack and his new companion, whose name, he learned, was Bruno Scheurl, ambled toward the park with other weary men coming up out of the subway.

He glanced over at the Moskva Hotel, which had taken shell damage when the Germans forced their way into Kiev. It looked as good as new now, all the rubble cleared away, all the glass in place. He wondered how long that would last. If Germany held the line of the Dnieper, it might survive intact a while longer. If not—if not, the hotel would be the least of his worries.

The Palace of Culture was similarly pristine; the Museum of Ukrainian Fine Arts on Kirov Street had not been damaged when Kiev fell. Across Kirov Street from the museum lay Central Recreation Park. The trees, green and leafy when Sack last saw them, now were skeletons reaching bony branches up to the dripping sky. The grass in the park lay in dead, yellowish-white clumps.

“Ugly place,” Scheurl remarked.

“It's nice in summer,” Sack said. “But I'm damned if I know how even Russians—excuse me, Ukrainians—live through winter hereabouts, especially when winter seems to run about eight months out of the year.”

Near the entrance to Dynamo Stadium stood a granite monument more than twice the height of a man. In low relief, it showed four stalwart-­looking men in the short pants and knee socks of footballers. A nearby plaque told who they were, but its Cyrillic letters meant nothing to Sack. He jerked a thumb at it, asked, “Can you read what it says?”

“Maybe. I did some Russian in school.” Scheurl studied the plaque, then complained, “Ukrainians spell funny. I think it says these fellows were part of a team of Russian prisoners who beat a crack
Luftwaffe
team in an exhibition match during the last war—and got executed for it. The death match, they call it.”

“Ha!” Sack said. “I wonder what really happened.”

Shrugging, Scheurl headed into the stadium. Sack followed. Signs of all sorts in the stands and on the football field directed soldiers to their units. The rows of colorful seats were rapidly filling with field-gray. Military policemen served as ushers and guides. “What unit?” one of them asked Sack.

“Forty-First
Panzergrenadiers
, second regiment,” the lance-corporal answered.

The fellow with the gorget glanced down at a hastily printed chart. “Section 29, about halfway up. Haven't seen many from your division yet.”

Sack believed him. Too many comrades hadn't made it back over the Trubezh, let alone the Dnieper. He and Scheurl parted company, one of a thousand partings with brief-met friends he'd made since he came east.

The people who made the signs hadn't left a division's worth of room for the Forty-First
Panzergrenadiers
. Maybe they knew what they were doing; only a company's worth of men rattled around in the area, so many dirty peas in a pod too big for them. Sack found a couple of real friends here, though, men he'd fought beside for more than a year. They all looked as worn and battered as he felt. He asked after others he did not see. Most of the time, only shrugs answered him; once or twice, he got a grim look and a thumb's-down.

Somebody asked him in turn about Gustav Pfeil. “He took a leg wound, not too bad,” he said. “I got him to a doctor. He should be all right, unless”—he found himself echoing the Danish medical officer—“the field hospital gets overrun.”

“He may be luckier than all of us,” somebody else said. “If he does make it, they'll fly him all the way back to Germany.” Everyone in earshot sighed. Germany seemed more a beautiful memory than a real place that still existed. Reality—mud and blood and rain and fear—left scant room for beautiful memories.

Sack nervously looked around at the ever-growing crowd. “If they land a salvo of rockets in this place, they'll kill thousands,” he said.

“We've got our own rocket batteries in the trees east of here, on the far side of the square,” one of the other
panzergrenadiers
assured him. “They've knocked down everything the Reds have thrown so far.”

Sack nodded and tried not to think about the potentially ominous ring of those last two words. “I notice there aren't a whole lot of vehicle crews here,” he said. “Did the damned Asiatics take out that many panzers and combat vehicles?”

“No, that's not as bad as it seems,” the other
panzergrenadier
said. He was a little skinny fellow named Lothar Zimmer, and seemed to have been born without nerves. “There's a big vehicle park north of here, and most of the crews are trying to get their machines serviced. The fellows you see here are just the orphans, the ones who had theirs blown out from under them.”

“That's a relief, anyhow. I was beginning to wonder if we had any armor left at all.”

One thing the Germans knew almost instinctively was how to organize. Without that skill, the campaigns across the vast distances of European Russia would have been impossible to imagine, the more so as the Reds had more machines and far more men than did Germany or even Europe as a whole. Even with it, the tide was flowing west now, not east.

Still, as he watched Dynamo Stadium fill, Sack had to believe Germany would hold the onrushing Communist hordes out of Europe. Each of the men here was worth two, three, four of his foes, thanks to the combination of discipline and initiative the German army had mastered better than any other. Given a spell to regroup and breathe a little behind the barrier of the Dnieper, they'd surely halt the Reds and keep most of what they'd won in these past bloody two and a half years.

Yet no sooner had the sight of so many Germans sorting themselves out by unit boosted the lance-corporal's confidence than whispers began running through that crowd of soldiers. Sack could almost watch them spread by the way the men turned toward each other like so many stalks of wheat bending in the breeze. Where the whispers had passed, silence lay heavy.

They came piecemeal to the Forty-First
Panzergrenadiers
, a word here, a word there:
balkas
(the gullies that crisscrossed the country on both sides of the Dnieper), helicopters, Reds. By now, Sack had had a lot of practice at joining a word here with a word there and making a whole rumor of it. “They've crossed the river,” he said. He sounded almost as stunned as
Wachtmeister
Pfeil had after the shell fragment laid open his leg.

Another word came: bridgehead. Then another: breakthrough. Lothar Zimmer could paste them together, too. “If they break through here, where do we stop them next?” he said. No one answered him.

The stadium loudspeakers began to bellow, ordering units to report to concentration points scattered all through Kiev. Chatter stopped as men listened for their own assignments. Eventually, Sack's came: “Forty-First
Panzergrenadiers
to vehicle park seventeen, Forty-First
Panzergrenadiers
to vehicle park seventeen!”