Armistice

by Harry Turtledove

Gachechiladze chuckled harshly. “We go long enough, maybeso we see your Eigims again, hey?”

  “I’ve heard ideas I liked more—I’ll tell you that,” Konstantin said.

  The loader needed a moment to realize the tank commander hadn’t gone and repeated himself. When he did, he chuckled again. “Me, too, specially we still gots dumb metyeryebyets at our gun,” he said.

  Pyotr Polikarpov was sitting right next to him in the turret. He paid no attention to anything Gachechiladze said. Maybe he thought listening to a loader was beneath a gunner’s dignity. Or maybe he just didn’t make the effort to penetrate Gachechiladze’s thick Georgian accent. Either of those, to Konstantin’s way of thinking, did indeed make him a dumb motherfucker.

  Before sunrise the next morning, the troop train moved east again. It hadn’t even got to the border between Kaliningrad Oblast and the Lithuanian SSR before bandits started shooting at it. These guys weren’t fooling around the way the Poles had been. They knew the Red Army men weren’t just going to pass through their shitty little country. The Russians were coming to Lithuania to do a job of work, work the Lithuanians didn’t want done.

  They had rifles, machine pistols, and machine guns. None of those would do much to a tank. But things stopped being funny when they started lobbing mortar bombs at the train. A hit from one of those could wreck a tank if it came down on the engine louvers. It could wreck the locomotive. Or it could tear up the tracks and force a derailment.

  Ignoring the nuisance fire, Major Zhuk went from flatcar to flatcar and tank to tank of his command. “The gloves are off,” he told Konstantin. “You see anybody shooting or getting ready to shoot at us, ventilate the pussies. You got that?”

  “I serve the Soviet Union, Comrade Major!” Morozov said. After Zhuk went on to the next tank, Konstantin thumped Polikarpov on the shoulder. “You heard the boss man. Anything that looks like trouble, blow holes in it. How’s that sound?”

  “It’s all right with me,” Polikarpov said. Here, where he could actually be useful, he sounded as bloodthirsty as a tulip.

  He did do some firing with the machine gun, though, not long after daybreak. Konstantin looked out through the periscopes built into the T-54’s cupola. He saw the enemy machine gun spitting bullets at the train. He saw Polikarpov’s tracers reaching out for it.

  “By the Devil’s granny’s stinking old cunt, can’t you shoot straighter than that?” he howled.

  “Sorry, Comrade Sergeant. I’ve never fired at a stationary target from a moving gun platform before.”

  “How is that different from firing at a moving target from a stationary tank?” Morozov demanded.

  “I don’t know, Comrade Sergeant. It just is.” Polikarpov sounded offended that anyone should question his idiotic explanation.

  Things didn’t get better when they rolled into Lithuania. They’d just passed through the town of Taurage, a few kilometers inside the border, when the train stopped. Konstantin didn’t hear any crashes or booms that made him think the engine had been hit or had gone off the tracks. That was about the only good news he could find.

  Genrikh Zhuk pounded on the turret roof a few minutes later. “Unchain the tank,” he said. “As soon as they position the ramp, dismount. We’ll go into action as soon as enough of us get down. This is real war. They have Panzerfausts and old tanks. They’re bastards, they’re bandits, but they mean it. Be careful. Don’t do anything stupid.” He moved on.

  Can I throw Polikarpov out? Konstantin wondered. He passed the word to his crew. “Panzerfausts are bad news. They were the Nazis’ RPGs at the end of the Great Patriotic War. They don’t have much range, but they can kill a tank. Pyotr, you see a guy with a stovepipe, kill him fast, you hear?”

  “I’ll do it, Comrade Sergeant,” the gunner said, which was at least the right answer. He added, “Bandits must be Nazis themselves if they saved that shit all these years.”

  He might have been right. It didn’t matter now, though. And, if the Lithuanians had tanks, those wouldn’t be German leftovers. No, they’d be looted from Soviet armories. How much treason had gone into that? Not a little bit, or I’m a virgin, Morozov thought.

  Out of the cupola went his head. You had to be able to see. If that gave snipers a better shot at you, then it did. Life was full of chances.

  Here came a tank, from the direction of Taurage. It was one of the original T-34s, the ones with the 76mm gun and the small, two-man turret. At first, Konstantin just accepted that. Then, even before he saw the yellow-green-red flag painted on the turret, he realized such an obsolete machine was exactly the kind the bandits were likeliest to be able to steal. “Kill it, Pyotr!” he screamed into the intercom.

  Pyotr fired the T-54’s main armament—and missed. The T-34 fired back. It missed, too. The commander in there was his own gunner. The Fritzes had shot rings around those T-34s, but with their puny guns it did them less good than they wanted. Pyotr took another shot, and missed again. A third, and another miss. Konstantin swore horribly. The T-34 hit his tank then, but the undersized round didn’t get through.

  One more try from the worthless Polikarpov. This time, the Lithuanian tank started to burn. “Took you fucking long enough,” Konstantin snarled.

  Then, too late, he saw a lance of fire flying straight at his tank. The Panzerfaust might have been old, but it still worked. The shaped charge slammed into the engine compartment. Fire and smoke erupted. The T-54 stopped.

  “Out!” Morozov screamed. “Out! Out!” The hatches were narrow, but everybody made it. Konstantin had a pistol. Nodar Gachechiladze had a PPSh. That was it, against a country full of bandits who hated every Red Army man ever born.

  ROLF MEHLEN OPENED his tin of American rations and eyed the canned scrambled eggs and ham with resignation. “This isn’t what anybody would call good, but it keeps you going, I guess,” he said.

  “It’s better if you heat it up first,” Max Bachman said.

  “Better isn’t good. Besides, I haven’t got the patience.” As if to prove as much, Rolf spooned the glop into his mouth.

  Max had some different ration—Rolf thought it was beef stew. He also shoveled it straight into his gob. Rolf didn’t blame him; the stew was just as bad warm. After Max swallowed, he said, “No, this isn’t great, either. But you know what?”

  “No. What?” Rolf said obligingly.

  “It beats the hell out of half-rotten horsemeat stewed with turnip tops.”

  “Well, yeah. Those were the days, by God. Christ, there were plenty of times when we wanted to jump up and down and dance because we had horsemeat, even if it was off. How much fighting did you do on an empty belly?”

  “Too much, same as you.” Max’s spoon scraped the bottom of the tin. “Haven’t had to do much of it this time around, though. Nice being on the end of the Amis’ supply chain, isn’t it?”

  “It’s a miracle the Americans aren’t all too fat to walk, let alone fight,” Rolf said. If he mocked them, he didn’t have to think about how much they had. Last time around, they’d supplied big chunks of the Russian and English armies along with their own, and they’d been fighting Japan at the same time as Germany. They sure weren’t any poorer this time around. It was daunting, if you let it be.

  Max lit a Lucky Strike—more bounty from the rations. He blew out smoke. “How’s the javelin-catching going?”

  “The what?” Rolf knew he sounded irritated. He hated it when he didn’t get a joke, and Max’s were more obscure than most.

  “Mine-clearing duty.” The printer condescended to explain. “You know what they call somebody who does that long enough?”

  “As a matter of fact, I don’t, but what difference does it make? You’re going to tell me anyway, right?”

  Instead of telling him right away, Max blew him a kiss. “You’re cute when you’re mad,” he said. “And I am going to tell you, because you’re obviously too dumb to figure it out for yourself. They call him a casualty, that’s what.”

  “Yob tvoyu mat
’,” Rolf said—it sounded filthier in Russian. “Besides, that’s rubbish. Some of those guys made it all the way through the last war. They were good.”

  “They were good and lucky,” Max said. “And they had the fancy training. What do you have besides a detector and a probe?”

  “Enough sense to be careful,” Rolf retorted. “I didn’t blow myself up like that stupid Ivan.”

  “You know, it’s peace now, or pretty close. They’ll be mustering us out. We can go home, maybe even in one piece. If I’d been able to get leave, I’d’ve done it already.”

  “I guess so.” Rolf knew he should have sounded enthusiastic. He didn’t, not even to himself.

  Max blew a stream of smoke at him. “I know what’s wrong with you.”

  “Nothing’s wrong with me!” Rolf said hotly.

  “Like hell. I’ll tell you what it is, too. You don’t want peace to break out. You want to go right on shooting Russians.”

  “That’s—” Rolf broke off. He wanted to say it was all a load of trash. But he couldn’t, not without having both Max and himself know what a liar he was. He’d never felt more alive, more real, than when the Leibstandarte Adolf Hitler roared into action against the Reich’s enemies. He’d thanked God when this new war broke out. He could open up his business again at the same old stand and go back to doing what he did best in all the world: killing Communists.

  Oh, it wasn’t the same as it had been in the good old days. Some swishy queers had rewritten the rule book. People had kittens if you shot prisoners now, for instance. But it was still war, the best thing there was, maybe including pussy.

  “You see?” Max said with a knowing chuckle.

  “Oh, shut up,” Rolf told him. He tried a new tack: “The Führer was the same way, you know. The fighting he did in Flanders in the first war, that was the high point of his life.”

  “He was a runner then, wasn’t he?” Max said.

  Rolf nodded. “That’s right.”

  “From what my pa and his Bierstube buddies said, most of those guys got killed in a few weeks. Except for the time he caught some gas, Adolf went through that whole war with hardly a scratch. Talk about lucky!”

  “God looked out for him.” Rolf meant it.

  But Max just rolled his eyes. “If God looked out for Germany, Hitler would’ve caught a fragment between the eyes in 1914. We’d all be better off if he had.”

  Rolf turned away in disgust. “Why do I waste my time talking with you?”

  “You don’t like it, go out to the minefields and talk with the mines,” Max said. “Half the time in the last war, I thought you SS clowns fought so you could die for the Vaterland instead of making the Russians die for the rodina.”

  “Like anybody could expect a conscript to understand honor.” Rolf got to his feet and stalked off. Behind him, Max laughed out loud. That only stiffened his back—and his resolve.

  Out he went, with his fancy new American mine detector…and with his rifle, just in case. The grassland he stomped through wasn’t marked or mapped as a minefield, but he hadn’t gone more than thirty meters or so before he heard a loud buzz in his earphones.

  “What the devil?” he said. His first guess was that the gadget had found a buried tomato tin or something. But you didn’t get to be an old soldier by assuming your first guess was right. If you got a signal, especially a strong one like that, you had to proceed as if it were the real thing.

  He flattened out on the ground, careful to go no farther. Then, cautiously, he probed with his bayonet. The steel met more metal. He withdrew it and began to dig. Without noticing he was doing it, he whistled tunelessly between his teeth.

  Before long, the curved metal of the mine casing made him mutter “Well, fuck me” under his breath. He knew that shape, all right. He should have. He’d laid enough of them. It was a Tellermine, a German antipanzer mine from the last war. This had to be a Wehrmacht minefield everybody’d forgotten about.

  The Tellermine wasn’t dangerous to people; its tripping pressure was too heavy. It wasn’t dangerous unless the firing mechanism had been booby-trapped, anyhow. Then the guy defusing it would get the last nasty surprise he ever needed.

  That wasn’t what made the fear sweat drip from Rolf’s armpits. You didn’t plant Tellermines by themselves. No—you laid a bunch of S-mines and wooden-cased Schü Minen with them, to maim the enemy foot soldiers who’d be loping along with the panzers. The antipersonnel mines made clearing the field one of those interesting bits of business, too.

  Rolf wondered why sheep or cows or herders hadn’t blown themselves to sausage meat around here. Somebody would have got rid of this minefield if they had. But no. He was stuck with it. He was, in fact, stuck in the middle of it.

  Better to go back than forward, he decided. He didn’t have—he didn’t think he had—far to go before he got back to safe ground. Then he’d report to an officer and let the officious son of a bitch figure it out.

  He stepped very carefully. One mistake, and…If he was diligent with the detector…He made it to the edge of the overgrown bare ground and relaxed. Out of the worst of it now. One more step and…

  Pop! It didn’t really sound like an explosion. The S-mine had sat there since 1945, but it still worked fine. German engineering. The Amis called them Bouncing Bettys. It jumped to about waist-high, then blew up for real, spraying shrapnel balls every which way. Rolf looked down in amazement at what was left of him. He screamed. He screamed and screamed and screamed, until he finally stopped.

  —

  A nurse came up to Cade Curtis’ bed. She wasn’t bad, but he still had enough morphine in him to make his interest purely academic. I’ll be a junkie, a one-legged junkie, he thought. He couldn’t get very worried about it: one more side effect of the drug.

  “A couple of men here to see you, Captain,” she said.

  Doped as he was, Cade couldn’t miss the disapproval that stuck out all over her like a porcupine’s spines. He didn’t get it. Nobody’d come to see him since he’d been wounded. Visitors would be something different, anyhow. “Okay,” he said.

  She sniffed and seemed to gather those affronted prickles around her before she flounced off. When she came back, she was leading two soldiers in American uniform. One was Howard Sturgis. The other, Cade saw with delighted surprise, was Jimmy. The nurse didn’t scream Gook! at him, but that was what was eating her, all right.

  Seeing Jimmy, though, was the best thing that had happened to Cade since he got hit. Morphine or not, he grinned from ear to ear. “Hey, what are you doing here?” he exclaimed.

  “He made me bring him,” Sturgis said dryly. “I figured he’d roll a grenade into my dugout if I didn’t, so here we are.”

  “He should be under arrest!” the nurse said.

  “It’s a joke, honest,” Cade said. Howard Sturgis nodded. The nurse relaxed—by some small fraction.

  “Captain Curtis, he like father to me,” Jimmy said, missing the byplay. “Before I meet him, I nothing. I never be nothing, neither. Now I am man. Now I am American man.” He couldn’t have sounded prouder.

  By the expression on her face, the nurse wanted to tell him he was no such thing and never could be any such thing. The expressions on Cade’s face, and on Sturgis’, made her keep her mouth shut.

  “Have to pay respects to father. Have to help take care of father.” Jimmy used English to voice a very Korean sentiment.

  And Cade suddenly murmured, “Holy cow!”

  “What’s cooking, Captain?” Sturgis said. “You okay?”

  “Except for missing a leg, I’m great,” Cade answered, and for once he meant it. “Know how we’ve been trying to finagle a way to get Jimmy back to the States?” He waited for Sturgis to nod, then hurried on: “How about if I adopt him? They can’t keep him out if he’s my kid, right?”

  “You’re out of your mind, and that’s fraud against the government!” The nurse’s voice went high and shrill.

  “Oh, baloney,” Cade said. “H
e’s fought for the USA. Heck, he saved my life—I wouldn’t be here if he didn’t haul me to an aid station. He works like a son of a gun.”

  “That’s all true—every word of it,” Howard Sturgis affirmed.

  “You’re still crazy,” the nurse said.

  “Why?” Cade asked. “He’d make a better American than an awful lot of people born in Alabama or Wisconsin.”

  “He’s a gook, that’s why,” the nurse said.

  Jimmy swung toward her. He was a medium-sized, smooth-cheeked man, but the rage in his eyes made him seem eight feet tall and completely covered with hair. “You don’t call me that,” he said in a soft, low, deadly voice. “You don’t never call me that, you hear?”

  Howard Sturgis held out an arm in front of Jimmy to bar his path if he lost his temper. “Easy, boy,” Sturgis said. “She’s a dumb bitch, but she’s an officer.”

  The nurse squeaked in fury. “How dare you talk about me that way?”

  “You brung it on yourself, that’s how.” Sturgis didn’t care if she didn’t like what she heard. He’d won his battlefield commission for bravery. If they busted him back to sergeant, or even down to private, because he was insubordinate, he’d probably kiss them on both cheeks.

  “I know guys have adopted Korean kids.” Once Cade got an idea, he ran with it—which was more than he could do in the flesh right now.

  “This is not a kid.” The nurse pointed at Jimmy. In his much-worn U.S. uniform, he sure didn’t look like a kid.

  “Maybe he’s just a big kid.” Cade knew damn well there was more than one way to skin a cat. He’d never been a barracks lawyer before, but he was ready to start. “How old are you, Jimmy?”

  Jimmy shrugged. “I don’t know, Captain Cade, sir. Maybe nineteen, maybe twenty. Something like that.”

  “See?” Cade told the nurse. “He’s still a minor.”

  “And you’re still a nut job.” She rounded on Sturgis and Jimmy. “Get out! All you’ve done is upset him.”

  “I’m not upset,” Cade said. The nurse turned hard of listening. She shooed the men from his unit out of the ward.