“The Germans are better at war than the cursed Croats,” Bogdan said. “They are hard to trap, hard to trick. Even their raw troops, the ones who learn against us, have that combination of discipline and initiative which makes Germans generally so dangerous.”
Smith nodded. Even with Manstein’s leadership, fighting the Russians to a standstill had been a colossal achievement. Skirmishes along the borders of fascist Europe—and in such hunting preserves as Serbia—had let the German army keep its edge since the big war ended.
Bogdan went on, “When they catch us, they kill us. When we catch them, we kill them. This is as it should be.” He spoke with such matter-of-factness that Smith had no doubt he meant exactly what he said. He had lived with war for so long, it seemed the normal state of affairs to him.
Then the partisan’s voice changed. “The Germans are wolves. The Croats, their army and the stinking Ustashi, are jackals. They rape, they torture, they burn our Orthodox priests’ beards, they kill a man for having on his person anything written in the Cyrillic script, and in so doing they seek to turn us Serbs into their own foul kind.” Religion and alphabet divided Croats and Serbs, who spoke what was in essence the same language.
“Not only that, they are cowards.” By his tone, Bogdan could have spoken no harsher condemnation. “They come into a village only if they have a regiment at their backs, and either flee or massacre if anyone resists them. We could hurt them far worse than we do, but when they are truly stung, they run and hide behind the Germans’ skirts.”
“I gather you are coming to the point where that does not matter to you,” Smith said.
“You gather rightly,” Bogdan said. “Sometimes a man must hit back, come what may afterwards. To strike a blow at the fascists, I am willing to ally with the West. I would ally with Satan, did he offer himself as my comrade.” So much for his disbelief, Smith thought.
“Churchill once said that if the Germans invaded hell, he would say a good word for the devil,” Drinkwater observed.
“If the Germans invaded hell, Satan would need help because they are dangerous. If the Croatians invaded hell, he would have trouble telling them from his demons.”
Smith laughed dryly, then returned to business: “How shall we convey to you our various, ah, pyrotechnics?”
“The fellow who bought your eels will pay you a visit tomorrow. He has a Fiat, and has also a permit for travel to the edge of Serbia: one of his cousins owns an establishment in Belgrade. The cousin, that swine, is not one of us, but he gives our man the excuse he needs for taking his motorcar where we need it to go.”
“Very good. You seem to have thought of everything.” Smith turned away. “We shall await your man tomorrow.”
“Don’t go yet, my friends.” Agile as a chamois, Bogdan clattered down the steep steps of the mausoleum. He carried a Soviet automatic rifle on his back and held a squat bottle in his hands. “I have here slivovitz. Let us drink to the deaths of fascists.” He yanked the cork out of the bottle with a loud pop. “Zhiveli!”
The harsh plum brandy burned its way down Smith’s throat like jellied gasoline. Coughing, he passed the bottle to Drinkwater, who took a cautious swig and gave it back to Bogdan. The partisan leader tilted it almost to the vertical. Smith marveled at the temper of his gullet, which had to be made of something like stainless steel to withstand the potent brew.
At last, Bogdan lowered the slivovitz bottle. “Ahh!” he said, wiping his mouth on his sleeve. “That is very fine. I—”
Without warning, a portable searchlight blazed into the courtyard from the open gateway into Trsat Castle. Smith froze, his eyes filling with tears at the sudden transformation from night to brighter than midday. An amplified voice roared, “Halt! Stand where you are! You are the prisoners of the Independent State of Croatia!”
Bogdan bellowed like a bull: “No fucking Croat will take me!” He grabbed for his rifle. Before the motion was well begun, a burst of fire cut him down. Smith and Drinkwater threw themselves flat, their hands over their heads.
Something hot and wet splashed Smith’s cheek. He rubbed the palm of his hand over it. In the actinic glare of the searchlight, Bogdan’s blood looked black. The partisan leader was still alive. Shrieks alternated with bubbling moans as he writhed on the ground, trying to hold his guts inside his belly.
Jackboots rattled in the courtyard as men from the Ustashi, including a medic with a Red Cross armband, dashed in from the darkness. The medic grabbed Bogdan, stuck a plasma line in his arm. Bogdan did his best to tear it out again. A couple of ordinary troopers kept him from succeeding. “We’ll patch you up so you can sing for us,” one of them growled. His voice changed to gloating anticipation: “Then we’ll take you apart again, one centimeter at a time.”
A rifle muzzle pressed against Smith’s forehead. His eyes crossed as they looked down the barrel of the gun. “Up on your feet, spy,” said the Ustashi man holding it. He had 7.92 millimeters of potent persuasion. Smith obeyed at once.
An Ustashi major strode into the brilliant hole the searchlight had cut in the darkness. He marched up to Smith and Drinkwater, who had also been ordered to his feet. Smith could have shaved on the creases in his uniform, and used his belt buckle as a mirror for the job. The perfect outfit served only to make him more acutely aware of how grubby he was himself.
The major studied him. The fellow had a face out of a fascist training film: hard, stern, handsome, ready to obey any order without question or even thought, not a gram of surplus fat anywhere. An interrogator with a face like his could make a prisoner afraid just by looking at him, and instilling fear was half an interrogator’s battle.
“You are the Englishmen?” the major demanded. He spoke English himself, with a better public-school accent than Smith could boast. Smith glanced toward Drinkwater. Warily, they both nodded.
Like a robot’s, the major’s arm shot up and out in a perfect fascist salute. “The fatherland thanks you for your help in capturing this enemy of the state and of the true faith,” he declared.
On the ground, Bogdan’s groans changed tone as he realized he had been betrayed. Smith shrugged. He had a fatherland, too—London told him what to do, and he did it. He said, “You’d best let us get out of the harbor before dawn, so none of Bogdan’s people can be sure we had anything to do with this.”
“It shall be as you say,” the major agreed, though he sounded indifferent as to whether Smith and Drinkwater gave themselves away to Bogdan’s organization. He probably was indifferent; Croatia and England loved each other no better than Croatia and the Communists. This time, it had suited them to work together. Next time, they might try to kill each other. They all knew it.
Smith sighed. “It’s a rum world, and that’s a fact.”
The Ustashi major nodded. “So it is. Surely God did not intend us to cooperate with such degenerates as you. One day, though, we shall have a true reckoning. Za dom Spremni!”
Fucking loony, Smith thought. If the major read that in his eyes, too bad. Croatia could not afford an incident with England, not when her German overlords were dickering with London over North Sea petroleum rights.
The trip down to Rijeka from Trsat Castle was worse than the one up from the city. The Englishmen dared not show a light, not unless they wanted to attract secret policemen who knew nothing of their arrangement with the Ustashi major and who would start shooting before they got the chance to find out. Of course, they ran the same risk on (Smith devoutly hoped) a smaller scale, traveling in the dark.
Traveling in the dark down a steep hillside also brought other risks. After Peter Drinkwater fell for the third time, he got up swearing: “God damn the Russians for mucking about in Turkey, and in Iraq, and in Persia. If they weren’t trying to bugger the oil wells there, you and I wouldn’t have to deal with the likes of the bloody Ustashi—and we’d not have to feel we needed a bath afterwards.”
“No, we’d be dealing with the NKVD instead, selling out Ukrainian nationalists to Mosco
w,” Smith answered. “Would you feel any cleaner after that?”
“Not bloody likely,” Drinkwater answered at once. “It’s a rum world, all right.” He stumbled again, but caught himself. The path was nearly level now. Rijeka lay not far ahead.
The Phantom Tolbukhin
Most stories come to me character-first or situation-first. This one didn’t; it came to me title-first; those who know my work know I will make puns like that every now and again, or rather more often than every now and again. Then, of course, I had to find a story to go with it. This one looks at the Ukrainian town of Zaporozhye, too, but in a world different from that of “Ready for the Fatherland.”
* * *
General Fedor Tolbukhin turned to his political commissar. “Is everything in your area of responsibility in readiness for the assault, Nikita Sergeyevich?”
“Fedor Ivanovich, it is,” Nikita Khrushchev replied. “There can be no doubt that the Fourth Ukrainian Front will win another smashing victory against the fascist lice who suck the blood from the motherland.”
Tolbukhin’s mouth tightened. Khrushchev should have addressed him as Comrade General, not by his first name and patronymic. Political commissars had a way of thinking they were as important as real soldiers. But Khrushchev, unlike some—unlike most—political commissars Tolbukhin knew, was not afraid to get gun oil on his hands, or even to take a PPSh41 submachine gun up to the front line and personally pot a few fascists.
“Will you inspect the troops before ordering them to the assault against Zaporozhye?” Khrushchev asked.
“I will, and gladly,” Tolbukhin replied.
Not all of Tolbukhin’s forces were drawn up for inspection, of course: too great a danger of marauding Luftwaffe fighters spotting such an assemblage and shooting it up. But representatives from each of the units the Soviet general had welded into a solid fighting force were there, lined up behind the red banners that symbolized their proud records. Yes, they were all there: the flags of the First Guards Army, the Second Guards, the Eighth Guards, the Fifth Shock Army, the 38th Army, and the 51st.
“Comrade Standard Bearer!” Tolbukhin said to the young soldier who carried the flag of the Eighth Guards Army, which bore the images of Marx and Lenin and Stalin.
“I serve the Soviet Union, Comrade General!” the standard bearer barked. But for his lips, he was utterly motionless. By his wide Slavic face, he might have come from anywhere in the USSR; his mouth proved him a native Ukrainian, for he turned the Great Russian G into an H.
“We all serve the Soviet Union,” Tolbukhin said. “How may we best serve the motherland?”
“By expelling from her soil the German invaders,” the young soldier replied. “Only then can we take back what is ours. Only then can we begin to build true Communism. It surely will come in my lifetime.”
“It surely will,” Tolbukhin said. He nodded to Khrushchev, who marched one pace to his left, one pace to the rear. “If all the men are as well indoctrinated as this one, the Fourth Ukrainian Front cannot fail.”
After inspecting the detachments, he conferred with the army commanders—and, inevitably, with their political commissars. They crowded a tumbledown barn to overflowing. By the light of a kerosene lantern, Tolbukhin bent over the map, pointing out the avenues of approach the forces would use. Lieutenant General Yuri Kuznetsov, commander of the Eighth Guards Army, grinned wide enough to show a couple of missing teeth. “It is a good plan, Comrade General,” he said. “The invaders will regret ever setting foot in the Soviet Union.”
“I thank you, Yuri Nikolaievich,” Tolbukhin said. “Your knowledge of the approach roads to the city will help the attack succeed.”
“The fascist invaders already regret ever setting foot in the Soviet Union,” Khrushchev said loudly.
Lieutenant General Kuznetsov dipped his head, accepting the rebuke. “I serve the Soviet Union,” he said, as if he were a raw recruit rather than a veteran of years of struggle against the Hitlerites.
“You have the proper Soviet spirit,” Tolbukhin said, and even the lanternlight was enough to show how Kuznetsov flushed with pleasure.
Lieutenant General Ivanov of the First Guards Army turned to Major General Rudzikovich, who had recently assumed command of the Fifth Shock Army, and murmured, “Sure as the devil’s grandmother, the Phantom will make the Nazis pay.”
Tolbukhin didn’t think he was supposed to hear. But he was young for his rank—only fifty-three—and his ears were keen. The nickname warmed him. He’d earned it earlier in the war—the seemingly endless war—against the madmen and ruffians and murderers who followed the swastika. He’d always had a knack for hitting the enemies of the peasants and workers of the Soviet Union where they least expected it, then fading away before they could strike back at his forces.
“Has anyone any questions about the plan before we continue the war for the liberation of Zaporozhye and all the territory of the Soviet Union now groaning under the oppressor’s heel?” he asked.
He thought no one would answer, but Rudzikovich spoke up: “Comrade General, are we truly wise to attack the city from the northeast and southeast at the same time? Would we not be better off concentrating our forces for a single strong blow?”
“This is the plan the council of the Fourth Ukrainian Front has made, and this is the plan we shall follow,” Khrushchev said angrily.
“Gently, gently,” Tolbukhin told his political commissar. He turned back to Rudzikovich. “When we hit the Germans straight on, that is where we run into trouble. Is it not so, Anatoly Pavlovich? We will surprise them instead, and see how they like that.”
“I hope it won’t be too expensive, that’s all,” Major General Rudzikovich said. “We have to watch that we spend our brave Soviet soldiers with care these days.”
“I know,” Tolbukhin answered. “Sooner or later, though, the Nazis have to run out of men.” Soviet strategists had been saying that ever since the Germans, callously disregarding the treaty Ribbentrop had signed with Foreign Commissar Molotov, invaded the USSR. General Tolbukhin pointed to the evidence: “See how many Hungarian and Romanian and Italian soldiers they have here in the Ukraine to pad out their own forces.”
“And they cannot even station the Hungarians and Romanians next to one another, lest they fight,” Khrushchev added—like any political commissar, if he couldn’t score points off Rudzikovich one way, he’d try another. “Thieves fall out. It is only one more proof that the dialectic assures our victory. So long as we labor like Stakhanovites, over and above the norm, that victory will be ours.”
“Anatoly Pavlovich, we have been over the plan a great many times,” Tolbukhin said, almost pleadingly. “If you seek to alter it now, just before the attack goes in, you will need a better reason than ‘I hope.’ “
Anatoly Rudzikovich shrugged. “I hope you are right, Comrade General,” he said, bearing down heavily on the start of the sentence. He shrugged again. “Well, nichevo.” It can’t be helped was a Russian foundation old as time.
Tolbukhin said, “Collect your detachments, Comrades, and rejoin your main forces. The attack will go in on time. And we shall strike the fascists a heavy blow at Zaporozhye. For Stalin and the motherland!”
“For Stalin and the motherland!” his lieutenants chorused. They left the barn with their political commissars—all but Lieutenant General Yuri Kuznetsov, whose Eighth Guards Army was based at Collective Farm 122 nearby.
“This attack must succeed, Fedor Ivanovich,” Khrushchev said quietly. “The situation in the Ukraine requires it.”
“I understand that, Nikita Sergeyevich,” Tolbukhin answered, as quietly. “To make sure the attack succeeds, I intend to go in with the leading wave of troops. Will you fight at my side?”
In the dim light, he watched Khrushchev. Most political commissars would have looked for the nearest bed under which to hide at a request like that. Khrushchev only nodded. “Of course I will.”
“Stout fellow.” Tolbukhin slapped him on the
back. He gathered up Kuznetsov and his political commissar by eye. “Let’s go.”
The night was very black. The moon, nearly new, would not rise till just before sunup. Only starlight shone down on Tolbukhin and his comrades. He nodded to himself. The armies grouped together into the Fourth Ukrainian Front would be all the harder for German planes to spot before they struck Zaporozhye. Dispersing them would help there, too.
He wished for air cover, then shrugged. He’d wished for a great many things in life he’d ended up not receiving. He remained alive to do more wishing. One day, he thought, and one day soon, may we see more airplanes blazoned with the red star. He was too well indoctrinated a Marxist-Leninist to recognize that as a prayer.
Waiting outside Collective Farm 122 stood the men of the Eighth Guards Army. Lieutenant General Kuznetsov spoke to them: “General Tolbukhin not only sends us into battle against the Hitlerite oppressors and bandits, he leads us into battle against them. Let us cheer the Comrade General!”
“Urra!” The cheer burst from the soldiers’ throats, but softly, cautiously. Most of the men were veterans of many fights against the Nazis. They knew better than to give themselves away too soon.
However soft those cheers, they heartened Tolbukhin. “We shall win tonight,” he said, as if no other alternative were even imaginable. “We shall win for Comrade Stalin, we shall win for the memory of the great Lenin, we shall win for the motherland.”
“We serve the Soviet Union!” the soldiers chorused. Beside Tolbukhin, Khrushchev’s broad peasant face showed a broad peasant grin. These were indeed well-indoctrinated men.
They were also devilishly good fighters. To Tolbukhin’s mind, that counted for more. He spoke one word: “Vryed’!” Obedient to his order, the soldiers of the Eighth Guards Army trotted forward.
Tolbukhin trotted along with them. So did Khrushchev. Both the general and the political commissar were older and rounder than the soldiers they commanded. They would not have lost much face had they failed to keep up. Tolbukhin intended to lose no face whatever. His heart pounded. His lungs burned. His legs began to ache. He kept on nonetheless. So did Khrushchev, grimly slogging along beside him.
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