“You’ve got blood on you,” Rolf remarked.
“It isn’t mine. There’d be more if God wasn’t pissing on us last night,” Gustav said.
“Ganz gut.” Rolf had heard enough to satisfy him. The only thing the Waffen-SS cared about was spilling the other guy’s blood.
Instead of eating K-rations for breakfast, they got last night’s stew reheated in a Goulaschkanone—Landser slang for a field kitchen. Barley, turnips, carrots, and bits of meat went down easy and put plenty of daub on the wattle of your ribcage.
They did if you got to finish them, anyhow. The Russians started early that morning, raining Katyushas down on the part of Wesel they hadn’t seized before Gustav had more than half-emptied his mess kit. He let the little tin basin and spoon fly any which way as he dove for the nearest muddy foxhole. Those rockets screaming in always made him want to piss his pants. The first Germans at whom the Ivans had aimed Katyushas ran like rabbits—the ones the bombardment didn’t kill, anyhow. If you wanted to flatten a square kilometer, a couple of launch racks’ worth of Katyushas were the next best thing to an A-bomb.
The Ivans didn’t have the advantage of surprise any more, though. Gustav huddled in his hole, waiting for the rockets to stop. If they didn’t kill him, he’d have to fight them. They didn’t. He did. He rapidly developed a deep affection for the Soviet assault rifle he’d killed to acquire. It beat the snot out of the PPSh.
But there were too many Russians, too many tanks. He thought he’d fallen back to the black days of 1945, when there were always too many tanks and too many Russians. He scrambled out of the foxhole to join the retreat. It was that or die.
He saw his mess tin, lying on the pavement. A fragment from a Katyusha had torn it almost in half. One more war casualty, he thought. He trotted northwest, toward the new defensive line the Germans and Amis were trying to set up.
—
“Give them the machine gun, Juris!” Konstantin Morozov shouted.
“I’m doing it, Comrade Sergeant,” Juris Eigims replied. The gunner used the weapon coaxial with the T-54’s cannon to spray the luckless enemy soldiers—Englishmen, Konstantin thought they were from the shape of their helmets—who had the bad luck to show themselves just as the tank chugged out from behind a burnt-out church.
Some of the Tommies fell over. Some ran back to the stone fence that had protected them till they came out from behind it. Others made pickup on their wounded and dead mates. The machine gun bit some of those guys, too. It didn’t care that they were brave and wanted to save their comrades. It only cared that they were there, where it could reach them.
Morozov said, “Why don’t you hit that fence with a round or two of HE? Then send in another one and smash whatever’s right in back of it.”
“Right, Comrade Sergeant.” Eigims barked an order to Vazgen Sarkisyan. The loader slammed a 100mm shell into the breech and banged it closed. The Baltic gunner fired. Inside the turret, the roar wasn’t too bad. Had he been out in the open air, Konstantin would have thought it took his head off.
Hit by fifteen kilos of speeding metal and high explosives, several meters of the stone fence abruptly ceased to be. So did a good many enemy soldiers behind those meters. The blasted bits of stone made more murderous shrapnel than anything the most fiendish shell-builder would pack into a casing.
“Want me to hit the wall again, Comrade Sergeant? We got good results from that last round.” Eigims did understand that killing enemy troops was his own best chance of staying alive. While they were in action, he didn’t go out of his way to undercut the tank commander.
Coughing on propellant fumes, Morozov nodded. “Da. Say, fifteen or twenty meters to the left of the last one.”
“Got you.” As Sarkisyan loaded another HE shell into the gun, Eigims traversed the turret. The cannon bellowed again. Another stretch of stone fence turned to deadly fragments. Another swath of Englishmen huddling behind it turned to sausage meat.
“Good shot!” Morozov said. “Now one more, through a gap.”
“You want it to burst just behind there?” the gunner asked.
“That’s right. That’s just right!” Konstantin reached down and thumped Eigims on the shoulder, a liberty he hadn’t taken till now. “Now we’ll do for the ones the first two rounds only scared.”
“Khorosho.” Juris Eigims ordered another HE shell from the loader. As soon as Sarkisyan manhandled it into place and closed the breech, the gunner fired. The cartridge case clanged on the floor of the fighting compartment. The shell burst sent bodies cartwheeling through the air, high enough so Morozov could see them above the top of the battered stone fence. Eigims glanced up at him. “Shall I send one more?”
Not without regret, Konstantin shook his head. “I don’t want to get greedy. We stay out here in the open too long, they’ll give it to us.” He spoke over the intercom to Vladislav Kalyakin, who sat all alone at the front of the T-54’s hull: “Back us up behind the church again, Vladislav. Some people who don’t like us very much will start throwing things at us in a minute.”
“You’ve got it, Comrade Sergeant.” Gears ground as the driver put the tank into reverse. The T-54’s transmission wasn’t what anybody would call smooth. But it beat hell out of the T-34’s. In the older tank, the driver always kept a heavy mallet where he could grab it in a hurry when he needed to persuade the beast to engage the top gear.
The Americans in their fancy Pershings would laugh at that. During the Great Patriotic War, Germans in their fancy Tigers and Panthers would have laughed, too…for a while. Then the front stopped moving east and rolled west, west, inexorably west, all the way to Berlin. After a while, the fucking Fritzes started laughing out of the other side of their mouths.
Now the front was rolling west again. Pretty soon, the Americans—and the English, and the French, and the Nazi retreads who fought alongside them—would be laughing out of the other side of their mouths, too.
Juris Eigims tapped Konstantin on the leg of his coveralls. When the tank commander glanced down, Eigims said, “You know what you’re doing, hey, Comrade Sergeant?”
From him, Morozov would never get higher praise. Konstantin knew it, but tried not to make too much of it. “Well, maybe a little bit,” he answered. “It’s not like I’m a virgin inside a tank, you know.”
“Captain Lapshin said that, yeah,” the gunner replied. “But some people, you put ’em in charge of something and they start thinking they’re little tin gods. You aren’t like that.”
By some people, he was bound to mean some Russians or perhaps lots of Russians. He wasn’t even wrong, as Morozov knew too well. Some Russians, perhaps lots of Russians, were like that. No doubt some Latvians and Lithuanians were, too. But in a world where there were swarms of Russians and a handful of Balts, the Latvians and Lithuanians rarely got the chance to show it off.
“Look, all I want to do is get through this mess in one piece,” Konstantin said. “We’ve got to fight. Nobody says we’ve got to be stupid while we do it.” He paused to light a papiros and suck in smoke. Then he asked, “How’s that sound to you?”
“I’ve heard things I liked worse.” Eigims paused, too, weighing his words. “As long as you’re like this, it doesn’t matter so much that I didn’t get the tank.”
The cigarette gave Konstantin the excuse to waste another few seconds before he replied, “You can swing one. You know what to do. If we stay alive, you’ll get your chance.”
“Maybe. Or maybe not. I’m not what you’d call a socially reliable element.” Eigims didn’t bother hiding his bitterness.
“In a war, being able to do the job counts for more,” Konstantin said.
“Easy for you to tell me that. You’re a Russian.”
“I’ve been in the army since halfway through the Great Patriotic War. I’m a sergeant. By the time they make me a lieutenant, I’ll be dead of old age.” Morozov had no great hankering to wear an officer’s shoulder boards. But that was beside the point he was try
ing to make.
Eigims grunted. Konstantin let it alone, but he was confident he had it right. If you could do the job and they didn’t blow you up, you would make sergeant and command a tank. Russian? Karelian? Armenian? Lithuanian? Uzbek? Chukchi from the far reaches of Siberia? He’d seen sergeants from all those peoples, and more besides, in the armored divisions that smashed the Hitlerites. They were still in the Red Army, too.
It wasn’t quite the same when you talked about officers. Then Slavs and Armenians and Georgians (Stalin was one, after all) had an edge on the other tribes, mostly because they’d shown themselves to be more trustworthy.
Morozov’s musing cut off when Kalyakin asked him, “Comrade Sergeant, what do you want me to do now? Stay here and wait for the enemy or for reinforcements?”
“No, no. Back it up some more. Let’s not come out at them the same way. We’ll go around to the far side. Juris, swing the turret around so you can fire as soon as you see the chance. Slap a round of AP in there for that. If we need it, we’ll need it bad.”
“I’ll do it,” Eigims said. Actually, Sarkisyan would, but it amounted to the same thing. And they did need it. The first thing Konstantin saw when they came around the other side of the church was a Centurion. But it had its main armament aimed at where he had been, not where he was.
“Fire!” he yelled as the English tank’s turret started a desperate traverse. Eigims did, and he hit with the first shot. The Centurion exploded in smoke and flame. Konstantin ordered the T-54 back behind the church again. He’d given the Tommies something to stew over, all right.
—
Somewhere—maybe off a dead Russian officer—Sergeant Gergely had found himself a big, shiny brass whistle. He wore it around his neck on a leather bootlace, and he was as happy with it as a three-year-old would have been with a toy drum. He always had liked to make noise. What sergeant didn’t?
He blew it now. It was loud and shrill. “Come on, you lugs! Get moving! It’s been a while, but now we’re starting to put the capitalist imperialist warmongers on the run!” he said, and blew it again.
Istvan Szolovits didn’t giggle. Not giggling took some effort, but he managed. During the last war, Gergely would have shouted Hitler’s slogans, and Admiral Horthy’s, and those of Ferenc Szalasi, the Magyar Fascist Hitler installed after he stopped Horthy from making a separate peace with Russia.
Now Gergely yelled what Stalin wanted him to yell. He sounded as if he meant every word of what he said, too. Szolovits was sure he’d sounded just as sincere when he bellowed Hitler’s slogans, and Horthy’s, and Szalasi’s.
And he must have sounded even more sincere when he explained to the Chekists or the Hungarian secret police how he’d been lying through his teeth when he made noises for Hitler and Horthy and Szalasi. He’d made them believe him, or give him the benefit of the doubt when there should have been no doubt.
He’d been a noncom for the Fascists. Now he was a noncom for the Communists. If the world turned on its axis yet again and Hungary found itself a satellite of the USA rather than the USSR, Istvan would have bet anything he had that Gergely’d wind up a noncom for the capitalists. Whoever was in charge needed good noncoms, and the sergeant damn well was one.
Which didn’t mean Istvan was eager to follow Gergely as the veteran loped forward. An American machine gun was stuttering dangerously up ahead. A man could get hurt if he got close, or even closer, to it.
But the Hungarians weren’t the only ones moving to the attack. They had Poles to their left and Russians to their right. The Russians, richer in equipment than their fraternal socialist brethren, had a couple of SU-100 self-propelled guns with them. Those were tank destroyers from the last war. Following the Nazis’ lead, Stalin’s designers put a 100mm gun in a non-traversing mount on a T-34 chassis with some extra frontal armor. Tanks could do more things, but guns like that were cheaper and easier to make—and when they hit, they hit hard.
Those big mobile guns wouldn’t destroy just tanks, either. They were also lovely for knocking even concrete machine-gun nests to smithereens. One of these SU-100s did exactly that. When the nasty machine gun shut up, Istvan let out a whoop like a Red Indian in a Karl May Western.
Andras Orban laughed. “You tell ’em, Jewboy!” the Magyar said.
“Suck my dick, Andras,” Istvan answered. Why didn’t the Yankees knock you over before the self-propelled gun got ’em? he wondered. Most Magyars didn’t jump up and down about Jews. Szolovits had no trouble coping with that. But Andras was one of the minority who, had he been born a German, would have wanted to shove Jews into the gas chambers at Auschwitz.
You couldn’t say out loud that you hoped he’d get killed. He and you were allegedly on the same side. But not even the MGB had yet figured out a way to read what you were thinking.
Only a few strands of barbed wire protected the American lines. The men hadn’t been here long. They hadn’t had time to run up the thick belts that stymied every kind of attack except one spearheaded by heavy tracked vehicles. Some of the wires were already cut. Istvan twanged through others with the cutter he wore on his belt. A bullet cracked by above his head. He was already down on his back, reaching up to work on the wire. He exposed himself as little as he could.
Then he was past the obstacle and rolling down into a trench. A Yank lay there, half his face blown off. Istvan had seen horrors before, but he was still new enough not to be hardened to them. His stomach did a slow lurch, like a fighter pilot’s in a power dive.
That didn’t stop him from rifling the dead man’s pockets and belt pouches for cigarettes, food, and the morphine syrette from his aid kit. Americans were as rich as people said they were, sure as the devil. He’d never seen soldiers with gear as fine as the U.S. Army gave its men. Not even the Germans had come close. Of course, the end-of-the-war Germans he remembered were the ones who’d taken a beating for the past few years. But he didn’t think even the victorious Germans of Blitzkrieg fame made war as extravagantly as the Americans did.
Sergeant Gergely blew his stupid goddamn whistle again. “Keep moving!” he shouted. “We’ve got to drive them while we can!”
One of the Red Army SU-100s obliterated another machine-gun nest. An American with a bazooka obliterated the other self-propelled gun. It burned and burned, sending up its own stinking smoke screen. How long had the men in there lived after the rocket slammed into their machine? Long enough to know how screwed they were? Long enough to scream? If they had, the SU-100’s armor didn’t let their cries escape. More imaginative than he wished he were, Istvan had no trouble hearing those shrieks inside his head anyway.
He scrambled up and out of the foremost trench, rolled across the dirt between it and the next, and flopped down into that one. He found himself not ten meters from two live Yanks.
One of them started to bring up his rifle. Istvan shot first, by sheer reflex, from the hip. His round caught the American three centimeters above the bridge of his nose. The man groaned and crumpled like a dropped sack of flour.
That was nothing but dumb luck, but only Istvan knew it. He felt terrible about it. He didn’t want to kill Americans. But he was also the only one who knew that.
The dead GI’s buddy certainly didn’t. He didn’t see a scared Hungarian Jewish conscript fighting not to heave. He saw a fierce, straight-shooting Communist warrior whose rifle now bore on him. He threw down his own M-1, raised his hands, and gabbled something in English that had to mean I give up!
Istvan frisked him, quickly and clumsily. The American handed him his wallet and wristwatch. Istvan took them, though he cared more about smokes and food and medicine. Then he gestured back toward the rear. Off the new POW went, hands still held high.
He had no guarantee, of course, that some other trigger-happy soldier of the Hungarian People’s Army wouldn’t plug him for the fun of it or because he had nothing left worth stealing. But that was his problem, not Istvan’s. Istvan also did a quick job of plundering the soldier he’d kill
ed. The dead man’s identity disk said he was Walter Hoblitzel.
“I’m sorry, Walter,” Istvan muttered. He meant it. He would rather things had worked out so he could surrender to an American, not the other way around. You got what you got, though, not what you wanted.
“What are you doing there?” someone asked. Istvan turned. It was Andras Orban.
“What do you think I’m doing, you stupid chancre?” Istvan answered. The best way to treat Andras was like the asshole he was. “I killed him, so I’m getting his tobacco and his ration tins.”
“Can I have some cigarettes? I’m almost out,” Orban said.
“Kill your own American, hero,” Istvan told him, and headed west again. He was lucky—Andras didn’t shoot him in the back.
When he caught up with Sergeant Gergely, he did give him some of the tobacco he’d taken from the Yanks. He didn’t like Gergely much, but he had an odd respect for him. Gergely nodded back. “Thanks, kid,” he said. “This beats the shit out of retreat, y’know?”
“Does it?” Istvan didn’t.
“Bet your ass it does,” the sergeant said. “Hope you don’t find out, that’s all.” Not knowing how to answer that, Istvan kept his mouth shut.
A MAXIM GUN SPAT DEATH across the line toward Cade Curtis. The Russians and Germans had used the water-cooled murder mills during the First World War, long before Cade was born. The Germans moved on to lighter, air-cooled weapons. The Russians, having found something that worked, kept Maxims through the second war, too. And they passed them on to Mao’s band of brigands so the Red Chinese could shoot them at Chiang Kai-shek’s men, and now at the Americans.
The water-cooled Maxim gun might be obsolete. Lighter guns were much easier to haul around. When you advanced, they could come forward with you, not after you. But when the front wasn’t moving much, any old machine gun was about as good as any new one. If your luck happened to be out, old or new would kill you just as dead.
When the passing stream of bullets wasn’t close, Cade stuck his head up over the parapet to make sure the Red Chinese infantry wasn’t coming out of its trenches. The gunners spotted him and swung the Maxim back his way, but not till well after he’d ducked again.
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