“Anything?” Sergeant Klein asked.
“Doesn’t look like it,” Cade answered. “They’re just throwing lead at us.”
“Nice thing about a water-cooled piece is, you don’t burn through barrels like you do with an air-cooled gun,” Klein said. “All that happens is, the cooling water in that metal jacket starts to boil. The limeys in Italy liked water-cooled guns. When the water got hot enough, they’d pour it out and brew tea.”
“Yeah?” Cade didn’t know whether to believe that or not.
“Honest to God, sir.” The veteran raised his right hand, as if in a court of law. “Not like I never drank any of that tea myself. I used to think it was for limeys or fairies, but when it’s wintertime in the fucking mountains anything hot goes down good. Italy’s got winters a hell of a lot nastier than the steamship lines talk about.”
“How’s it stack up against the Chosin Reservoir?” Curtis asked dryly. “Near as I could tell, if we went any farther north we’d be fighting polar bears.”
“Sir, I wasn’t there for that. My hat’s off to you for coming through in one piece—a hell of a lot of good guys didn’t.” Lou Klein actually did sketch a salute. “From things I’ve heard from you and other people, that would’ve made the Russians and German come to attention in the first winter of their war.”
“I wouldn’t be surprised.” Cade didn’t want to talk about it, or even think about it, now that it was over. He’d had a balaclava under his helmet, plus a muffler wrapped around everything south of his eyes. He’d had a tunic, a sweater, and a parka. He’d had two pairs of long johns under his pants—hell when he had to take a dump—and padded, insulated boots. He’d worn mittens. He’d felt like a goddamn popsicle all the time in spite of everything.
The machine gun’s stream of bullets traversed past them again. Some of the fiery tracers looked close enough to let you reach up and light a Camel off of them. Cade understood that wasn’t a Phi Beta Kappa idea, which didn’t make it go away.
Lou Klein spat against the side of the trench. “Hell of a lot of good A-bombing those cities in Manchuria and Siberia did, huh? You can tell the Chinks’ll run out of ammo about twenty minutes from now. Boy, did we fuck the hell outa their logistics.”
Cade dug a finger into his none too pink and shell-like ear, as if at a loud noise. “Sorry, Sergeant,” he said. “My sarcasm detector went off so hard there, it damn near deafened me.”
“Heh, heh.” Klein gave that two syllables’ worth of laughter—about what it deserved. “Yeah, I was just kidding, but I was kidding on the square.”
That was pretty much the definition of sarcasm. Saying as much to the veteran noncom struck Cade as one more losing proposition. Klein was old enough to be his father. Just like Cal Curtis back in Tennessee, he assumed he knew better than Cade. That Cade outranked him made him politer than the senior Curtis about saying so, but only to a certain degree. Senior sergeants were the men who taught junior officers their trade in the field. The U.S. Army had inherited that tradition from the English. Cade didn’t know or care from whom the Tommies had lifted it.
Little by little, as he showed he had some notion of what he was doing, Lou acted more as if he was his superior after all. That still came by fits and starts, though.
Thinking out loud, Cade said, “We got some more bazooka rounds in last night, didn’t we?”
“Sure did.” Klein sounded disgusted. “Naturally, they send the fuckers up here when we ain’t seen no enemy tanks for a coupla weeks. They can—” He offered a suggestion for where the brass could stick them.
Cade didn’t think they’d fit there, even greased. But he said, “I wasn’t thinking of tanks so much. If we send out a bazooka or two after it gets good and dark, maybe we can get rid of that stinking Maxim.”
Klein didn’t answer for close to a minute. He stood there with his whiskery chin cupped in his hand, his eyes far away, weighing the scheme. Almost as slowly, he nodded. “Every once in a while, Lieutenant, you’re damn near worth what they pay you, huh?”
“You say the sweetest things.” Cade hesitated, then went on, “I’ll take one of the tubes myself. I know more about getting through wire than most of the guys.”
“You don’t gotta do that, sir,” Klein said quickly.
“It’ll give us a better chance to take out the machine gun,” Cade said with a shrug. “That’s good for everybody, me included.” Klein’s lips moved silently. Cade thought he said stupid kid, but wasn’t sure. He didn’t want to become sure badly enough to ask.
He and the other guy with a launcher, a PFC named Frank Sanderson, loaded their rockets before they set out on the craw across no-man’s-land. “Some fun, huh, sir?” Sanderson said.
“Now that you mention it, no.” Cade was wishing he’d listened to Sergeant Klein. He’d grabbed the bull by the horns. Now he had to wrestle it down.
The bazooka tube and rocket were awkward slung across his back. If something snagged the trigger…In that case, he’d have just enough time to be embarrassed before the Red Chinese killed him.
A couple of hundred yards to the left, an American machine gun started shooting at the enemy’s trenches—though not in the direction from which Cade and Sanderson were coming. As Cade had hoped, the Chinks returned fire. The Maxim’s tracers and muzzle flashes told him exactly where it lurked.
He snipped one strand of barbed wire after another. He heard every clip and every twang, but the enemy soldiers didn’t. The machine-gun duel drowned out softer sounds. His real worry was that the Red Chinese would send out their own patrol and find him. That wouldn’t be so real hot.
He worked his way to within a couple of hundred yards of the Maxim, Sanderson literally on his heels. He motioned for the PFC to come up alongside him. “I’ll go left now,” he whispered. “You go straight. Get in as close as you can. When I fire, you do the same. Then we get the hell out of here.”
“I like that part, Lieutenant,” Sanderson whispered back.
Cade slithered in to just over a hundred yards from the gun. Then he peered down the bazooka’s rudimentary sight and pulled the trigger. Whoosh! Roar! As the rocket zoomed away, a wire mesh screen at the front of the launch tube kept its flames from scorching his face.
Sanderson’s rocket went off no more than three seconds after his, from almost as close. The Maxim gun, which had been barking away, suddenly shut up. Cade discarded the launcher and scurried off toward the American trenches. He stayed as low to the ground as he could.
More than a little to his surprise, he made it. So did Sanderson. None of what the Red Chinese threw at them struck home. And now they wouldn’t need to worry about that Maxim…till the bastards on the other side made a nest for a new one.
—
Ihor Shevchenko methodically shoved 7.62mm pistol rounds into his PPD’s snail drum. The big magazine was stamped with a 71 to let you know the most cartridges you could fit in there. Whoever designed that into it was smart—but maybe not smart enough. Some of the dumb bastards the Red Army was sucking into its insatiable maw couldn’t even read the number.
Artillery shells flew by overhead with freight-train noises. Those were Soviet 155s, heading for the German town of Rheine. The Dutch border was only a few kilometers to the west.
Turning to one of the other guys topping up the tank on his submachine gun, Ihor said, “Crazy how you still know what kind of gun it is just by the sound of the ammo in the air.”
Dmitri Karsavin nodded. “It is, yeah.” Like Ihor, he’d been through the mill the last time around. His limp was worse than the Ukrainian’s, in fact. He went on, “It only works for our pieces, though. The Americans’ guns don’t sound the same as the Hitlerites’ did.”
“You’re right about that.” Ihor nodded. “I didn’t hear the Americans’ guns the last time. A fragment took a chunk out of my leg when we were in western Poland, getting ready to drive on into Germany.”
“Sounds a lot like my story,” the other retread said. “I go
t mine in Budapest. A rocket blew up too close to me and bit me in the ass. You see me naked, I’ve only got half my right buttock.”
“No offense, buddy, but I don’t want to see you naked. You don’t do a fucking thing for me,” Ihor said. But no wonder Karsavin limped.
“Well, we’re even, believe me. It’s not like I’m perfect, but I ain’t no fruit.” Karsavin hadn’t shaved lately. He didn’t smell good. His uniform could have used a wash. He looked a lot like Ihor, in other words, even if his stubble was darker than the Ukrainian’s.
“I never in a million years figured I’d have to do this again.” As Ihor spoke, he went on filling the snail drum. He didn’t need to pay much attention to his fingers; they knew what to do on their own. “Once was plenty to last me the rest of my days.”
“You do what they make you do, that’s all.” Dmitri Karsavin spoke with a peasant fatalism Russians and Ukrainians shared. “My father fought against the Kaiser for the Tsar. He fought against the Whites for Lenin. When the Nazis jumped us, he fought them for Stalin. And they killed him outside of Kharkov in 1943.”
“Sorry to hear it,” Ihor said. To him, the city’s name was Kharkiv. He kept quiet about that. Ukrainians learned Russian whether they wanted to or not. It didn’t work the other way around.
Lieutenant Smushkevich came over to the fire to see what they were up to. When the company commander saw them doing something useful, he nodded and smiled. “Good job, boys,” he said, though he was younger than either of them. “Glad to see you’ll be ready. We’re going to pound the crap out of Rheine an hour before sunup, and then we’re going in and taking it away from the imperialists.”
“Comrade Lieutenant, I serve the Soviet Union!” Karsavin said. Ihor’s head bobbed up and down to show he did, too. He would have come out with it if the other veteran hadn’t beaten him to the punch.
“Ochen khorosho,” Smushkevich said. How nervous was he? This might well be his first time under fire. He didn’t talk about himself, though. Instead, he went on, “This isn’t a brand-new dance for either one of you, is it?”
“No, Comrade Lieutenant.” This time, Ihor spoke for them both.
“All right. Try to keep an eye on the new kids, will you? Don’t let them be too stupid. They’re our seed corn. We don’t want to throw them into the grinder if we can help it.”
“I serve the Soviet Union!” Ihor got to say it, too. What the lieutenant meant was Try not to let them get killed because they have no idea what they’re doing. A veteran could do a little of that, but not a whole lot. If you held a rookie’s hand for him, you were liable to turn into a casualty yourself. Ihor had seen enough war to have a pragmatic attitude about it. He didn’t want to get killed or maimed. If somebody else did, especially somebody he didn’t know well or care about, that was the other guy’s worry.
“Good luck to both of you,” the lieutenant said. “I’ll see you in Rheine after we take it.” If he was nervous, he made a good stab at not showing it. With a nod, he went off to talk with some more of his men.
Ihor rolled himself in a blanket and tried to sleep. He got more than he expected, less than he hoped for: about par for the course. The old fear was back. Will I still be in one piece this time tomorrow? How hard would the Yankees fight?
He was dozing when the Soviet artillery started up in earnest. The thunder from all those guns bounced him awake. He grabbed the PPD. “Luck,” he told Dmitri Karsavin, who was also unrolling himself. Then he hunted up Misha Grinovsky. The youngster who wouldn’t be a pipefitter just yet was smoking a cigarette in quick, nervous drags. Ihor set a hand on his shoulder. “Stick close to me, kid. It’s like anything else. As soon as you’ve done it once, you’ll know how forever.”
“I sure hope so.” Grinovsky threw down the butt and lit a new smoke.
Before Ihor could offer any consolation—and before he had to start lying—Lieutenant Smushkevich blew a whistle. “Forward!” he shouted. “Forward for the workers and peasants of the Soviet Union and for our glorious leader, the great Comrade Stalin!”
Everybody who heard him cheered his head off. When someone used Stalin’s name that way, what else could you do? Somebody would report you for keeping quiet. If the Americans didn’t get you after that, the MGB damn well would.
Ihor didn’t know how many men trotted forward with him. A couple of divisions’ worth, anyway. Tanks went ahead with the foot soldiers, new T-54s and beat-up T-34/85s pulled from storage alongside them. Against a modern American or English tank, the Great Patriotic War’s workhorse was a deathtrap. Till it ran into one of those, though, it could smash up a lot of enemy infantry.
Rheine was a town of about 40,000. It lay in a valley between two low ranges of hills. The Americans had guns in the hills to the west. Ihor could see them winking in the distance. That meant shells were on the way. Sure as hell, he heard the hateful rising shriek in the air.
“Down!” he screamed. He had his entrenching tool out and started digging himself a foxhole before the artillery rounds began to burst. He saw that Karsavin hit the dirt with a veteran’s speed, too.
Misha Grinovsky…didn’t. He stayed on his feet a couple of fatal seconds too long. Flying fragments spun him around and tore him apart. What was left lay twitching a few meters from Ihor. He was dead; he just might not have figured it out yet. Once you’d done it once, you were fine. Too many, though, never made it past the first time. So much for one grain of seed corn.
A church steeple more than a hundred meters high dominated Rheine’s skyline. The Soviet shelling hadn’t toppled it. The American artillery fire was so accurate, Ihor would have bet a Yank spotter lurked up there. He wasn’t the only one who thought so. Shturmoviks roared in and rocketed the steeple. The Red Army men cheered when it tumbled down.
Ihor ran forward, yelling to hold fear at bay. Machine-gun and rifle rounds cracked near him, but none bit. He got into the outskirts of town. Something in olive drab moved behind a fence. He fired a quick burst. The something went down. You had to be careful with the PPD. On full auto, it pulled up and to the right even worse than the PPSh.
The Yanks fought street by street, house by house. They didn’t know all the tricks, the way the Fritzes had. But they were brave, and they had a lot of firepower backing them. The Red Army had to spend lives to clear them out. Spend lives it did. By afternoon, the hammer and sickle floated over Rheine.
—
For the first time in his life, Vasili Yasevich found himself among people who all looked like him. No one in the little town of Smidovich stared at him because he didn’t have golden skin, black hair, high cheekbones, and narrow eyes. No one here casually said insulting things about him assuming he couldn’t follow and wound up gaping when he came back with filthy Mandarin of his own.
He knew he should have felt like a man who’d just fallen asleep on earth and awakened in paradise. If this was paradise, though, he found himself a stranger here.
Smidovich was about as far into the back of beyond as anyone could go while still remaining in the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics. Moscow, even Irkutsk, lay thousands of kilometers to the west. Vasili would have thought that no one in any Soviet center of power would have paid any attention to this village even before atom bombs fell on the two closest cities of any size, Khabarovsk to the east and Blagoveshchensk to the west.
The problem with Smidovich wasn’t that it was so far away from everything else. The problem was that the four thousand or so people here had all come from somewhere else—or if they hadn’t, their parents had. And they’d brought the rest of the Soviet Union with them. Inside their heads.
Vasili had lived in Harbin while it was part of Japanese puppet Manchukuo. He’d lived on there after Mao’s men took over for the Red Army soldiers who drove the Japanese out of Manchukuo and turned it back into Manchuria. He’d been careful during those bad times, and cautious, but he’d never known anything like this.
More and more, he understood why his father and mothe
r swallowed poison rather than letting the Chekists haul them back to the USSR. Everybody here was scared all the time. That was the biggest part of what isolated him from his own neighbors.
They would say good morning. They would hire him to chop wood or to shape it into a bedframe or cabinet or to lay bricks. Every place needed people who could do those things. He was pretty good at them, even if his old man would rather have turned him into a druggist.
But behind Good morning or How much do you want for laying these bricks?, they didn’t want to talk to him. They hadn’t known him for years. They didn’t think they could trust him not to rat on them to the MGB if they said anything the least bit out of line. So they didn’t.
Something else also showed he wasn’t from these parts, something he couldn’t possibly have imagined: how fast he worked. He told a plump widow named Nina Fyodorova that he would make a bookcase for her in three days. When he lugged it to her cabin on the day he’d promised, her eyes almost bugged out of her head.
“You really meant it!” she blurted.
“Da.” He nodded. “Why not?” He didn’t see anything extraordinary about that. The work was as straightforward as you pleased.
But she said, “Two weeks from now, most people would still be telling me lies about how soon it would be ready.” To prove she wasn’t joking, she paid him half again as much as she’d told him she would. He didn’t ask her for the extra—she did it of her own accord.
The same kind of thing happened when Vasili made a little brick shed for Nikolai Feldman, who wanted to use it to smoke fish. Staring at how quickly one course of bricks went onto another, Feldman said, “You’re a regular Stakhanovite, aren’t you?”
Vasili knew only vaguely what a Stakhanovite was. It had to do with working long and hard; he knew that much. He said, “The sooner I get it done, the sooner I can start something else.”
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