“So would I,” Mouradian broke in, and got a laugh.
“You bet you would be,” the other officer said. “Wouldn’t do you a kopek’s worth of good, though.”
One more drunken truth. “He’s still a good man to have in the bomb bay,” Sergei said.
“Sure he is,” the other fellow agreed. “He’s got more muscles in his cock than most guys have in their leg.” That was an exaggeration. Sergei thought so, anyhow.
Colonel Borisov looked at his wristwatch. That made several other people, Sergei among them, do the same thing. It was three or four minutes before the top of the hour. Borisov stood up. A moment later, he involuntarily sat down again. Swearing, he tried again. He swayed this time, but stayed on his feet. Proud as a sozzled peacock, he shuffled over to the radio set and turned it on.
The tubes needed half a minute or so to warm up. When sound started coming out of the set, a children’s chorus was singing of the glories of Marx, Lenin, and Stalin. Listening, Sergei suddenly understood how a fly had to feel while it was drowning in a saucer of sugar syrup. His face showed none of that. Even drunk, he had no trouble hiding what he thought. Few Soviet citizens had that kind of trouble; most of the surviving ones who did were in a gulag these days.
Mercifully, the chorus ended. An announcer spent a minute urging his listeners to buy war bonds. “Work like Stakhanovites, save like Stakhanovites!” he boomed. Then he too shut up and went away. Sergei wondered how many exhortations like that he’d heard. Thousands. It had to be thousands. And the radio was a new invention, too. He remembered the first time he’d ever listened to one. He’d been sure it was magic. What else could it be?
“Moscow speaking,” a familiar voice said. You could set your watch by the hourly news bulletins. Sergei had, plenty of times. If he tried it now, he’d make a hash of it. Enough antifreeze coursed through his veins to make that a certainty.
“Moscow speaking,” the newsreader repeated. “Fierce fighting continues east of Warsaw. Fascist claims to have driven the heroes of the Red Army back in headlong retreat are, of course, nothing but the usual lies that spew like vomit from the Hitlerite and Smigly-Ridz regimes. Advances by the forces of progress, however, have proved less rapid than our beloved General Secretary, Comrade Stalin, would have preferred. Changes in the command structure of Red Army units fighting in Poland are expected to improve matters in short order.”
Someone whistled softly. Sergei didn’t see who it was, but he shared the sentiment. How many generals who hadn’t advanced fast enough to suit Stalin were advancing on Siberia right this minute? How many had died of 9mm heart failure? When you shot a man in the back of the head, his heart did stop beating. “Heart failure” made for a nice, neat death certificate.
“English, French, and Norwegian forces continue to retreat in Norway,” the newsreader continued. “We must resign ourselves to the fact that the capitalist and imperialist forces cannot be relied upon to check the Nazis, and that another country is vanishing down the Hitlerite maw. If Norway falls, it will bring the German cannibals dangerously close to the Soviet Union’s northwestern border-only a thin slice of Finnish territory separates Norway from the USSR. And Finland, under the reactionary rule of Marshal Mannerheim, cannot be relied upon the remain neutral.”
What did that mean? Was Stalin thinking about taking Finland himself before the Nazis could? If he was, would he get away with it? The Soviet Union had had a tougher time in Poland than anyone expected. How tough were the Finns? Sergei had no idea, and wasn’t eager to gain a firsthand education on the subject.
“In the Far East, fighting continues against the Japanese imperialists,” the newsman said, and not another word on that score. The bald announcement could mean only one thing: the fighting wasn’t going well for the Soviet Union.
Sergei had wondered if the squadron would be detached from the fighting in Poland and sent across the USSR to bomb the Japanese invaders. Since it hadn’t happened yet, he doubted it would for a while: not till spring, at the earliest. Days of decent flying weather were so scarce in this season, it might be faster to disassemble the SB-2s and ship them and their crews by train, then put the machines back together again.
The trouble with that was, the planes couldn’t go far enough by rail. Barring a miracle, Vladivostok would fall. And Marxist-Leninist doctrine had no room for miracles. Too bad, Sergei thought. The Motherland could really use one over there.
“On another front, Japan’s intolerable aggression and oppression have reaped what the historical dialectic would predict,” the newsreader continued. “Chinese guerrilla strikes against the brutal enemy continue in Shanghai, Peking, and other centers occupied by the invaders. Anything that damages Japan on one front cannot help but damage her on all fronts.”
He was right… Sergei supposed. He also sounded like someone whistling in the dark to try to show he wasn’t afraid. If Japan were fighting the United States in the Pacific, that might draw off enough energy to weaken her against the USSR. Chinese guerrillas weren’t a big enough cause to create the same effect.
But the United States remained neutral. If Japan beat the USSR, that would be all right with the Americans. And if the Soviet Union finally beat Japan, that would be all right, too. Why not? Either way, each country would hurt the other badly, and the USA would end up facing a weakened foe.
The newsreader started bragging about aluminum production, hydroelectric plants, and kilometers of copper wire. Sergei stopped listening. Industrial output was important, but he couldn’t do anything about it. The vodka bottle came round once more. He damn well could do something about that. He could, and he did. The bottle felt noticeably lighter when he passed it again. Outside, the wind raved on.
* * *
Christmas was coming again. Peggy Druce hadn’t expected to spend one holiday season away from Herb, let alone two. She couldn’t do anything about that. Before this latest trip to Europe, she’d always thought she was too important, or at least too clever, for anything bad to happen to her.
She knew better now. When the world went to hell around you, you discovered you weren’t fireproof after all, no matter what you’d thought before. Well, I’m doing asbestos I can, she thought, and smiled and flinched at the same time. Herb would make that kind of horrible pun at any excuse or none.
Making it here wouldn’t do her any good. A lot of Swedes, maybe even most of them, knew some English. But they wouldn’t get the wordplay-which might be just as well.
Still, this was better than the joyless Christmas and New Year’s she’d spent in Berlin the year before. The lights were on-no blackouts in Sweden. Food wasn’t rationed. People here wore better clothes, and they went around looking happier than the Germans had. Why not? Sweden wasn’t in the war. She wouldn’t be, either, unless the Nazis dragged her in.
The Swedes were ready to fight if Germany tried it. You saw plenty of men in uniform in Stockholm. Sweden had stronger industries than either Denmark or Norway. She bought planes and tanks from other countries, but also built her own. She made her own artillery, too. Peggy didn’t suppose Sweden could actually lick Germany, but she’d let Hitler know he’d been in a fight.
Didn’t he already have enough on his plate? He seemed likely to win in Norway, and Germany and Poland were doing all right against Russia. Peggy was sure Hitler would happily fight Stalin to the last drop of Polish blood.
But things weren’t going so well for the Nazi supermen in the west. And that was the key front… wasn’t it? When the war first broke out, she would have been certain it was (with the exception that the German attack on Marianske Lazne almost killed her, and what could be more important than that?). She wasn’t so sure any more. One way or another, the Russians would have their say. Peggy was no Red-Herb would have bopped her over the head with something had she leaned that way-but she could look at a map and make sense of what she saw. There was an awful lot of Russia, and there were an awful lot of Russians. Sooner or later, that had to count… u
nless, of course, it didn’t.
Only one way to tell: wait and see. Peggy had just reached that brilliant conclusion when a knock on the door to her hotel room chased it out of her head. She opened the door without the least hesitation: certainly with less than she would have shown in a hotel back in the States. Stockholm wasn’t the kind of place where a burglar was likely to cosh you and make off with whatever he could carry.
“Yes?” she said, and then, “Ja?” The word was the same in Swedish as in German, but she tried to make it sound different. Jut because she could speak some German didn’t mean she wanted to.
“Hello. My name is Gunnar Landquist,” the man standing in the hallway said in almost perfect English. “I am a reporter from the Handelstidningen, in Goteborg.” That was Sweden’s second-largest city, right across the Kattegat from Denmark. Landquist was about her own age, tall, with brown hair going gray, very fair skin, and blue eyes.
“Isn’t that the newspaper the Germans don’t like?” she said.
“One of them,” Landquist answered with a small-boy grin that made him look much younger. No, the Nazis weren’t happy about freedom of the press, and the freer the press was to call them the SOBs they were, the less happy they got. The Swede went on, “You have seen of the war more than most civilians, or so my friends tell me. Our readers, I am sure, would be interested in the views of an intelligent American traveler.”
“That’s nice,” Peggy said. “Where do you think you’ll find one?”
The Swede blinked, then threw back his head and laughed. “Oh, it will be a pleasure to interview you!” he exclaimed. He was armed with a pencil and a spiral-bound notebook nearly identical to the ones reporters in the USA carried.
“I doubt it, but come on in anyway.” Peggy stood aside so Landquist could. He laughed again. When he perched on a chair, Peggy sat on the edge of the bed. “Okay. What do you want to know?” she asked.
“How do you feel about the Germans and their war?” He poised pencil above paper, waiting.
Peggy was about to rip Hitler for all she was worth. Then she wondered what would happen if she did and German troops suddenly appeared in Stockholm, the way they had in Copenhagen. Nothing good, not to her-and not to Sweden, either. The Nazis had long memories when it came to slights: at least, to slights aimed at them.
And so she was more prudent than she might have been: “What I want to do most is get back to the United States. The German diplomats have done everything they could to give me a hand. Even Hitler himself cleared up some red tape for me once. But”-she gave Gunnar Landquist one of her crooked smiles-“they won’t stop the shooting just to let me go back, darn it.”
He scribbled. “You have been under attack by the Germans and by England and France, is it not so? Which is worse?”
Her smile grew more crooked yet. “The one that’s going on right this minute is the worst attack ever. The one you lived through yesterday, you don’t need to worry about any more.”
“I see. Yes. That makes good sense.” Landquist wrote some more.
“Sorry. I’ll try not to let it happen again,” Peggy said.
He blinked again. Peggy got the feeling he had to put it into Swedish inside his own head before he could realize it was meant for a joke. Once he figured it out, he didn’t hold back. He had a big, booming guffaw that made you want to like him. “You are wicked!” he said, plainly meaning it for a compliment.
“Thank you,” Peggy answered, deadpan, which produced another explosion of merriment from him.
“My, my,” he said. “How am I to write a story when I am laughing so hard? Let me ask you a more serious question: with all the rationing she uses, how long can Germany go on fighting?”
That was serious, all right. Peggy gave it the best answer she could: “A long time, at least by what I saw. The food isn’t so great, but there’s enough of it. Nobody’s going hungry. People can’t get many new clothes, but they can manage with their old stuff. Most of what’s new goes straight to the Wehrmacht. But I’ve heard there’s rationing in England and France, too. You’d know better than I would, and more about how tight it is.”
“I know it is there. Past that…” Landquist shrugged. “No one on either side seems happy to admit he has not got plenty of everything.”
“You’re bound to be right.”
Landquist lit a cigarette: an American Chesterfield. Seeing Peggy’s wistful stare, he offered her the pack. They hadn’t been her brand back in the USA, but they came closer than any of the European blends she’d been smoking. She sighed with pleasure after he gave her a light. Then he said, “With the fighting to our west, not many more of these will come through.”
“The war to the west is why I’m still here,” Peggy answered, floating on clouds of tobacco-flavored nostalgia. “I mean, Sweden is a nice country and everything, but I’d still rather go home. I want to, but I can’t.”
“I am sorry.” Unlike a lot of people who said that, Gunnar Landquist actually sounded as if he meant it. “If there were something I could do-”
That subjunctive was correct. Even so, most Americans would have said If there was. Sometimes you could tell foreigners because they spoke your language more accurately than you did.
“Since you cannot go, what will you do?” Landquist asked.
“Stay,” Peggy said, which made him laugh yet again. She went on, “If I have to stay somewhere that isn’t America, this is a nice place to be.”
“I am glad to hear it. I shall write it down and quote you.” Write it down he did. He tipped her a wink. “So you like us better than Germany, do you?”
“Oh, Lord, yes!” Peggy blurted. Gunnar Landquist wrote that down, too. Peggy wondered if she ought to ask him not to. If-no, when-the Germans read it, it would only piss them off. She’d been trying to avoid that, even in this interview. Well, too goddamn bad this time, she thought. It was nothing but the truth.
* * *
Theo Hossbach hadn’t much enjoyed spending a winter in the field in the Low Countries and France. By the way things were going, spending a winter in the field in Poland would be even less fun. He came from Breslau, not that far west of where he was now. Winters got pretty beastly there, too. Not so beastly as this, though. He didn’t think so, anyhow.
Adi Stoss came from some lousy little town near Munster, way the hell over on the other side of Germany. He pissed and moaned about the cold and wind like you wouldn’t believe. “This weather ought to be against the Geneva Convention,” he said with an exaggerated shiver, huddling close to the fire the panzer crew had made of boards taken from a wrecked farmhouse. The peasant whose house it had been was in no position to complain; they’d found his body, and his wife’s, and a little boy’s, in the ruins.
“Screw the weather,” Hermann Witt said. The panzer commander didn’t get far from the fire, either, no matter what he said. He wasn’t one of the people who could light a cigarette in any weather. Finally giving it up as a bad job, he went on, “What ought to be against the fucking Geneva Convention are the Russians.”
A puff of fog escaped from Adi’s mouth as he grunted. Theo made some kind of small noise, too, but the wind grabbed it and blew it away. Neither of his crewmates paid any attention. Chances were they wouldn’t have even if they’d heard him. He didn’t worry about that. It wasn’t as if he wanted people paying attention to him, for God’s sake.
Adi looked east. He pounded his mittened hands together to try to get some blood flowing in them. “You suppose it’s true? What the damn foot soldiers were going on about, I mean?”
“That the Ivans cut the cocks off our guys in that patrol they caught? That they stuffed ’em in their mouths afterwards?” Gloomily, Witt nodded. “Yeah, I believe it. I went through basic with one of the guys who found ’em. I’m not saying Benno wouldn’t tell a lie, but he wouldn’t tell that kind of lie-know what I mean?”
“I only wish I didn’t,” the driver answered. He pounded his hands some more, staring down at the g
round between his feet. When he looked up again, his face seemed ravaged and old. “Here’s hoping our guys were dead before the Russkis went to work on ’em.”
“Yeah. Here’s hoping.” Witt scowled. “If I thought they were going to do that to me, I’d shoot myself first.”
“Christ, who wouldn’t?” Stoss cupped his hands in front of his crotch. “Fun old war, ain’t it?”
“Fun… Aber naturlich.” The corners of the sergeant’s mouth turned down even farther. “How the hell are you supposed to fight against people who do that kind of shit? They aren’t people, not really. Nothing but savages.”
“How do you fight ’em? You kill ’em, that’s how. And you make goddamn sure they don’t take you alive.” Adi slapped his hip. “I never let loose of my pistol these days.”
“Makes sense to me.” Witt turned to-turned on-Theo. “How about you, Hossbach?”
“Huh?” Theo said in surprise. A blush heated his face. He couldn’t leave it there. A few more words came out: “Adi usually makes sense.”
“Fat lot of good it does him, too,” Witt said. “Sorry son of a bitch is stuck in Poland just like the rest of us.”
“Oh, there are worse places,” Adi said lightly.
“Yeah?” Witt challenged. “Name two.”
“Dachau. Belsen.” All at once, Stoss’ tone wasn’t light any more. The names came off his tongue flat and hard as paving stones.
He didn’t just kill the conversation; he shot it right behind the ear. Witt got very busy-almost theatrically busy-heating meat-and-barley stew in his mess tin. The cooks coyly declined to tell their customers what kind of meat it was. That made Theo suspect it would whinny if you poked it with a fork. He’d eaten horsemeat in the field before. This had the same strong flavor and gluey texture. He didn’t worry about it. A full belly beat an empty one any day of the week.
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