So the bourbon on the rocks could damn well wait till after dinner. In the meantime, she lit a Chesterfield. Nothing wrong with cigarettes, by God! Not even if her granny would have got the vapors seeing her smoke one like a loose woman. Nothing wrong with coffee, either. She turned on the stove to heat up what was in the pot sitting there.
When Herb was out of town, time crawled by. A postcard from Reno-which, by the gaudy picture on the front, billed itself as the biggest little city in the West-was no substitute for the man himself. I won fifty bucks at a slot machine the night I got here, he wrote, and I’ve been putting it back a dime at a time ever since. He didn’t say anything about what he was doing way the hell out there, but she wouldn’t have expected him to.
She made one of her own patriotic forays into the Lehigh Valley, which kept her hopping for a few days. A speech at an Odd Fellows hall near the Civil War monument in what they called the Circle in Easton had the crowd eating out of her hand. The next morning, a Sunday, the Easton Democrats who’d sponsored her told her they’d never seen anybody else sell war bonds like that.
“All in the wrist,” she answered, not without pride.
A young man who looked like a black Irishman-the town seemed about a third Irish, a third German, and a third everything else-gave her a lift back to the train station. “I bought a bond myself,” he said. “Paying my own salary, like. I’m going into the Marines next week.”
“Good luck to you,” Peggy said from the bottom of her heart.
“Thanks,” he answered. “I’ll take whatever I can get.” That struck her as a sensible attitude. But if he was so sensible, why was he joining the Marines?
Because he was a man, so he could. Peggy made speeches and did volunteer work and used all the other substitutes for fighting a middle-aged woman could find. And if she sometimes had a drink or three to blunt the edge of loneliness, she did keep hold of the bottle, not the other way around.
She coped. It was with some astonishment that she realized Herb had been gone almost two months. Even by his standards and those of the government that ran him around, it was a long time to be away.
A couple of days after that thought crossed her mind, a fat manila envelope plastered with stamps was stuck in the mailbox. The postmarks on the stamps were from Reno. The return-address label was from a law firm there. “What the hell?” Peggy said, and carried the envelope and the rest of the mail inside.
The envelope held a sheaf of typed and printed legal papers. Paper-clipped to the front was a note in Herb’s familiar scrawl. I’m sorry, Peggy, it said, but honest to God I think this is for the best. I still like you more than anybody, but I just don’t love you any more. As you’ll see, the house is yours, free and clear. So is a big chunk of the bank account, and so is the car. I’ve got myself an apartment not far from the office. Not great, but it’ll do. Take care. When I get home, I’ll explain it all some more-or you can spit in my eye if you’d rather. Herb.
She numbly flipped through the papers. He’d established legal residence in Nevada. He’d petitioned for and been granted an interlocutory decree. Terms were … pretty much what he’d outlined in the note. They were fair: more than fair, in fact.
It all felt like a boot in the stomach just the same. “Jesus Christ in the foothills!” Peggy yipped. “I’ve been Reno-vated!” Then she started to cry.
RAF fighter-bombers streaked low above the Luftwaffe strip near Philippeville. Machine guns and cannon blazing, they shot up anything they saw. Then, their engines roaring flat out, they pulled tight turns and streaked off to the west no more than a hundred meters off the ground.
Hans-Ulrich Rudel and Albert Dieselhorst huddled in a zigzagging trench alongside the runway. A bullet thumped into the back wall of the trench, half a meter above Hans-Ulrich’s head. He dug his nose even deeper into the dirt than it already was.
When the enemy planes disappeared, Sergeant Dieselhorst said, “You know, I’d rather go to the dentist and get a tooth pulled.” His voice sounded muffled. He hadn’t pulled his face out of the dirt yet, either.
“Without novocaine,” Hans-Ulrich agreed. Cautiously, he did stick up his head. He felt like a turtle coming out of its shell to see if the hawks were gone.
They were, but they’d left something to remember them by. One of the squadron’s Stukas burned in its revetment. Earthen walls and camouflage netting hadn’t saved it. The netting was on fire now, too. A column of greasy black smoke mounted from the dead Ju-87 and blew off toward the Reich on the breeze.
Dieselhorst looked out, too. His forehead and chin had mud on them. So do mine, I bet, Hans-Ulrich thought. He rubbed his nose, which was also bound to be muddy. Dieselhorst gave forth with what good news he could: “It’s not our plane, anyway.”
“No, it isn’t,” Hans-Ulrich agreed. “And the Jabos weren’t carrying bombs-or else they’d already dropped them somewhere else. They didn’t crater the runways. We can fly off them.”
“You’re right. We can.” Dieselhorst sounded less than delighted at the prospect. “But are you sure you still want to? It’s a different world out there these days.”
He wasn’t wrong. Rudel wished he were. The Stuka was designed to fly where the Luftwaffe dominated the air, where Bf-109s kept enemy fighters away from it. The dive-bomber wasn’t quite a sitting duck in flight, but it sure was a waddling duck, especially when weighted down by panzer-busting cannon pods.
“What else can we do?” Hans-Ulrich said. “If they order us up, we’ll go. And we’ll do the best we can while we’re up, too.”
“Of course we will,” Sergeant Dieselhorst answered. They’d flown all those missions together. Even if they didn’t always like each other, that bound them together more tightly than some husbands and wives. Each of them would have been dead a dozen times if not for the other. Then the sergeant went on, “Have to hope we come down in one piece, though.”
“Hope? Yes,” Rudel said. “But sometimes you do what you have to do because other people depend on you to do it right.”
And you’ve got to do it no matter what happens to you. He didn’t come out with that. Sergeant Dieselhorst understood it perfectly well. The difference between them was that Dieselhorst hated it, while to Hans-Ulrich it was just a price that might have to be paid as part of the cost of doing the Fuhrer’s business. He wasn’t eager to pay the price, but he was ready.
They flew again, against batteries of English heavy guns that German artillery hadn’t been able to take out. The Stuka had been invented as an extension of artillery. It was the ideal kind of mission for the dive-bombers-as long as German fighters could keep enemy planes off them.
Somebody had to think the mission was important: both Bf-109s and FW-190s flew top cover for the Stukas. Some Focke-Wulf fighters were also being used as ground-attack planes, beginning to take on the role the Ju-87 had held for so long. FW-190s were much faster and more maneuverable than Stukas-no doubt about that. But they couldn’t put their bombs down right on the center of a fifty-pfennig coin. They couldn’t terrorize enemy soldiers with Jericho Trumpets, either. They were too modern. They had retractable landing gear, not the Stuka’s fixed installations.
Hans-Ulrich liked the kind of plane he flew. He’d been in the Stuka since the war started. He didn’t want anything new. The Ju-87 might look obsolete, but it was still up for jobs no other aircraft could match. The squadron wouldn’t have been attacking this English artillery unit if that weren’t so.
The front near the Belgian border seemed pretty quiet as the Stukas flew over it. Both the French and the English had made some spasmodic lunges against the Wehrmacht’s defenses. They’d got bloodied for their trouble, and hadn’t seemed so eager since.
A little flak came up at the Ju-87s, but only a little. Some machine guns winked petulantly upward, too, even if they had not the slightest chance of reaching high enough to hurt the planes.
Back behind the lines were gun pits by the dozen, by the score, by the hundred. Seeing so m
any down there gave Hans-Ulrich pause. The Western democracies might not be thrilled about the war, but they weren’t giving up on it, either. They were just fighting it on the cheap, with shells rather than with soldiers.
They had more flak guns protecting the artillery. Unlike the ones up by the trenches, these were in earnest. Puffs of fire and smoke shaped like armless men sprang into being not far from the Stukas. Hans-Ulrich’s plane bucked in the air after a near miss.
“I see the target,” Colonel Steinbrenner said into Rudel’s earphones. The squadron CO tipped his plane into a dive. “Follow me down.”
One after another, the Stukas did. As Hans-Ulrich started his dive, Sergeant Dieselhorst reported, “Our fighters are mixing it up with the Indians.”
“Let’s hope they can hold them off till we drop our bombs,” Rudel answered. He didn’t know what else he could say. They would certainly be faster and more maneuverable once they’d shed a tonne of explosives and sheet metal. Not fast. Not maneuverable. Not enough to escape enemy fighters. But more of each.
Down below, the heavy English guns swelled from little plasticine toys to scale models to the real things in seconds. The real things, damn them, had still more flak guns interspersed among them. The Stuka right in front of Rudel’s took a direct hit and fell out of the sky. The pilot and the man in the rear seat never had a prayer.
Rudel yanked on the bomb-release lever. The big bomb under the Ju-87’s midline fell free. He pulled the stick back, hard, fighting to bring up the nose. Everything went black for a split second as the blood drained from his head. Then Sergeant Dieselhorst’s exultant shout brought him back to himself: “You knocked that baby ass over teakettle!”
“Good,” Hans-Ulrich said. “Now we have to get out of here in one piece.” He gunned the Stuka for all it was worth-which, unfortunately, wasn’t much. If a Hurricane or a Spitfire broke through the fighter screen higher up and dove on him, he’d go down like the luckless fellows in the Ju-87 right below his.
What made one man die while another lived? It was and wasn’t an odd question to wonder about while racing along just above the treetops. His father wouldn’t have wondered. The stern minister would have said it was God’s will, and that would have settled that-for him, anyhow.
Well, of course it’s God’s will. Everything is God’s will, Hans-Ulrich thought. But that only shifted the question. Why was God so arbitrary?
Why did He decide one fellow’s time was up and let another, worse, chap live to a ripe old age and father eight children? Where was the justice in that?
Because He was God, and He could. It was an answer of sorts, but not one that brought Hans-Ulrich any comfort.
What brought him comfort was not seeing any RAF fighters boring in on his lumbering plane, not hearing Dieselhorst’s machine gun go off in what would probably be a futile gesture of defiance as an enemy swooped down on them. Yes, it was amazing how comforting negative information could be.
Chapter 25
“C’mon, you whore. Let’s clean your cunt.” Ivan Kuchkov shoved the pull-through into the barrel of his PPD submachine gun. Sasha Davidov was tending to his PPD, too. He raised a dark eyebrow. “You know, Comrade Sergeant, anybody listening to you would think you were talking about something else.”
“Fuck your mother, Zhid! Like I give a shit,” Kuchkov told the skinny little point man. His voice held no particular malice. That was just the way he talked, to his weapon and to the people around him. He listened to the phonograph record in his mind of what he had said a moment before and started to laugh. “All right, fuck me, too. That is pretty cocksucking funny.”
Along with the men in his section, he crouched in a clearing in some bushes near a stream. Artillery muttered in the distance. There were Germans within a couple of kilometers, but not far within that distance. Ukrainian nationalist bandits were liable to be prowling around, too. They might be closer than the Fritzes; they were commonly better at sneaking up on things.
They were also dumber than the Fritzes. Couldn’t they see that, regardless of whether Hitler or Stalin won the war, they were going to get it in the neck? Did it really matter to them whether they got it from the Gestapo or the NKVD?
For now, without orders to move against the Hitlerites, Kuchkov didn’t intend to do one single goddamn thing but sit here and play with his dick. He fought when he had to. He didn’t mind killing Germans, not even a little bit. But they could kill him, too. Why give them unnecessary chances?
Somebody off in the distance made a noise. Bushes were good for all kinds of things. They kept people on the other side from seeing you, and they warned you when trouble was on the way. Kuchkov quickly reassembled his PPD and slammed the big snail drum of a magazine into place under the weapon. If that noise meant trouble, he could throw a lot of rounds at it before he had to worry about reloading.
His men were all grabbing for their weapons and making sure they had a round chambered. Everybody here had been through several fights-no blushing virgins at this dance.
One of the sentries Ivan had posted around the encampment called out a challenge. Ivan heard some kind of answer, but couldn’t make out what it was. He didn’t have long to think about it, because a split second later a rifle shot rang out.
“C’mon!” Ivan said to Sasha Davidov. As quietly as they could, they scrambled through the bushes toward the gunshot. Kuchkov picked the Jew because his quiet was likely to be quieter than anybody else’s.
And so it proved. Sasha and the sentry coming back to the encampment nearly ran into each other. “Bozhemoi, Vitya!” Davidov barked. “I almost scragged you there.”
“I halfway wish you did.” Vitya Ryakhovsky’s face was white as new-fallen snow, his eyes wide and filled with horror. “At least it’d be over quick then. I just shot the politruk.”
“Fuck me in the mouth!” Ivan said. He had to bite down hard to keep from adding You stinking bitch! I wish I’d done that! However much he wished it, it wasn’t one of the things you came out with, not unless you wanted to hand your buddies your balls forever. Instead, he stuck to business: “What the piss happened?”
“I was there, where I was supposed to be,” Vitya answered. “I’d dug a good foxhole, and stuck branches and stuff in the dirt to hide it. I heard a noise-somebody pushing through the bushes.”
“We all heard it,” Sasha broke in. “I wouldn’t be surprised if they heard it back in Kiev.”
“Uh-huh.” Still pale as death, the sentry went on, “So I challenged. But this guy told me to tie my cock in a knot. That’s not the word, so I fired. I figured he was a Ukrainian bandit or something. And I hit him. Only-”
“It was the political officer,” Ivan finished for him. That stupid, arrogant answer sounded like a politruk, all right.
Vitya nodded shakily. “It was. Christ have mercy, I didn’t know!”
“Is he dead?” Sasha Davidov asked.
“He’s dead, all right-dead as makhorka.” Ryakhovsky nodded again, grimly this time. “I got him right in the bull’s-eye, just above his nose.”
“Let’s make fucking sure,” Kuchkov said. “Take us to him.” Wounding a politruk might be even worse than killing one, if such a thing were possible. A wounded political officer would testify against you, and of course they’d listen to him first and to you not at all. That was how things worked.
But the soldiers wouldn’t have to worry about that here. Maxim Zabelin lay crumpled on his side, his own machine pistol next to him. He still looked pissed off; his features hadn’t relaxed into blankness yet. The hole above his nose was small and neat. Going out, the round from the Mosin-Nagant had blown off most of the back of his head.
“What are we going to do?” Sasha Davidov whispered.
Kuchkov had been worrying at that himself. Reluctantly, he said, “Vitya, we’ve got to take it to the lieutenant. All the bastards at the camp heard your dick shoot off, y’know? We can’t fucking cover it over in hay. Some cocksucker’ll get toasted and blab, an
d then you’ll catch it ten times as bad.”
“Couldn’t I just run off?” Ryakhovsky asked miserably. He didn’t like the odds, and Ivan didn’t blame him.
But Sasha said, “No, you can’t do that, Vitya. Not this time. They’d think you murdered Lieutenant Zabelin on purpose and then did a bunk. If they grabbed you after that …” He didn’t go on, or need to. Vitya could paint those gruesome pictures inside his own head.
“Listen to him. He’s a goddamn smart sheeny,” Ivan said. “You better come. You got a chance, I think. The lieutenant, he’s a halfway decent prick.” For an officer, he thought, but he didn’t say that. Vitya had plenty to worry about without it.
The luckless (or lucky, depending on how you looked at things) sentry came along almost apathetically, as if he knew he couldn’t do anything about whatever was going to happen to him. No, not as if. He couldn’t, and that was the long and short of it.
Lieutenant Obolensky and the men with him had camped several hundred meters east of the stream in a ruined farmhouse whose surviving walls would shield his fire from the Germans’ eyes. “What’s up, Sergeant?” he asked when Kuchkov and Ryakhovsky and Davidov came back to him.
“Comrade Lieutenant, we’ve got us one cunt of a problem,” Kuchkov answered. He elbowed Vitya in the ribs. “Tell the lieutenant what the fuck happened.”
Stammering, Vitya did. “I wouldn’t’ve fired if he’d given me the word. Honest to God, Comrade Lieutenant, sir, I wouldn’t’ve!” he wailed at the end.
Lieutenant Obolensky didn’t say anything at all for more than a minute. By his face, he was thinking hard, though. “I believe you,” he replied at last. “But I’m not sure how much good that does you. I’m going to have to report this, too. I’m sorry, but I am. My dick gets cut off if don’t.”
Two Fronts twtce-5 Page 42
