A few days later, he did snag a pass into Honolulu. He got drunk, he went to Hotel Street, and he got laid. Then he drank some more and got laid again. In the course of drinking more still, he knocked an Army sergeant cold with a left to the belly and a right to the jaw. He walked out of that joint before the Shore Patrol showed up, leaving the Army three-striper on the floor. The jerk would be sadder when he woke up, but probably no wiser.
He made it back to the Boise on time. Next morning, it was black coffee and some of those aspirins. He hardly remembered coldcocking the Army guy. Nor was he the only man just back from liberty who seemed a little the worse for wear.
For his sins, the Boise steamed out into the Pacific later that day for live-fire exercises with towed targets. Aspirins or no aspirins, when the guns started going off he thought his head would explode with them. Before long, he hoped it would.
The other guys at the gun razzed him every time he flinched. Since he flinched a lot, he got several weeks’ worth of razzing all in the space of a few hours. “Hangovers and big booms don’t mix,” Joe Orsatti observed.
“Thank you, Albert Einstein,” Pete replied. After a moment, he added, “Fuck you, Albert Einstein.”
His jimjams didn’t keep him from passing shells to the loader when planes brought targets overhead. If slow-moving strips of orange cloth had dive-bombed the Boise, the Marines at her secondary armament would have blown them out of the sky.
A Navy lieutenant warned, “Keep an eyeball peeled for submarines. We aren’t within safe waters.”
He outranked the leathernecks—a two-striper was the equivalent of a Marine Corps captain. So they couldn’t say much while he was in earshot. Once he’d gone … That was a different story.
“What? He thinks we’re too dumb to look if he don’t tell us to?” Orsatti groused.
“He must figure we’re like ordinary swabbies,” Pete put in. That got some laughs. Marines were convinced sailors were idiots in training to be morons. Of course, it worked both ways, which was one of the reasons sailors and Marines from the same ship sometimes brawled when they got liberty at the same time.
One of the other guys in the gun crew just said, “Whistleass pecker-head.” That summed things up as well as any other two words Pete could have thought of.
No one saw a periscope, or even imagined he saw a periscope. The hydrophones didn’t report any contacts. There was talk that the Boise would get a fancy new version as part of her refit. Sonar was the name Pete had heard. He didn’t know much about it, but he was in favor of anything that would help keep them from stopping a torpedo.
They made it back to Pearl undamaged. That young lieutenant seemed convinced they got back for no other reason than his own enormous heroism. The leathernecks laughed behind their hands. Otherwise, they kept their opinions to themselves.
IVAN KUCHKOV HATED squelching through the mud. He hadn’t had to do that when he was in the Red Air Force, or not nearly so much of it, anyhow. But his only other choices were falling behind and letting the Nazis capture him (a bad bet) or getting wounded or killed (a worse one). So squelch he did.
Ukrainian mud seemed particularly oozy and bottomless, too. Everybody said Ukrainian soil—the famous black earth—was fertile beyond compare. He supposed that was so: this country was all kolkhozes. But, when the rasputitsa came, the black earth also turned goopy beyond compare.
“Avram!” Ivan called. Then he raised his voice to yell “Avram!” again, louder this time. The point man was well out ahead of the section, the way he was supposed to be.
He stopped when he finally heard Kuchkov. “What do you need, Comrade Sergeant?” he shouted back. He could afford to make some noise, as Ivan could; no Germans were in the neighborhood. Or if the Germans were, things were even more fouled up than the brass wanted to admit. Kuchkov guessed—no, on second thought he was sure—that was possible, maybe even likely.
He slogged forward through the muck to catch up to Sasha Davidov. If there were Fascists around, he didn’t want to call the point man back. Then the whole section might run into them without warning. That he might run into them without warning occurred to him only when he’d almost reached the Jew. He hung on to his PPD-34 a little tighter once it did.
And the first question out of his mouth was, “Any fucking sign of the pricks?”
Avram shook his head. “Not around here, Sergeant.” He pointed ahead. “Once we get over that swell of ground, we’ll be able to see farther. Of course, if there are any Germans on the far side of it, they’re liable to spot us, too.”
Ivan grunted. Normally, he would have had no more use for a skinny, swarthy little kike than any other Russian of peasant stock did. But times weren’t normal—not even a little bit. The game had changed as soon as the USSR and the Nazis actually came to grips. Some Russians and more Ukrainians and people from the Caucasus liked Hitler better than Stalin. They’d desert if they got the chance. Not even the politruks could stop them all the time.
You didn’t need to worry about the Jews, though. They were in the fight to the last bullet. They had to be. If the Nazis caught them, they’d get a bullet, all right. A Russian might be able to surrender. No guarantees, but he might. Zhids didn’t have a prayer. The Germans casually murdered them, the same way they got rid of the political officers who fell into their hands.
Pointing to that same swell of ground, Kuchkov asked, “Can you haul your sorry ass to the top and over without letting the Fascist pussies spot you?”
Avram was no braver than he had to be. But then, people who were braver than they had to be had a way of not living long. He tossed a papiros into the mud—he didn’t want some alert Fritz noticing the coal or the smoke. He nodded: not with any great enthusiasm, but he did. “I can do it.”
“All right. You go ahead, then. But some of the clumsy cuntfaced bitches in our outfit, you know they’d trip over their dicks if they tried, right?” Ivan said. He waited for the Jew to nod again before he went on, “So I’m gonna lead our assholes around to the left. If it’s clear, you fucking meet up with us there. Got it?”
“Yob tvoyu mat’, Sergeant,” Davidov assured him.
Ivan burst into raucous laughter and slapped him on the back. Literally, what the Jew said meant Fuck your mother. In a different tone of voice or at a different time, it might have made Kuchkov try to murder him. But the filthy phrase lay at the bottom of mat. It could have a multitude of meanings, foul or fair. What Avram was getting across here was You bet your ass.
Fair enough. He was betting his own ass that he could do what he said he could do. “Go on, then,” Ivan told him. “You get into trouble, I’ll send some of the shitheads after you.”
Davidov nodded and went on. If he got into trouble, Ivan’s promise probably wouldn’t do him any good. He had to know that, but he moved up anyhow. He might be a kike, but he was all right.
The rest of the section took its own sweet time catching up to Kuchkov. The men weren’t fools. They could tell they were pretty safe where they were. The farther ahead they moved, the better—or rather, the worse—their chance of bumping into Nazis with guns.
Kuchkov profanely explained how they were going to skirt the swell of ground ahead. He also told half a dozen soldiers to rush to Avram’s rescue if the point man’s luck ran out. “You fuck that up, you better be more scared of me than you are of those German walking foreskins,” he added. The soldiers nodded. Anyone who wasn’t afraid of Ivan didn’t know him very well.
It had been drizzling. The rain started coming down harder as he took his section where it needed to go. In a way, that was good: the Germans would have more trouble noticing them. In another, not so good: the Red Army men would have more trouble spotting the Fascists.
Avram carried a PPD-34, too. You wanted to be able to throw a lot of lead at the bad guys in a hurry if you came across them when you didn’t expect to. Ivan kept his head cocked toward the top of the low hillock. He’d hear that snarl through the rain’s plashing.
It didn’t come. He got the rest of the section where they needed to go. Then he waited. Avram Davidov materialized as if out of thin air. “I think there are some Germans in the trees along the stream up ahead,” he said.
“You sure?” Ivan asked him.
“Pretty sure, Comrade Sergeant,” Davidov answered. “I don’t have any field glasses, but they looked like Germans, sure as the devil.”
“Bugger the cocksucking Devil,” Kuchkov said. He turned to another Red Army man. “Yuri!”
“Da, Comrade Sergeant?”
“Go back and tell the company CO that we’ve bumped into the fucking Fascists. Ask him if he wants to reinforce us for a proper attack or if we should just sit tight and keep an eye on the pussies. You got me?”
“Da,” Yuri said again, and accurately gave back what Ivan had said. Like his sergeant, he could no more read and write than he could fly. He relied on his memory in ways people who could write never did. He was also pretty good at traveling cross-country—not so good as Avram, but good enough. Off he went, at the fastest clip the mud allowed.
Ivan didn’t need to order his men to start digging foxholes and camouflaging them. The soldiers automatically did that when they saw they wouldn’t be moving up for a while. The foxholes here would be nasty places, and would start filling up with water soon. The men dug anyhow. If German machine guns or artillery were going to probe for them, they wanted somewhere to hide.
Yuri probably wouldn’t make it back for a couple of hours. It might be dark by the time he did, which would put things off till tomorrow. Ivan didn’t mind; he was in no hurry to get shot at. He just hoped the Nazis weren’t readying their own onslaught. They might not need to wait hours to set up something good-sized. The bastards had radio sets falling out of their assholes.
Night came before either Yuri or a German attack. Yuri did manage to find his way back in the dark, and the jumpy sentries managed not to shoot him when he did. “Reinforcements will come up in the morning,” he reported. “The captain wants us to sit tight till then.”
“Khorosho,” Ivan said. The order let him to what he already wanted to, which suited him fine.
But, as Avram discovered, the Germans reinforced under cover of darkness. The Soviet attack never went in. Instead, the Red Army pulled back another kilometer or two and tried to draw a firm line in the mud.
Chapter 23
Hans-Ulrich Rudel shivered. Snowflakes swirled through the air. His breath smoked. The ordinary Luftwaffe greatcoat wasn’t defense enough against the Russian winter. He’d have to go back to wearing his flying togs all the time, the way he had the year before.
The Wehrmacht had been caught short last winter. Even the Germans’ Polish allies laughed at them or, worse, pitied them because of their inadequate cold-weather gear. Nothing could embarrass German national pride worse than pity from a pack of slovenly, hard-drinking, wife-beating Poles.
Things were better this year. Proper winter clothing was reaching the Landsers who needed it most in something like adequate quantities. They wouldn’t have to steal lousy, flea-infested sheepskin jackets from Russian peasants, the way they had before. They wouldn’t have to tailor bedsheets into camouflage smocks for the snow, either. There were proper snowsuits, reversible between white and Feldgrau. Progress, of a sort.
But only of a sort. As a lot of invaders had discovered before Germany tried it, Russia was easy to get into. Getting out was a lot harder. You could win victory after victory … and then what? The Red Army kept throwing in fresh divisions as if it manufactured them in Magnitogorsk. And there were always more kilometers of broad, flat Russian terrain ahead of the men from the Reich.
Nobody talked much about having a bear by the ears. Get labeled a defeatist and you’d soon envy men who’d only been captured by the Ivans. Hans-Ulrich was sure, though, that if he’d started having doubts about what Germany could hope to accomplish here, other people had worse ones and had had them longer. He was automatically loyal to the Reich, to the Party, and to the Führer. Others tried to separate the idea of Germany from the people actually running the country.
And there were other worries. Not long after the ground got hard enough to let them start flying again, Albert Dieselhorst sidled up to Rudel on the airstrip and spoke in a low voice: “What have you heard about the French?”
“Huh?” Hans-Ulrich blinked. “What do you mean, what have I heard about them? They eat frogs’ legs and snails. They make good wine, too, though you’d care more about that than I do. What else am I supposed to know?”
His radioman and rear gunner breathed out twin gusts of exasperation through his nostrils. “In a military sense … sir.” The military honorific plainly took the place of something more like you donkey.
“Well …” Hans-Ulrich chose his words with care, even with Dieselhorst. If he talked about the way the French had held the Reich out of Paris two wars in a row, he could still end up in trouble. So he stuck with the obvious: “They’re holding a stretch of the line not too far south of here.”
“Yes. They are.” The sergeant exhaled again, not quite so extravagantly this time. “How hard are they holding it?”
“Huh?” Hans-Ulrich repeated. This time, though, he didn’t stay a blockhead long. Even an innocent like him began looking for plots when the war wasn’t going so well. “What? Do you think they’re going to try and pull an England on us?”
“It’s … possible.” Dieselhorst seemed happier that his superior did have some kind of clue after all. “Are you ready to fly against them if we have to?”
“I’m always ready to fly against the enemies of the Reich,” Rudel answered, now without the least hesitation.
Sergeant Dieselhorst grinned crookedly. He reached out and set a hand on Hans-Ulrich’s arm. It wasn’t the kind of thing a noncom was supposed to do with an officer. It was, though, the kind of thing an older man might naturally do with a younger one he liked. “There you go, sir. I should’ve known you’d come out with something like that.”
“Well, what else do you expect me to say?” If Hans-Ulrich sounded irritable, it was only because he was. He was a falcon. Fly him at something, and he’d kill it for you. What it was didn’t matter, as long as you wanted it dead. He didn’t think of himself in those terms, of course. But then, chances were a true winged, taloned falcon didn’t think of itself in those terms, either.
“Not a thing, sir. Not a goddamn thing.” Dieselhorst paused, perhaps wondering whether to go on. After a few seconds, he did: “If the froggies screw us over, we’ve got a two-front war for real.”
“God forbid!” Rudel burst out. That had been the nightmare in the last fight, one that Germany hadn’t had to face this time around. If she did … Well, the war got harder.
“God won’t forbid it. God doesn’t work that way.” Dieselhorst spoke about God with as much assurance and conviction as Hans-Ulrich’s father ever had. He went on, “People are going to have to take care of it. One way or another, it’ll be people. It always is.”
He sketched a salute and ambled off. No one, not even a National Socialist Loyalty Officer, could have made anything of the conversation if he didn’t overhear it. They’d been flying together since the start of the war: more than three years now. Of course they’d have things to talk about.
If France went bad, the Luftwaffe would have to fight back out of Germany itself. Well, out of the Low Countries, too. But all that seemed small consolation for so much fighting, so much treasure, so much blood. And if France let England back onto the Continent while the war against the Russians ground on … That could be very bad. Hans-Ulrich didn’t need to be a General Staff officer to see as much.
Two days later, he got up the nerve to ask Colonel Steinbrenner, “Sir, just how loyal are the French?”
The squadron commander blinked. “Et tu, Brute?” he said.
“Sir?” He might as well have been speaking Latin. After a moment, Hans-Ulrich realized he was.
Sighin
g, Steinbrenner dropped back into plain old Deutsch: “So you’ve heard the rumors, too, have you?”
Rudel also realized that, if he had, odds were everybody else in the squadron had been buzzing about them this past fortnight, or maybe longer. There was an encouraging thought. Not even winning the Knight’s Cross had made him less of a white crow. “Yes, sir. I’ve heard them,” he mumbled.
“Well, now that you have, you know as much as I do,” Steinbrenner said. “If they turn out to be true, we’ve got some new troubles. If they don’t, we’ve got our old lot. Any other questions?”
What came out of Hans-Ulrich’s mouth then surprised him: “Can I get a little bit of leave, sir? Long enough to go back to Bialystok? If things turn bad, I’d like to have the chance to say good-bye to Sofia.”
“You know, you ask so few favors, it makes me nervous sometimes,” Steinbrenner said. “Yes, I’ll give you leave. What you do with it is your business, not mine. Enjoy yourself, though.”
“Thank you very much, sir!” Hans-Ulrich stiffened to attention and saluted. Colonel Steinbrenner’s answer was more a wave than a salute, but that was a superior’s privilege.
Three days later, Hans-Ulrich was back in Poland. It was snowing in Bialystok, too. He didn’t feel so cold there, though. The tavern where Sofia worked wasn’t far from the train station. German and Polish soldiers crowded the place, drinking as if they didn’t want to think about tomorrow—and they probably didn’t.
The bartender stuck his head into the back room and shouted something in Polish that had Sofia’s name in it. She came out a moment later, trim and neat as always. The bartender pointed toward Hans-Ulrich, who sat at a small table against the wall.
The War That Came Early: Coup d'Etat Page 40
