“Absent friends,” the Luftwaffe men chorused. Most of them had something strong to hand, too.
Hans-Ulrich didn’t. A groundcrew man clucked at him. “Shouldn’t drink toasts in water. It’s unlucky.”
“Not water,” Rudel replied with dignity. But his eggnog was unfortified.
“Close enough. Too damn close.” The other pilot raised his glass again. “And here’s to close enough and too damn close, as long as the bastards miss.”
“Amen!” Hans-Ulrich drank to that, too, even if it was with plain eggnog.
Off in the distance, guns boomed. The ceiling was too low to let planes take off and land, but the war went on. One of the groundcrew men, a graying, wrinkled fellow with only three fingers on his left hand, said, “Wasn’t like this the first Christmas in the last war.”
“I’ve heard about the truce, Franz,” Hans-Ulrich said. “Was it really as big a thing as people say—our Landsers playing football with the Tommies, and all that?”
“I know people who watched the games,” Franz answered. “I know one guy who played. I didn’t see ‘em myself—my regiment was opposite the Frenchmen. We didn’t play football with them. But we did come up out of the trenches and meet in no-man’s-land, damned if we didn’t. We traded cigarettes and rations and stuff you could drink, and we all said what a bunch of assholes our officers were.…No offense, sir.”
Everybody laughed. Rudel made sure his laughter was louder than anyone else’s. You couldn’t let the men think you were a stuffed shirt, even if you were—maybe especially if you were. Hans-Ulrich knew he was, at least by most people’s standards.
He shrugged. He had his father’s stern Lutheran God, and he had the Führer (whom he saw as God’s instrument on earth), and he had his Stuka (which was his own instrument on earth). As long as he had them, he didn’t need to worry about anything else.
Or so he thought, till bombs started walking toward the hut where he and his countrymen were celebrating Christmas. The weather might be lousy here, but it was good enough farther west to let planes take off, and the English or French were paying a call.
They were bombing blind, of course, up there above the clouds. Let it fall, and it’s bound to come down on somebody’s head. That had to be what they were thinking, and they were right. The Luftwaffe did the same thing when the weather was bad, as it so often was at this season.
Hans-Ulrich didn’t want to be the first one running for a trench. He also didn’t want to wait too long and go sky-high in case the bombardiers got lucky. The line between courage and foolhardiness could be a fine one.
Franz took the bull by the horns. “I’m never going to go up for the goddamn Ritterkreuz,” he said, and dashed out the door.
Where one man went, others could follow without losing pride. A zigzag trench ran only a few meters outside the hut for such occasions as these. As Hans-Ulrich jumped down into it—his boots squelched in mud—he tried to imagine winning the Knight’s Cross to the Iron Cross himself. He’d got an Iron Cross Second Class a week before: an early Christmas present, his CO called it. But you could win an Iron Cross Second Class just by staying alive at the front for a couple of weeks—oh, not quite, but it seemed that way.
Franz had the ribbon for one, no doubt from the last war. Back then, the Iron Cross Second Class was almost the only medal an enlisted man could win. Hitler had an Iron Cross First Class, which made him an exceptional hero, because he’d never even reached sergeant.
And then Hans-Ulrich stopped worrying about Hitler’s Iron Cross or anything else but living through the next few minutes. The enemy planes up there were bombing blind, but they couldn’t have done better on a sunny, clear summer’s day. They might not have done so well, because high-altitude bombing was turning out to be one of the big disappointments of the war. It was neither as accurate nor as terrifying and intimidating as the experts had claimed it would be.
Which didn’t mean winding up on the wrong end of it was any fun. Now Rudel got a taste of what he gave the foe. The earth shook under him like a blancmange. The noise was impossible, overwhelming. Blast did its best to tear his lungs out from the inside.
After the longest six or eight minutes of Hans-Ulrich’s life, the bombers droned away. “Der Herr Gott im Himmel!” he said. Then he said it again, louder, because he couldn’t hear himself the first time. He stuck his head up and looked over the lip of the trench.
The hut still stood, but it leaned drunkenly Its windows were blown out—or, more likely, in. Bomb craters turned the landscape into a miniature Verdun. Something a few hundred meters away was burning enthusiastically—a truck, Hans-Ulrich saw.
Sergeant Dieselhorst stuck his head up a few meters from Hans-Ulrich. “I wouldn’t mind not doing that again,” the rear gunner remarked, and then, apropos of nothing that presently surrounded him, “Merry Christmas.”
“Merry Christmas,” Rudel echoed automatically. “Where were you? You weren’t singing carols—I know that.”
“I should hope not,” the noncom said. “If you want to waste your time that way, go ahead, but I was doing something more important: I was sleeping, by God.” He pointed to some trees not far away. “I was happy as a clam under there, but then the goddamn bombs started coming down.”
He sounded irate in a particular way. Hans-Ulrich nodded, because he felt that same indignation. When he went out and dropped a fat one on a French truck column, that was business. But when the sons of bitches on the other side tried to blow him to the moon, it felt like dirty pool. How dare they do such a thing? Didn’t they know the Führer and the Reich were going to win any which way? Why were they working so hard in what was bound to be a forlorn hope?
And why were they coming so close to killing him? That was the real question.
“I wonder if we’ve got any fighters up there,” somebody said. “If we do, those Allied shitheads’ll be sorry in a hurry.”
Hans-Ulrich nodded. He’d listened to Me-109 pilots going on about what sitting ducks British and French bombers were. They couldn’t run, they couldn’t hide, and they couldn’t fight back. He would have liked that better if his Stuka weren’t in the same boat. No matter how scary it seemed to the troops on the ground, it couldn’t get out of its own way. If the Messerschmitts didn’t keep enemy fighters away from them, Ju-87s would tumble out of the sky as often as the Western Allies’ bombers did.
“We ought to pay those damned sky pirates back,” someone else said, lifting a phrase popular in German papers.
Dieselhorst’s snort put paid to that. In case it hadn’t, the sergeant went on, “How? We can’t take off. Even if the weather didn’t stink, some of that load came down on the airstrip. They’re going to have to flatten it out again before we can use it. We might as well drink and play skat, because we aren’t flying for a while.”
A sergeant feeling his oats could sound more authoritative than any major ever hatched. Sergeants mysteriously, mystically knew things. Officers could command, but they didn’t have that amazing certainty.
“Anybody think more of those fuckers are coming?” asked a ground-crew man in greasy, muddy coveralls. By his tone, he wanted somebody like Dieselhorst to pat him on the head and say something like, No, don’t worry about it. You’re safe now.
But no one said anything of the kind. Hans-Ulrich realized he wouldn’t have minded some reassurance, either. When the silence had stretched for a bit, the groundcrew man swore again. Maybe that made him feel a little better, anyhow. Rudel didn’t usually grant himself even that safety valve, though some of the close calls he’d had on missions made him slip every now and then. He always felt bad about it afterwards, but coming out with something ripe made him feel better when he did it.
He climbed out of the trench and brushed mud and dirt off of himself. “We might as well go back,” he said. “The best way to get even with the enemy is to have a good time.”
When the Luftwaffe men went back inside their shelter, they found that blast and wind had
blown out most of the candles on the Christmas tree. A pilot with a cigarette lighter got them going again. He flicked the lighter closed and put it in his pocket. “God only knows how long I’ll be able to get fuel for it,” he said. “Then it’s back to matches—as long as we have matches.”
He wore an Iron Cross First Class. Nobody could accuse him of being a coward or a defeatist…but he sounded like one. Hans-Ulrich wanted to take him aside and talk some sense into him. But when he tried to do that, the people he was talking to had a way of getting angry instead of appreciating his advice. He didn’t like it, which didn’t mean he hadn’t noticed it. He kept his mouth shut.
Caroling some more would have been nice, but nobody seemed to want to. That made a certain amount of sense: if you were listening for airplane engines, you didn’t want to be noisy yourself. Rudel missed the music all the same.
Sergeant Dieselhorst had come in with the rest of them. He was drinking schnapps. Soon enough, he was laughing and joking with the rest of the men. Hans-Ulrich wished he could fit in so easily—or at all.
Achilly wind whipped snow through the air almost horizontally. A good coal stove heated the officers’ barracks outside of Drisa. All the same, Anastas Mouradian shivered. “I’ll never be warm again,” he said in his deliberate Russian. “Never, not till July and the five minutes of summer they have here.”
Sergei Yaroslavsky and the other men in the barracks were all Russians. They hooted at the effete southerner. They’d all seen plenty of weather worse than this. “Hell, we could fly in this if we had to,” Sergei said.
“And we might, too,” somebody else added. “Is it five o’clock yet?”
After a glance at his watch, Sergei said, “A couple of minutes till.”
“Good,” the other flyer said. “Turn on the radio. Let’s hear the news.”
Mouradian was closest to the set. He clicked it on. It made scratchy, flatulent noises as it warmed up. There were better radios—Yaroslavsky had seen, and heard, that in Czechoslovakia. He didn’t say anything about it. Things weren’t so bad as they had been during the purges the year before, but a careless word could still make you disappear.
Or you could disappear for no reason. Plenty of people had.
“Comrades! The news!” the announcer said. “In the West, the capitalists and Fascists continue to murder one another.” He gave a summary of the day’s fighting—or rather, the claims and counterclaims about the day’s fighting, finishing, “Plainly, by the lies and contradictions on display, neither side in this struggle of reactionary decadence is to be believed.”
“May the Devil’s grandmother eat them all up,” another pilot said. The sentiment was unexceptionable. The way the man put it wasn’t. Russians talked about the Devil and his relations all the time. When the Soviet Union was aggressively atheist, though…Such talk could land you in trouble if someone who didn’t like you reported it.
Anything could land you in trouble. Sergei’d just been thinking about that.
“In the Far East, Japanese imperialists continue to encroach on the territory of the fraternal socialist Mongolian People’s Republic,” the announcer said. “The Foreign Commissar, Comrade Litvinov, has stated that such incursions cannot and will not be tolerated indefinitely.”
“Wonder if that’s where we go next,” Mouradian said. Sergei had wondered the same thing when he was ordered to fly their SB-2 out of the Ukraine. But they’d ended up at the other end of the USSR instead, about as far from the trouble in Mongolia as they could get.
And there might have been reasons for that, because the next words out of the newsreader’s mouth were, “The semifascist Smigly-Ridz regime in Poland has once more rejected the Soviet Union’s just and equitable demands for an adjustment of the border in the northeast. The Poles still cling to their ill-gotten and illegal gains from the war they waged against the USSR in the early 1920s.”
Everybody leaned toward the radio. In portentous tones, the announcer went on, “Comrade Stalin has spoken with grave concern of the way the Polish regime mistreats the ethnic Byelorussians in the area in question. How long the peace-loving Soviet people can tolerate these continued provocations, only time will tell.”
He went on to talk about the overfulfillment of the norms for the current Five-Year Plan. Yaroslavsky listened to all that with half an ear; it didn’t directly affect him. The other did. When Stalin said he didn’t like the way somebody did something, that somebody was commonly very sorry very soon. And hardly anything could make a country sorrier faster than flight after flight of SB-2 bombers.
“I didn’t think we’d go,” Sergei said. “If the Poles yelled to the Nazis for help, that would put German troops right on our border, and—” He didn’t say and that wouldn’t be so good. Most of the men in the barracks had served in Czechoslovakia. They knew what rough customers the Hitlerites were.
Anastas Mouradian picked up where he left off: “If the Nazis get bogged down against England and France, they’ll be too busy to do anything about what goes on here.”
Several flyers nodded. Sergei was one of them; it looked that way to him, too. He would have said it if his crewmate hadn’t. “Soldiers are moving up toward the border. So…” The pilot who said that let his voice trail off. He wasn’t a general, and he wasn’t a prophet. You didn’t want to come out with anything that might be remembered too well.
“We aren’t going to fly right this minute,” another officer said, and produced a bottle of vodka. Despite what Sergei had said before, he was obviously right. The bottle went round. Pretty soon, another one followed it. One more after that and they wouldn’t have been able to walk or see, let alone fly. The Red Air Force ran on vodka as surely as it ran on aviation gasoline.
They got their orders the next day. Sergei still felt the drinking bout. Like the other flyers Lieutenant Colonel Borisov summoned to his office, he did his best not to show it. “We are going to liberate our Byelorussian brethren from the yoke of the Polish semifascist regime,” the squadron commander declared. “Marshal Smigly-Ridz has refused to be reasonable and democratic, and so we must persuade him.”
He’s refused to do what we want, and so we must pound the shit out of him. Sergei had no trouble translating Communist jargon into what went on in the real world. By the knowing grunts that came from several other men, neither did anyone else.
“Red Army units will enter the territory to be liberated at 0700 tomorrow morning,” Borisov declared. His eyes were cat-green but set on a slant; like so many Russians, he likely had some Tatar in the woodpile. “Your assignment will be to strike at Polish troops, and to bomb the rail junction at Glubookoje to prevent the Smigly-Ridz regime from bringing up reinforcements. Questions?”
“What if the weather doesn’t let us fly, Comrade Lieutenant Colonel?” Sergei asked.
“Then we will stay on the ground,” Borisov answered. “But our superiors do not believe that is likely.”
What exactly did he mean there? Did higher-ups in the Red Army and Red Air Force have reliable forecasts of good weather? Or would the SB-2s take off no matter how rotten the weather was? Yaroslavsky suspected the latter. With air-cooled engines, the bombers wouldn’t freeze up the way they might with liquid cooling. And they’d had skis installed instead of landing wheels, so they could deal with snow pretty well. Even so…
Sergei suspected a plan somewhere said, Air support will be laid on at such and such a time in such and such places with so many bombers and so many escorting fighters. Bad weather? Plans like that didn’t worry about such mundane details. Come what might, the air support would be laid on.
“Other questions?” Borisov asked.
His tone said he didn’t really want any more, but Anastas Mouradian raised his hand anyway. Frowning, Borisov nodded at him. “What do we do if the Nazis come in on the Poles’ side, Comrade Lieutenant Colonel?” Mouradian asked.
Several people inhaled sharply. That was a question with teeth, all right. Borisov didn’t look hap
py. “The hope and expectation are that this will not occur.”
“Yes, sir,” Mouradian said, and he waited.
The contest of wills was silent. The squadron commander didn’t want to say anything else. Mouradian didn’t want to come right out and ask, But what if it does? That silence stretched tighter and tighter. Finally, it snapped. So did Borisov: “We are at war with Germany. If German troops or aircraft operate against us, we are to prosecute the war against them. Is that clear?”
“Yes, sir. Thank you, sir,” Mouradian said.
It was clear to Sergei, too. He didn’t like it. Poland and Romania had been the USSR’s shield against Fascist Germany. If the Poles scream for help to their Western neighbor, that shield was gone. Stalin never would have made demands on Poland if the Germans weren’t up to their eyebrows in war on their other frontier. But if they weren’t quite up to their eyebrows…
Sergei had faced Messerschmitts and German antiaircraft guns in Czechoslovakia. He didn’t relish doing it again. Of course, the next time anyone set over him gave a damn about his opinion would be the first.
Maybe the high command did know something. Sergei was sure stranger things had happened, though he couldn’t think of one offhand. The day was cold, but it was bright and sunny. The SB-2 was fueled up and bombed up and ready to go. Sergei and Mouradian and Ivan Kuchkov climbed in.
Groundcrew men spun the bomber’s props. The engines roared to life. Sergei ran his checks. All the instruments looked good. The SB-2 slid down the snow airstrip. Sergei pulled back on the stick. The nose went up. The airplane left the ground. Anastas Mouradian cranked up the landing gear. The skis retracted almost as neatly as wheels.
Snow down below made navigation a challenge. It would have been harder yet if artillery bursts hadn’t shown the way. Tanks and soldiers were swathed in white, but cast long shadows across the even whiter snow. There was the border, and there were the Soviet troops crossing it to liberate the fraternal, peace-loving people who lived just to the west.
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