“You again!” she said in mock surprise when he walked into the tavern. A couple of Germans who’d been regulars there longer than he had chuckled. He ignored them; they were foot soldiers, not flyers, so their opinions didn’t matter to him.
Sofia’s did. He sat down at a table, so she’d have to come over. If he’d perched on a stool at the bar, the bored-looking man behind it would have taken care of him. That was the last thing he wanted.
“Two bottles of vodka, right?” she said in Yiddish. She knew-she couldn’t very well not know-he steered clear of booze.
“Tea, please,” Hans-Ulrich said tightly. Ordering milk in a dive like this only made people laugh at you… more than they did anyhow. Besides, he’d found that milk you bought in Poland had at least a fifty-fifty chance of being sour.
“Tea.” Sofia rolled her eyes, but she didn’t laugh, not out loud. She came back a few minutes later with a glass-Poles drank tea Russian-style-and a pot that had probably come to Bialystok from England when Queen Victoria still sat on the throne disapproving of things. Hans-Ulrich, who disapproved of a good many things himself, felt more than a little sympathy for the late Queen.
But he didn’t disapprove of Sofia. On the contrary. As she poured the tea, he slipped an arm around her waist. She made as if to pour some in his lap. He let go, the feel of her still warm on his fingers.
She set the teapot on the table. “What is it with you, anyway?” she demanded.
“What do you think it is? You drive me crazy.”
“You must be crazy.” She followed his German well enough, but the word she used, meshuggeh, was one he’d had to figure out from context. She pointed to the Luftwaffe eagle on his chest-the eagle holding a swastika in its claws. “You’re wearing that, and you think I’d want anything to do with you? Maybe you don’t drink, but I bet you smoke an opium pipe.”
“I’m here-Germans are here-to defend Poland against the Reds,” Rudel said. “Is that so bad? Does it make me so awful?”
“That’s not so bad,” Sofia said. She pointed to the swastika-carrying eagle again. “ That makes you awful.”
“Would you rather see Russian commissars buying drinks here?”
“Or not buying drinks.” This time, she pointed to the teapot. “So you can quit hokking me a chynik about that.” One more Yiddish phrase he’d picked up-literally, banging on a teapot, but stretched to mean making a fuss in general. “The Russians wouldn’t come down on us because we were Jews. They’d just come down on us because we were here.”
“Is that better?” Hans-Ulrich asked. Only afterwards did he think to add, “We aren’t coming down on you. We’re being correct.” That was the best face he could put on it.
“It’s better,” Sofia answered. “In the last war, you people came here, too, and there were Jews in the Kaiser’s army. Where are they now?”
“They… don’t support the Fuhrer. ” Again, that was the best he could do.
“Can you blame them?” Sofia said.
“I don’t care about such things,” he said, which was a good long stretch from the truth. “All I care about is you.” He came closer to veracity there, at least for the moment.
Sofia spelled it out in words of one syllable: “All you want to do is lay me.”
“That’s not all I want to do. I mean-” Hans-Ulrich broke off in confusion.
“What else? Do I want to find out?” she said. Before he could answer-and probably dig himself in deeper-she stalked off to tend to the ground pounders and locals at some of the other tables.
But she came back. She kept coming back. Hans-Ulrich thought she had to have some interest in him. If she didn’t, she’d take his order, take his money, and ignore him the rest of the time. Or she really would pour hot tea on his crotch. He knew he was dense about such things, but that would get the message across.
“More tea?” she asked.
“Sure.”
“All right. If you won’t get in trouble because you had a Mischling bring you your teapot.” She knew the word the Party used to describe half- and quarter-Jews. Away she went.
Hans-Ulrich felt the question as if a round of flak had burst under his Ju-87. Even if Germans couldn’t treat Polish Jews the way they treated Jews back in the Reich, they weren’t supposed to go out of their way to be friendly. He didn’t just want to be friendly, either. He wanted to… But, as he’d told her, that wasn’t the only thing he wanted, which complicated things further.
Before this latest failed coup against the Fuhrer, he wouldn’t have worried about it so much. Everything was tighter now, though. People who’d done fine in the field had disappeared because the security organs didn’t think they were politically reliable. Rudel had always approved of that. Now he discovered the English poet’s bell tolling for him.
“Here you go.” Sofia plunked another teapot, steam rising from the spout, on the table.
“Thanks. You asked if I’d get in trouble for liking you.” That wasn’t exactly what she’d asked, but it was what she’d meant. “As far as I’m concerned, you’re worth taking the chance on.”
“Maybe you’re brave. More likely, you’re just stupid,” Sofia said, which was a shrewd guess on both ends.
“What’s so stupid about liking you?” Hans-Ulrich said plaintively.
That plaintiveness finally reached her. She’d started to turn away, but she swung back with a sharp gesture. “Wait a minute,” she said, suspicious and wary as a cat. “When you say you like me, you don’t just mean you want to go to bed with me. You mean you really like me.” She might have been accusing him of some horrible perversion. For all he knew, she was.
He nodded anyway. His heart hadn’t thumped like this when he was diving on panzers with his experimental guns to win the Ritterkreuz. The French might have killed him, but they wouldn’t have left him alive and embarrassed. “That’s right,” he said.
“You are stupid,” she said. Then she bent down and gave him a kiss that would have melted all the wax in his mustache if only he’d worn one. The German infantrymen whooped. Before he could grab her and pull her down onto his lap, she skipped back with a dancer’s grace. “Be careful what you wish for. You’re liable to get it.”
And wasn’t that the truth? All through the mud time, he’d wanted the chance to hit back at the Russians. Now he’d got it. The front would roll east. And when and how would he get back to Bialystok to see Sofia again?
There was a joke they told even in the God-fighting Soviet Union. It had to do with the atheist’s funeral. There he lay, all dressed up with no place to go. It wasn’t a very good joke, but when did that ever stop people?
Anastas Mouradian felt like that atheist in his coffin. He’d crossed the whole vast breadth of the USSR. He’d flown a couple of missions against the Japanese besieging Vladivostok. And now the city had surrendered. The war against Japan wasn’t over, but the little yellow men had what they wanted. Now it was up to the Red Army and Air Force to take it back… if they could.
If Japan were the Soviet Union’s only enemy, Stalin likely would have massed an army and an air fleet up around Khabarovsk for a drive down the line of the Trans-Siberian Railway toward Vladivostok. How was he supposed to do that, though, when the war with the Hitlerites was about to heat up ten thousand kilometers to the west?
“They’ll send us back when the balloon goes up!” Nikolai Chernenko seemed excited at the prospect.
Whether he was or not, Stas wasn’t. “That’ll be halfway around the world for me, just to get back where I started.”
His copilot didn’t want to listen to him-no surprise, not when Chernenko was as young as he was. “Are the Germans better in the air than the Japs?” the kid asked.
Germans intimidated Russians in a way the Japanese couldn’t come close to matching. Mouradian felt some of that himself. “They’re very good,” he said. “You can’t get foolish or sloppy against them, or you’ll end up dead before you’ve got any notion why.”
“Wh
at do you mean?” Chernenko might have flown combat missions, but he was still a virgin in some important ways.
That thought told Mouradian how to go on. “Remember what it was like the first time you kissed a girl?”
“I sure do!” The enthusiasm heating the younger man’s voice said he hadn’t made the discovery very long ago-maybe the night before he left his parents’ apartment or his collective farm to report to the Soviet military.
Was I ever that young? Stas wondered. In some important ways, he doubted it. Southerners took for granted things that shocked most Russians. But that was neither here nor there. Gently, the Armenian said, “Fine. Could anybody have explained what kissing a girl was like before you went and did it?”
Chernenko emphatically shook his head. “I don’t think so!”
“ Khorosho. For what it’s worth to you, I don’t think so, either. Well, fighting the Germans is kind of like that, only you can’t try to take their bra off afterwards. You’ll find out, if that’s what the people with the rank want you to do. Then this will make more sense to you, if you happen to remember it.”
The youngster frowned, with luck in wisdom. His spotty face dead serious, he asked, “Why do German fighter pilots wear brassieres? Does it help them against G forces or something?”
“Oh, Kolya, Kolya, Kolya.” Mouradian gave up. They might both use Russian, but they didn’t speak the same language. One of these days, raw Second Lieutenant Chernenko might turn into First Lieutenant or even Captain Chernenko. He’d grow up. It happened fast when people were shooting at each other. When that day came, he and Mouradian might be able to talk outside the line of duty and make sense to each other. Stranger things had happened. They must have, even if Stas couldn’t think of any right this minute.
Meanwhile, even if Vladivostok had fallen, the war against Japan sputtered on. In Stalin’s place, Mouradian would have patched up a peace with Japan so he could square off against Hitler undistracted. Maybe he was working on that. Maybe Foreign Commissar Litvinov was in Tokyo right now, making a face-saving deal.
But if he was, Radio Moscow wasn’t saying anything about it. Radio Moscow had said as little as it could about losing Vladivostok. All it said was that the garrison commander had yielded the city against orders. If soldiers and civilians were starving, if there was no hope of rescue-and Mouradian knew all too well there wasn’t-what could the general do but give up? That was how it looked to him. Radio Moscow saw things differently. And you didn’t argue with what Radio Moscow said, except perhaps within the privacy of your own mind. Even then, you had to be careful lest your face betray you.
SB-2s flying out of the base near Khabarovsk bombed towns in northern Manchukuo. They flew across the Tartar Strait and bombed Karafuto. That was what the Japanese called the southern half of Sakhalin Island, which they’d taken in the aftermath of the Russo-Japanese War. The bombers also flew patrols over the Tartar Strait and down into the Sea of Japan. Orders on those missions were to attack and sink any warships they spotted.
German Stukas were ugly, ungainly planes. But Mouradian had been on the receiving end of their dives, and knew how accurately they could place their bombs. SB-2s weren’t made for work like that. Stas was willing to try, but a long way from optimistic about the results.
Come to that, he was a long way from optimistic about finding warships, much less hitting them. This was the first time he’d ever seen the ocean, any ocean. It was as illimitably vast as the Russian steppe he’d traveled to get to Siberia. How were you supposed to find anything as small as a ship in all that wave-chopped gray-green sea? Clouds inconsiderately drifting across it didn’t help, either.
Damned if they didn’t, though. Nikolai Chernenko whooped like a savage. “There!” he said, pointing a dramatic forefinger. “A fucking battleship!”
Stas didn’t know if it was a battleship or only a destroyer. He was no connoisseur of warships. But he knew damn well a warship it was. It bristled with guns and turrets, and its hull arrogantly knifed through the water. In these parts, it could only be Japanese.
“We’ll go in low,” he declared. The SB-2 was no Stuka, but maybe it could impersonate one in the cinema.
Chernenko frowned. “We have no orders to do that, Comrade Pilot.”
He was a Russian, all right. And he was a New Soviet Man. Anything without orders was right up there with doubting Marxism-Leninism in the USSR’s catalogue of heresies. But Mouradian answered, “We have no orders not to do it. And it gives us the best chance for a hit.”
He watched his copilot and bomb-aimer chew. If he had to, he vowed to make the attack run himself, his way. But Chernenko’s face cleared. Stas had shown himself to be orthodox, or at least not unorthodox. “I serve the Soviet Union!” Chernenko exclaimed.
Mouradian spoke into the voice tube to the bomb bay so Sergeant Suslov would know what was going on. “Just tell me when,” Suslov said. “I’ll drop ’em right down the whore’s cunt.” He even talked like the Chimp.
Shove the stick forward. Watch the nose drop. Not too steep, or you’d never pull out again. This wasn’t a dive-bomber. When the airframe groaned, you needed to listen to it.
The ship swelled from bathtub toy to full-sized fearsomeness much too fast. Blue-clad Japanese sailors ran every which way like angry ants. Antiaircraft guns started filling the sky around the SB-2 with puffs of black smoke with fire at their heart.
“Five degrees to the left, Comrade Pilot. I say again, five degrees left.” With business to attend to, Chernenko was a competent professional. Mouradian obeyed without question. “Da,” Chernenko said. “That’ll do it.” Stas thought so, too-they’d pass over the ship from bow to stern. A near miss from a shell shook the SB-2. The copilot ignored it, calling through the tube, “Be ready, Innokenty! At my order!”
“Ready, Comrade Bomb-Aimer! Let’s fuck ’em!” Suslov answered.
“Now!” Chernenko shouted.
As soon as the bombs fell free, Mouradian pulled back sharply on the stick, climbing away from the antiaircraft fire. He heard soggy thumps when the bombs went off. When he could see the ship again, smoke rose from the stern. “We did something to it, anyhow,” he said, although it was still steaming.
“We should have done more.” Chernenko sounded absurdly disappointed. “I wanted to sink the son of a bitch.”
“We’ll have more chances.” Mouradian was just glad they’d got away in once piece. He’d never dreamt a ship could throw that many shells. It almost tempted him to go after the next one from several thousand meters up. Almost.
Colonel Otto Griehl looked out at the men of his black-clad regiment. The black-clad panzer crewmen stood waiting. Theo Hossbach absentmindedly scratched an itch. Next to him, Adi Stoss puffed on a cigarette. Nobody seemed very excited. They all-even Theo-had a good idea of what was coming next.
Griehl scratched, too, at a scar on his chin. He was lean, almost hawk-faced, with hollow cheeks and close-cropped gray hair. Like his men, he wore pink-piped black collar patches with a silver Totentkopf in each one. The skull and crossbones had been the panzer emblem for as long as Germany’d had armored fighting vehicles.
“Well, boys, it’s time,” Griehl said. “We came into this fight by dribs and drabs, and then we had to put up with the worst winter even an old man like me can remember.” Theo wasn’t sure the colonel’s face had room for a grin, but it did. It made him look years younger-though still old, of course. It didn’t last long. He sobered as he went on, “But now we’re here in the East in proper force, and now the ground and the weather… aren’t too bad.” That was as much praise as he would dole out to Polish conditions. “And so-it’s time to show the Ivans what we can do.”
A low hum ran through the Panzertruppen. Here and there, men nodded: Adi did, and so did Sergeant Witt. Theo just stood, listening. He was ready, but he wasn’t eager. He knew what could happen when things went wrong. If he was ever tempted to forget, the missing joints on his ring finger reminded him.
; “We’re going to drive them out of Poland,” Griehl said matter-of-factly. “Once we take care of that-well, we’ll see. I don’t know what the Fuhrer and the High Command will want us to do then. One thing at a time, though. Let’s talk about our immediate objectives.”
And he did, detailing the routes the regiment would take as it pushed east and north from the vicinity of Bialystok. He talked about artillery and air support, and about the infantry who would move forward with the panzers.
“Most of them are Polish units,” he said. “Remember that, for God’s sake, and don’t shoot them by mistake. They wear a darker, greener khaki than the Russians, and their helmet is almost like the Czech pot-it doesn’t have a brim like the Russian model.”
“Tell us something we didn’t know,” Adi muttered. Theo heard him, and maybe Witt did, too, but nobody else. Theo was patient with these lectures. One reason you walked barefoot through the obvious was that people did forget, especially when other people were trying to kill them.
“Give the Poles a hand where you can,” Griehl said. “They’re good troops. They’re brave troops. The only thing that’s really wrong with them is, they don’t have as many toys as we do. Infantry, machine guns-they’ve got those. But they’re light on artillery and panzers and planes. That’s why they called us in to help against the Reds. So we’ll do it.” He grinned again. “It’s not like the Fuhrer hasn’t got his own reasons for going after Russia. If you’ve read Mein Kampf, you’ll know that.”
He got more nods. Hitler’s book was Holy Writ to the Party. Theo had looked at it, found it bombastic and badly written, and put it aside. But you didn’t have to have gone through page by page to know he talked about Russia as Germany’s Lebensraum. Stalin doubtless had a different view of that, which didn’t bother the Fuhrer.
“We go at 0430 tomorrow,” the colonel finished. “Good luck to every one of you. Believe you me, Ivan will never know what hit him.”
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