“If anything will,” Walsh said. “For a little while.” Scholes laughed. Walsh wished he’d been joking.
When a Pe-2 taxied to takeoff, the engines stayed pretty quiet. When you gave them full throttle to get airborne, the roar filled your head. Anastas Mouradian wore a leather flight helmet. He had earphones so he could hear radio messages from his squadron commander and fellow flyers. The roar filled his head anyhow. It seemed to swallow him whole. He often marveled that it didn’t shake his molars right out of his jaw.
By the way Isa Mogamedov’s lips drew back from his teeth as the bomber started its climb, the Azeri was feeling the same way. Seeing Stas’ eyes on him, he said something.
Whatever it was, that all-consuming roar made it unintelligible. Stas cupped a hand behind his ear to show he didn’t get it. Mogamedov obligingly tried again. He shouted and used exaggerated mouth movements so the pilot could read his lips: “Poland this time.”
“Da.” Mouradian nodded to show he’d heard. “We’re moving forward.” He also mouthed the words, feeling much like a ham actor as he did. There were things he didn’t say, too. For instance, he didn’t remark on how long it had been since the squadron could bomb any country other than the USSR. When you said something like that, you put your life in the hands of the person to whom you said it.
Yes, a bomber pilot and copilot/bomb aimer already had their lives in each other’s hands. But that was different. If the Germans—or even the Poles—got one of them, they’d get both of them. The NKVD could pick and choose. Better, far better, not to give the Chekists the chance.
Flak came up at the Pe-2s. Mouradian’s plane bounced in the air like a truck rattling over a rutted road. But no clangs told of steel ripping through the thin aluminum skin. All the gauges stayed steady. The Germans still held part of Byelorussia and the Ukraine. The Red Army hadn’t cleared them out of Latvia and Lithuania yet, either.
But the Pe-2s could hit Poland even so. They could, and they would. Marshal Smigly-Ridz needed to be reminded there was a price for choosing Hitler over Stalin. The Soviet Union had already paid an enormous price because Smigly-Ridz didn’t care to cough up Wilno when Stalin demanded it. That was one more of the things you said to nobody unless you happened to own a death wish.
On they droned. It was a longer flight than most, so Stas kept a wary eye on the fuel gauge. They’d have plenty to get where they were going and back again unless something went wrong. He eyed the gauge anyhow. Getting hit was the most likely way for something like that to go wrong, but far from the only one. A cracked line, a clogged line … The longer you’d been flying, the more possibilities like that you could think of.
He and Mogamedov both spent a lot of their time peering out every which way at once through the cockpit glass. Bf-109s, FW-190s, whatever outdated junk the Poles were flying—if you didn’t spot them before they saw you, you’d go down in flames before you could complain about how obsolete the fighters were. Stas wished he had eyes on stalks like a crawfish so he really could look in two directions at the same time.
The squadron commander’s voice sounded tinnily in his earphones: “That’s Wilno dead ahead. We’ll aim at the railroad yards and the steel mills.”
Railroad connections and factories had made Stalin want the town in the first place. Now his minions would try to wreck them. If you thought about it, it reminded you of a spoiled five-year-old. If I can’t have them, you don’t get to use them, either! The scary thing was, that was probably just what was going through Stalin’s beady little mind.
Yet another thing you couldn’t say. Mouradian could say “Acknowledged,” so he did. He also called into the speaking tube: “Lower the bomb-bay doors, Fedya. We’re almost there.”
“I’m doing it,” the bombardier answered. And Mechnikov did. The wind howled in a new way as it whipped around inside the bomb bay.
Flak started coming up from the guns in and around Wilno. The fire was fierce and accurate. Whether those were Poles or Germans down there, they knew their business.
Stas tipped the Pe-2 into a shallow dive all the same. “A little to the left, Comrade Pilot,” Mogamedov said. “We’re coming up on the train station.”
“A little to the left.” Stas adjusted their course.
“Let them go, Fedya!” the Azeri called to the bombardier. The explosives fell free. The bomb-bay doors closed. Stas yanked the Pe-2 around in a tight turn and scooted for home.
Just in time. Messerschmitts tore into the Red Air Force bombers. One dove past Mouradian’s plane and was gone before he could open up on it. He did see that it was marked with Poland’s two-by-two red-and-white checkerboard rather than the German swastika. So the Poles weren’t flying junk any more, then. Hitler’d sold them fighters worth having.
The machine gun in the dorsal turret chattered furiously. Fyodor Mechnikov saw something worth shooting at, or thought he did. Better to blast away at something that wasn’t there than to let a Fritz—or even a Pole—shoot you from behind.
Two planes trailing smoke and fire spun toward the ground: a Pe-2 and a smaller 109. Mouradian gunned his machine till all the performance gauges cranked well into the red. The groundcrew men could fix the engines later. Or they could if he bought himself a later for the mechanics to fix them in.
He wondered if he should try to get higher. If he did, he and his crewmates would have a chance to bail out in case a 109 shot up the plane. But climbing would cost him speed, and speed was what would get him out of here. A Pe-2 was just about as fast as a Messerschmitt, and had far more range. Going flat out would bring him back to the airstrip with less gas in the tanks than he’d expected, but that was the least of his worries now.
Another bomber from the squadron went down. What made a fighter pilot go after one plane but not another? The size of the red stars on its wings? The way the sunlight shone off the cockpit or the turret and drew his notice? Being in the right place to dive on the Pe-2? Or nothing more than dumb luck? Stas had no answers. He’d never had any answers to questions like those. All he knew was, he was still around to ask them.
Ten minutes put ninety kilometers or so between him and the Polish 109s waspishly defending Wilno. One more check showed only a few scattered Pe-2s close enough to see. When he eased back on the throttles, the engines seemed to sigh in relief. The pointers on the dials fell back to safe levels.
“Another one down,” Mogamedov said, and then, “A few more like that and we don’t come home from one.”
“Afraid you’re right,” Stas said. “But it’s not as if we haven’t known that for a while, is it?”
“No.” After a beat, Mogamedov added, “No wonder so many Russian pilots drink like fish, is it?”
“Mm, maybe not,” Stas said. “But do they drink because they’re pilots and they know they’re going to catch one, or just because they’re Russians? Some of the Russians in the groundcrew pour it down every bit as hard, and they never get off the ground.”
“And some of the pilots would drink like that if they didn’t fly,” Mogamedov allowed. “Not all of them would, though, or I don’t think so.”
“It could be. I may do some drinking myself today once we get down,” Mouradian said.
“Some drinking? Most people do some drinking. Drinking till you can’t see any more—that’s different,” Mogamedov said.
He hardly ever did even some drinking. But, as you didn’t say some things, so you didn’t ask some questions. If he admitted he was a believing Muslim, he would be giving Stas a hold on him. If he denied it, he might be lying. The two of them were all right in the cockpit, and in the officers’ tent. For an Armenian and an Azeri, that would do, and more than do.
Hans-Ulrich Rudel stood to stiff attention in front of the folding table that served Colonel Steinbrenner as a desk. “Reporting as ordered, sir,” he said, saluting. “What do you need?”
“To ask you a question,” the squadron CO said. “Whatever you tell me, I promise it won’t be held against you.�
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Whenever somebody told you something like that, he didn’t mean it. Even a preacher’s son like Hans-Ulrich got that. “One of those questions, is it?” he said with a wry grin.
Steinbrenner, though, wasn’t grinning. “Yes, I’m afraid it is,” he answered, and his voice sounded as somber as if he were officiating at a graveside service.
“Well, then, you’d better ask me, hadn’t you?” Rudel said. Any trace of amusement vanished from his voice, too.
“All right. Here goes.” But the colonel paused to light a cigarette and drag deep before he continued, “If you were ordered to bomb a German city in a state of rebellion against the Führer and the Grossdeutsches Reich, would you do it? Could you do it?”
No wonder he hesitated! That wasn’t what anybody would call a small question. Hans-Ulrich knew what the proper military answer was. Zu Befehl, Herr Oberst! Anything else was less than his duty, less than his oath to Adolf Hitler. All the same … No, it wasn’t a small question. He tried to come back with a question of his own: “Is that what you are commanding me to do, sir?” You were—just barely—permitted to make sure you clearly understood your orders.
But all Steinbrenner said, in a voice like stone, was, “Answer what I asked you, please.”
“Bomb German civilians?”
“German civilians revolting against the government of the Grossdeutsches Reich.”
“Sir, I—” Rudel came to an unhappy stop. Fighting Germany’s enemies was an honor, a privilege. Telling him who Germany’s enemies were was the Führer’s job. But if the Führer told him the German Volk were Germany’s enemies … Had he been a pinball machine, his eyes would have read TILT. “Sir, I just don’t know,” he finished after that stop.
“Thank you,” the squadron CO said. “You’re dismissed.”
“Sir?” Too much was happening too fast.
“Dismissed.” Steinbrenner cut off the syllables as if with a scissors. In case two-syllable words had suddenly got too hard for Rudel, he chose some shorter ones: “Get the fuck out of here.”
Hans-Ulrich left. Not to put too fine a point on it, Hans-Ulrich fled. Mere combat didn’t faze him—he had its measure. If you lived, you lived. If you died, you died. You did your best to live. But the unknown terrified even the bravest.
A lot of men would have gone to the officers’ tent and got smashed. If you couldn’t think straight, you didn’t need to worry about what you couldn’t—or didn’t want to—understand. But drowning his sorrows had never been Rudel’s style. Obeying orders no matter how he felt about them had never been a problem before. Now, all of a sudden, it was.
The trouble was, the airstrip didn’t have many places where someone could go to be by himself. The first one he thought of was the revetment that sheltered his Stuka. But when he got there he found Albert Dieselhorst fiddling with the trim tabs on the plane’s tail.
“Morning, sir. What’s cooking?” Dieselhorst took a longer look and found a different question: “Good God! Who stepped on your tail?”
“Colonel Steinbrenner did,” Rudel answered.
“Why?” the radioman and rear gunner demanded. “You haven’t even screwed any Mischlings I know of since we got to Belgium. You’re a good boy … uh, sir.”
“Danke schön,” Hans-Ulrich said in a distinctly hollow voice. “No, I wasn’t naughty—not that way, anyhow.”
“What did you do, then?”
“I didn’t do anything. It’s what the colonel asked me.” Hans-Ulrich explained just what that was.
Sergeant Dieselhorst stared at him. “Der Herr Gott im Himmel!” he burst out, and then added several comments even more pungent. Once he’d got those out of his system, he asked, “And what did you answer?”
“I said I didn’t know whether I could do it or not.”
“Huh.” The sergeant eyed him thoughtfully. “I’ll tell you one thing, so you know. If they ever give you orders like that, I sure as hell don’t want to sit in the back seat.”
“You’ll end up in all kinds of hot water if you try to refuse,” Hans-Ulrich pointed out.
“I understand that. Believe me, I do. I’ve been in the service a lot longer than you have.” Dieselhorst hawked and spat on the dirt near the Stuka’s tailwheel. Shaking his head, he went on, “I don’t think they’ll give you orders like that, though.”
“Why not? Why would they ask me something like that if they aren’t serious about it?”
“Oh, I’m sure they’re serious about it. Matter of fact, I’m sure they’re crapping their drawers about it.” The veteran set a hand on Rudel’s shoulder. “But Colonel Steinbrenner asked you. If you aren’t the guy in the squadron who’s most loyal to the people in power, fuck me if I know who is. And you told him you weren’t sure you could bomb your own people. Suppose somebody who doesn’t like the Party so much takes his Stuka up. Where will he put his bombs? On the rebels? Or on the shitheads who tried to make him bomb them?”
“That would mean civil war!” Hans-Ulrich yipped.
“Very good,” Dieselhorst said, with the air of a teacher congratulating a short-pants kid who’d aced an exam. “But doesn’t it seem to you like we’ve already got a civil war? Why would they be asking you about bombing Germany if we didn’t?”
Hans-Ulrich opened his mouth. Then he closed it again. He realized he had no good answer for that. He didn’t even have a bad answer for it.
Sergeant Dieselhorst patted him on the back. “You’re doing fine,” he said, still as teacher to student, or maybe more like father to son. The age difference between them wasn’t that large, but the difference in worldliness probably was. Dieselhorst went on, “Keep going down that road and you’ll make it to grown-up yet.”
“Oh, fuck you!” Hans-Ulrich shook off the sergeant’s hand. Dieselhorst laughed like a loon, which only irked the younger man more. He said, “You’re so smart, what would you have told the colonel if he asked you something like that?”
“You gave him a good answer. And he knows how honest you are, so he has to take it seriously,” Dieselhorst replied. “I might have said the same thing. Or I might have told him there’s no way I’d do anything against my own people, because there isn’t.”
“The SS might make you change your mind,” Hans-Ulrich remarked.
“Sir, the blackshirts can make anybody promise anything—I give you that,” Dieselhorst said. “But they can’t make you keep your promise once you take off. There’s no room in the cockpit for some asshole to hold his Luger to your head. They know it, too. They’re not all stupid. Only lots of them.”
That was also heresy or disloyalty or insubordination or whatever you wanted to call it. Or maybe it was just the attitude of a man who saw what he saw and knew what he knew and tried to get along as best he could.
“Like I say, sir,” he went on earnestly, “I don’t think it’ll come to that, honest to God. If you don’t want to start dropping bombs inside of Germany, nobody wants to.”
Was that faint praise? Or was it faint damn? Hans-Ulrich decided to take what he could get. “Thanks,” he said, and left it right there.
Somewhere up ahead, there were Germans. Somewhere up ahead, there always seemed to be more Germans. Ivan Kuchkov had started to think the Hitlerites stamped out soldiers in a factory somewhere near Berlin. He shared the conceit with the men in his section. He gave them orders; they were stuck listening to him unless they really wanted to get the shit piled on their backs.
“They turn the fuckers on a lathe,” he said, warming to his story, “and then they spray on the gray uniforms the way we paint trucks.”
“I almost believe it, you know?” Sasha Davidov said.
“What? They don’t make kikes the same way?” Ivan gibed.
The scout shook his head. “Afraid not, Comrade Sergeant. If they did, there’d be more of us. No, we fuck like everybody else.”
“Like hell you do,” Kuchkov said. “You’ve got those clipped cocks. Probably shortens the recoil when your gun goe
s off.”
As the Red Army men laughed, Davidov said, “I knew there had to be some kind of reason for it.” He didn’t sound pissed off or anything. That was good. Ivan had no use for him as a Jew, but he made a damn fine point man. And somebody who could see trouble before it saw him was a better life-insurance policy than even a full drum on your PPD.
“Where was I?” the sergeant went on. “Oh, yeah. They machine the fucking Fritzes. They paint the uniforms on the cunts. And then … You guys ever seen a bottle factory? One where the bottles trundle by on a fucking belt and this machine stamps the caps on ’em, bang, bang, bang? You know what I’m talking about, assholes?” He waited for them to nod, then finished, “Well, that’s how Hitler’s pricks get the helmets on their knobs.”
“It’s cheap work,” Sasha said. “A bullet goes right through one of those things.”
Kuchkov picked up his own helmet. While he wasn’t in action, he just wore a forage cap. He hefted the ironmongery. “Sure, bitch. And this’ll keep out everything up to a goddamn 105, right?”
Sasha Davidov didn’t answer. Everybody knew a German helmet was better than the Soviet model. Ivan had had that thought himself, too many times to count. Never mind the steel—even the leather and pads that made the thing tolerable to wear—were of higher quality than their Red Army equivalents. It was such a fucking shame that wearing one would make his own side put holes in it.
One of his men asked, “Comrade Sergeant, are you criticizing Soviet production?”
The guy was a new replacement. His name was Mikhail … Mikhail Something. Ivan couldn’t remember his surname or patronymic. But he knew danger when he heard it. “Not me,” he answered without missing a beat. “Nobody’s helmet keeps out bullets. Anything that could’d be so goddamn heavy, it’d make your stupid head fall off.”
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