And then there was Bruce McNulty, one of the B-29 pilots who visited fire and devastation on cities under Stalin’s muscular thumb. He never had come on so strongly as a lot of the flyers did. That left her surprised at herself for slapping him down as hard as she did.
She realized later, when it was too late, she’d done it more because she might be interested than because she wasn’t. She wasn’t used to being interested in a man. She hadn’t been, not that way, since the War Ministry let her know Tom wouldn’t be coming home.
She would have chalked it up to water over the damn dam if he hadn’t shown up with roses one night after closing time not long before. She made sure she took those upstairs to her flat over the pub. If she’d left them where the customers could see them, everybody would have been sure he knew what she’d done to get them. That she hadn’t done that at all had nothing to do with the price of a pint. Her life would have got complicated in ways she didn’t need.
Or did she? She’d sometimes daydreamed about a handsome American pilot sweeping her off her feet and carrying her back to the States when his tour of duty here ended. She’d always assumed no Yank she slept with here would want to take her home with him. With Bruce, she wasn’t so sure.
Then the locals started coming in, and she had no time for daydreams. Once Sculthorpe became a going concern, the men from Fakenham who visited the Owl and Unicorn mostly began to do it in the afternoon. Except for the darts hustlers, they left the evening to the officers and other ranks who bicycled in from the base. Oh, not always, but more often than not.
Some nights, no one from the base showed up. Those were the nights when the roar of big planes climbing into the darkness—and, much later, landing again—reverberated through Fakenham. Daisy always hoped as many came back as had set out.
Sometimes men suddenly stopped coming in. Sometimes she found out what happened to them; sometimes nobody ever mentioned their names again. You never could tell. When that silence fell, she didn’t like to break it by seeming snoopy.
I will, though, if I think anything’s happened to Bruce, she told herself. Then they’d know where her feelings lay. She didn’t care, which was in itself a measure of how strong those feelings were.
Tonight, though, Bruce walked in early, as cheerful as if he were a commercial traveler rather than a B-29 pilot. How many A-bombs had he dropped? How many cities had he ruined? How many people had he incinerated? Daisy didn’t like to think about that, but sometimes she couldn’t help it. Bruce and the other pilots didn’t like to talk about it, so they probably didn’t care to contemplate it, either.
“Pint of your best bitter, dear,” he told Daisy, and shoved two silver shillings across the bar.
A pint cost one and three. Daisy started to make change; he waved for her not to bother. That was a ridiculous tip, but not so ridiculous as the ones he’d left when he started coming around. “Thanks,” Daisy murmured. “You really don’t have to do that, you know.”
He laughed. “What better do I have to spend my money on than good beer from a pretty girl?” he said. “Eat, drink—especially drink—and be merry, because tomorrow…Well, we’re all better off not thinking about tomorrow, aren’t we?”
The pilots might not want to talk about their friends and comrades who went down instead of coming back, but they had them on their minds, all right. They knew that what happened to those fellows could happen to them next. They knew it would happen to them if they flew enough missions. Sooner or later, the ball on the roulette wheel always landed in the zero slot, and people at the table lost their bets. Casinos never went broke. Pilots didn’t keep coming back forever.
After a long draught from the pint, he said, “You know, one of these times, if you can find somebody to ride herd on this place for a while, we ought to go out dancing or something—if there’s any place to go dancing around here.”
“I expect there is.” Actually, Daisy wasn’t so sure of that herself. The last time she’d wondered about it, she’d been going out with Tom before…well, before.
“Can you get somebody, then?” Bruce asked.
“I expect I can.” Daisy wasn’t so sure of that, either. But she was very sure she’d try her hardest.
BORIS GRIBKOV and the rest of the Tu-4’s crew had lingered in western Germany much longer than he’d ever expected they would. Having your navigator blow out the back of his head would do that to you.
They could have flown back to an airfield in the eastern zone or in Poland or Czechoslovakia. They could have done a little hop like that without a navigator, or with Alexander Lavrov, the bombardier, filling in for poor, dead Tsederbaum. It would have been safe enough.
But no one who outranked Gribkov thought for a moment of letting them get away without interrogation. First came the men from the MGB, the Ministry of State Security. “Did Lieutenant Tsederbaum show any sign of disaffection before committing suicide?” a Chekist with a double chin asked Gribkov.
Of course he did, you dumb prick, Gribkov thought. His face, though, showed nothing of what went on behind his eyes. In the USSR, you learned not to give yourself away…or you gave yourself away and paid the price for it.
You also learned not to give anyone else away if you could possibly help it. His voice as wooden as his features, the pilot said, “Never that I noticed, Comrade.” They couldn’t do anything to Leonid, not now. They could build a dossier against his relatives. Gribkov didn’t care to lend them a hand.
“Before his act, was he in any way unsatisfactory in the performance of his duties?” the MGB man persisted. Yes, they were trying to make a case, all right.
“He wouldn’t have won a Hero of the Soviet Union medal if he had been,” Gribkov said, shaking his head. “We struck Seattle. We struck Bordeaux. We struck Paris. We couldn’t have hit our targets without the best navigation.”
“Then why did he do it?” the fat fool demanded.
He did it because we struck Seattle and Bordeaux and Paris, Boris thought. Tsederbaum made the mistake of seeing enemies as human beings. For a fighting man, that could be fatal. For the thoughtful Jew, it damn well had been.
Try explaining as much to a Chekist, though. To the men who’d been headquartered at the Lubyanka till the Americans turned it into radioactive fallout, enemies were always enemies. Even friends were sometimes enemies.
This fellow badgered Gribkov awhile longer, then gave up and left him alone. But he and his pals also had to interrogate the rest of the crew. They took their time about it. Boris didn’t ask if anyone told them more than he had. The less you asked, the less you could get in trouble for later.
He got questioned again two days after the session with the MGB man. The fellow who grilled him this time wore the uniform of a Red Army major. Gribkov rapidly began to doubt that that was what he was, or that it was all of what he was. Everyone knew about the MGB. Hardly anyone heard more than whispers about the GRU, the Main Intelligence Directorate. It was the military’s intelligence branch, aimed at the parts of the world that didn’t belong to the Soviet Union.
“Did anyone get to Tsederbaum?” the major asked. “Did he talk to or listen to people he shouldn’t have?”
“I don’t think so, sir,” Gribkov answered truthfully. “As far as I know, he spent just about all of his time with us and with other Soviet flyers and soldiers.”
The major grunted. He’d introduced himself as Ivan Ivanov, a name so ordinary it couldn’t be real. “Did he ever talk with foreigners? When you flew your plane in here, did he go out and find a German popsy to screw?”
“No, Comrade Major.” Again, Gribkov told the truth. “Remember, he was a Jew. He liked Germans even less than Russians do, and that’s not easy.”
Another grunt from “Ivanov.” “He was a rootless cosmopolite, you mean,” he said, which was what the Party line called Jews when they were out of favor. “Who knows what those people really think? They’re masters of mystification. It’s part of what makes them so dangerous.” Like the M
GB man before him, he was working to build a case against the late Leonid Abramovich Tsederbaum.
As with the MGB man before him, Gribkov didn’t want to help. “Sir, as far as I know, the only people he was dangerous to were the Soviet Union’s enemies. Thanks to him, my bombs hit America once and France twice. How many other crews have done so well?”
“Ivanov” didn’t answer, which was in itself an answer of sorts. The likely GRU man did say, “If he was such a stalwart in the service of the working class, why did he shoot himself like a plutocrat after a stock-market crash?”
“Comrade Major, the only person who could have told you that was Tsederbaum, and he isn’t here to do it any more,” Gribkov said.
“We don’t need—we don’t want—weaklings in important military positions,” “Ivanov” said fretfully. “I have to get to the bottom of this, no matter how long it takes.”
“You can’t mean we won’t fly any more missions till you do!” Boris said. There was a kick in the head for you! As far as the pilot could see, Tsederbaum had stuck the pistol in his mouth and pulled the trigger because he couldn’t stand the missions the Tu-4 was flying. Now, because he had, it wouldn’t fly them?
Was that irony? No, madness! And Boris knew that if he burst out laughing he’d never be able to explain it to the GRU man, any more than he would have been able to with the Chekist. People who served the Soviet Union in those ways had their sense of humor cut out of them as part of the initiation process, probably without anesthetic.
In any case, Major “Ivanov”—though his rank might be as fictitious as his name—shook his head. He wasn’t so porky as the MGB man had been, but he’d never gone hungry for long. “No, no, Comrade, no. We will furnish you with a new navigator so you can keep on carrying the action to the imperialist warmongers. But the investigation will continue until we reach the truth concerning the late Lieutenant Tsederbaum.”
“I serve the Soviet Union!” Gribkov said, which here meant something like I’m stuck with whatever you tell me.
The new navigator was a round-faced first lieutenant named Yefim Vladimirovich Arzhanov. Boris put him through his paces at the navigator’s station, which lay directly behind his own but was separated from it by a bulkhead. As any pilot had to, Gribkov knew a little something about the art of navigation: enough to tell someone who also knew from a clown running a bluff. Arzhanov had a sleepy look to him, but he passed the tests the pilot gave him without needing to wake up all the way.
“You’ll do,” Gribkov said.
“Thank you, sir,” Arzhanov said. “Did you think they were trying to stick a rotten egg in your crew?”
“Of course not,” Boris answered, which, to anyone with ears to hear, meant You bet! “I just wanted to see how you run.”
“Like a stopped clock, Comrade Pilot—I’m sure to be right twice a day,” Arzhanov answered with a grin that made him look no more than fourteen.
His voice didn’t sound like Tsederbaum’s. He looked nothing like the Jew: he looked like the Russian he was. But it was a crack the dead man might have come out with. Gribkov shook his head. “I think the factory that makes navigators stamps them out crazy.”
“That’s me, sir. Just another spare part, at your service.” Yefim Arzhanov came to attention, clacked his heels together, and saluted as if he were flying for Austria-Hungary in what was now the big war before last.
“You’ll do, all right,” Gribkov said. “Just what you’ll do, I’m afraid to ask, but we’ll all find out, won’t we?”
The first thing Arzhanov did for the Tu-4 was guide the heavy bomber back to an airfield outside of Prague. As the dry run had given Boris confidence he would, he handled the short flight with unflustered competence.
Just getting away from the place where Leonid Tsederbaum decided the weight he carried was too much for his narrow shoulders came as a relief. Now they could get on with the war.
—
It was the middle of the night, moonless, cloudy, with spatters of warm July drizzle coming down every so often. It was dark as the inside of a concentration camp guard’s heart, except when guns and rocket launchers going off lit the clouds’ underside with brief, red, hellish glows.
It was, in other words, the perfect time for Gustav Hozzel to pull a sneak. He crawled through the shattered streets of Wesel, away from the blocks on the west side of town that the Germans and Americans still held and toward the Red Army’s positions. He didn’t tell his friends where he was going. He most especially didn’t tell his company CO. Max and Rolf would have tried to talk him out of it. Captain Nowak would have ordered him not to try such a harebrained stunt. What they didn’t know wouldn’t hurt them.
A snake wouldn’t have lifted any higher off the ground than he did. He could feel the buttons on his tunic front scraping the asphalt as he wriggled along. The humid air stank of smoke—most of it the nasty, toxic kind that came from burnt paint and motor oil and fuel—and of death. Except during the coldest stretches of Russian winter, that spoiled-meat reek walked hand-in-hand with war.
More rain dripped from the heavens. That was good, and it was bad. The Ivans would have a harder time spotting him. But he might not hear or see approaching trouble till it arrived. Every few meters, he paused to look and listen before moving on. He wasn’t in a hurry. He just wanted to get back.
He had a bayonet in his right hand, a wire-cutter in his left. He hadn’t brought his PPSh. Firing it would be nothing but a kind of suicide. He’d scream to the whole world, or all of it that mattered, Here I am! Kill me!
The really scary thing was, he’d done worse sneaks than this. That one through the snow in southern Poland during the last winter of the old war…He’d come back with a fifteen-kilo ham, enough to let him and his buddies gorge for a couple of days instead of starving. He’d been a hero in his section—till the Russian steamroller started rolling again, anyhow.
He wouldn’t make his buddies fat this time. He did aim to make them jealous. Back and to the side of…was it this shattered building? Yes, sure enough—the apothecary’s shop.
Gustav started to go round the corner, then froze. Somebody was already crouching over what he craved. If another man from his own side had beaten him to it, more power to the sneaky bastard.
But that wasn’t somebody from his own side. Even as he watched, the Russian soldier started to drag his countryman’s corpse back toward the part of town the Reds held securely. Silent as a hunting hawk, Gustav set down the wire-cutter and eased up into a crouch. Then he sprang on the unsuspecting Ivan’s back.
His left palm covered the enemy soldier’s mouth. His strong left arm pulled the Russian’s head back. And the bayonet still in his right hand cut the man’s throat. The Russian gurgled desperately for most of a minute. He thrashed with ebbing strength till he went limp. Gustav held that hand over his mouth for an extra little while anyway. You didn’t get to be an old soldier by taking chances you didn’t have to.
So the Ivan was beyond doubt dead when Gustav slid him to the ground. He wasn’t what the German was after. The body he’d wanted to recover was. The afternoon before, Gustav had seen that that guy’d bought a plot in spite of his AK-47. Gustav had wanted one for a long time. This was his chance to get hold of one.
Part of the stock was still wet from the blood of the Ivan he’d just disposed of. Swearing silently, he wiped his hand on his trouser leg. But it wouldn’t be the first piece he’d carried that was bloodied in the literal sense of the word.
He frisked both dead Russians, and came up with five magazines for the assault rifle. They held thirty rounds apiece. That would keep him going for a little while, anyhow. If he couldn’t get more, he’d go back to the PPSh. He wouldn’t toss it just yet. He also discovered that one of the Ivans’ canteens was full of vodka. That was worth having, too.
“Now,” he said, shaping the words but not putting any sound behind them, “let’s get the hell out of here.”
Sometimes you got careless on the
way back after you pulled a stunt like this. When you did, chances were you paid for it. Gustav took even more pains on his way back to his side’s chunk of Wesel than he had on his foray into the Red Army’s part of town.
The live Russians didn’t know he’d been and gone. Neither did the German pickets. That amused and worried him at the same time. What he’d done, some enterprising Ivan could imitate.
He curled up in his blanket and shelter half and went to sleep. He’d snored through plenty worse than this on-and-off drizzle. He slept so hard, Rolf had to shake him awake once it got light. As soon as he uncocooned himself, the ex-LAH man saw his new toy. “Where’d you get that?” he demanded.
“Came in one of the cans from my last K-ration,” Gustav said, deadpan.
Rolf cussed him out in German, Russian, and what was probably Magyar. Then he calmed down. His gaze sharpened. “First one I’ve seen close up,” he said. “It looks just like a Sturmgewehr, doesn’t it? Except for the crappy wood stock, I mean. Even that banana-shaped magazine’s the same.”
Gustav had seen only a few of the German assault rifles during the last war. They were made from stamped metal and plastic: no wood at all. “You know how the Russians copy shit,” he said. “Monkey see, monkey do.” He pulled off the receiver. “Are the guts the same, too?”
Rolf bent over to examine the Soviet rifle’s working parts. He whistled softly between his teeth. “No. Not even close,” he said, his admiration grudging but real. “Our piece was a lot more complicated. This…This is about as simple as it can get and still work, looks like.”
“It does, yeah. Makes it easy to take care of, anyway. I like that,” Gustav said. The PPSh was the same way. It was far less elegant than a German Schmeisser, but much more robust. Come to think of it, you could say the same thing about the T-34 when you set it in the scales against German panzers.
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