“I got him!” If Hans-Ulrich sounded surprised, it was only because he was. As he had in France and earlier here, he’d mostly been trying to scare off the enemy with the 37mms’ ferocious muzzle flashes. Hitting him was an unexpected bonus.
“Way to go! You’re more than halfway to making ace,” Sergeant Dieselhorst said. They both laughed. And well they might have. A Stuka, especially a Stuka burdened with the heavy panzer-busting guns, was a most unlikely candidate for an ace’s mount.
That Russian was stupid, Rudel thought. If he’d attacked from behind, especially from below, the Stuka would have been as near defenseless as made no difference. But he’d decided to rush straight in, and he’d walked into a haymaker. War seldom forgave mistakes. The Ivan would never make another one. That was for sure. Hans-Ulrich hoped the AP round had killed him. Going down trapped in a flaming crate was a fate he didn’t wish even on his enemies.
His own heart still hammered in his chest. Combat grabbed you by the throat in an instant. It was much slower letting go.
It wasn’t as if he and Dieselhorst were out of danger for this mission, either. Those panzers down below hadn’t gone away. If he didn’t do for them, they’d do for some of his countrymen. He swung the Stuka’s wing over and tipped the plane into a dive.
He thought a small sigh came through the speaking tube. Did Dieselhorst think they’d done their duty for the day by shooting down the fighter? Hans-Ulrich didn’t ask him. He was the pilot; responsibility for what they did lay with him. Besides, he might have been wrong.
Those were KV-1s, all right. Even from a good height, they were noticeably bigger than the other Russian panzers—and noticeably bigger than even the biggest German machines. Embarrassing that the Slavic Untermenschen could come up with such formidable monsters.
As he had when the Chato filled his windscreen, he hit the firing button. A split second later, he pulled back hard on the stick, yanking the Stuka out of its dive.
“You got him!” Sergeant Dieselhorst yelled jubilantly. “He’s burning like a crazy son of a bitch!”
How many men inside the panzer? Five, if it was crewed like the larger German models. They were probably burning inside the chassis. Hans-Ulrich felt less sympathy for them than he had for the Chato’s luckless pilot. The flyer had been a member of his guild, even if he was on the wrong side. These guys? Maybe somebody down on the ground would waste time feeling sorry for them. Rudel didn’t. He climbed again to attack another KV-1.
As he dove this time, big muzzle flashes greeted him from the ground. Black puffs of smoke appeared around the Stuka. “Jesus fucking Christ!” Dieselhorst said. “They brought their flak up toward the front with them.”
The blasphemy made Hans-Ulrich frown, but all he said was, “I noticed, thanks.” Some Soviet officer had had a rush of brains to the head. If the Germans were going to attack your armor from the air, why not try your best to shoot them down while they were doing it?
Blam! Blam! The 37mm guns thundered again. He mashed the throttle down, clawing for altitude as hard as he could. Sergeant Dieselhorst’s whoops told him he’d hit another panzer. That didn’t make him as happy as it might have. He felt as if the Stuka were just hanging in the air, waiting for the Ivans to bite chunks off it.
And they did. Fragments tore into the back of the fuselage. “You all right, Albert?” he called.
“Ja,” Dieselhorst answered. “We’ve lost some of the tail assembly, though. Does she still answer?”
Rudel cautiously tried the controls. The plane responded—more slowly than he would have wanted, but it did. The airflow felt rougher than it should have, too. He made up his mind—he wasn’t going to take on any more Russian panzers today. He wasn’t going to take on any more Russian flak guns, either, not if he could help it. He turned southwest: the shortest way back to his own side’s lines.
“Good thing this beast can take it,” Dieselhorst said fondly.
“It sure is,” Hans-Ulrich agreed, but then he added, “Don’t jinx it, Albert. We aren’t back yet.” If another Chato dove on them, he didn’t know what he’d do. No, as a matter of fact, he did know. He’d crash, that was what.
He drew small-arms fire crossing the line, nothing worse. Some of the small-arms fire came from the Landsers down there. He took the Lord’s name in vain himself, something he did only when badly provoked.
The controls got mushier. Dieselhorst said, “I’m looking back at it, and it won’t hold together much longer.” He didn’t sound so fond any more.
“Right.” Hans-Ulrich had been afraid of that. Time to set her down, then. No airstrips in the neighborhood, but there was a reasonably straight dirt road, one luckily without a column of German panzers or trucks rumbling along it. The landing was rough, but it was a landing, not a crash. He brought the Stuka to a halt and shoved back his section of the canopy. They always said any landing you could walk away from was a good one. By God, they were right!
“WELL, WELL,” Willi Dernen said. “What have we here?” But he knew what they had there: a scope-sighted sniping Mauser with a bolt that bent down so a man could work it without interfering with the sight.
“If you want it, it’s yours,” the quartermaster sergeant said. “I remember you used one in France for a while.”
“Uh-huh.” Willi nodded. Unfortunately, that hadn’t lasted long. The Oberfeldwebel who was teaching him how to pot enemies at long range got his own head blown off by a sniper from the other side. Awful Arno was only too eager to reel Willi back to ordinary duty.
“So I figured, since I got my hands on it, I’d give it to somebody who knew what to do with it.” The quartermaster sergeant didn’t say how he’d got his hands on it. Maybe he’d won it at skat. Maybe it had fallen off a truck—or maybe he’d swiped it from one that stopped at his depot. Any which way, he held it out to Willi now.
And Willi took it. “Thanks.” He raised it to his shoulder and peered through the sight. Yes, his hand still remembered where to go to find the bent bolt. Might be embarrassing—could be fatally embarrassing—if he reached out and missed. He asked, “Have you got any of the fancy ammo that’s supposed to go with a piece like this?”
“A couple of boxes.” The middle-aged supply sergeant handed those over, too. “God knows if I’ll be able to get hold of more, though. Save this shit for when you really need it. Use the regular rounds most of the time.”
“Gotcha. Will do,” Willi said. Snipers’ rifles weren’t just ordinary Mausers with a funny bolt and a sight slapped on. They were generally better made, better finished, and more accurate. Firing rounds of equally special manufacture, they gave a marksman a decent chance to kill a man at a kilometer and a half. At ordinary ranges in ordinary fighting, though, ordinary ammunition would do.
The sergeant eyed Willi. “You and the guy who runs your squad don’t exactly get along, do you? Will he let you use that rifle the way you’re supposed to?”
He did have a good memory, all right. Willi shrugged. “Who knows what Awful Arno will do next? Half the time, I don’t think he does.”
“Yeah, he isn’t long on brains, is he?” the quartermaster sergeant said. That made Willi laugh out loud, the way unexpectedly finding someone else who thinks like you often will.
Predictably, Corporal Baatz gave him the fishy stare when he ambled back up to the front. “Where’d you get that?” he demanded, as if he suspected Willi had stolen the rifle. He probably did.
But Willi answered with the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth: “Quartermaster sergeant issued it to me.”
“Sure he did. Now tell me another one,” Awful Arno said.
“So help me.” Willi raised his right hand in the German oath-taking gesture. “You think I’m a liar, go ask him yourself.”
Baatz paused, his little piggy eyes narrowing further. “You think you can bluff me into believing your bullshit,” he said at last. “Well, I’m here to tell you I didn’t fall off the turnip truck yesterday. I will ask
him, and then I’ll pin your ears back for bullshitting me. You can kiss that chickenshit pip on your sleeve good-bye! The likes of you a Gefreiter? Ha!” He stomped away.
Adam Pfaff looked up from cleaning his own gray-painted Mauser. “Where did you get the fancy piece?” he inquired.
Willi grinned at him. “You’ll find out.”
Fifteen minutes later, Awful Arno came back, his face a thundercloud. It wasn’t the first time he’d made somebody under his command out to be a liar and wound up with egg on his face. Knowing him, it wouldn’t be the last, either.
He said not another word about the scope-sighted rifle. Instead, he reamed out a new replacement who hadn’t done a single thing that Willi could see. That was Arno Baatz, through and through. He wouldn’t blame himself for picking the wrong time to call a bluff. Oh, no. He’d take it out on somebody else, somebody who couldn’t hit back. Schoolyards were full of bullies just like him. Unfortunately, so was the army.
“Be damned,” Pfaff said as he stowed his cleaning kit. “The supply sergeant really did issue it to you?”
“He really did. And if Awful Arno doesn’t like it, too bad.” Willi kept his voice down. Baatz had rabbit ears, damn him. Even as things were, his head whipped around. Yes, he knew when his name was taken in vain. That was perhaps his lone resemblance to God. But he couldn’t pick out the soldier who’d used the nickname he hated. It wasn’t as if Willi were the only candidate.
After 105s pounded the Russian positions in front of them, the Germans moved forward again. The artillery fire hadn’t squashed the Ivans. It never did. They dug like animals, and popped out of their holes as soon as the shelling stopped. Rifles and machine pistols, machine guns and mortars, greeted the Wehrmacht.
Willi soon got the chance to try out the new Mauser. He knocked over a Russian at about 800 meters. It wouldn’t have been an impossible shot for an ordinary rifle, but it would have been a damn good one. With the sight and the silky-smooth action on this baby, it felt routine.
That Ivan must have been an officer, and one the Reds didn’t want to lose. They tried to avenge themselves by smashing the Germans with artillery. The Russians were brave, but they made crappy tacticians. A lot of the time, they used guns to do what brains couldn’t.
Huddling in a scrape he kept deepening every time he got the chance, Willi wished the Russians were smarter. Then they wouldn’t use so much brute force. He hung on to the rifle in case the Reds followed up their barrage with a counterattack. Right now, that didn’t feel likely. They were just trying to murder as many Landsers as they could.
When the shelling let up, Willi heard wounded men screaming and wailing. He winced and bit his lip. Under pressure like this, what kind of soldier he was hardly mattered. If a shell came down on his hole, he was a dead or wounded soldier. He couldn’t do anything about it one way or the other. A kid just out of basic training cowering in another foxhole might live where he died. Fool luck, nothing else but. It hardly seemed fair.
He’d had thoughts like that ever since the war started. He was still here. Of course, so was Awful Arno. If that didn’t prove how basically unfair the world was …
Willi might not have been able to do anything about the Russian artillery on his own, but the Wehrmacht could. A Fieseler Storch buzzed over the battleground, scouting out the Ivans’ positions. The German army co-op plane could take off and land on next to no ground at all. It was ridiculously maneuverable. It could even hover like a kestrel in a strong headwind.
And it could let an observer see what he needed to see. Not long after the Storch flew off—by all signs undamaged despite the storm of small-arms fire the Ivans threw at it—a squadron of Stukas worked over the Russian batteries. One of the Stukas got hit during its dive and didn’t pull out. A column of black, greasy smoke marked the end of the plane and its crewmen.
The others did what dive-bombers were supposed to do. A 500kg bomb would knock any artillery piece ass over teakettle. And what it did to the poor sorry bastards serving the gun …
Had they not been doing their damnedest to blow him into cat’s-meat, Willi might have spent more sympathy on the Ivans. Then again, he might not. He hated all artillerymen, no matter where they came from. They murdered honest foot soldiers without needing to worry about getting shot themselves. Dive-bombers were just what they deserved. The only reason he put up with German artillerymen at all was that they sometimes helped the Stukas keep the other side’s gunners anxious.
Whistles squealed. Officers shouted, “Follow me!” Willi and the rest of the ground-pounders did. For once, everything was easy. The Russians who didn’t surrender ran away. He cherished the feeling. He knew too well he wasn’t likely to meet it again any time soon.
OUT BETWEEN the Nationalist trenches and the ones the Republicans held, somebody had lain dead for too long. Or maybe it was a donkey or a horse, but Chaim Weinberg didn’t think so. Their stink was different from a dead man’s. He couldn’t have said exactly how it was different, but it was.
The wind blew from the northwest, so there was no escaping the horrible reek. He wished he could turn off his nose. Weren’t you supposed to start ignoring bad smells after a while? Everybody said so, but old Everybody’d never had to contend with a stench from hell like this one.
All the Abe Lincolns in the trench bitched about it. They all said someone ought to go out into no-man’s-land, find the dead soldier or donkey or whatever it was, and shovel some dirt over it. Nobody volunteered for the job, though, not even at night. Odds were the Nationalists knew exactly where the heap of corruption lay and had a sniper just waiting to pot any enterprising International who tried to clean up the mess.
“It ain’t fair,” Chaim groused. “They don’t even have to smell it most of the time. Cocksuckers just sit around and let us suffer.”
“And so?” Mike Carroll said.
“So fuck it.” Chaim lit a Gitane. That was fighting one stench with another, but harsh tobacco improved on dead meat. He supposed it did, anyhow. Mike looked wistful. Chaim doled out a cigarette. He wouldn’t have if the other American had suggested that he go out there and scoop dirt over the corpse. Mike hadn’t—quite. So he earned a smoke for himself.
Cigarettes were too soon gone. The death stench endured. Where were vultures when you really needed them? People talked about smells so bad they would gag a vulture. Chaim had always believed that was nothing but talk—if vultures weren’t made for rotten meat, what were they made for? But they didn’t seem to want anything to do with whatever that was out there.
“You know what’s crazy?” Mike said.
“Besides you, you mean?” Chaim returned. “Nu? What?”
“Funny man. Ha, ha,” Mike said patiently. Then he went back to what had been on his mind before: “What’s funny is, we’re only like forty-five minutes by car away from Madrid. And we’ve got to put up with this shit all the time.”
“Front was a lot closer than forty-five minutes from Madrid when we got here. Hell, the front then was fuckin’ in Madrid. We’re the ones who pushed it back,” Chaim said, not without pride. He looked up and down the trench. Too many long-familiar faces he didn’t see. “Those of us who’re left, anyway.”
“Ain’t it the truth?” Mike Carroll took a flask off his belt, raised it—not high enough to let a sniper see him—and said, “Absent friends,” before drinking. He handed it to Chaim.
“Absent friends,” Chaim echoed, adding, “Thanks,” before he drank, too. It was Spanish brandy, snarly-strong. The Spaniards called it cognac, but that was a libel on the genuine good stuff. Chaim coughed as he gave back the flask. “Shit’ll put hair on your chest.”
“Like you don’t have enough already,” Mike said. Chaim knew he had more than the other American; they’d bathed in creeks side by side often enough. He wondered if not having so much bothered Mike. If it did, he picked dumb-ass things to worry about. He was tall and slim and blond and handsome. Not being any of those things sure as hell got under
Chaim’s skin.
But I’m the one who’s laying La Martellita, dammit, Chaim thought. When she feels like it. When she can stand me. Even with the qualifications, that came as close to heaven as a good secular Marxist-Leninist expected to get. As far as Chaim was concerned, laying La Martellita was as close to heaven as Pius XII was likely to get. And, if Pius XII got a look at La Martellita, Chaim figured the Pope would agree with him. Unless his Holiness liked chorus boys, he would, and maybe even then. La Martellita was plenty to make any fag ever born want to try switch-hitting.
The front was only forty-five minutes from Madrid, and Madrid was only forty-five minutes from the front. Supplies came up with ease—when there were supplies, anyway. The Republican forces had been hungry for foreign munitions since France and England jumped into bed with Hitler and jumped on Stalin’s back. Spanish factories did what they could, but the ammo they made was junk. Cartridges misfired or jammed. Shells too often didn’t burst. If you had Mexican or French or German rounds (those, these days, came only from Nationalist corpses), you saved them for when you really needed them.
And so Chaim was surprised and delighted when trucks brought case after case of French cartridges up from the capital. “Where’d these come from?” he asked a driver. “They find ’em in a warehouse they forgot about or something?”
“No sé, Señor.” A Spanish shrug was a much more dignified production than its French equivalent. “They loaded them into my truck. They told me to take them to the fighting men. This I have done.” Anything beyond what he’d done, he plainly considered none of his business.
Mike said, “The crates don’t look weathered, like they would if they’d been sitting in a warehouse or something. And the brass on the rounds is shiny, too. Stuff seems new.”
“It does, doesn’t it?” Chaim scratched his head with almost the determination he would have given to pursuing a louse. “But that’s crazy. Why would the froggies send us fresh ammo when they’ve gone Fascist, or close enough?”
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