Coup D'Etat

by Harry Turtledove

  Except there was. Relying on the Russians’ inborn simplicity and fondness for the brute-force approach didn’t always pay. Some Soviet designer had had a better idea—a much better idea, as a matter of fact. If you sloped your panzer’s armor at, say, a forty-five degree angle, a lot of shells that would have penetrated vertical plate ricocheted away instead. And even the ones that did dig into the armor had to go through more of it to do damage: for shots coming in from most directions, sloped plate was effectively thicker than the same amount of vertical armor would have been.

  Once you saw the stuff in action—once you watched your best shots bounce off a T-34 without hurting the metal monster—the idea seemed obvious. Everything seemed obvious after you banged into it nosefirst. But if it was so goddamn obvious, how come no German engineer in a clean white lab coat had twiddled with his slide rule till he came up with it first?

  The Russians were Untermenschen, weren’t they? Hitler and Goebbels loudly insisted they were. If they were Untermenschen, though, and the swastika-following Aryans were Übermenschen, why did the Red Army have better panzers? If the Ivans just had more panzers (which they also did), that wouldn’t have been so corrosive to Nazi ideology. The USSR was a hell of a big country. Having seen more of it than he’d ever wanted to, Theo knew that right down to his toes. And he also knew the T-34—and, to a lesser degree, the KV-1 as well—made every German panzer look like a model from the year before last.

  He said as much to Adi. The Panzer III’s layout put them side by side at the front of the hull. Not only that, Theo trusted Adi further than he trusted … well, just about anybody else. You couldn’t count on people to keep quiet if security forces started hurting them. Short of that, Theo was sure Adi would never betray him. He was pretty sure Sergeant Witt wouldn’t, either, but only pretty sure. The new guys who fattened up the crew? He hadn’t made up his mind about them yet. It wasn’t as if there was any hurry.

  Adi nodded. “They’re mighty good, all right. Not perfect, but mighty good.”

  “Not perfect? Close enough!” Theo was stung into volubility, or as close to it as he came. “The gun? The armor? Der Herr Gott im Himmel, the armor! The diesel engine, so they don’t burn the way our beasts do?”

  “Ja, ja.” Adi sounded like a man indulging a little boy. That infuriated Theo till the driver went on, “The commander’s up in the turret all by himself, though, the way Hermann was with the Panzer II. He’s got to shoot the cannon, fire the machine gun, and command the panzer. And he’s got more panzer to command than Hermann did with the II.”

  “Oh.” Theo thought that over. He didn’t need long. With a sheepish shrug, he admitted, “You’re right.”

  Stoss shot him a sour look. “How am I supposed to have a proper argument with you when you go and say things like that?”

  “Sorry,” Theo answered. “But I’m not going to lie.”

  “Too bad. We could probably keep wasting time till sundown if you did,” Adi said. “Now we’ve got to find ourselves something else to talk about instead.” Irony glinted in his dark eyes. He could come out with something like that, confident Theo wouldn’t take him seriously. Plenty of soldiers would have.

  They didn’t need to look for a new topic for very long. Off to the left, at the edge of an apple orchard, a Russian machine gun snarled to malignant life. The water-cooled Russian gun was much heavier and clumsier than a modern, air-cooled MG-34. It didn’t shoot as fast, either. Once in position, though, it made a more than adequate murder mill.

  “Panzer halt!” Hermann Witt’s voice traveled the speaking tube from the turret to the front of the hull.

  “Halting,” Adi answered as he hit the brakes. Witt traversed the turret—smoothly and quickly, with the hydraulics. In case of battle damage, he could also use a hand wheel and gearing to crank it around. It was too big and heavy for him to wrestle it into place with handles, as he could have in a Panzer II.

  The cannon spoke twice. After a moment, though, the Russian machine gun spat more defiant death at the Germans. Back in the turret, Sergeant Witt swore. Theo would have, too. He presumed the panzer commander knew what he was aiming at and had hit it. If the machine-gun crew was still in business, it was operating out of a concrete emplacement.

  Witt snapped, “Armor-piercing!” The cannon fired twice more. This time, Witt grunted in satisfaction. “Got the fuckers!” he said. “Some poor, sorry shithead lugging a flamethrower won’t have to try to fry them before they puncture him instead. Forward, Adi!”

  “Forward,” the driver echoed, putting the Panzer III back in gear. In a low voice—too low for Witt or either of the new guys in the turret to hear—he went on, “Who knows what all else is lurking in the trees? Our foot soldiers will find out. Oh, won’t they just!”

  That same thought had occurred to Theo. He wouldn’t have said it out loud, not even quietly to a friend he trusted. There lay one of the big differences between him and Adi Stoss. They had others, of course, but the fact that Adi would speak his mind seemed the most important. It did to Theo, anyhow.

  TO HANS-ULRICH RUDEL, the woods southwest of Smolensk looked like, well, woods. They were less manicured than a carefully maintained German forest would have been. The Ivans had so much land, they had forests coming out of their ears. They had everything coming out of their ears, from iron and coal to wood to people. That was the only possible reason they were giving the Reich so much trouble.

  From 3,000 meters overhead, Hans-Ulrich wouldn’t have been able to tell that the panzers in front of the woods belonged to the Wehrmacht if some of them hadn’t draped themselves in swastika flags as an identification symbol. Even seeing the banner that united Party and Reich didn’t leave him a hundred percent sure. The Reds sometimes captured those flags and used them as shields against the Luftwaffe.

  Hans-Ulrich chuckled, there alone in the cockpit. A swastika flag might keep German planes from bombing Soviet panzers. But how many of the enemy panzer outfits that used it had suffered attacks from the Red Air Force? That kind of crap happened too often even to Germans who’d carefully briefed their air support about the ruse of war they were using. Given the Russians’ slipshod procedures, they were bound to go through it even more.

  “These are the right woods, aren’t they?” Rudel asked through the speaking tube. He wanted to make certain he didn’t do anything idiotic.

  Sergeant Dieselhorst’s quick “You bet, sir” went a long way toward reassuring him. Dieselhorst might not respect the Führer as much as he should, but he was the kind of man who went to extraordinary lengths to keep from endangering anybody on his own side. Sure enough, he went on, “The river curls behind the trees and then goes into them, just like it does on the map. For a change, the map and the landscape match up great. We’re where we ought to be, all right.”

  “Good. If I put the bombs in amongst the trees, then, they’ll come down on top of the Russians,” Hans-Ulrich said. Using Stukas for a job ordinary bombers might have done wasn’t efficient. A blind man could see that. But if no ordinary bombers could be spared, bombs from Stukas were better than nothing—as long as they landed where they were supposed to.

  He yanked hard on the bomb-release lever. The explosives under the Ju-87’s wings and attached to the fuselage’s midline fell away. He watched the bombs tumble down toward the treetops—but only for a moment, because Sergeant Dieselhorst’s rear-facing machine gun suddenly gave forth with a long burst. “A Rata! A fucking Rata!” Dieselhorst yelled.

  The names Marshal Sanjurjo’s soldiers and their German allies had hung on Russian fighters in the Spanish Civil War stuck, even if the Germans were facing them thousands of kilometers from Spain these days. Biplane Polikarpovs were Chatos; the shape of the cowling for their radial engines made the nickname fit.

  Later Polikarpov monoplanes also had flat noses, but the Spaniards and Legion Kondor flyers called them Ratas—Rats—to distinguish them from the biplane fighters. They were no match for a Bf-109. When you flew a Ju
-87, though, that seemed much less comforting.

  Bullets slammed into the Stuka from behind. The Rata flashed past and swung into a tight turn, obviously intending to make another pass, this time from dead ahead. No matter how grossly inferior to a 109 the Polikarpov fighter was, it could outrun and outmaneuver a dive-bomber as if the Junkers plane were nailed in place in the sky.

  Rudel did everything he could. He fired bursts from his twin forward-facing 7.92mm machine guns. He tried to turn away from the ugly little monoplane with the big red stars on its green-painted fuselage. The Rata looked as if it were homemade, possibly by someone who didn’t know much about airplanes. But Hans-Ulrich might have been trying to fly a rooster against a hawk.

  A bullet scarred the Stuka’s windscreen. If that hadn’t been made of thick armor glass, the round would have scarred Rudel, too, or more likely left him too dead to heal and scar. More rounds hit the armored engine compartment and the wing. Even if the engine was armored, the instrument panel screamed that the Ju-87 was losing fuel at a hideous rate and overheating even faster. Some of those rounds got home despite the protection.

  The engine coughed, farted, ran smoothly for a few seconds, and then coughed again. Smoke started pouring out of it.

  “You there, sir?” Sergeant Dieselhorst sounded worried, and with good reason, too.

  “I’m here,” Hans-Ulrich answered. “I was hoping you were.”

  “We going to have to bail out?”

  “Well …” Hans-Ulrich didn’t want to say yes. German parachutes left a lot to be desired, even if merely having a parachute would have made a pilot from the last war jealous. The idea of coming down near—or maybe among—the Ivans didn’t thrill him, either. But the engine coughed one more time, then crapped out altogether. A Stuka glided better than a brick, but not a whole lot better. Sometimes the outside world answered questions for you. “Yeah, Albert, we’ve got to bail out.”

  Dieselhorst tried to make light of it. “Not like we’ve never done this before, right?”

  “Right.” Rudel’s voice sounded hollow, even to him. They’d been shot down once before, over France. Had the poilus caught them, they probably would have been taken prisoner. No guarantees with the Ivans, none at all.

  But if they didn’t get out now, they were guaranteed dead. Pilot and rear gunner had separate sliding cockpit canopies. Maybe that wasn’t such a terrific design feature. If one of them got stuck …

  They didn’t, not this time. And neither Hans-Ulrich nor Dieselhorst mashed himself to strawberry jam by hitting the tail as he scrambled free of his enclosure. Nothing left to do but fall, yank the ripcord, and hope. Later, Rudel realized he should have done some praying while all that was going on. He consoled himself by remembering he was just a trifle busy at the time.

  Whump! When the chute filled with air, it felt as if a mule kicked him right in the chops. His vision grayed out for a moment. Then color and motion came back to the world.

  He floated downward. Off to his left, Sergeant Dieselhorst waved to him from under another silk canopy. Hans-Ulrich waved back. He yanked on the lines to spill wind from one side of the canopy and steer himself away from the Red-infested woods. He also anxiously looked around for that Rata. Russian fighter pilots had the charming habit of machine-gunning helpless parachuting German flyers. It wasn’t sporting, but they didn’t care. To his relief, the Rata was nowhere in sight.

  Russian soldiers on the ground did fire at him and Dieselhorst. A bullet thumped through the taut silk above him. If the hole turned into a tear … He’d regret that all the way down, but not afterwards. He didn’t worry about a bullet thumping through him till he’d almost reached the ground. He wondered why the devil not. Stupidity came to mind.

  As the ground rushed up below him, he had to worry about his landing. He’d sprained an ankle—only luck he hadn’t broken it—the last time he came down in a chute. He didn’t want to be out of action for weeks now. He bent at the knees and at the waist, as training suggested. Another Russian bullet cracked past him, too close for comfort. Training never talked about distractions like that.

  Thud! He made it. Not a pretty landing, but the moving parts all seemed to work. He cut himself free of the parachute, then grabbed for his Luger—soldiers were loping toward him. But his hand fell back: they wore Feldgrau, and helmets of a familiar shape.

  Now—did they realize he was a countryman? “Good job!” one of them yelled, waving. Hans-Ulrich grinned and waved back—they did. He looked around. Albert Dieselhorst was free of his chute and on his feet, too. They’d be flying again as soon as they got a new bus.

  Chapter 18

  Stas Mouradian’s latest airstrip lay not far in front of Smolensk. The Germans and their allies kept coming forward, despite everything the Red Army and Air Force could do to stop them. If Smolensk fell … Stas wasn’t a member of Stavka, the Soviet General Staff, but he could see how bad that would be. Smolensk was the great bastion on the road to Moscow.

  If Moscow fell, the game would be up. He could see that, too. Maybe Stalin would find refuge somewhere beyond the Urals. Having traveled the width of the USSR, Stas knew how vast the country was. But could you keep fighting with your capital gone? Would anyone follow your orders if you tried?

  But that was a worry for another day, probably a worry for another year. The red flag with the gold hammer and sickle still flew over Smolensk. The swastika was still hundreds of kilometers from Moscow. That Stas could wonder what would happen if the capital fell said things weren’t going the way Soviet authorities wished they would.

  It wasn’t that serious yet. Maybe it wouldn’t get that serious. But if Stalin hadn’t been greedy, if he hadn’t decided he could take Wilno away from Poland on the cheap, the war between the USSR and the Reich might well have stayed a war in name only. Till Smigly-Ridz asked Hitler for help, the Soviets and the Nazis couldn’t get at each other without violating some buffer state’s neutrality. That would have been more dangerous than it was worth.

  Would it have been more dangerous than thinking that Stalin’s greed had led him into an enormous mistake? Now there was an interesting question for any Soviet citizen to contemplate! As long as you kept your mouth shut, you had a chance of staying safe (from the NKVD, anyhow; the Luftwaffe was a different story). But Mouradian had heard—as who in the Soviet Union had not?—of people arrested for no better reason than an expression some Chekist didn’t fancy. Those people went into a camp as readily as the ones brave or crazy enough to criticize the regime out loud. They came out of the camps as readily, too: which is to say, just about never.

  The distant rumble of artillery distracted Stas from such gloomy reflections. He cocked his head to one side, listening. Those were Russian guns. That was good. No—it was better. He would really have had something to worry about if he heard German guns from here.

  But the squadron had been flying out of this airstrip for only about a week. When the Pe-2s got here, you couldn’t hear anybody’s guns. Stas had been used to fields farther forward. He’d been used to, if not happy about, the sound of guns. Once or twice, he’d had to fly off a runway enemy artillery was suddenly able to reach. Being out of earshot of the front had felt relaxing.

  Now he wasn’t any more. He wasn’t so relaxed, either.

  At the edge of the airstrips, a technician wearing earphones manned a sound detector that looked like nothing so much as half a dozen enormous hearing trumpets. They could pick up approaching enemy planes at distances greater than the naked eye could reach. They could some of the time, at any rate. When everything went just right. When other noise didn’t distract or confuse the technicians.

  There has to be a better way, Stas thought. If he knew what that way was, they’d pin a Hero of the Soviet Union medal on him in a flash. At a guess, it had something to do with radio. Everything modern and scientific seemed to. His guesses stopped right there. He was a pretty good pilot, but he’d never make an electrical engineer.

  The technici
an jerked off the earphones and ran to a bell mounted on a nearby post. He rang the bell as if his life depended on it. And his life was liable to, for he shouted, “They’re coming! They’re coming!”

  A kicked anthill would have shown more chaos, but not a lot more. People ran every which way. Antiaircraft gunners manned their cannons and pointed them west. The technician was pointing in that direction, but Stas couldn’t tell whether the gunners followed his lead or simply knew German planes were most likely to appear from that direction. Pilots and groundcrew men jumped into zigzagging trenches to shelter from the expected attack. Some of them had rifles. If they fired at the Luftwaffe planes, it might make them feel better. It was unlikely to do anything else.

  Stas realized he was the only man just standing there. He wasn’t running. He wasn’t jumping. He wasn’t training an antiaircraft gun in the desired direction or chambering a round in his Mosin-Nagant.

  Now he could hear the ominous drone of German airplane engines without the fancy sound detector. Their note was different from that of Soviet powerplants. It seemed deeper, and somehow imbued with sinister purpose. Maybe that was Stas’ imagination. On the other hand, he knew he was far from the only Soviet fighting man who imagined the same thing.

  “What the hell are you doing there, you stupid fucking idiot? Growing roots like a beet?” a groundcrew sergeant shouted. “You don’t get your cock in gear, they’ll plant you, all right!”

  Where the rising drone from those bombers hadn’t unfrozen Stas, the sergeant’s profanity did. That might have been because it was aimed at him personally, unlike the bomb loads that would come whistling down any second now. He sprinted toward the closest trench.

  He hadn’t even got there before the antiaircraft guns started pounding away for all they were worth. He jumped in. Somebody down below caught him and steadied him. “Thanks,” he said, without noticing who.