“Unhealthy, my ass,” Peggy muttered as she stubbed out the butt. Now that Herb wasn’t here, she could talk to herself as much as she pleased. No one would think she was crazy. Well, not on account of that, anyhow.
She was thinking about lighting another one when the telephone rang. She answered it. “Hello, Peggy. Ned Altrock here,” said a hearty voice.
“Oh, hello, Ned. How are you?” Peggy said. He was a good-sized wheel in the Pennsylvania Democratic Party. She didn’t know what his precise title was. It amounted to fixer.
“I’m busy,” he replied. “Only a year till the election, you know.”
“Uh-huh,” Peggy said. Till she’d got involved in politics, a year away from an election might as well have been forever. She knew different—she knew better—now. A year was nothing. The wheels had already started spinning behind the scenes. Ned sounded as if he were doing a good many RPMs, all right.
“I hope we can count on you to do your part again this year,” Altrock said. “People still talk about what a tiger you are on the campaign trail.”
“Do they?”
“They sure do. And we can use some more of that, you know,” the fixer said. “The war news isn’t everything we’d want it to be, even if we’ve got Midway back. You can bet the Republicans will try and beat us over the head with it. Anything you can do to make people be sensible, that’d be terrific. Things are liable to get tight this time around.”
By make people be sensible, he of course meant make people do what we want and vote our way. Peggy said, “Well, why not? It’s not like I don’t have some time on my hands nowadays. You’ll pay the usual expenses, right? Train tickets, hotel bills, food, that kind of stuff?”
“Oh, heck, yes,” Altrock assured her. “Hey, we’ll throw in a stipend, too. I know things are a little tighter for you now.”
That meant he’d heard about the divorce. “Thanks,” Peggy said. Nice to be wanted, even if he was only interested in her for what she could do for FDR.
People who fought on the ground said the Germans were easier to push back than they ever had been. They’d pulled so much out of the Soviet Union to hold off England and France in the West that they didn’t always have enough left to keep the Red Army from going forward.
Anastas Mouradian only wished things were like that in the air war, too. The problem was, the air frontier above the Low Countries was narrow. The Luftwaffe had taken some planes out of the USSR to fight over there, but not all that many. Plenty of 109s and 190s still prowled the frigid air over the workers’ and peasants’ paradise.
“It will work out however it works out,” Isa Mogamedov said when Stas muttered about that in the cockpit. With the ground frozen hard, the Pe-2 squadron was back in business. Unfortunately, so were the Messerschmitts and the Focke-Wulfs.
“So it will,” Stas said, and sent the copilot and bomb-aimer a quizzical look. Mogamedov hadn’t quite come out with the Arabic Inshallah, but he’d come about as close as a secular New Soviet Man was ever likely to. A Russian probably wouldn’t have noticed anything out of the ordinary in the reply. Then again, Russians hadn’t spent the past nine hundred or a thousand years living next door to Azeris.
Groundcrew men used a truck-mounted starter—a device borrowed from the Americans—to make the bomber’s engines turn over: first the port, then the starboard. Mouradian studied the instrument panel. Everything looked the way it was supposed to. He waved to the boss sergeant on the airstrip. The noncom waved back.
One after another, the Pe-2s took off. The target today was one of the railroad lines leading west out of Minsk. Stas couldn’t remember hitting targets on the far side of the Byelorussian capital. Not in this phase of the war, anyhow.
He released the brakes and taxied down the dirt runway. The bomber got airborne and climbed over the pale-barked birch trees in the woods past the end of the airstrip. The birches looked as if they’d been whitewashed like the squadron’s planes. Any Nazi fighter pilot would have a hard time spotting the Soviet aircraft against the drifts below them.
As he got closer to the front east of Minsk, more monuments of man’s inhumanity to man made themselves known in spite of the snow. There was a burnt-out tank, with soot spread over whiteness. From this height, he couldn’t tell whose tank it had been. That didn’t matter any more. It was nothing but scrap metal now. Sooner or later, he supposed, the Russians would haul the carcass to a foundry and make something new out of it.
Here was a burning village that had been on the German side of the line for a long time but now found itself in Soviet hands once more. Stas couldn’t see any of the human dramas down there, either, but this scene had played out many times before farther east. Some of the peasants would have cozied up to the Nazis, either because they liked Hitler better than Stalin or just because they thought that was the best way to keep their bellies full and their wives and daughters unraped.
And now they would pay for guessing wrong. Their neighbors would want revenge. The NKVD would want to pay back treason. If the peasants were lucky, they’d go straight into punishment battalions. There, at least, they had a small chance of coming out in one piece. If they weren’t so lucky, they’d go to the gulags instead. Or they’d simply meet a noose or a bullet to the base of the skull.
Their wives and daughters still might get forced. Only the uniforms of the men holding them down would be different.
The squadron didn’t fly over Minsk. The Pe-2s took a dogleg to swing south of the city. The Red Air Force had found out by painful experience that the Fascists had packed the place with antiaircraft guns. German gunners had both skill and enthusiasm. You didn’t want to give them a shot at you if you didn’t have to. For that matter, you didn’t want to give them a shot at you even when you did have to.
But skirting the flak guns took the squadron straight into a swarm of marauding FW-190s. Stas hated the new German fighter. A Pe-2 had a fair chance against a 109. Odds when you ran into 190s were worse. They had more speed, heavier guns, and a cockpit that gave their pilots terrific all-around vision. They were Trouble with a capital T.
“Dump the bombs!” Stas shouted into the speaking tube that carried his voice back to the bomb bay.
“I’m fucking doing it,” Fyodor Mechnikov answered. The bomb-bay doors opened. The explosives would come down on somebody, with luck on somebody German. Mouradian wasn’t inclined to be fussy. Designers always claimed that their brainstorms were fighting bombers. They always lied. Fighters were made for just one thing: shooting down other planes. Bombers had to do other things, too, and couldn’t fight back so well.
Suddenly lighter by upwards of a tonne, the Pe-2 got faster and more nimble. All the same, Stas stayed low and gunned the bomber for every kopek it was worth. The best way to deal with German fighters was not to hang around anywhere close to them.
But then the machine gun in the dorsal turret chattered. “Eat shit, you whore!” Mechnikov shouted at the fighter he was trying to drive off.
Bullets slammed into the Pe-2. There was no fire. The engines kept running. When Stas cautiously tried the controls, they worked. No hydraulic lines punctured. No wires cut. That was all luck, of course—nothing else but. The German pilot who’d put the burst into the Pe-2 had to be cursing his. He’d done everything right. He just hadn’t managed to knock the bomber out of the sky.
Stas fired a burst at the FW-190 as it streaked past. He didn’t do it any harm, either. It zoomed away to go after some of the other planes in the squadron. That suited Mouradian fine. “We scared off the son of a bitch, anyhow,” he said.
“That’s right. Fedya must have taught him respect.” Mogamedov spoke with perhaps less irony than he’d intended.
“If he hadn’t been up there banging away, that burst the Hitlerite hit us with would have been longer. It might have done us a lot of harm.” Stas kept eyeing the gauges. Everything was jammed up hard against the emergency lines. Fair enough. If almost getting shot down didn’t qualify as an emerge
ncy, what in blazes would?
Mogamedov kept checking the instrument panel, too. It didn’t seem to satisfy him … or he might have had trouble believing it. “The engines sound good, don’t they?” he said, as if by putting it in the form of a question he didn’t have to sound like someone who believed it.
“Pretty good.” Stas didn’t want to admit any more than he had to. A New Soviet Man ought not to believe in outmoded superstitions like tempting fate. Sometimes, though, the unreconstructed old Armenian peeked out from behind the New Soviet mask he wore.
Behind Mogamedov’s goggles, an equally unreconstructed old Azeri checked to make sure the 190 was really gone. So Stas thought, anyhow. He might have been wrong, but he didn’t think so.
Then bursts of flak, black with angry, fiery cores, began buffeting the Pe-2. In his wild efforts to escape the German fighter, Stas had come too close to the rings of antiaircraft guns girdling Minsk. He swung the plane hard to the south once more, away from the city.
“Where did the rest of the squadron get to?” Mogamedov asked.
“Good question. My guess is, we’re scattered over fifty kilometers of sky,” Stas answered. “As long as we see each other again back at the airstrip, we can worry about the details some other time.” Mogamedov thought that over, then nodded.
Off in the distance, a German stuck up his head to see what the French in front of him were up to. Aristide Demange took a shot at the Boche. He didn’t think he hit the con. He did make him disappear in a hurry, which was what he’d wanted to do.
He also hopped down off the firing step from which he’d fired. A few seconds later, the Fritzes turned loose a burst from a machine gun. Maybe all those rounds would have missed him. It was nothing he cared to find out by experiment.
A poilu coming into the trench from the smashed Belgian village behind it grinned sympathetically. “You were lucky, Lieutenant, getting down when you did,” the fellow said, his southern accent nasal and grating in Demange’s ears.
“Lucky, my left one,” Demange said, focusing his usual scorn for all humanity on one human in particular. “Listen, Marcel, I don’t care how stupid you are. Even a Provençal clodhopper like you should be able to see that, when you try and kill somebody, he’s gonna try to kill you, too. So maybe you shouldn’t give him the chance, eh?”
Marcel pondered that. Demange could see, or imagined he could see, the gears going round in the soldier’s head—going round … very … very … slowly. “D’accord,” Marcel said at last.
Demange suppressed the urge to clap a hand to his forehead in theatrical despair. The only thing that could have made Marcel act any dumber than he did now would have been for him to chew gum like a cow or an American. The worst of it was, Demange couldn’t ride him as hard as he would have liked. When it came to smarts, Marcel wasn’t the highest card in the deck, no. But he was easygoing and he fought all right. You didn’t expect or even want brains in all the privates.
The ruined village in back of them was the one that had been in front of them a few weeks before. They didn’t need to measure their advance in centimeters per day, but they didn’t need to measure it in kilometers per day, either. At this rate, they’d cross the Low Countries and push on into Germany about when Demange died of old age.
Of course, if he stayed at the front, old age was the least of his worries. He didn’t take idiotic chances, the way fools fresh from basic training and hotheads did. He remembered that the sons of bitches on the other side carried rifles and other tools of mayhem. The less they got to use them on him, the better he liked it.
Some chances, though, you couldn’t help. If some fat general’s secretary told him she wouldn’t suck him off one morning, he was liable to order his brigade to attack the Germans out of sheer spite. That kind of shit never got into the history books. It happened all the time, though.
He stuck up his head to see if some frustrated German general whose secretary wouldn’t put out was going to get a regiment’s worth of the Führer’s finest slaughtered on account of pique. The Fritzes seemed quiet. Demange hadn’t come up in the place he’d fired from. He also didn’t stay up longer than a second or two. Yes, he knew the ropes.
Nobody was supposed to go between the lines. They called the battered ground out there no-man’s-land for a reason. But a Belgian farmer in a worn felt hat, baggy corduroy trousers, and stout Wellingtons ambled along as if he had not a care in the world. Little smoke signals rose from the pipe clenched between his teeth.
Demange had seen such types before, in the last war and in this one. They came out of their holes whenever things quieted down. Sometimes they were harmless. They’d arrange to trade your tobacco for the other fellow’s schnapps, or to take a letter from a granny on one side of the wire to her granddaughter on the other.
Sometimes they were anything but harmless. They’d spy for one side or the other or sometimes for both. While they were going through the motions of trading, they’d scout out the other side’s positions and report back to whoever was paying them. Or the sweet letter from grandmother to little girl would be chock-full of coded messages. You never could tell.
And Demange distrusted Belgians on general principles. Half the Flemings wished they were Germans. The Walloons—even the ones who weren’t Rexist bastards—spoke French with a funny accent, even worse than what a Provençal like Marcel used.
“Hey, you!” Demange yelled at this Belgian. The man slowly looked back toward him, as if uncertain he was being addressed. Demange had seen it done better. Hell, he’d done it better himself. “Yeah, you, shit-for-brains! Get your ugly ass back here so I can talk with you!”
The farmer did his best to pretend he was deaf. His best didn’t impress Demange. Up came the rifle. He wasn’t particularly trying to hit the Belgian, but he wasn’t particularly trying to miss, either.
If a rifle bullet cracking past a meter or two in front of your snoot didn’t draw your attention, chances were you’d already bought a plot. The Belgian decided he might do better to come back to the French lines after all. A good thing for him, too. Demange would have aimed the next round with care.
A lot of people would have had trouble getting through the drifts of barbed wire in front of the French lines. The farmer knew the secret ways at least as well as Demange did. Have to change our routes, Demange thought irritably.
Down into the trench slid the Belgian. He wore a bushy gray mustache. He might have fought in the trenches the last time around. Now he’d gone into business for himself.
“What d’you want?” he asked in his peculiar French.
“What were you doing out there?” Demange returned. “And don’t fuck with me, either. You give me crap, I’ll knock your teeth down your throat.” He sounded as if he looked forward to it. Well, he did. It would turn a boring day halfway interesting.
The anticipation in his voice and on his narrow, nasty face got through to the Belgian. Some people, you did better not to mess with. “I was going to sell the Boches some applejack,” the farmer said slowly.
He did not visibly have any. “Where is it?” Demange snapped. “And if you say you were gonna bring it later, you’re in more trouble than you know what to do with.”
“I’ll show you.” The farmer unbelted his pants and let them drop. He wore long johns under them—it was cold out here. He also wore rubber bands around the ankles of the long underwear. He reached into the long johns and pulled out two fat rubber hot-water bottles. He handed Demange one. Demange unscrewed the stopper and sniffed. That was applejack, all right. Demange held out his hand for the other one. Sourly, the farmer passed it to him. He checked. Applejack in both of them, all right.
“Well, it is what you say it is,” Demange allowed. “And since it is, I’ll give you a whole franc for it.”
“A franc!” The Belgian’s mustache quivered with fury. He must have known he’d get screwed, but he hadn’t expected to get screwed that royally.
Because Demange was feeling gene
rous, he said, “Oh, all right—a franc for each bottle.” He tossed the Belgian not one but two coins of yellow aluminum-bronze. “Out of my own pocket, you see.”
“No wonder some of us think the Germans are a better deal,” the farmer said. “You … You …!” Words failed him, which was his good luck.
“Get lost, cochon,” Demange said coldly. “I ever see you again, we’ll talk about it with the undertaker.”
Away the Belgian went. If looks could have killed … But you needed a rifle for that.
“Gather round, boys!” Demange told the soldiers he led. “We’d better destroy the evidence, in case he complains to a brass hat or something.” Destroy the evidence they did, and they had a hell of a time doing it, too.
Hans-Ulrich Rudel understood that Stukas had had their day—literally—as dive-bombers. Without fighter cover, they wouldn’t, and didn’t, last ten minutes. And giving them the cover they needed tied up Bf-109s and FW-190s that could have been doing more useful things.
Logically, the Luftwaffe should have scrapped them all and given their pilots hotter planes to fly, planes that could fight or flee well enough on their own to get by without escorts. But the higher-ups didn’t want to junk any weapons of war that still had use to them. And so some egghead decided to turn the Ju-87s into night raiders.
It made a certain amount of sense. Even Hans-Ulrich had to admit that much. Planes aloft in the dark were hard to spot and hard to shoot down once spotted. That French bombers built before the war, bombers even more spavined than Stukas, kept coming back from night attacks over the Vaterland proved as much.
Finding targets in the dark was also an adventure, of course. But the Ju-87s were no more inaccurate than any other German bombers. You couldn’t dive-bomb when you couldn’t judge when to pull up. You could fly on the level and drop all those hundreds of kilos of explosives where you hoped they’d do your side the most good.
You could, and the Stuka pilots were doing it. They’d struck at ammunition dumps and railroad yards close to the front. They’d also ventured deeper into France. Hans-Ulrich had hit Caen twice and Paris once. He’d bombed them, anyhow. He hoped he’d hit them.
Last Orders: The War That Came Early Page 23