Two Fronts twtce-5

by Harry Turtledove

  “I don’t want to know what you think. I don’t even want to know if you think,” the senior noncom said. “C’mon. Let’s go get some chow. And some joe. I run on joe like it’s gasoline.”

  So did Pete. So did half-more than half-the other leathernecks and swabbies on the Ranger. The stuff they served in the galley wasn’t always good, but it was always strong. It was always hot, too. Aspirins or no aspirins, drinking it made Pete’s lips and the less visible injuries inside his mouth hurt like hell. The salt he sprinkled on his scrambled eggs and the salt already in his slice of ham were no fun, either. He ate stolidly just the same, keeping his eyes down on his own tray.

  Other Marines kept looking at him. Well, his battered puss invited looks. The leathernecks kept looking around for Barney Klinsmann, too. Klinsmann was nowhere to be seen.

  Very softly, Sergeant Cullum asked, “You didn’t go and kill him, didja?”

  “Kill who?” Pete said. “That deck rivet you gave a name to?” But he gingerly shook his head. That hurt, too. Everything today hurt. He hoped the Japs would leave them alone till tomorrow, or even the day after. Right this minute, he wasn’t worth the paper he was printed on.

  But, as people and countries often found reason to say, you shoulda seen the other guy.

  Eventually-after loading up on ham and eggs of his own-Cullum called down to sick bay. “You got a leatherneck name of Klinsmann down there?” he asked the pharmacist’s mate on the other end of the line.

  “What’s he say?” Three or four Marines asked the same thing at the same time.

  He waved them to silence, listening to what the pharmacist’s mate was telling him. When he hung up, he said, “Barney’s in there, awright. He says he tripped and fell down a stairway on his face. He’s busted up enough, the sick-bay guys almost believe him. He musta hit every tread with his nose, though, or his teeth, or one eye or the other.”

  “Isn’t that interesting?” Pete said when Cullum finished. A long time ago, somebody-damned if he could remember who now, but it must’ve been somebody with brains-had told him that phrase was one of the handful of things you could come out with damn near anywhere and be okay. How about that? was another one, he’d said. There weren’t many, but knowing one or two came in handy all kinds of weird ways. Whoever the guy was, he’d known what he was talking about, sure as hell he had.

  “Interesting,” Sergeant Cullum echoed. “Yeah. Right. Doesn’t sound like you’ll be taking any more shit from Klinsmann for a while.”

  Pete shrugged, which also hurt. “Wasn’t that big a deal.”

  “Huh.” Cullum’s grunt was redolent of skepticism. “Way the guy down in sick bay was going on, Barney’s fucking lucky nobody had to send a radiogram to his next of klins, man.”

  “Ouch!” Pete said when the pun got home. Several of the other leathernecks groaned. McGill went on, “I didn’t know you went in for shit like that.” By the way he said it, he might have accused the other noncom of wearing frilly scanties under his uniform.

  “Too goddamn bad,” Cullum answered. “I didn’t know you went in for ruining guys. It really does sound like Barney almost woke up dead this morning.”

  “I don’t know what the hell you’re talking about,” Pete said.

  “Uh-huh. And rain makes applesauce. I don’t gotta be Sherlock Holmes to see what’s going on when you’re beat up and Klinsmann’s like he got run over by a tank.”

  “I got nothin’ special against Klinsmann,” Pete said.

  “Good thing you don’t! If you did, some shark’d be hunting for a toothpick right now, I bet.”

  “Honest to God, all I wanna do is kill Japs,” Pete insisted. “Kill Japs an’ kill Japs an’ kill more Japs.”

  Nobody argued with him. The other Marines didn’t seem even a little bit interested in saying anything that might provoke him. Barney Klinsmann hadn’t worried about it, and Barney was damn near pushing up a lily right this minute. Barney was a big, tough guy, too. And a hell of a lot of good that had done him. Pete went up onto the Ranger’s flight deck to look for more Japs to kill.

  The Fall RASPUTITSA meant Stas Mouradian’s Pe-2 wasn’t going anywhere for a while-unless, of course, it vanished into the bottomless mud. After rain turned to snow and mud froze hard, the air war would pick up again. And, for the first time since the war was new, Stas didn’t worry too much about going back into action.

  He’d been fighting the Fascists from the very beginning. When Hitler invaded Czechoslovakia-four years ago now! — Mouradian had served as copilot and bomb-aimer on an SB-2 helping the Czechs from an airstrip in Slovakia. They’d called the SB-2 a fast bomber because it had proved able to outrun the biplane fighters it met in Spain. Stas had thought it would be able to do the same thing against whatever the Nazis threw at it.

  Then he’d met the Bf-109. Unlike a lot of Soviet flyers who made the Messerschmitt’s acquaintance, he’d survived the first encounter. But that imaginary sound, as of breaking glass, stood for the shattering of his illusions.

  Even in a Pe-2, a plane much more modern and much speedier than the old allegedly fast bomber, he still feared the 109. Bombers were made for dropping bombs. Fighters were made for shooting down other planes. If you asked a bomber to try to do a fighter’s job, you’d be sorry-although probably not for long.

  When the air war did pick up again in a few weeks, chances were the Luftwaffe wouldn’t have enough 109s (or their fearsome new friends, the blunt-nosed, deadly FW-190s) to go after all the bombers the Red Air Force would throw at it. The Fritzes had to split their planes between this front and the revived one in the West.

  Stas approved of that. The Germans would still throw up monstrous fireworks displays of flak, of course. Flak could kill you, too, but he didn’t worry about it the way he worried about 109s and 190s. Flak was impersonal, like the weather. If you weren’t lucky, some would hit your plane. But flak didn’t come hunting you in particular, the way fighter pilots did.

  A lot of Russian flyers drank their way through the rasputitsa. To an Armenian’s way of looking at things, Russians drank at any excuse or none. And they didn’t drink for the taste of it. They drank till they got drunk or, at least as often, till they fell over.

  Maybe that was because, when they drank, they drank vodka. Oh, they had beer, too, but they scorned it. What Russians mostly didn’t have was wine. Every valley in the Caucasus had its own vintage. Few of them made France look to her laurels, but a good many weren’t bad. A glass or two with a meal-that was civilized. Cultured, a Russian would say.

  What was cultured about swilling vodka till you passed out? What was cultured about swilling it till you puked, or till you choked on your own puke? What was cultured about swilling it till you fell out a window, or fell through one you thought was open? Russians killed themselves like that all the time, and killed one another in drunken brawls.

  You couldn’t talk about it with them, either. They wouldn’t listen, even if they happened to be sober at the time. The most they would ever say was This is how we are. This is how we’ve been forever. We aren’t about to change, not for you and not for anybody.

  Change? It was to laugh. Russians reveled in the way they were. And, like any imperial nation, they tried to remake in their own image the peoples they ruled. Which other army in all the world gave its soldiers a daily ration of a hundred grams of high-octane vodka?

  Oh, sure, soldiers all over the world drank. Considering what went into the soldier’s trade, how could you blame them? But, outside the Red Army, they drank unofficially. Inside the Red Army … Tanks ran on diesel fuel. Trucks ran on gasoline. Soldiers ran on vodka. That was how Stavka looked at things.

  Full of such pointless reflections (and they were-that the Tsar had tried to impose prohibition during the last war was one of the reasons, and perhaps not the least of them, Tsars ruled Russia no longer), Stas slogged through the mud to the tent where flyers ate and drank (and drank, and drank) and listened to Radio Moscow.

 
To make sure flyers and other Soviet citizens listened only to Radio Moscow, to make sure no unauthorized opinions corrupted them, radio sets manufactured in the USSR received just the frequencies on which Radio Moscow and other Soviet stations broadcast. Somewhere (somewhere unauthorized, as a matter of fact), Stas had heard that Hitler admired the system when he learned about it, and wished Germany had one like it.

  A samovar bubbled on a rickety table in one corner of the big tent. To give them their due, Russians always had tea handy. Sweet tea soothed a hangover if anything did. Tobacco smoke was thick enough to make Stas’ eyes water. Hard rolls, pork sausage, a pot of borscht, a pot of shchi if you felt like cabbage soup instead of beet soup … It wasn’t exciting, especially if you were an Armenian who expected more in the way of spices than dill and caraway seeds. But you could fill your belly.

  Vodka bottles were making the rounds, too. No surprise there. They always did. No one could even think of complaining, not when the rasputitsa grounded the squadron. Stas passed one along without drinking when it came his way.

  “More for me,” said the Russian to whom he handed it. The man’s larynx worked before he sent it along.

  Stas cut thin coins of sausage and dropped them into a tin bowl of shchi. No, it wasn’t what he would have eaten back home. But Armenia was a little land. When you went out into the wider Soviet world, you found that Russians were an imperial nation even in such matters as what their non-Russian comrades ate.

  A glass of tea in front of him might deflect the peripatetic vodka bottles. Or it might not. But he wanted the tea any which way. The thick soup was salty. So was the sausage. Tea helped dilute things.

  He’d almost got to the bottom of the bowl when two more officers strode into the mess tent. Like most of the men already inside, he casually glanced up to see if the newcomers were people he wanted to talk to.

  They weren’t. They were strangers. But he didn’t go right back to eating, any more than the other flyers in the squadron did. The strangers’ cap bands and collar tabs were bright blue: the color of the NKVD.

  They carried identical PPD machine pistols. They had identical Tokarev pistols on their belts. But their arm-of-service color was much more frightening than their weapons. One of them glanced at a scrap of paper in his free hand. “Pyotr Konstantinovich Filimonov!” he barked.

  Had Stas been the luckless Pyotr Konstantinovich, he would have run-or else he would have opened fire. It almost surely wouldn’t have helped-he knew that-but he thought he would have done it anyhow. How could they treat you any worse afterwards than they were going to anyhow?

  The genuine Filimonov sprang to his feet and came to attention so stiffly, he might have been embalmed-and if he wasn’t, chances were he would be pretty soon. Well, buried, anyhow; they might not bother to embalm him in the Lubyanka or at a camp. “I serve the Soviet Union!” he said, as if the Chekists were about to pin an Order of Lenin on his chest.

  They had other things in mind. He must have known as much, even if he didn’t show it. The NKVD man who’d read his name tossed away the bit of paper and ground it under the heel of his boot. Both Chekists looked relieved he wouldn’t cause any trouble. They gestured with their PPDs. “Come along, then,” one of them said, and Filimonov came.

  A vast silence filled the mess tent. Well, it wasn’t me-this time, Stas thought. He would have bet anything he owned that his comrades-in-arms were thinking exactly the same thing. And when another vodka bottle came his way, he grabbed it and drank like a Russian.

  Ivan Kuchkov shored up the sides of his foxhole with planks from a wrecked hut a few meters away. That helped, up to a point. The muddy walls probably wouldn’t cave in and squish him now. But he was still hunkered down in a muddy foxhole that got muddier by the minute as the autumn rain went on plashing down.

  “Fuck me!” he muttered. “This is pure shit!” That was his opinion of most of Red Army life. Before that, the sergeant had had an even lower opinion of Red Air Force life. Flying personnel in the Red Air Force didn’t get a vodka ration when they went on missions, which accounted for the difference.

  He glanced back over his shoulder, wondering whether he’d be more comfortable in what was left of that peasant hut. He didn’t think so, which only proved not much of it was left. And, even in the rain, he was liable to get shot if he came out of the foxhole. The Germans had their lines out in the middle of the unharvested fields, and some of them were much too handy with their Mausers and machine guns.

  “Stinking cunts,” Ivan said. Most of the time, he’d made a good thing out of his service to the Soviet state. He’d done better for himself as a soldier than he would have as a laborer on a collective farm or a small-time hooligan-he was sure of that.

  Most of the time. But squatting in a boggy foxhole wasn’t his notion of fun. Even a real fight would have been better than dicking around here and waiting to come down with trench foot.

  So he thought, anyhow, till Lieutenant Novikov, the latest zit-faced officer to command the company, squelched and slithered over to him and spoke in a low voice: “I have a job for you, Kuchkov.”

  “What’s up, Comrade Lieutenant?” Ivan didn’t even add Besides your dick, the way he would have most of the time. Unlike a lot of punk officers, Novikov seemed to try hard. He didn’t get the vapors when the Hitlerites shot at him, either. So why not give the kid the benefit of the doubt?

  He found out why not immediately afterwards: “Division HQ wants to interrogate some German prisoners. Take a few men-take a squad if you think you’ll need to-and go get ’em for us.”

  “Fuck me!” Kuchkov said again, this time sorrowfully. He could think of a million good reasons why someone else should lead the raid, or why it shouldn’t go on in the first place. He kept his mouth shut. None of those reasons mattered a fart’s worth when weighed against Division HQ wants. What Division HQ wanted, Division HQ got.

  Novikov tried to butter him up. “You’re the best man we’ve got for it. Nobody else comes close.”

  “Happy cocksucking day.” Ivan knew the rest of the pricks in the company pretty well. The lieutenant was right. That didn’t make him any happier-just the opposite, in fact.

  The first guy he snagged for the raiding party was Sasha Davidov. The scrawny Jew let out a sigh the Nazis could probably hear back in Berlin. “What did I do to deserve this, Comrade Sergeant?” he asked resignedly.

  “You fucking well stayed alive walking point,” Kuchkov answered. “I ain’t gonna choose one of the dead pussies, y’know? They don’t move any too fuckin’ swift.”

  He got the ghost of a chuckle out of Davidov. “Maybe I’ll stay lucky one more time,” he said. “Stranger things must have happened somewhere.” The Zhid didn’t sound as if he believed it.

  Speaking of luck, Kuchkov had figured it would quit raining before he went prisoner-hunting. If anything made him more likely to get plugged, that would be it. But the rain came down harder than ever.

  He waited till the wee small hours just the same. He gulped tea to stay awake, and gulped vodka to feel brave. He didn’t get toasted to the point where he started falling over his own feet, and he didn’t let his fellow raiders get that drunk, either.

  To his surprise, Davidov didn’t drink at all. He just smoked papiros after papiros, cupping them in his hands to keep the rain from dousing them. The Jew didn’t play teetotaler all the time, so Kuchkov asked him, “What’s up with you?”

  “I don’t want to miss anything, that’s all,” Davidov answered. “Maybe I wouldn’t with the vodka in me, but maybe I would, too. I’ll drink plenty after we get back-you can bet your dick on that.”

  Hearing mat from him made Ivan laugh. “We’re all betting our dicks,” he said, and then, “When we grab the fucking Fritzes, you can palaver with ’em, right? I mean, you’re a Zhid, so you know Yiddish, don’t you?”

  “Yes, Comrade Sergeant,” the point man said patiently. “It’s not the same as German, but it’s not as different as Ukrainian is
from Russian. If they don’t kill me, they’ll understand me well enough.”

  “Bugger shit-eating Ukrainian,” said Kuchkov, who’d heard more of it down here than he’d ever wanted to listen to. He didn’t notice Davidov’s irony till they were sneaking out toward the German lines. Too late to do anything about it then.

  He couldn’t see more than a few meters. He couldn’t hear more than a few meters, either; the rain took care of that. If Mauser rounds cracked past, or if one of the nasty machine guns the Russians called Hitler’s saws started spitting bullets twice as fast as a Maxim gun could, he figured he’d notice that.

  Through the rain, Davidov called, “Wire here! Hold up while I cut it.” He pitched his voice perfectly to reach his Red Army comrades and go no farther. Ivan hoped like hell he did, anyway. After a minute (and, presumably, after some snipping Ivan couldn’t hear), the Jew said, “All good now. This way-toward my voice.”

  Kuchkov sliced the back of his hand on a barb from the cut wire. He cussed furiously under his breath. “Maybe you’ll get lockjaw, Comrade Sergeant,” one of the Russians said. “What would you do then?” The other raiders all laughed-quietly, but they did. Ivan couldn’t even think about revenge till later. The Red Army men crawled on.

  “Hold up!” Davidov hissed urgently from out in front. “I can hear Germans talking.” Kuchkov cocked his head to one side. He still heard no Fritzes. Maybe the point man had stayed alive as long as he had not least because his ears were better than other people’s.

  Kuchkov crawled forward. “Where are the dicks?” he asked. The Jew pointed. Ivan could barely make out his arm in the rainy gloom. He knew what he had to do now, though. He held his PPD a little tighter. Odds were it had got muddy. Well, it would work even so. German Schmeissers were much better made, but mud and grit in the works and they turned up their toes.

  The Red Army men slithered closer. Now Ivan could hear the Fritzes, too. He couldn’t understand them, but they didn’t sound worried. They had no idea enemy soldiers were in the neighborhood. “Grenades!” he called to his men. “Grenades, and then we rush. Don’t shoot too fucking much. Remember, we gotta bring a couple of these bitches back alive.”