“Only a corporal?” Novikov barked bitter laughter. “For me, getting promoted was a miracle. I come from a kulak family. Do you know what kulaks are? Were, I should say—not many of us are left alive.”
“Kulaks are rich farmers, right?” Luc hoped he wasn’t confusing the Russian word with something else altogether.
But the captured, cultured corporal nodded. “Rich enough to have a few cows, anyhow. Richer than the ordinary muzhik. Richer because they worked harder than the ordinary muzhik and didn’t drink as much. Rich enough that they didn’t want to get herded into collective farms and give up more than they got. Rich enough to get called enemies of the state and go to the wall.” He grimaced. “I’m lucky to be alive, let alone a corporal.”
He might have thought that would impress Luc. And it did—but only up to a point. “Happy day, buddy,” Luc said. “Doesn’t mean you wouldn’t’ve shot me if you got the chance. I’ve been in this shit since ’38. Tell me about lucky to be alive.”
“It could be, though, that you were allowed to be a human being before the war began,” Novikov replied.
Allowed to be a human being. Luc chewed on that till he spotted Lieutenant Demange. If anyone ever stood foursquare against the notion of letting people be human beings, Demange was the man. He waved to Luc. “What the hell you got there?” he called, as if Luc had brought in some exotic animal instead of an ever so mundane POW.
“Russian who speaks French better’n you do, Lieutenant,” Luc answered sweetly.
Demange said something about Luc’s mother that he was unlikely to know from personal experience. Luc grinned; he’d got under Demange’s skin, which he didn’t manage to do every day. The lieutenant glowered at Yevgeni Novikov. “So what the fuck you got to say for yourself, prickface?”
“I am glad your sergeant here did not kill me when he could have,” Novikov told him. “I hope you will not, either.”
He knew what could happen to captured soldiers, then. Well, who didn’t? And Demange looked comically amazed. “You con!” he said to Luc. “The asshole does speak better French’n me. Better than you, too.”
“I’m not arguing,” Luc said. “The guys who question him won’t have to fuck around with German.” There were French interrogators who spoke Russian, but only a very few. But lots of Frenchmen could get along in German, and so could lots of Russians. Conducting an interrogation in French would be a luxury.
Lieutenant Demange nodded. “You’re right. I bet he speaks better French than the clowns who squeeze him, too.” He chuckled unpleasantly. “And a whole bunch of good that’ll do him. Go on and take him back, Harcourt.”
“Will do.” Luc would have taken Novikov back any which way. Any excuse to move away from the front line where people were liable to shoot at you was a good one. Now I only have to worry about shells and bombs, Luc thought with perfectly genuine relief. Had he tried to imagine that before the war, he would have decided he was nuts.
He had to give Novikov up at regimental headquarters: a scattered handful of tents any self-respecting Boy Scouts would have laughed at. They would, at least, unless a French picket plugged them before they could get close enough to laugh. The picket was invisible till he called a challenge. He’d definitely earned his merit badge in foxhole digging.
Luc didn’t know the headquarters password. A rigid Russian or German might have shot him for that. The sentry laughed at him and then passed him through. The guy could see and hear he was a Frenchman.
The officers at the HQ weren’t thrilled to see Yevgeni Novikov. One more POW—just what we don’t need, their attitude declared. Then he opened his mouth. They fell on him with glad cries after that, especially when they discovered he would sing like a skylark. They even gave Luc a cup of good burgundy—not pinard, heaven forbid; they were, after all, officers—and a pack of Gauloises as the bringer of good news.
Thus fortified, he started up to the front again. He took his own sweet time getting there. If Lieutenant Demange didn’t like it, too damn bad. But Demange wouldn’t care, not about something like this. Back when he was a sergeant, he would have taken his time returning, too. Anybody would. Who in blazes wanted to come straight to the killing zone?
That thought made Luc stop again. When you were heading to the front, any excuse was a good one. So it looked to him, at any rate. But there were a few white crows who were never happier than when they were mixing it up with the Nazis or Reds or whoever the enemy happened to be.
Most of the time, dumb cons like that didn’t last long. They got too eager, and somebody on the other side—probably some scared fuck who would rather have been in an estaminet somewhere with a barmaid in his lap—took them out. Not many people missed them once they were gone, either. They tended to get their comrades killed, too.
Every once in a while, though … By all accounts, Hitler had been that kind of ferocious loner. He’d spent just about all the last war as a runner at the front, and he’d come through with hardly a scratch. You couldn’t begin to figure the odds on that. The way it looked to Luc, God had dropped the ball there.
He laughed at himself. “Fat lot anybody can do about it now,” he said, and lit one of his new Gauloises.
Chapter 20
Instead of flying out of an airstrip in front of Smolensk, Stas Mouradian was flying out of one east of the city. That suggested that the fighting wasn’t going the way the Politburo and General Secretary Stalin had in mind.
Of course, other such hints had appeared long before this. When the war started, Stas had flown out of an airstrip in Slovakia. Slovakia lay a long way west of where he was flying from now. So did Poland. So did Byelorussia. He’d flown from airstrips in those places, too.
Looking at that progression (even if you ignored his detour to the Far East, which also hadn’t turned out well), you might start to suspect that Soviet leadership left something to be desired. As a matter of fact, Stas had started suspecting as much even in Slovakia.
He’d also suspected he’d better keep quiet about it. The enemy could kill you. So could your own side. Defeatism was a capital crime. If the Nazis shot you down, you at least had a chance of getting things over with in a hurry. Once the Chekists started in on you, they’d take their time and really make you sorry.
He wondered how long his squadron would be able to keep flying. Lately, days had been dawning with clouds massing in the northwest and drifting across the sky, covering it ever more thickly. The fall rasputitsa was coming. Airstrips, roads between towns, and everything else would turn to mud.
He also wondered why Red Air Force engineers hadn’t built more paved airfields around here. They might have given the Soviet Union a vital edge in its fight with the Fascists and their allies. Maybe the engineers had had other things to do, things they found more important. What those things might be, Stas couldn’t imagine.
Even saying there should be paved runways near Smolensk, or wondering aloud why there weren’t, was one more thing that might make the NKVD notice you. Stas knew they had a dossier on him. Well, they had a dossier on everybody. But the folder with his name on it would be thicker than most. Every so often, he couldn’t stop himself from hinting that not all the men who led the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics were grand and towering geniuses.
The squadron took off from its dirt runway and flew north and a little west toward Velizh, another town threatened by the Nazis. If the enemy swung around behind Velizh, the fortress might fall even if it wasn’t immediately overrun. The Germans had shown how good they were at biting off pockets with their armor and then using guns and infantry to chew up the Soviet forces still inside.
Lieutenant Colonel Tomashevsky stayed in the clouds as much as he could. He had to be navigating by compass and dead reckoning and perhaps a little un-Soviet prayer. All the same, Stas thought he would have flown the same way were he leading the squadron. Unlike the SB-2, the Pe-2 was no clay pigeon for the Bf-109. It was about as fast as the German fighter. But the Messerschmitt c
ould outclimb, outdive, and outturn it. Dogfights with 109s remained a bad bet.
When Tomashevsky ordered the Red Air Force bombers down below the cloud layer, down to where they could see—and be seen—once more, Stas expected them to have to grope around for Velizh. Russia was full of fields and forests. He’d traveled all the way across it to the Far East. He knew how enormous it was, and how lucky you had to be to find anything on the first try.
“Bozhemoi!” Ivan Kulkaanen exclaimed as the last rags of mist blew away from the windscreen and the horizon stretched out to kilometers. They were right over the town their bomb loads were supposed to defend.
“I couldn’t have put it better myself,” Mouradian said. Was the squadron commander that good a navigator, or had he filled an inside straight? Stas didn’t think he could do it again, but he’d done it once, and nothing else mattered for this mission.
The war was laid out below them, as if on a situation map. Soviet trenches in front of Velizh kept the Nazis from storming in. But the Red Army had to defend long lines, and its strength was spread thin. The Germans were forming assault columns. If one of them broke through, the Soviet soldiers in the trenches would have to fall back to keep from being bypassed.
Lieutenant Colonel Tomashevsky’s static-distorted voice resounded in Stas’ earphones: “We will bomb the central Fascist column. Acknowledge.”
“Bombing the central column—plane eight acknowledging,” Mouradian replied. Other pilots also showed they’d heard. Again, Stas would have made the same choice. That German force looked thicker and more muscular than either of the other two. How would it look after a good many tonnes of high explosives came down on its head?
As a matter of fact, Tomashevsky didn’t bomb the head of the column. He released his presents several kilometers to the west. The other Pe-2s followed him in. They were supposed to bomb the same place he did. But followers never did. They didn’t want to hang around any longer than they had to. The Nazis were already throwing up fierce antiaircraft fire.
Because of all that, the Pe-2 pilots following the squadron commander didn’t drop their bombs right where he had. They bombed short—and progressively shorter as plane after plane unloaded. Stas was no more immune than anyone else. He’d seen—and been part of—the effect on every mission he’d flown.
What he’d never seen before was someone taking advantage of it. Lieutenant Colonel Tomashevsky understood ahead of time what his flyers would do. Their bombs fell ever more toward the front of the German column, and probably smashed the hell out of it. If he’d blasted the head of the column himself, most of the rest of the squadron’s bombs would have landed short. Some of them might have come down on the poor bastards defending Velizh.
Doctrine, as Stas knew, was for the squadron leader to put his bombs exactly where they belonged. Doctrine decreed that the other pilots would of course place their loads right where he had. In the Red Air Force no less than the Red Army, doctrine carried the weight of holy writ.
What Lieutenant Colonel Tomashevsky had done worked better than doctrine. It couldn’t have been an accident or an error. Stas admired the squadron commander’s cleverness. He thought it was a shame Tomashevsky wouldn’t be able to spread the improvement to other officers who led squadrons. When he submitted his report, he would have to say he’d conformed to orders in every particular. Officers who did anything else wound up explaining themselves to the NKVD, which no one in his right mind wanted to do.
“Back to base,” Tomashevsky ordered. Again, Stas acknowledged. He was never sorry for permission to get the hell out of there.
Kulkaanen peered down at the German column as Mouradian turned the Pe-2 toward the neighborhood of Smolensk once more. He shook his head in pleased surprise. “Boy, we walloped the snot out of them, didn’t we?” he said.
“We sure did,” Stas agreed dryly. Did his copilot have the slightest idea of how they’d walloped the snot out of the Nazis? If he did, he was doing his best to hide it.
That thought brought Mouradian up short. Ivan Kulkaanen might be doing his very best to conceal any surplus intelligence he owned. Maybe you would get promoted if you showed you had more on the ball than the other junior lieutenants around you. Or maybe you’d get … what was the word farmers used? Culled, that was it. A sunflower that stood taller than the others in the field almost begged for the scythe.
Marx said Communism’s doctrine should be From each according to his abilities, to each according to his needs. But what if your abilities were of the sort that made your superiors nervous? You’d be sorry, that was what. Or you’d turn into a chameleon, so they’d look right at you without seeing you, or at least without noticing you were any different from the rest.
Was that what Kulkaanen was up to? Stas didn’t think so, but he hadn’t imagined even the possibility till now. And something else occurred to him. Was that something he should be doing more of himself? He knew he was brighter than most of the other pilots in the squadron. His superiors likely did, too. All of a sudden, he wondered whether that was good or dangerous.
No NKVD men waited to haul him off to a fate worse than combat when he landed the Pe-2. The Chekists had plenty of other things to worry about. If he was on their list, he hadn’t yet come to the top. Since his own side didn’t feel like killing him yet, the Germans would get another chance one day soon.
TO AN ENGLISHMAN, Egypt, even in what should have been autumn, came with only two settings on the thermostat: too hot and much too bloody goddamn hot. Alistair Walsh donned khaki drill shorts that showed off his pale, hairy legs. Even in tropical uniform, he sweltered.
He started out wearing a solar topee: a fancy name for a pith helmet. But another veteran sergeant who’d had a go at the half-arsed desert warfare with the Eyeties set him straight about that. “Go any place where they might shoot at you and you want a proper tin hat, pal,” the other man said. “That ugly thing you’ve got on your head—”
“You mean my face?” Walsh broke in. They were pouring down pints in a makeshift sergeants’ club somewhere between Sollum, which was in Egypt, and Tobruk, which was in Italian-owned Libya. Just a big tent, actually, and the beer came from bottles, but it could have been worse.
The other sergeant laughed. “I’ve seen worse mugs. My own, for instance. But you do want a tin hat. Even if it’s already khaki, paint it again and throw sand on the paint while it’s still wet. That kills sun glare better than anything else we’ve found.”
“Nice.” Walsh nodded appreciatively. “I wouldn’t have thought of that.”
“Nor I,” his drinking partner said. “I’ve heard we nicked the notion from Musso’s boys, but I can’t swear to it.”
“Interesting. How much in earnest are they, really?”
“Well, it depends,” his new chum answered.
“It often does,” Walsh agreed, his voice dusty.
The other fellow chuckled. “And isn’t that the bloody truth? They were brave enough against the Austrians the last go-round.”
“Not exactly the first string on either side in that match,” Walsh said.
“Too true. They haven’t covered themselves with glory in Spain. By all accounts, most of them never wanted to go there, and they’ve fought that way. Here … It depends more on the unit and the officers with the Eyeties than it does with the Fritzes,” the other sergeant said.
“With the Fritzes, they always mean it,” Walsh said with feeling. “You know what you’re getting with them, same as with Navy Cuts.” In aid of which, he lit a cigarette and offered his new friend the packet.
With a nod of thanks, the other man took one. “I’m Joe Billings,” he said, and stuck out his hand.
Walsh shook it and gave his own name. “And just as much a Taffy as you’d expect from the handle,” he added. If he said it first, the other fellow couldn’t use it against him.
But Billings only nodded. “Heard it in the way you talked,” he said, and no more. By his own accent, he came from England’s in
dustrial Midlands. He went on, “Some of the Italian regiments, they aren’t worth tuppence ha’penny. Others … Others’ll give you everything you want and more besides. For a while, I should say. They’re all short of staying power.”
“Not the men, by what you say.” Walsh was trying to put pieces together.
“Not in those outfits. Some damn fine soldiers there,” Billings said. “Rifles, machine guns, grenades, that kind of thing, one bloke’s kit is about as good as the other’s. But they’re short on artillery, they’re woefully short on tanks, and the ones they’ve got are old-fashioned junk.”
“Heh.” Walsh drained his pint. “Back in France, I would have said the same thing about ours. The Germans chased us a deal more than we chased them, and that’s the truth.”
“You aren’t fighting the Germans any more, though,” Billings said. “This is a different business.”
How different it was Walsh discovered anew when he ducked out of the tent to ease himself. A million stars blazed down on him. The Milky Way was a pearly mesh cast across black, black sky. You never saw night skies like this in England or France. Too much moisture in the air, and, till the blackouts, too many lights sullying the darkness. Oddly, the only place he’d ever known the heavens like this before was in Norway, on a few of the rare clear winter nights.
But this wasn’t Norway, either. He’d frozen his ballocks off there despite a sheepskin coat. Nights got cold here—you did want your greatcoat—but not cold like that. The wind smelled different. You didn’t breathe in ice and pine trees here. You smelled sand and dust and petrol and exhaust. English forces here were far more motorized than they had been in Norway.
Walsh sniffed again as he did up his trousers. He didn’t know what he was sniffing for. Camel shit? Something like that, he supposed. He’d seen a few camels since he got to Egypt. The natives used them. So did the English and the Italians—when they ran short of lorries. You could also eat them if you had to. Walsh hoped like hell he’d never have to. Could anything that ugly possibly taste good?
The War That Came Early: Coup d'Etat Page 35