anxious insides.
“What’s our target, Comrade Colonel?” someone asked.
“There’s an enemy concentration east of Vitebsk,” Tomashevsky said. “Mostly Englishmen and the French, Intelligence says.” His lip curled in fine contempt. “If they want to play these games, we have to show them the price. And if we smash them up before they get to the front, that’s one thing less for the Red Army to worry about.”
Groundcrew men were bombing up the Pe-2s and making sure their machine guns had full belts when Mouradian and Kulkaanen went to their plane. Some of the bombs had slogans chalked on the casings: For Stalin! and Death to Fascists! and the like. The only way the enemy would find out about one of those was if the bomb proved a dud. But the groundcrews did that kind of thing all the time. It made them happy and didn’t hurt anything, so why not?
Fyodor Mechnikov profanely directed bomb stowage. The blocky sergeant reminded Stas a lot of Ivan Kuchkov, with whom he’d served before getting promoted away. He wasn’t quite so hairy or quite so ugly, and he didn’t have quite such a foul mouth, but he came close on all three counts.
“We’ll give ’em hell, right?” he said to Stas.
The Armenian nodded gravely. “That isn’t borscht we’re dropping on them.”
“Borscht.” The bombardier didn’t need long to decide what he thought of that. “You’re weird… sir.”
“It could be,” Mouradian agreed. “It probably is, in fact. But as long as I get the plane there and back, as long as we deliver the load, what difference does it make?”
“When you put it that way, not fucking much,” Mechnikov allowed.
Flying the Pe-2 was a pleasure. It had so much speed and maneuverability, people called it the fighting bomber. Of course, they’d said the same thing about the SB-2, the plane Stas had learned on, only a few years earlier. The state of the art had passed the SB-2 by. One of these days, the Pe-2 would also grow obsolescent. But it hadn’t happened yet.
“If we’re gong after the English and French, we won’t have to worry so much about 109s, will we?” Kulkaanen asked as they reached cruising altitude.
“I hope not,” Stas said sincerely. Calling a Pe-2 a fighting bomber meant it had a chance against a Messerschmitt. A good chance? Well, no. From what he’d heard, English fighters were about as good as the 109, French machines not quite. Neither country had swarms of them in these parts, the way the Nazis did.
The squadron droned on toward the west. A few antiaircraft guns fired at them as they crossed the front. Russian? German? Both? No one got hit, so it didn’t matter. Somewhere down there in the snow…
“Approaching the target.” Tomashevsky’s voice echoed in Stas’ earphones. The pilot wondered how he could tell. Then he saw fairly well camouflaged tents below-and antiaircraft fire abruptly picked up.
“Let ’em go, Fedya!” he called to the bombardier through the speaking tube.
Away they went. All at once, the bomber grew nimbler. It needed to, for English Hurricanes-Mouradian thought they were Hurricanes-tore into the formation less than a minute after the Pe-2s turned for home. Tracers scored deadly, fiery lines across the sky. Two bombers spun earthward, one after the other. A Hurricane went down, too, flames licking back from the dead engine toward the cockpit.
Stas didn’t see a parachute open there. He didn’t look very hard, either. He was too busy throwing his plane around the sky, trying to keep any Hurricanes from getting on his tail. Mechnikov fired a burst from the belly machine gun. No answering storm of lead tore into the Pe-2, so maybe he scared off the enemy. Or maybe he was shooting at nothing. Stas didn’t care. As long as he got away, he didn’t care about anything else.
Chapter 4
Julius Lemp swept the horizon with his Zeiss binoculars. Ratings up on the U-30’s conning tower scanned all segments of the sky. The Baltic was a damned narrow sea. You had to stay alert every second you were on the surface. Trouble would land on top of you with both feet if you didn’t.
Estonia lay to the south, Finland to the north. Under Marshal Mannerheim, Finland was neutral or even friendly to the Reich. Estonia would have liked to be. Stalin didn’t give the little country the choice. The Reds still resented losing the Baltic states when the Russian Empire fell apart. (They resented losing Finland, too, but they weren’t in such a good position to do anything about that.)
When the Soviet Union sneezed, Estonia came down with the sniffles. When Stalin said Do something! his little neighbor did it. Otherwise, especially in troubled times like these, the Red Army would march in.
As a matter of fact, the Red Army-and the Red Air Force and Red Navy — had marched in. That was why Lemp cast an especially wary eye toward the south. But things could have been worse. Estonia still remained independent in name. Stalin had promised that his forces would leave once the emergency was over. Even an idiot knew Stalin’s pledges were worth their weight in gold, but at least he’d bothered to make this one.
Lithuania was as much a German sphere as Estonia was a Russian. Hitler had reannexed Memel, and the Lithuanians seemed pathetically eager to cede it to him. He might have grabbed the whole country if they hadn’t. Like Stalin, he swore up and down that the Wehrmacht would pull out after he’d won the war. Lemp chuckled nastily. Once a guy got it in, he always promised he’d pull out.
“What’s funny, Skipper?” one of the ratings asked. The field glasses never left his eyes; his steady scan of the sky never faltered. Lemp told him. He laughed.
So did the rest of the sailors up there. “You used that line, too, did you?” another one said.
“Who, me?” Lemp answered in a voice brimming with innocence. More goatish laughter erupted. Aboard the Kriegsmarine’s surface ships, Prussian discipline was alive and thriving. Everything was bright metal and fresh paint and sharp trouser creases and smooth shaves and “Zu befehl, mein Herr!”
U-boats weren’t like that. By the nature of things, they couldn’t be. No one wasted precious fresh water on shaving. Like his men, Lemp wore a scraggly growth of face fungus. His uniform was as grimy and smelly as theirs were. The only thing that distinguished his from theirs was the white cover on his service cap; theirs were all navy blue. He’d taken the stiffening wire out of the crown, as every U-boat skipper did: one more silent swipe at spit and polish.
The sun glinted off the sea to the south and threw dazzling reflections into his face. It stood higher in the sky than it had in the depths of winter-not that anybody who had to sail the Baltic in that season saw it very often. But the wind still blew down from the north-straight off the North Pole, by the feel of it. Despite a heavy peacoat and quilted trousers, Lemp shivered.
One of the ratings stiffened. He pointed southeast. “Smoke on the horizon!”
Lemp’s binoculars swung that way. Yes, the dark smudge was there-low and hard to make out, but there, sure as hell. And smoke, in these waters, could come only from a Russian ship. “Good job, Anton. I’ll see it goes into your file,” the skipper said. Then he called down the hatch to the exec, who had the helm: “Change course to 135. All ahead full. Anton spied the smoke.”
“Changing course to 135, Skipper.” Klaus Hammerstein’s voice floated up from below. He was a good officer. He’d get promoted away from the U-30 into a boat of his own before too long. When he was the Old Man himself, he could let more of his good nature show. He’d have an exec to do the dirty work for him then, instead of his doing it for someone else. Lemp heard him call the setting change back to the engine room. The U-boat’s diesels throbbed harder. The Type VIIA could make sixteen knots on the surface. That would be plenty to run down a freighter. If Anton had found an enemy warship…
I’ll worry about that later, Lemp told himself. He did not hold the Red Navy in high regard. Yes, the Ivans were brave. But he’d spent most of the time since the war started facing off against the Royal Navy out in the North Sea and the Atlantic. Those were the best surface sailors in the world. Better than their opposite numbers in the Kriegsmarine? He nodded to himself. They were the men from whom the Germans-and everybody else-tried to learn their craft. Set against competition like that, the Russians didn’t come close to measuring up.
He went to the big, pier-mounted binoculars on the conning tower. They had a narrow field of view, but more magnification and far more light grasp than the ones he and the ratings wore on straps around their necks. And now he wasn’t scanning for things that might be there. Something was, and he knew just where to look for it.
Distant waves leaped toward him. So did that smoke smudge, not quite so low on the horizon now as the U-
