machine gun. The less said about the Magyars and the Slovaks, the better. Anyway, they were farther south. Theo didn’t know what to think of the Romanians, but the way they’d gone belly-up in the last war didn’t make him figure Stalin’s teeth were chattering.
“I know you’ll serve the Reich well. I know you’ll serve the Volk well. And I know you’ll serve the Fuhrer well.” Colonel Griehl’s arm shot up and out in the Party salute. “ Heil Hitler! ”
“ Heil Hitler! ” The panzer men echoed the shout and the salute. Since the failed Putsch against the Fuhrer, it was supposed to have replaced the traditional military salute. And so it had-where anyone you didn’t trust could see you saluting. Theo muttered something wordless to himself. What was one more mask among the many he already wore?
He scrambled up into his familiar place behind the Panzer II’s turret, away from the world and its cares- except, of course, when it started screaming at him through the radio earphones. The fighting compartment smelled of metal and leather and sweat and exhaust and smokeless powder. It smelled like home to Theo, even if home was thinly armored, too lightly armed, and rapidly becoming obsolete.
From the turret, Witt said, “One of these days before too long, we’ll get ourselves a Panzer III instead.”
“God, I hope so!” Adi Stoss exclaimed as he started the engine. Theo wasn’t so sure he did. Yes, a Panzer III had thicker armor, a better cannon, and a bow machine gun to go with the one in the turret. But it also had a loader and a gunner in the turret along with the commander (the radioman handled that bow gun). Was getting to know two new people scarier than attacking the Ivans in this old crate? To Theo, that seemed too close to call.
They didn’t have the new panzer yet. No matter what Sergeant Witt said, reports that they’d get one soon were only scuttlebutt. With a good crew-which this machine did have-a Panzer II could still do the job. Stoss put the beast in gear. They not only could do the job, they damn well had to.
Witt rode with his head and shoulders out of the turret. Any panzer commander would do that when he wasn’t in combat. You could see a lot more that way; unlike the III and some French and English machines, the Panzer II had only a hatch, not a cupola. There was talk that new IIs would come with them, but that didn’t do this one any good.
A good panzer commander would stay head-and-shoulders out of the machine even in action. The vision ports in the turret just weren’t an adequate substitute. Witt did. Heinz Naumann had, too. That was how he’d stopped something. No one could fault Naumann’s guts: not even Adi, who’d hated them.
“There are some Frenchmen,” Adi said over the Maybach engine’s rattling growl and the squeak and clank of the caterpillar treads. “They’re by the side of the road, trying to get their trucks going again.”
“Surprise!” Sour amusement filled Hermann Witt’s voice. Russian roads went from bad to worse. Road maps showed as paved were either rutted dirt tracks or, more often, not there at all. Theo didn’t know who’d made the maps. Some fool who believed Soviet propaganda, probably. He did know that Western European soft-skinned vehicles made to run on asphalt or concrete fell to pieces trying to deal with Russian potholes and mud and engine-abrading dust. German trucks broke down as fast as their French and English counterparts.
In spite of his earphones, Theo started hearing gunfire. The Ivans knew when things could get rolling. They did what they could to stop their foes from pushing deeper into Russia. Witt ducked into the turret, but only to grab his Schmeisser. Then he popped up again like a jack-in-the-box.
“Infantry reporting enemy panzers in the woods ahead,” someone said on the radio. Theo relayed the message to Sergeant Witt.
“Oh, they are, are they?” Now Witt sounded almost gay. “Well, that’s what we’re here for, right?” Theo didn’t answer. He had no idea why he was here. He only knew he was, and that he wanted to go on being here. Philosophy in the back of a panzer? Witt would never understand.
Then half a dozen people started screeching in Theo’s earphones at the same time. “Oh, my God!” Hermann Witt exclaimed, while Adi Stoss yelled, “What a fucking monster!” One of the people on the radio said something about the biggest panzer he’d ever seen, so Theo decided it wasn’t King Kong coming out of the woods after all.
Which didn’t mean it wasn’t dangerous. Witt fired several 20mm rounds at the Russian machine. He slapped in another ten-round clip and fired some more.
“They just bounce off!” he said in horror. Beauty wouldn’t kill the Red beast, and maybe nothing else would, either. Witt came out with something even more horrified-and horrifying: “Dodge like hell, Adi! He’s aiming at us!”
Adi did his best to comply. Russian panzer gunners were often lousy, especially against moving targets. Often, but not always. Wham! Clanng! The hit almost threw Theo out of his seat. The round didn’t get through into the fighting compartment, but the Panzer II slewed sideways and stopped.
“Out! Out fast!” Adi shouted. “He knocked a track off! If he hits us again-”
He didn’t go on, or need to. Theo grabbed his Schmeisser and bailed out. The other two panzer crewmen left through his hatch, which exposed them to less enemy fire than their own. They huddled in the lee of the disabled panzer.
“I don’t know about you guys, but I feel like a deshelled snail,” Adi said.
Theo nodded. He did, too. He peered around the damaged Panzer II. He wanted a glimpse of the machine that did the dirty work. It was a monster. It seemed twice the size of the light German panzer, and mounted a gun that looked like a piece of field artillery. The cannon belched flame. Wham! Clanng! Another Panzer II exploded into fire. That crew had no prayer of getting away. Theo shuddered. Roasting inside your shell was even worse than coming out of it.
“Moscow speaking.” By the self-important way the words came out of the radio, the whole city might have been talking through the speaker, not just an announcer holed up in a studio somewhere. Or so it seemed to Anastas Mouradian, anyhow. He didn’t share the conceit with his fellow flyers. They already thought he was strange. He didn’t want to give them any more reasons.
“Red Army forces have struck more and more heavy blows against the Fascist and reactionary invaders west and south of Smolensk,” the newsreader went on. “The enemy’s tanks continue to show themselves unable to face in the field the latest products of Soviet engineering.”
Radio Moscow gave forth with great steaming piles of propaganda. Anyone with an ear to hear-which Mouradian certainly owned-knew that. Here, though, as best he could tell, the announcer meant every word. The new heavy tanks named for General Kliment Voroshilov were bigger and tougher than anything the Nazis or their friends built. Facing Panzer IIs-even Panzer IIIs-a KV-1 was like a bear against a pack of yapping dogs. But the KV- 1s came in ever-growing packs, too.
“Farther south,” the radio newsman went on, “the soldiers of the glorious Red Army are being welcomed as liberators in Bessarabia, which the Romanians stole while reactionary forces attempted to strangle the infant Soviet Union in its cradle.”
That sounded impressive. Mouradian wasn’t old enough to remember much about the Russian Revolution and its aftermath. He remembered that Armenia had been independent for a little while, and then part of a bigger Trans-Caucasian Soviet Socialist Republic. Then, after the Whites and their foreign allies were beaten, Moscow reasserted its authority over the region. No, he didn’t remember all the political details. What he mostly remembered was going hungry all the time.
Anyone who’d lived through the Revolution had memories like that. If you were a Ukrainian, you had several sets of them, and you were probably lucky to be alive. Rumors said lots of Ukrainians welcomed German and Polish soldiers the way the radio reported the Bessarabians were welcoming the Red Army. The louder and more stridently Radio Moscow denied those rumors, the more Stas believed them.
“Unrest in England against the government’s unnatural alliance with the Hitlerite barbarians continues to grow,” the newsreader said. “Police have been uncommonly brutal in suppressing demonstrations against Prime Minister Wilson.”
He went on to talk about ever-swelling Soviet war production. Plan after plan was overfulfilled, quota after quota exceeded. Stas wondered if he was the only flyer listening who thought about what would happen if people demonstrated against Stalin in Red Square. The NKVD, which was commonly brutal, would be uncommonly so for something like that. Would captured protesters be killed out of hand or sent to the gulags so they had more time to think about what reckless fools they’d been? An interesting question. Either way, the poor devils wouldn’t like the answer.
