He didn’t care. He could go to the other end of the world for all the difference that made to him. More than half of him hoped he would. If nobody knew him when he finally arrived, wherever that was, wonderful. What more than a fresh start could a man down on his luck hope for?
They pinned the Order of the Red Star on Anastas Mouradian for shooting down a Flying Pencil. He wished winning the medal would have meant more to him. What it did mean boiled down to two things. First, he’d taken a chance and lived through it. And, second, the authorities might cut him a little more slack with the medal than they would have if he hadn’t won it.
Sadly, he understood he couldn’t count on the second one to hold true. If the NKVD decided he was a nuisance, he’d end up in a gulag or dead as fast as the Chekists could arrange it. If they only wondered, the medal might make them give him the benefit of the doubt.
Well, it might.
With the war not going so well, he needed any good-luck charm he could grab. The powers that be in the Soviet Union were like bad-tempered children. When they didn’t get their way, they threw tantrums. Bad-tempered children smashed toys, or maybe dishes. Bad-tempered Soviet commissars and their flunkies smashed people instead.
Mouradian didn’t worry about his own side more than he did about the Germans. Hitler’s minions were actively trying to kill him. The NKVD wasn’t. He didn’t think it was, anyhow.
Still, he couldn’t help noting that, in a perfect world, he wouldn’t have had to worry about his own side at all. What? This world was imperfect? What a surprise! What a disappointment!
If this were the perfect world, or even a better world, the Nazis and their parasites wouldn’t be closing in on Smolensk. But they were, despite the Soviet armed forces’ best-certainly most fervent-efforts to stop them. Radio Moscow tried its hardest to deny that. These days, though, Luftwaffe bombers could reach the USSR’s capital. Once, they’d knocked Radio Moscow off the air for several hours. Only once, but Stas didn’t take it for a good sign.
And, if this were the perfect world, or even a better one, the Soviet move against Romania would have bothered the Fascists more. A blow against their soft underbelly… Only the underbelly turned out not to be so soft. These days, the fighting wasn’t in eastern Romania. It was in the western Ukraine. No doubt because it was, Radio Moscow mentioned it as seldom as possible.
So Stas relied on things he heard unofficially. You couldn’t always rely on such things. Then again, you couldn’t always rely on Radio Moscow, either, though saying so, or even lifting an eyebrow at the wrong time, could cost you your life. Unofficially, some Ukrainians were greeting the Nazis as liberators, giving them bread and salt and strewing flowers in the path of their armored personnel carriers.
Unofficially, things in the Ukraine had been very bad before the war. Soviet authorities were bound and determined to liquidate the kulak class. And well they might have been-the richer peasants hadn’t cared to give up their land and flocks and tools and join collective farms. The authorities broke them. Nobody knew how many Ukrainians died-starved or shot-in the collectivization process. Or, if anyone did know, he wasn’t talking.
If some of the survivors didn’t act like good Soviet citizens now, whose fault was that? Theirs, of course, or it would be if the USSR won. Then they’d look down the barrel of another round of retribution. In the meantime, maybe they were getting some of their own back.
Stas did wonder how much. He also heard unofficial things about how the Germans behaved in Soviet territory. Some of those things were hard to believe. If the Nazis acted that way in the Ukraine, they’d wear out their welcome in a hurry. Maybe they wouldn’t be so stupid down there.
Or maybe they would. Stas wouldn’t have been surprised. It wasn’t as if Stalin hadn’t acted like a bloodthirsty monster enforcing his will there.
The Armenian flyer sighed after he got back to his tent. He was alone there-it was safe enough. As safe as anything could be these days, anyhow. No, when Stalin behaved like a bloodthirsty monster, he wasn’t acting. He was showing what he really was. And so was Hitler.
Which one made the worse bloodthirsty monster? Stas was damned if he knew. The English had had an affair with Hitler and decided they would rather dance with Stalin. The French, by contrast, stayed in bed with the Nazis. So did the Poles… but they would have slept with Stalin had Hitler jumped them first.
Stas almost welcomed the next mission. Wasn’t a clean chance of getting killed better than the muddy ocean of doubts that had filled his thoughts lately? He could make himself believe it… right up till the moment when shell fragments slammed into the Pe-2. As soon as that happened, he discovered how much he wanted to live.
The engines still sounded all right. There was no fire. He gave the instrument panel a quick, frightened once-over. The fuel gauge stayed steady. So did oil pressure. He cautiously tried the controls. All seemed in working order. “Bozhemoi!” he said-with feeling. “I didn’t think we’d be that lucky.”
Another German antiaircraft shell burst close to the bomber. The Pe-2 staggered in the air, but no more clangs or rattles warned of another hit.
Ivan Kulkaanen frowned. He fiddled with his earphones. His frown deepened. “Radio’s out,” he reported.
No one was talking in Stas’ earphones at the moment, either. Was that because no one was talking or because nobody could get through? Mouradian did some fiddling of his own. Then he eyed the set’s dials. He hadn’t done that before-he’d had more urgent things to worry about. Sure enough, every needle lay dead against its peg.
“Well, it could be worse,” he said. “We can get back without a radio, and they’ll slap in another one or splice the cut wires or do whatever else needs doing.”
“Sure.” Kulkaanen nodded. “Nobody can order us to do anything stupid now, either.”
“No one would ever do anything like that.” Virtue overflowing filled Mouradian’s voice. He and the young blond Karelian in the other seat exchanged amused looks. Of course their superiors were always wise and careful. Of course.
No one would warn them if Messerschmitts attacked the squadron, either. Stas spent the rest of the flight wishing for eyes in the back of his head. Wishing failed to produce them. He got back to the airstrip anyhow, and put the Pe-2 in the hands of the repair crews.
He hadn’t been down long before the squadron commander summoned him. Saluting, he said, “I serve the Soviet Union!”
“Do you?” Lieutenant Colonel Tomashevsky growled. “Then why didn’t you move up in the formation when I ordered you to, dammit?”
“Sir, I never heard that order.” Mouradian explained what had happened, finishing, “You can check with the groundcrew men. They’ll tell you I’m not making any of this up.”
Tomashevsky eyed him. “I won’t check. But if I ever find out you were lying, you’re dead. No demotions. No camps. No punishment details. Dead.” He spoke without melodrama. Stas might have wished to hear some. That would have left him less than sure the squadron commander meant it. As things were, he had no room for doubt.
Tomashevsky kept looking at him, waiting for him to say something, willing him to say something. So he did: “Sir, if I ever lie, it won’t be about anything where you can catch me.”
“I should hope not,” the senior officer said. “You’d have to be stupid to do something like that. Dark-haired men aren’t stupid. They have other things wrong with them, but they aren’t stupid.”
Russians often lumped Armenians and Georgians and Jews together that way. Stas mildly resented it. So did most Armenians and Georgians and, he supposed, even Jews. With a crooked smile, he answered, “Sir, I didn’t come here to pick your pocket. I came here to blow up Germans.”
“Always a worthy cause,” Tomashevsky agreed dryly. “But if a pocket walks by begging to be picked, will you hold back?”
“Maybe not,” Stas admitted. “But then, would you?” For a moment, he feared he’d cut too close to the bone. But the squadron commander laughed and waved him away. Away he went, before Tomashevsky could change his mind.
Chapter 15
