things had happened. Damn right! Chaim thought. I’ve got me a kid named Carlos Federico! He swigged from the brandy flask again.
In Russia, the sky seemed wider than it did anywhere else Willi Dernen had ever seen. That might have been because the countryside seemed-and was-wider, too, but Willi wasn’t so sure about it. He wasn’t sure about anything any more. He’d been here too long and done too much, and victory still looked as far away as whatever lay under the far end of that vast Russian sky.
He had other reasons for keeping an eye on the clouds drifting across the wide sky, too. Adam Pfaff noticed him doing it as they tramped along a dirt road-once you got out of the cities, Russia had no other kind. “What’s up?” Pfaff asked. “You can’t do anything about the weather.”
“My ass, I can’t,” Willi said. “I can worry about it, and I damn well do. It’ll start pouring rain pretty soon, and all these shitty roads’ll turn to glue. Then we freeze our nuts off for the next six months. Some fun, huh?”
“Well, sure. What would you rather be doing?” Pfaff said. “Drinking and fucking. What else is there?” Willi sounded honestly surprised.
His friend considered. “Well, there’s…” Pfaff shook his head. He thought some more. “Or there’s…” Another rejection, this time with a thumbs-down. “Nah.” More thought still. He grinned ruefully. “You’re right. That’s about all there is that’s worth doing. Oh-maybe filling up on mutton stew, too.”
“There you go,” Willi said. “But we get to do this crap instead. Aren’t we lucky?”
“We’re lucky if we come through alive,” answered the man with the gray Mauser.
“Dernen!” Arno Baatz shouted. “Are you lowering Pfaff’s morale?”
“Not a bit of it, Corporal,” Willi said. “He’s lowering mine.” Beside him on the dusty road, Pfaff giggled softly.
Awful Arno didn’t. “Think you’re funny, don’t you? Well, you listen to me. Just because nobody’s made a charge stick on you yet doesn’t mean nobody will. You mark my words.”
Willi was about to tell Baatz where to put his words-sideways-when the section point man came trotting back toward the main body of men. Johann Stallinger made a good point: he was short and skinny and anxious. He nodded ahead, in the direction from which he’d just come. “Something’s in those fields,” he said. “The way the grain was moving, it’s not from the wind.”
“Are you on the rag again, Stallinger?” Awful Arno asked.
“If you don’t like the job I do, Corporal, you can put somebody else up there,” the point man answered. Whatever else he might have thought, his pale, pinched face didn’t show it.
You could watch Baatz working through it. You could, and Willi did. Arno did want to go forward. “If you’re having vapors…” he growled. But he knew Stallinger might not be. Johann was point man for a reason. If the fields were full of Russians, the section was asking to get bushwhacked. Baatz’s pudgy features cleared as he made up his mind.
“Braun!”
“Yes, Corporal?” Gustav Braun’s face said he wished he were a thousand kilometers away from here.
“You got that big drum on your machine pistol. Let Stallinger take you up to the fields he’s having spasms about, and you shoot the whole thing off. If that doesn’t flush the Ivans, nothing will, on account of there won’t be any there,” Baatz said.
Willi blinked. The order actually made good sense. He wouldn’t have thought Awful Arno had it in him. Braun carried a Russian PPD-34 submachine gun instead of a Schmeisser. The Russian piece came with a drum that held seventy-one rounds. It took 7.62mm cartridges instead of 9mm, but the Germans had captured plenty. The big magazine made it heavy to cart around. Every once in a while, though, you needed the extra firepower. This looked to be one of those times.
Even Braun could see as much. “Right, Corporal,” was all he said. If he didn’t sound thrilled… Well, Willi wouldn’t have been thrilled with an order like that, either, no matter how much sense it made.
Stallinger did have a Schmeisser. A point man often found himself in positions where he needed to spray around a lot of lead in a hurry. He also seemed less than delighted about going back to where he’d sensed trouble, but hey, there was a war on. You did all kinds of things you weren’t delighted about.
The rest of the Landsers spread out into a loose skirmish line. Nobody told them to. No one needed to tell them. They knew what was what. Willi knew he had a round in the chamber. He knew it, but he made sure anyway. He noted the best place to dive for cover, and also the next best place.
Stallinger and Braun went forward. If the Russians had a machine gun in amongst the barley… If they had a machine gun in there, hell was out to lunch, because they could mow down the rest of the section, too.
Braun knew his business. He didn’t just squeeze off one long burst as he fired. The muzzle would have pulled up and to the right, and he would have shot over what he was trying to flush out. He fired two, three, four rounds at a time. Willi didn’t know exactly when he hit something. The Ivans might have been disciplined enough to keep quiet when they got shot. But one fellow couldn’t help making the grain around him sway in unmistakable fashion as he toppled over. Tiny in the distance, Stallinger waved urgently.
Awful Arno waved back. Get away! that meant, but giving the order was easier than following it. The Russians figured out that they weren’t going to be able to take the whole section unawares. They grabbed what they could get, and opened up on Stallinger and Braun. Both men went down. Maybe they weren’t dead, but Willi didn’t like the odds.
He was already trotting forward before Awful Arno told him to. So were the rest of the Landsers. You didn’t let the Russians take your buddies alive, not if you could help it. You didn’t even want them grabbing German corpses. They mutilated them for the fun of it, and to intimidate live Germans who came upon their handiwork.
Bullets reached out toward the advancing men in Feldgrau. One cracked past Willi, viciously close. He had to make himself keep moving by main force of will. His body, animal thing that it was, wanted to throw itself flat, or else to run. The barley still concealed the Ivans.
But not perfectly, not as he got closer to them. He spotted khaki through green going gold. When he raised his Mauser to his shoulder, the Russian showed plainly through the telescopic sight. He fired. He got a split-second glimpse of most of the man’s face contorted with pain. Then he worked the bolt, lowered the rifle, and trotted on. That enemy soldier wasn’t likely to trouble them any more.
Ambush spoiled, the rest of the Red Army men slipped off to the east. Their rear guard kept firing to make sure the Germans didn’t chase them too enthusiastically. If they wanted to retreat, Willi was ready to let them. Awful Arno kept yelling for the section to push harder.
Then he yelled again, wordlessly this time. He held his rifle in his right fist. His left arm hung uselessly, blood darkening the field-gray sleeve. “I’m hit!” he said. Disbelief filled his voice. And why not? He’d stayed lucky for going on three years-he must have thought nothing could bite him. Well, that showed how much he knew.
The Landser next to him slapped a wound bandage on his arm. “Go back, Corporal,” the fellow said. “The aid men will patch you up. Can you manage on your own, or shall we send somebody with you?”
“Send somebody.” Willi wasn’t sure he was the senior Obergefreiter, but he spoke up anyway. “He can’t handle his weapon one-handed. If we’ve bypassed any Ivans, they’ll do for him if he’s by himself.”
They took his orders. Baatz and a protector headed for the rear. Willi didn’t know what he’d do without Awful Arno to goad him on. He looked forward to finding out, though.
When the Germans got up to the point man and his comrade, they found Braun dead but Stallinger still very much alive, though down with a leg wound. More men hauled him off to the rear. They buried Braun in a shallow grave and set his helmet on it. They might have marked the grave with a bayoneted Mauser, too. The PPD-34 was too valuable. Another Landser grabbed it and brought it along.
Chapter 19
The farther south and east into the Ukraine the Germans and Romanians drove the Red Army, the more familiar things became for Ivan Kuchkov. More of the people spoke Russian, for instance. It was Ukrainian-accented Russian, with guttural h’s replacing proper g’s, but he could more or less make sense of it. Real Ukrainian hovered right at the edge of comprehensibility for him, which pissed him off.
