He stopped when he finally heard Kuchkov. “What do you need, Comrade Sergeant?” he shouted back. He could afford to make some noise, as Ivan could; no Germans were in the neighborhood. Or if the Germans were, things were even more fouled up than the brass wanted to admit. Kuchkov guessed-no, on second thought he was sure-that was possible, maybe even likely.
He slogged forward through the muck to catch up to Sasha Davidov. If there were Fascists around, he didn’t want to call the point man back. Then the whole section might run into them without warning. That he might run into them without warning occurred to him only when he’d almost reached the Jew. He hung on to his PPD-34 a little tighter once it did.
And the first question out of his mouth was, “Any fucking sign of the pricks?”
Avram shook his head. “Not around here, Sergeant.” He pointed ahead. “Once we get over that swell of ground, we’ll be able to see farther. Of course, if there are any Germans on the far side of it, they’re liable to spot us, too.”
Ivan grunted. Normally, he would have had no more use for a skinny, swarthy little kike than any other Russian of peasant stock did. But times weren’t normal-not even a little bit. The game had changed as soon as the USSR and the Nazis actually came to grips. Some Russians and more Ukrainians and people from the Caucasus liked Hitler better than Stalin. They’d desert if they got the chance. Not even the politruks could stop them all the time.
You didn’t need to worry about the Jews, though. They were in the fight to the last bullet. They had to be. If the Nazis caught them, they’d get a bullet, all right. A Russian might be able to surrender. No guarantees, but he might. Zhids didn’t have a prayer. The Germans casually murdered them, the same way they got rid of the political officers who fell into their hands.
Pointing to that same swell of ground, Kuchkov asked, “Can you haul your sorry ass to the top and over without letting the Fascist pussies spot you?”
Avram was no braver than he had to be. But then, people who were braver than they had to be had a way of not living long. He tossed a papiros into the mud-he didn’t want some alert Fritz noticing the coal or the smoke. He nodded: not with any great enthusiasm, but he did. “I can do it.”
“All right. You go ahead, then. But some of the clumsy cuntfaced bitches in our outfit, you know they’d trip over their dicks if they tried, right?” Ivan said. He waited for the Jew to nod again before he went on, “So I’m gonna lead our assholes around to the left. If it’s clear, you fucking meet up with us there. Got it?”
“ Yob tvoyu mat’, Sergeant,” Davidov assured him.
Ivan burst into raucous laughter and slapped him on the back. Literally, what the Jew said meant Fuck your mother. In a different tone of voice or at a different time, it might have made Kuchkov try to murder him. But the filthy phrase lay at the bottom of mat. It could have a multitude of meanings, foul or fair. What Avram was getting across here was You bet your ass.
Fair enough. He was betting his own ass that he could do what he said he could do. “Go on, then,” Ivan told him. “You get into trouble, I’ll send some of the shitheads after you.”
Davidov nodded and went on. If he got into trouble, Ivan’s promise probably wouldn’t do him any good. He had to know that, but he moved up anyhow. He might be a kike, but he was all right.
The rest of the section took its own sweet time catching up to Kuchkov. The men weren’t fools. They could tell they were pretty safe where they were. The farther ahead they moved, the better-or rather, the worse-their chance of bumping into Nazis with guns.
Kuchkov profanely explained how they were going to skirt the swell of ground ahead. He also told half a dozen soldiers to rush to Avram’s rescue if the point man’s luck ran out. “You fuck that up, you better be more scared of me than you are of those German walking foreskins,” he added. The soldiers nodded. Anyone who wasn’t afraid of Ivan didn’t know him very well.
It had been drizzling. The rain started coming down harder as he took his section where it needed to go. In a way, that was good: the Germans would have more trouble noticing them. In another, not so good: the Red Army men would have more trouble spotting the Fascists.
Avram carried a PPD-34, too. You wanted to be able to throw a lot of lead at the bad guys in a hurry if you came across them when you didn’t expect to. Ivan kept his head cocked toward the top of the low hillock. He’d hear that snarl through the rain’s plashing.
It didn’t come. He got the rest of the section where they needed to go. Then he waited. Avram Davidov materialized as if out of thin air. “I think there are some Germans in the trees along the stream up ahead,” he said.
“You sure?” Ivan asked him.
“Pretty sure, Comrade Sergeant,” Davidov answered. “I don’t have any field glasses, but they looked like Germans, sure as the devil.”
“Bugger the cocksucking Devil,” Kuchkov said. He turned to another Red Army man. “Yuri!”
“ Da, Comrade Sergeant?”
“Go back and tell the company CO that we’ve bumped into the fucking Fascists. Ask him if he wants to reinforce us for a proper attack or if we should just sit tight and keep an eye on the pussies. You got me?”
“Da,” Yuri said again, and accurately gave back what Ivan had said. Like his sergeant, he could no more read and write than he could fly. He relied on his memory in ways people who could write never did. He was also pretty good at traveling cross-country-not so good as Avram, but good enough. Off he went, at the fastest clip the mud allowed.
Ivan didn’t need to order his men to start digging foxholes and camouflaging them. The soldiers automatically did that when they saw they wouldn’t be moving up for a while. The foxholes here would be nasty places, and would start filling up with water soon. The men dug anyhow. If German machine guns or artillery were going to probe for them, they wanted somewhere to hide.
Yuri probably wouldn’t make it back for a couple of hours. It might be dark by the time he did, which would put things off till tomorrow. Ivan didn’t mind; he was in no hurry to get shot at. He just hoped the Nazis weren’t readying their own onslaught. They might not need to wait hours to set up something good-sized. The bastards had radio sets falling out of their assholes.
Night came before either Yuri or a German attack. Yuri did manage to find his way back in the dark, and the jumpy sentries managed not to shoot him when he did. “Reinforcements will come up in the morning,” he reported. “The captain wants us to sit tight till then.”
“Khorosho,” Ivan said. The order let him to what he already wanted to, which suited him fine.
But, as Avram discovered, the Germans reinforced under cover of darkness. The Soviet attack never went in. Instead, the Red Army pulled back another kilometer or two and tried to draw a firm line in the mud.
Chapter 23
Hans-Ulrich Rudel shivered. Snowflakes swirled through the air. His breath smoked. The ordinary Luftwaffe greatcoat wasn’t defense enough against the Russian winter. He’d have to go back to wearing his flying togs all the time, the way he had the year before.
The Wehrmacht had been caught short last winter. Even the Germans’ Polish allies laughed at them or, worse, pitied them because of their inadequate cold-weather gear. Nothing could embarrass German national pride worse than pity from a pack of slovenly, hard-drinking, wife-beating Poles.
Things were better this year. Proper winter clothing was reaching the Landsers who needed it most in something like adequate quantities. They wouldn’t have to steal lousy, flea-infested sheepskin jackets from Russian peasants, the way they had before. They wouldn’t have to tailor bedsheets into camouflage smocks for the snow, either. There were proper snowsuits, reversible between white and Feldgrau. Progress, of a sort.
But only of a sort. As a lot of invaders had discovered before Germany tried it, Russia was easy to get into. Getting out was a lot harder. You could win victory after victory… and then what? The Red Army kept throwing in fresh divisions as if it manufactured them in Magnitogorsk. And there were always more kilometers of broad, flat Russian terrain ahead of the men from the Reich.
Nobody talked much about having a bear by the ears. Get labeled a defeatist and you’d soon envy men who’d
