Anastas Mouradian would have shown what he thought with a lift of a few millimeters from one black, bushy eyebrow. Everyone but Borisov would have noticed, and nobody would have been able to prove a thing. Southerners had that subtlety. Federov, plainly, didn’t.
The newsreader talked about overfulfillment of steel-production norms. He praised the Stakhanovite shock workers of Magnitogorsk, and added, “No German bombing plane will ever be able to reach them and disrupt their labors!”
He was bound to be right about that. How many factory towns beyond the Urals belched smoke into the sky around the clock as they made all the things the Soviet Union needed? Hundreds, maybe thousands. They would have been villages before the Revolution, if they were there at all. Distance kept them safe from Nazi bombardiers.
Germany couldn’t hide like that. Soviet aircraft had already delivered stinging blows to East Prussia, and had even raided Berlin a few times. The great powers of the West were supposed to be mighty in the air. Why weren’t they pounding Hitler’s manufacturing centers harder? Didn’t it prove how halfhearted they were in their war against the Fascists?
When the announcer started going on about wheat and barley production, Sergei stopped listening. Yes, the people of the USSR had to eat. Try as the fellow on the radio would, he couldn’t make figures detailing the number of hectares to be planted anything but deadly dull.
“Collectivization continues to advance,” he said proudly. “The very idea of personal property will soon fade away.”
Sergei owned nothing. His flying suit, his rations, his billet, his bomber… all from the state. The vodka? He wasn’t sure where the vodka came from. He’d downed enough of it so he didn’t care, either. As long as he could get his hands on some whenever he felt the urge, nothing else mattered.
Once the newsreader got into the production reports and the economic news, you could talk over him without fear of being seen as uninterested in the life-and-death struggle on behalf of the workers and peasants-and without everybody frantically shushing you for opening your big trap. One of the pilots said, “Well, we’ve got a few weeks till things dry out. What happens then?”
“It should be the same kind of war it was last year,” Colonel Borisov said. “And the Devil take England and France.”
He was the squadron commander. Because he was, Sergei said only, “Here’s hoping you’re right, Comrade Colonel.” The USSR was a classless society in law. In law, yes. But you’d still get the shitty end of the stick if you pissed off the fellow entitled to tell you what to do. Drunk or sober, Sergei knew that.
And, if he’d spoken his mind, he would have pissed Borisov off. Hitler hated the Soviet Union the way Stalin hated Germany. If the Wehrmacht had to stand on the defensive in the West so it could hit harder here, he feared it would do exactly that. If it did, could the USSR withstand the blow?
He had to hope so. Everyone who served the Soviet Union had to hope so. If not, it would be a rugged spring and a worse summer. The USSR was finally over the horrors of the Revolution. Even the purges… Well, they hadn’t stopped, but they’d slowed down. Sergei thought they had, at any rate. Did the country really need a big, hard foreign war right now?
Need one or not, the USSR was liable to get one. No doubt history and diplomacy justified Stalin’s demand for that little chunk of northeastern Poland last year. But the price for it might prove higher than anyone in his right mind would want to pay.
Back in the days before the draft sucked Vaclav Jezek into the Czechoslovak army, when he’d thought about France he’d pictured Paris and the Riviera-the parts you saw when you went on holiday. Imagining pretty girls wearing not enough clothes bronzing on the beach under the hot Mediterranean sun… Hell, it made you want to pack your bags and buy a train ticket right away.
Reality, at the moment, was rather different, as reality had a way of being. The harsh landscape of northeastern France was as much a monument to industrial man as the worst parts of Czechoslovakia, and that was saying a mouthful. It was as cold as it would have been back there, too.
Towns were jammed too close together. Piles of coal and slag heaps towered tall as church steeples and factory smokestacks. The dirt looked gray. Even though the war had shut down most of the factories, the air still held a chemical tang that made you want to cough. The foulness must have soaked into the soil.
And, to make things more enjoyable yet, the Germans seemed to plant a machine gun or a mortar on top of every hillock, natural or manmade. They had spotters in the steeples. For all Vaclav knew, they had them in the smokestacks, too. They had lots of artillery, and the gunners were very alert. They’d had time to dig in, in other words, and they weren’t planning to go anywhere.
A mortar crew in Feldgrau up on top of a long hillock of rubble must have imagined they were lords of all they surveyed. Which only proved their imagination was as wild as Vaclav’s had been when he thought about the Riviera. He’d sneaked through a sad, scabby-looking wood till he sprawled no more than a kilometer from the Nazis and their pet stovepipe.
“Can you hit them?” Benjamin Halevy asked quietly.
“With this baby? Sure.” Vaclav patted the antitank rifle. “Question is, is it worth it? Once the first guy goes down, they’ll take cover. And they can shoot back over the top of that thing. I can’t hit them once they move.”
“When they slide back to the other side, they can’t see what’s going on over here, right?” The Jew answered his own question: “Right. Not without an observer, they can’t. And you can plug an observer. So, yeah, make ’em move.”
“You’re the sergeant.” Vaclav steadied his piece of light artillery in the fork between a tree trunk and a stout branch. He had a good notion of the range. Next to no windage… He took a deep, steadying breath, then pressed the trigger.
As always, the report was hellacious. So was the kick. But one of those distant German figures spun and fell over. Vaclav had another round chambered in only a few seconds. The Fritzes were good, though. They flattened out and dragged the mortar off to where Vaclav couldn’t see it.
“Now we find our foxhole,” he said, and scurried back to suit action to word.
Halevy scooted along with him. “Their first few shots from the first position won’t be real accurate. But…”
“Yeah. But,” Jezek agreed. He put his butt, and the rest of him, inside the foxhole. Halevy’s was only a few meters away. When you knew you’d get shelled, you didn’t want to stay above ground, not when you didn’t have to.
Yes, those Germans were good. The Czech and the French Jew with Czech Jewish parents had barely dug in when mortar bombs started whispering down into the woods. The flat, harsh cracks as they went off and the whining shriek of fragments slashing through the air made Vaclav wish Czechoslovakia had never heard of conscription. Wish for the moon while you’re at it, he thought, and tried to fold himself even smaller.
Not all the shrieks in among the trees came from the bombs bursting there. Some were torn from the throats of the Czechs and Frenchmen the bombs wounded. “You all right?” Vaclav called.
“Depends on how you look at things,” Halevy answered. “They haven’t wounded me. But I’m not drinking champagne and smoking a fat cigar and feeling up the barmaid, either.”
Jezek snorted. “Barmaids!” It wasn’t as if he hadn’t tried slipping his hand under their skirts now and then. It wasn’t even that he hadn’t succeeded, and gone on from there, a few times. But he couldn’t think about them when he was getting shelled. He wondered why not. Even when they cussed you out for groping them, they were a hell of a lot more fun than what was really going on.
“Heads up!” Halevy said urgently. “You pissed the Fritzes off good.”
Vaclav came up from his foxhole and discovered what the Jew meant. A couple of armored cars with German crosses painted on them were edging out from around the back of the slag pile the mortar had topped. Soldiers in coal-scuttle helmets loped along with them. His lips skinned back from his teeth in a savage grin. His antitank rifle wouldn’t always do for tanks. But armored cars weren’t armored against more than small-arms fire. He could make some poor damned German draftees thinking about the feel of a barmaid’s stockinged thigh under their fingers even more unhappy than they were already.
He could, and he did. He knew where the driver sat in an armored car. After he sent two rounds into the first machine, it swung hard left and tried to drive up the manmade hill. The other armored car kept coming. Its toy
