“Nah.” Mechnikov shook his head again. “I’ve gone this long without it, I wouldn’t know what to do if I could all of a sudden. And I remember real good. I start writing shit down, I bet I start forgetting like a son of a bitch.”
He might well have been right. Stas had dealt with more than a few illiterate enlisted men in his time. Russia was full of them. In Western Europe, they said, almost everybody could read and write. It wasn’t like that here. And illiterates did tend to have better memories than people who could read and write. They needed them.
The newsreaders on the radio tried their best to give the impression that everything at the front was fine. Their best might have convinced civilians who hadn’t seen German soldiers or had German bombs fall on them yet. But if everything was as wonderful as the radio wanted people to believe, why was the Red Air Force rushing half- trained Pe-2 pilots to the front as fast as it could?
Stas didn’t think anything was as wonderful as the radio wanted people to believe. He never had. Soviet propaganda was primarily aimed at Russians, and Russians, as seen through the jaundiced eye of a man from the Caucasus, lacked a certain subtlety. So did Soviet propaganda, at least to Mouradian. Stalin was a man from the Caucasus, too. Chances were he chuckled cynically at the stuff he had his propagandists put out. Which didn’t mean the stuff didn’t work.
And the new bombers worked, too-at least if you didn’t crash them trying to get them to work. The pilots flew their planes and aircrews west toward the border between Russian and Byelorussia. That they landed at airstrips still inside the Russia Federation gave the lie to the swill that poured out of radio speakers. No, things weren’t going nearly so well as the Soviet government wanted people to think.
English and French reinforcements for the Nazis hadn’t got here yet, either. What would happen when they joined the Germans and Poles? Nothing good, not if you were a Soviet citizen.
Lieutenant Colonel Tomashevsky seemed to know his business. He wasn’t a drunken blowhard like Colonel Borisov or a hopeless loser like the fellow who’d briefly given Mouradian orders in the Far East.
“The Nazis are still coming forward,” he told the newly assembled men of his newly assembled squadron. He didn’t bother mentioning the Poles. In his place, Stas wouldn’t have, either. Tomashevsky went on, “We can’t stop them all by ourselves, but we can hurt them. That will give the Red Army a better chance to do its job.”
Was he saying the Red Army wasn’t doing its job? Would some political officer rake him over the coals for telling the truth? Such things happened all the time. That was a shame, but they did.
“One more thing,” he added. “The best way to become a Hero of the Soviet Union isn’t to try and dogfight the 109s. The Pe-2 may have started out as a heavy fighter, but it’s a bomber now. It’s a good bomber, but it’s still a bomber, dammit. The best way to become a Hero of the Soviet Union is to finish your mission, come back, and fly your next one and the one after that. That’s what heroes do: what needs doing. Go take care of it.”
Thus encouraged, they hurried to their planes. Antiaircraft guns’ snouts stuck up around the airstrip. Stas hadn’t seen any bomb craters, though. The Germans hadn’t found this place, then. Not yet.
Groundcrew men bombed up the squadron’s Pe-2s. Fyodor Mechnikov was ready. “Let’s blow the living shit out of these Nazi cunts,” he said.
“I couldn’t have put it better myself,” Stas replied.
Up they went. After the more sedate SB-2, takeoff in the new machine was like a kick in the pants. “I could get used to this,” Ivan Kulkaanen remarked.
“Let’s hope so,” Stas answered. Kulkaanen gave him a sidelong look. Stas didn’t know about Karelians in general-he hadn’t met many-but his bomb-aimer had an ear for the little things… if they were little. If the aircrew didn’t get used to these takeoffs, they’d probably be too dead to care.
They droned west. Orders were to hit the Germans outside of Mogilev, on the Dnieper. When they got there, they discovered the enemy was already ten or fifteen kilometers over the river. They bombed the biggest concentration of Germans they could find. Antiaircraft fire came up at them from the ground, but it wasn’t too bad. Mouradian had flown through plenty worse. No Messerschmitts seemed to be in the neighborhood. Nobody could anger Lieutenant Colonel Tomashevsky by pretending the Pe-2 still was the fighter it had originally been intended to be.
Once the bomb bay was empty, they sped back to Russia-Mother Russia to Mechnikov, if not to Mouradian or Kulkaanen (although it was to Tomashevsky: by his name, he was a Russian). Stas taxied into a revetment and killed the engines. As soon as the props stopped spinning, groundcrew men spread camouflage netting over the plane. The Germans wouldn’t have an easy time finding this airstrip.
Unless, of course, they followed the Red Air Force planes and watched where they landed. Maybe that was what happened. Any which way, the antiaircraft guns around the airstrip suddenly all seemed to go off at once. Mouradian, Kulkaanen, and Mechnikov scrambled out of the Pe-2 and sprinted for the nearest slit trench.
One after another, Stukas dove on the field. The first one flattened what had been a kolkhoz supervisor’s office and was now Lieutenant Colonel Tomashevsky’s headquarters. Stas hoped Tomashevsky hadn’t got back in it yet. Two other dive-bombers planted 500-kilo bombs right in the middle of the runway. Nobody would fly in or out till those holes got filled. And a fourth German bomber blew up a Pe-2 in spite of the netting that covered it. The flak didn’t get any Stukas. As they roared off to the west, Mouradian only wished he were more surprised. laustrophobia was foolish. Julius Lemp kept telling himself so. It helped… some. The Baltic was a couple of hundred kilometers across. But he was used to the greater elbow room of the North Sea and the vast freedom of the North Atlantic. Here in these enclosed waters, he felt as if he had land at his elbow every way he looked.
“Oh, good, skipper. I’m not the only one, then,” Gerhart Beilharz said when Lemp complained out loud.
“You’d best believe you’re not,” Lemp agreed. If anyone on the U-30 was entitled to feel cooped up all the time, it was Beilharz. With his size, it wasn’t as if he were wrong.
“Not a whole lot of traffic out there, either,” the engineering officer said. “I hope we’re not just wasting our time.”
“Me, too,” Lemp said. “Well, at least it’s a war.”
His voice sounded hollow. If he could hear it, no doubt Beilharz could, too. And he had his reasons for keeping enthusiasm on a tight lead. You could foul up all too easily in the Baltic, and foul up your career, such as it was, while you were at it. In the North Atlantic or the North Sea, he could assume any surface ship he saw was bound for England or France.
Here… Suppose he sank a Swedish freighter bound for the Reich with a load of iron ore. That would torpedo any hopes he might still have for moving up the chain of command. Would it ever! He’d survived sending one ship to the bottom by mistake. Nobody could get away with being wrong like that twice.
Even if he spotted a gunboat, it might not belong to the Ivans. It might be Swedish or Finnish or Polish or Latvian or Lithuanian or Estonian. He’d wondered if Stalin would gobble up the Baltic republics the way Hitler had seized the Low Countries. No sign of it yet. Like drowning men with life preservers, the little nations in these parts clung to neutrality for dear life. As soon as one side invaded them, the other would, too. Whichever big power won the war, Latvia, Lithuania, and Estonia would lose.
So he had to be careful. Airplanes might belong to one of the neutrals, too. He couldn’t shoot it out on the surface with one unless it fired at him first. Since that would be just exactly too late, he dove as soon as anybody spotted anything flying. Once, what turned out to be a Russian flying boat dropped depth charges on him- fortunately, with bad aim. They rattled his teeth and made the sailors use some amazing profanity, but did no damage.
“Are we going into the Gulf of Finland?” Beilharz asked one afternoon on the conning tower, in much the same tones a patient might use when asking his doctor if a biopsy had come back malignant.
“That’s where Leningrad is. That’s where the Russians go in and out,” Lemp answered. Beilharz only sighed. Well, Lemp felt like sighing himself. The Baltic was narrow. The Gulf of Finland wasn’t more than a good piss wide. If something went wrong while the U-boat was there… The technical term for that was screwed. But Lemp went on, “When somebody asked that American gangster why he robbed banks, he said, ‘Because that’s where the money is.’ ”
“Hey, even if we got a boatload of rubles, we couldn’t spend ’em in Germany anyhow,” Beilharz said.
Lemp was a pretty fair submarine driver. He hadn’t been blessed with the sharpest or quickest sense of humor, though. He was about to snap at Beilharz for missing his point when he realized, in the nick of time, that the Schnorkelmeister was joking. “Heh,” he managed-not the merriest or most sincere laugh that ever rang out on the U-30, but a laugh all the same.
Estonia owned the lower jaw to the Gulf of Finland, its namesake country the upper. Soviet territory lurked
