“Well, I didn’t tell her,” Rudel said, more uncomfortably still. No one superior to him had said anything to him about having a half-Jewish girlfriend. What would happen if he started getting letters from her, though? Letters always made things seem more official, more permanent. They might force the powers that be to notice.
“Don’t fuss.” Dieselhorst’s good cheer didn’t go with his own worries. “If she wants to find out, I’m sure she can.”
“Danke schon.” That wasn’t what Hans-Ulrich wanted to hear. He changed the subject: “I wish they’d let us get airborne again now that we can.” Sitting around through the Russian mud time had only given him more of a chance to stew in his own juices.
“Don’t you worry. It’ll happen soon enough, whether you want it or not.” Dieselhorst shook his head in resigned amusement. “Somebody’s been feeding you raw meat, hasn’t he?”
By way of reply, Rudel said something he wished he had back the second it came out of his mouth. Instead of withering Sergeant Dieselhorst, it made the rear gunner and radioman laugh. Rudel retreated in disorder.
He was flying again the very next morning, against a concentration of Russian armor and infantry west of Pskov. Bursts of colored smoke from German artillery pointed out the village in which the Ivans had holed up. Without that, he might not have known which village it was. Nobody could say the Russians weren’t masters at concealing themselves, no matter whether one tried to find them on the ground or from the air. Several Wehrmacht men had got their throats cut inside German lines, with no remaining sign of whoever’d done the dirty work.
But the huts in the village weren’t big enough to hide panzers from the air. The enemy soldiers had done what they could, piling brush and whatnot over the parts that stuck out. That changed the houses’ outlines, though, and gave the game away. “I’m going in on one,” Hans-Ulrich told Dieselhorst as he tipped the Stuka over into a dive.
However much he wished he would, he didn’t catch the Russians by surprise. Tracers from enemy machine guns leaped up toward the Ju-87. A bullet gouged his thick windshield but didn’t get through. The panzer he’d picked as his own swelled beneath him.
His thumb hit the firing button. The Stuka staggered in the air as the underwing cannon went off. One round from each of them and Rudel was hauling back on the stick for all he was worth, yanking the dive-bomber out of its plunge by brute force.
“You got him!” Dieselhorst yelled through the speaking tube. “The son of a bitch is burning!”
“Good,” Hans-Ulrich said. “Let’s go around again and see if we can take out another one.”
“You’re the boss,” Dieselhorst replied. If his tone implied that he thought Rudel was a few liters short of a full gas tank, the pilot didn’t have to listen to him.
Listen Hans-Ulrich didn’t. He fought for altitude. It took a while-the Ju-87 really did lose performance when it carried these 37mm guns. Then he dove again. This time, the Ivans were waiting for him but good. They fired off everything they had as his plane plunged toward the ground. But they had only machine guns and rifles. A Stuka was built to shrug off a good many small-arms hits and keep flying. Hans-Ulrich fired the 37mm guns again.
“He’s burning, too!” Dieselhorst reported as the pilot pulled out of the second dive. “Burning like a motherfucker!”
Serving in the Luftwaffe had got Hans-Ulrich past stewing when other people swore, the way a pastor’s son might have. That was between Dieselhorst and God, not between the sergeant and Rudel. So Hans-Ulrich only said “Good” before asking, “Did you see any more panzers in there?”
“Yeah, there was another one, south of the two you blasted,” Dieselhorst answered.
That wasn’t what the pilot wanted to hear-not even slightly. But he said what needed saying: “Well, let’s go get it, then.”
He half hoped-more than half hoped-Dieselhorst would try to talk him out of it. The rear gunner might not have had too hard a time. But Dieselhorst just repeated, “You’re the boss.” He still sounded as if he wondered whether Hans-Ulrich had all his oars in the water, but he sounded that way too often for Hans-Ulrich to worry about it now.
Hans-Ulrich did worry when a pair of flat-nosed Polikarpov fighters rushed straight at his climbing Stuka from out of the east. They were monoplanes, yes, but old-fashioned next to a Bf-109… which did him not a bit of good. The Ju-87 was hideously vulnerable to fighters any old time-and all the more so when it lugged the pair of antipanzer cannon.
Running was pointless. They had 150 kilometers an hour on him. And so he tried what he’d done once in the west: he opened up on them at long range with the 37mm guns. And either he was a better shot than he gave himself credit for or he got lucky. One of those big shells tore the wing off the lead Ivan. A round designed to smash through a panzer’s armor did horrible things to a fighter plane. The Polikarpov plummeted to the ground, flame licking along the fuselage. Hans-Ulrich didn’t see a parachute. Tough luck, fellow, he thought.
After seeing what happened to his buddy, the other Russian decided he wanted nothing to do with the Stuka. He whipped his plane into an improbably tight turn and got the devil out of there. Rudel fired at him, too, but missed.
“What’s going on?” Dieselhorst asked. Hans-Ulrich explained. “Well, shit,” the rear-facing gunner said. “You’ll be a fucking ace by the time the goddamn war’s done. A Stuka ace! Who would’ve figured that?”
“That’s not what they need me to do,” Hans-Ulrich said. “It’s just to stay alive.”
“I like staying alive,” the sergeant said plaintively.
“Well, now that you mention it, so do I,” Rudel answered. “But I’m still going to take care of that other panzer.”
Only he didn’t. The Russians holding the village set as many fires as they could. By the way some of them smoked, the Ivans threw motor oil on them. He couldn’t find the remaining panzer through those gray and black plumes, and neither could Dieselhorst. Bombs would still hurt the Red Army foot soldiers, but he didn’t have any. Dieselhorst reported the situation by radio as they flew away.
One more mission, Hans-Ulrich thought. He’d done his job, and the Polikarpov made a nice bonus.
Vaclav Jezek didn’t know what he’d expected when he agreed to go to Spain. He’d expected not to get handed over to the Nazis after France went and crapped out on him. He’d got that much, anyhow.
As a matter of fact, the Spaniards made a big fuss over the survivors of the Czech regiment. The mayor of some town along their route did some speechifying that would have sent a stolid Czech audience into gales of helpless laughter. He shouted. He wailed. He wept. He beat his breast. He used more, and more melodramatic, gestures than Hitler. And the Spaniards ate it up.
Of course, Vaclav understood not a word of the local language. As Benjamin Halevy had already shown, he could follow it after a fashion. “So what’s he going on about?” Vaclav whispered.
“He’s thanking us for not despairing of the Republic,” Halevy whispered back.
“I should hope not!” Vaclav said. “It’s the only country this side of Russia that doesn’t want to shoot us on sight.”
“It’s a quotation. It goes back to ancient Rome,” the Jew told him.
“If you say so.” Vaclav had been on the vocational track in his school days. German… You couldn’t escape German, not in a Czechoslovakia where one person in four was a Fritz. But only greasy grinds had anything to do with Latin.
German attitudes had rubbed off on Vaclav, or been drilled into him, in ways he didn’t even notice. He’d often thought the French were less efficient than they might have been. They kept trying to muddle through and improvise instead of planning beforehand, the way anyone with a gram of sense would have. So it seemed to someone whose country had been ruled for centuries by Germans, anyhow (even if they were Germans from Vienna and not Prussians).
But the French had at least heard of planning, whether they bothered to do any or not. With Spaniards, there was nothing but muddling through and improvising. The Republic must have known ahead of time that the Czechs were on their way. Vaclav would have thought one official or another would have decided where the new force was to go and what it would do after it got there.
No matter what he would have thought, nothing like that had happened. Along with a bunch of his buddies, he got off the train in Sagunto-another town that Halevy said went back to Roman days-to take a leak. He’d already discovered that Spanish pissoirs were even nastier than French ones, but when you had to go, you damn well had to go. He tried not to breathe while tending to his business.
