snow. “Well, I have finished my tour of this part of the line, Captain. Perhaps you will rejoin your party now.”
“I’m ready.”
With a grim little smile, the commissar stumbled to his feet. “Keep in the shadows of the trees.”
When they got back to the jeep, Pug said, “How far are we from Moscow here?”
“Oh, quite far enough.” The commissar whirred the noisy engine. “I hope you saw what you wanted to see.”
“I saw a lot,” Victor Henry said.
The commissar turned his Lenin-like face at the American, appraising him with suspicious eyes. “It is not easy to understand the front just by looking at it.”
“I understand that you need a second front.”
The commissar uttered a brutal grunt. “Then you understand the main thing. But even without the second front, if we must, Captain Genry, we ourselves will smash this plague of German cockroaches.”
By the time they reached the central square of the town, the snowfall had stopped and patches of fast- moving blue showed through the clouds. The wind was bitter cold. The tangle of trucks, wagons, horses, and soldiers was worse than before. Vehement Russian cursing and arguing filled the air. The old women and the wrinkle-faced boys still watched the disorder with round sad eyes. In a big jam of vehicles around two fallen horses and an overturned ammunition wagon, the jeep encountered the black automobile. Talky Tudsbury, in great spirits, stood near forty yelling soldiers and officers, watching the horses kick and struggle in tangled traces, while other soldiers gathered up long coppery shells that had spilled from burst boxes and lay-softly gleaming in the snow. “Hello there! Back already? What a mess! It’s a wonder the whole wagon didn’t go up with a bang, what? And leave a hole a hundred feet across.”
“Where’s Pamela?”
Tudsbury flipped a thumb over his shoulder. “Back at the church. An artillery spotter is stationed in the belfry. There’s supposed to be a great view, but I couldn’t climb the damned tower. She’s up there making some notes. How are things at the front? You’ve got to give me the whole picture. Brrr! What frost, eh? Do you suppose Jerry is starting to feel it in his balls a bit? Hullo, they’ve got the horses up.”
Amphiteatrov said he was taking Tudsbury to see a downed Junker 88 in the nearby field. Pug told him that he had seen plenty of Junker 88’s; he would join Pam in the church and wait for them. Amphiteatrov made an annoyed face. “All right, but please remain there, Captain. We’ll come back in twenty minutes or less.”
Pug said good-bye to the bearded commissar, who was sitting at the wheel of the jeep, bellowing at a scrawny soldier who clutched a live white goose. The soldier was coarsely shouting back, and the goose turned its orange beak and little eyes from one to the other as though trying to learn its fate. Making his way around the traffic tangle, Pug walked to the church on crunching squeaking dry snow. Freedom from the escort — even for a few minutes — felt strange and good. Inside the church, a strange unchurchlike miasma of medicine and disinfectant filled the air; peeling frescoes of blue big-eyed saints looked down from grimy walls, at bandaged soldiers who lay on straw mats smoking, talking to each other, or sadly staring. The narrow stone staircase spiralling up the inside of the belfry with no handholds made Pug queasy, but up he went, edging along the rough wall, to a wooden platform level with big rusty bells, where wind gusted through four open brick arches. Here he caught his breath, and mounted a shaky wooden ladder.
“Victor!” As he emerged on the topmost brick walk, Pam waved and called to him.
Seen this close, the bulging onion dome was a crude job of tin sheets nailed rustily on a curving frame. Squared around it was a yellow brick walk and parapet, where Pamela crouched in a corner, out of the whistling wind. The artillery spotter, shapeless and faceless in an ankle-length brown coat, mittens, goggles, and fastened- down thick earflaps, manned giant binoculars on a tripod, pointed west. A fat black tomcat beside Pamela crouched over a bowl of soup, lapping, shaking its big head in distaste, and lapping again. Pamela and the spotter were laughing at the cat. “Too much pepper, kitty?” Pamela’s gay flirtatious look showed she clearly was enjoying herself. Below, the bare plain stretched far east and south to distant forests, and west and north to the black wriggling river and sparse woods. Straight downward the town, a clot of life, made thin noise in an empty white flat world.
“
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“
With a grim nod and chuckle the spotter stepped away from the binoculars. Pug’s eyes were watering from the wind; he put them to the eyepieces and the Germans on the riverbank leaped into sight, blurry and small, still at the same work.
“Doesn’t it give you an eerie feeling?” Pam said, stroking the cat. “They’re so calm about it.”
Victor Henry went to a corner of the brick parapet and surveyed the snowy vista through all points of the compass, hands jammed in his blue coat. The spotter, turning the binoculars from south to north, made a slow sweep along the river, talking into a battered telephone on a long black wire that dangled over the parapet.
“Kitty, don’t forget behind the ears.” The cat was washing itself, and Pamela scratched its head.
Pug told her about his trip, meanwhile scanning the horizon round and round as though he were on a flying bridge. An odd movement in the distant snowy forest caught his notice. With his back to the spotter, he peered intently eastward, shielding his eyes with one chapped red hand. “Pass me those.” She handed him small field glasses, in an open case beside the binocular stand. One quick look, and Pug tapped the spotter’s shoulder and pointed. Swinging the large binoculars halfway round on the tripod, the spotter started with surprise, pulled off goggles and cap, and looked again. He had a lot of curly blond hair and freckles, and he was only eighteen or twenty. Snatching up the telephone, he jiggled the hook, talked, jiggled some more, and gestured anger at no answer. Pulling on his cap, he went trampling down the ladder.
“What is it?” Pamela said.
“Take a look.”
Pamela saw through the big eyepieces of the spotter’s instrument a column of machines coming out of the woods.
“Tanks?”
“Some are trucks and armored personnel cars. But yes, it’s a tank unit.” Victor Henry, glasses to his eyes, talked as though he were watching a parade.
“Aren’t they Russians?”
“No.”
“But that’s the direction we came from.”
“Yes.”
They looked each other in the eyes. Her red-cheeked face showed fear, but also a trace of nervous gaiety. “Then aren’t we in a pickle? Shouldn’t we get down out of here and find Amphiteatrov?”
To the naked eye the armored column was like a black worm on the broad white earth, five or six miles away. Pug stared eastward, thinking. The possibilities of this sudden turn were too disagreeable to be put into words. He felt a flash of anger at Tudsbury’s selfish dragging of his daughter into hazard. Of course, nobody had planned on being surprised in the rear by Germans; but there they were! If the worst came to the worst, he felt he could handle himself with German captors, though there might be ugly moments with soldiers before he could talk to an officer. But the Tudsburys were enemies.
“I’ll tell you, Pam,” he said, watching the worm pull clear of the forest and move sluggishly toward the town, leaving a black trail behind, “the colonel knows where we are now. Let’s stick here for a while.”
“All right. How in God’s name did the Germans get around back there?”
“Amphiteatrov said there was trouble to the south. They must have broken across the river and hooked through the woods. It’s not a large unit, it’s a probe.”
The top of the ladder danced and banged under a heavy tread. The blond youngster came up, seized a stadimeter, pointed it at the Germans, and slid a vernier back and forth. Hastily flattening out a small black and white grid map on one knee, he barked numbers into the telephone: “Five point six! One two four! R seven M twelve! That’s right! That’s right!” Animated and cheery now, he grinned at the visitors. “Our batteries are training
