Germans intimidated Russians in a way the Japanese couldn’t come close to matching. Mouradian felt some of that himself. “They’re very good,” he said. “You can’t get foolish or sloppy against them, or you’ll end up dead before you’ve got any notion why.”
“What do you mean?” Chernenko might have flown combat missions, but he was still a virgin in some important ways.
That thought told Mouradian how to go on. “Remember what it was like the first time you kissed a girl?”
“I sure do!” The enthusiasm heating the younger man’s voice said he hadn’t made the discovery very long ago-maybe the night before he left his parents’ apartment or his collective farm to report to the Soviet military.
Was I ever that young? Stas wondered. In some important ways, he doubted it. Southerners took for granted things that shocked most Russians. But that was neither here nor there. Gently, the Armenian said, “Fine. Could anybody have explained what kissing a girl was like before you went and did it?”
Chernenko emphatically shook his head. “I don’t think so!”
“ Khorosho. For what it’s worth to you, I don’t think so, either. Well, fighting the Germans is kind of like that, only you can’t try to take their bra off afterwards. You’ll find out, if that’s what the people with the rank want you to do. Then this will make more sense to you, if you happen to remember it.”
The youngster frowned, with luck in wisdom. His spotty face dead serious, he asked, “Why do German fighter pilots wear brassieres? Does it help them against G forces or something?”
“Oh, Kolya, Kolya, Kolya.” Mouradian gave up. They might both use Russian, but they didn’t speak the same language. One of these days, raw Second Lieutenant Chernenko might turn into First Lieutenant or even Captain Chernenko. He’d grow up. It happened fast when people were shooting at each other. When that day came, he and Mouradian might be able to talk outside the line of duty and make sense to each other. Stranger things had happened. They must have, even if Stas couldn’t think of any right this minute.
Meanwhile, even if Vladivostok had fallen, the war against Japan sputtered on. In Stalin’s place, Mouradian would have patched up a peace with Japan so he could square off against Hitler undistracted. Maybe he was working on that. Maybe Foreign Commissar Litvinov was in Tokyo right now, making a face-saving deal.
But if he was, Radio Moscow wasn’t saying anything about it. Radio Moscow had said as little as it could about losing Vladivostok. All it said was that the garrison commander had yielded the city against orders. If soldiers and civilians were starving, if there was no hope of rescue-and Mouradian knew all too well there wasn’t-what could the general do but give up? That was how it looked to him. Radio Moscow saw things differently. And you didn’t argue with what Radio Moscow said, except perhaps within the privacy of your own mind. Even then, you had to be careful lest your face betray you.
SB-2s flying out of the base near Khabarovsk bombed towns in northern Manchukuo. They flew across the Tartar Strait and bombed Karafuto. That was what the Japanese called the southern half of Sakhalin Island, which they’d taken in the aftermath of the Russo-Japanese War. The bombers also flew patrols over the Tartar Strait and down into the Sea of Japan. Orders on those missions were to attack and sink any warships they spotted.
German Stukas were ugly, ungainly planes. But Mouradian had been on the receiving end of their dives, and knew how accurately they could place their bombs. SB-2s weren’t made for work like that. Stas was willing to try, but a long way from optimistic about the results.
Come to that, he was a long way from optimistic about finding warships, much less hitting them. This was the first time he’d ever seen the ocean, any ocean. It was as illimitably vast as the Russian steppe he’d traveled to get to Siberia. How were you supposed to find anything as small as a ship in all that wave-chopped gray-green sea? Clouds inconsiderately drifting across it didn’t help, either.
Damned if they didn’t, though. Nikolai Chernenko whooped like a savage. “There!” he said, pointing a dramatic forefinger. “A fucking battleship!”
Stas didn’t know if it was a battleship or only a destroyer. He was no connoisseur of warships. But he knew damn well a warship it was. It bristled with guns and turrets, and its hull arrogantly knifed through the water. In these parts, it could only be Japanese.
“We’ll go in low,” he declared. The SB-2 was no Stuka, but maybe it could impersonate one in the cinema.
Chernenko frowned. “We have no orders to do that, Comrade Pilot.”
He was a Russian, all right. And he was a New Soviet Man. Anything without orders was right up there with doubting Marxism-Leninism in the USSR’s catalogue of heresies. But Mouradian answered, “We have no orders not to do it. And it gives us the best chance for a hit.”
He watched his copilot and bomb-aimer chew. If he had to, he vowed to make the attack run himself, his way. But Chernenko’s face cleared. Stas had shown himself to be orthodox, or at least not unorthodox. “I serve the Soviet Union!” Chernenko exclaimed.
Mouradian spoke into the voice tube to the bomb bay so Sergeant Suslov would know what was going on. “Just tell me when,” Suslov said. “I’ll drop ’em right down the whore’s cunt.” He even talked like the Chimp.
Shove the stick forward. Watch the nose drop. Not too steep, or you’d never pull out again. This wasn’t a dive-bomber. When the airframe groaned, you needed to listen to it.
The ship swelled from bathtub toy to full-sized fearsomeness much too fast. Blue-clad Japanese sailors ran every which way like angry ants. Antiaircraft guns started filling the sky around the SB-2 with puffs of black smoke with fire at their heart.
“Five degrees to the left, Comrade Pilot. I say again, five degrees left.” With business to attend to, Chernenko was a competent professional. Mouradian obeyed without question. “Da,” Chernenko said. “That’ll do it.” Stas thought so, too-they’d pass over the ship from bow to stern. A near miss from a shell shook the SB-2. The copilot ignored it, calling through the tube, “Be ready, Innokenty! At my order!”
“Ready, Comrade Bomb-Aimer! Let’s fuck ’em!” Suslov answered.
“Now!” Chernenko shouted.
As soon as the bombs fell free, Mouradian pulled back sharply on the stick, climbing away from the antiaircraft fire. He heard soggy thumps when the bombs went off. When he could see the ship again, smoke rose from the stern. “We did something to it, anyhow,” he said, although it was still steaming.
“We should have done more.” Chernenko sounded absurdly disappointed. “I wanted to sink the son of a bitch.”
“We’ll have more chances.” Mouradian was just glad they’d got away in once piece. He’d never dreamt a ship could throw that many shells. It almost tempted him to go after the next one from several thousand meters up. Almost.
Colonel Otto Griehl looked out at the men of his black-clad regiment. The black-clad panzer crewmen stood waiting. Theo Hossbach absentmindedly scratched an itch. Next to him, Adi Stoss puffed on a cigarette. Nobody seemed very excited. They all-even Theo-had a good idea of what was coming next.
Griehl scratched, too, at a scar on his chin. He was lean, almost hawk-faced, with hollow cheeks and close-cropped gray hair. Like his men, he wore pink-piped black collar patches with a silver Totentkopf in each one. The skull and crossbones had been the panzer emblem for as long as Germany’d had armored fighting vehicles.
“Well, boys, it’s time,” Griehl said. “We came into this fight by dribs and drabs, and then we had to put up with the worst winter even an old man like me can remember.” Theo wasn’t sure the colonel’s face had room for a grin, but it did. It made him look years younger-though still old, of course. It didn’t last long. He sobered as he went on, “But now we’re here in the East in proper force, and now the ground and the weather… aren’t too bad.” That was as much praise as he would dole out to Polish conditions. “And so-it’s time to show the Ivans what we can do.”
A low hum ran through the Panzertruppen. Here and there, men nodded: Adi did, and so did Sergeant Witt. Theo just stood, listening. He was ready, but he wasn’t eager. He knew what could happen when things went wrong. If he was ever tempted to forget, the missing joints on his ring finger reminded him.
“We’re going to drive them out of Poland,” Griehl said matter-of-factly. “Once we take care of that-well, we’ll see. I don’t know what the Fuhrer and the High Command will want us to do then. One thing at a time, though. Let’s talk about our immediate objectives.”
And he did, detailing the routes the regiment would take as it pushed east and north from the vicinity of Bialystok. He talked about artillery and air support, and about the infantry who would move forward with the panzers.
“Most of them are Polish units,” he said. “Remember that, for God’s sake, and don’t shoot them by mistake. They wear a darker, greener khaki than the Russians, and their helmet is almost like the Czech pot-it doesn’t have a brim like the Russian model.”
“Tell us something we didn’t know,” Adi muttered. Theo heard him, and maybe Witt did, too, but nobody else. Theo was patient with these lectures. One reason you walked barefoot through the obvious was that people did forget, especially when other people were trying to kill them.
“Give the Poles a hand where you can,” Griehl said. “They’re good troops. They’re brave troops. The only thing that’s really wrong with them is, they don’t have as many toys as we do. Infantry, machine guns-they’ve got those. But they’re light on artillery and panzers and planes. That’s why they called us in to help against the Reds. So we’ll do it.” He grinned again. “It’s not like the Fuhrer hasn’t got his own reasons for going after Russia. If you’ve read Mein Kampf, you’ll know that.”
He got more nods. Hitler’s book was Holy Writ to the Party. Theo had looked at it, found it bombastic and badly written, and put it aside. But you didn’t have to have gone through page by page to know he talked about Russia as Germany’s Lebensraum. Stalin doubtless had a different view of that, which didn’t bother the Fuhrer.
“We go at 0430 tomorrow,” the colonel finished. “Good luck to every one of you. Believe you me, Ivan will never know what hit him.”
When the big push in the West started a little before Christmas 1938, officers promised men the showgirls and bars of Paris. They didn’t quite deliver; Theo lost the end of that finger in the last failed effort at a breakthrough. Maybe this time everything would work out the way Colonel Griehl said. Theo had his doubts. He didn’t voice them. For one thing, what was the point? For another, he hardly ever voiced anything.
He was in the panzer before the appointed hour. He squeezed meat paste from a tinfoil tube onto a chunk of black bread. Not the kind of breakfast he’d eaten before conscription called, but he didn’t raise his voice to complain, either. And that meat paste was one of the best rations the Germans had. Tommies on patrol stole tubes of it from dead Landsers.
Where he sat, he couldn’t see what was going on. All he could see were his radio set, the machine pistol next to it, and the panzer commander’s behind and legs. He didn’t care. He had his own little world. He heard the order to go forward, and relayed it to Hermann Witt. And, through the Panzer II’s armor and through his earphones, he heard the thunder of the German artillery as it pounded Soviet positions to the east. Stukas would be screaming out of the sky to take out strongpoints too tough for artillery. Theo couldn’t hear them, but he knew how an attack worked.
No. He knew how an attack should work. Things always went wrong. Neither side had really known what it was doing when the Wehrmacht drove into Czechoslovakia. A good thing the Czechs were as thumb-fingered as the Germans, or that one might have failed. On the Western front, they’d tried to go too far too fast. Looking back, he could see that. At the time, it seemed easy-until, all of a sudden, it didn’t any more.
Now… The Panzer II squashed barbed wire under its tracks. Foot soldiers, whether in Feldgrau or dark Polish khaki, would be able to follow. Sergeant Witt sprayed short bursts of machine-gun fire ahead of the panzer. If the Russians had to keep their heads down, the infantrymen with the German armor would have an easier time disposing of them.
Rat-a-tat-tat! Except is wasn’t rat-a-tat-tat!, or not exactly. It was clangety-clangety-clang!, as if somebody were attacking the panzer with a rivet gun. Machine gunners couldn’t resist panzers. They also couldn’t hurt them, if you didn’t count scaring the crew half to death.
“Panzer halt!” Witt shouted. Adalbert Stoss obediently hit the brakes. The panzer commander fired a three-round burst from the 20mm main armament. “All right,” he said. “Drive on!”
Forward they went, with a whine of protest from the overstrained engine. A moving target was harder to hit, and the Panzer II’s armor, especially on the sides, wouldn’t keep out anything more than small-arms fire. Theo knew from experience what happened when something got through. His crewmates didn’t, and he hoped like hell they didn’t find out. He’d got away from his murdered first panzer in one piece. Too many guys weren’t so lucky. If he never smelled that thick reek of burnt pork…
“Enemy panzers ahead-two o’clock!” Witt shouted. Theo’s balls crawled up into his belly, not that that would save them. From what he’d seen, Russian panzer gunners weren’t very good, but they only had to be competent, or even lucky, once to slaughter a crew. But then Witt shouted again, in glad surprise: “Cancel that! They’re ours-Czech machines!”