The War That Came Early: Coup d'Etat (44 page)

If La Martellita heard about this bombardment, would she hope a shell killed him? Then she wouldn’t have to go through the paperwork of divorcing him. She could get on with her life as the widow of
a heroic soldier. She could milk it for all it was worth.

After a moment, Chaim shook his head. His ladylove was no hypocrite. If she wanted him dead, she’d come right out and tell him so. She might do him in herself.

No, she just wanted to be rid of him. He hated that. And he hated the certain knowledge that he couldn’t do anything about it even more.

Almost everybody went through life wishing
he could get what he most wanted. From the moment Chaim set eyes on La Martellita, she was what he most wanted. He’d got her, too, even if she was so smashed the first time he did that she hardly knew he was doing it.

And he’d made the all too common discovery that getting exactly what you wanted could hurt even worse than mooning after it forever. As long as you kept on mooning after it, you
always thought it was perfect. Once you got it, you were much too likely to discover what a jerk you were for wanting it to begin with.

Beautiful women were there to be wanted, of course. To men, they often seemed to be there for no other reason. But how many of the men who actually got one stayed happy afterwards? Not many, unless Chaim missed his guess. He knew too well he wasn’t.

What were
you supposed to do? Turn into a queer? Even if you could, wouldn’t you get into the same kind of stew about gorgeous guys? Besides, he wasn’t a queer. He liked women. He liked the beautiful kind better than the homely ones, too. He didn’t know anybody who didn’t. You couldn’t win. You didn’t have a chance.

The Czech with the antitank rifle fired again. Some Fascist shithead probably discovered
he
didn’t have a chance. Whether he laid beautiful women or homely ones, he’d be laid out now.
Hasta la vista, fucker
, Chaim thought.

No barrage followed. Maybe this time the sniper just blew out a corporal’s insides. If ever a movement prided itself on class consciousness, it was Sanjurjo’s, but for all the wrong reasons. Or maybe the Czech missed. Stranger things had happened.
Damn right!
Chaim
thought.
I’ve got me a kid named Carlos Federico!
He swigged from the brandy flask again.

IN RUSSIA
,
the sky seemed wider than it did anywhere else Willi Dernen had ever seen. That might have been because the countryside seemed—
and was—wider, too, but Willi wasn’t so sure about it. He wasn’t sure about anything any more. He’d been here too long and done too much, and victory still looked as far
away as whatever lay under the far end of that vast Russian sky.

He had other reasons for keeping an eye on the clouds drifting across the wide sky, too. Adam Pfaff noticed him doing it as they tramped along a dirt road—once you got out of the cities, Russia had no other kind. “What’s up?” Pfaff asked. “You can’t do anything about the weather.”

“My ass, I can’t,” Willi said. “I can worry about
it, and I damn well do. It’ll start pouring rain pretty soon, and all these shitty roads’ll turn to glue. Then we freeze our nuts off for the next six months. Some fun, huh?”

“Well, sure. What would you rather be doing?” Pfaff said. “Drinking and fucking. What else is there?” Willi sounded honestly surprised.

His friend considered. “Well, there’s …” Pfaff shook his head. He thought some more.
“Or there’s …” Another rejection, this time with a thumbs-down. “Nah.” More thought still. He grinned ruefully. “You’re right. That’s about all there is that’s worth doing. Oh—maybe filling up on mutton stew, too.”

“There you go,” Willi said. “But we get to do this crap instead. Aren’t we lucky?”

“We’re lucky if we come through alive,” answered the man with the gray Mauser.

“Dernen!” Arno Baatz
shouted. “Are you lowering Pfaff’s morale?”

“Not a bit of it, Corporal,” Willi said. “He’s lowering mine.” Beside him on the dusty road, Pfaff giggled softly.

Awful Arno didn’t. “Think you’re funny, don’t you? Well, you listen to me. Just because nobody’s made a charge stick on you yet doesn’t mean nobody will. You mark my words.”

Willi was about to tell Baatz where to put his words—sideways—when
the section point man came trotting back toward the main body of men. Johann Stallinger made a good point: he was short and skinny and anxious. He nodded ahead, in the direction from which he’d just come. “Something’s in those fields,” he said. “The way the grain was moving, it’s not from the wind.”

“Are you on the rag again, Stallinger?” Awful Arno asked.

“If you don’t like the job I do, Corporal,
you can put somebody else up there,” the point man answered. Whatever else he might have thought, his pale, pinched face didn’t show it.

You could watch Baatz working through it. You could, and Willi did. Arno did want to go forward. “If you’re having vapors …” he growled. But he knew Stallinger might not be. Johann was point man for a reason. If the fields were full of Russians, the section
was asking to get bushwhacked. Baatz’s pudgy features cleared as he made up his mind.

“Braun!”

“Yes, Corporal?” Gustav Braun’s face said he wished he were a thousand kilometers away from here.

“You got that big drum on your machine pistol. Let Stallinger take you up to the fields he’s having spasms about, and you shoot the whole thing off. If that doesn’t flush the Ivans, nothing will, on account
of there won’t be any there,” Baatz said.

Willi blinked. The order actually made good sense. He wouldn’t have thought Awful Arno had it in him. Braun carried a Russian PPD-34 submachine gun instead of a Schmeisser. The Russian piece came with a drum that held seventy-one rounds. It took 7.62mm cartridges instead of 9mm, but the Germans had captured plenty. The big magazine made it heavy to cart
around. Every once in a while, though, you needed the extra firepower. This looked to be one of those times.

Even Braun could see as much. “Right, Corporal,” was all he said. If he didn’t sound thrilled … Well, Willi wouldn’t have been thrilled with an order like that, either, no matter how much sense it made.

Stallinger did have a Schmeisser. A point man often found himself in positions where
he needed to spray around a lot of lead in a hurry. He also seemed less than delighted about going back to where he’d sensed trouble, but hey, there was a war on. You did all kinds of things you weren’t delighted about.

The rest of the
Landsers
spread out into a loose skirmish line. Nobody told them to. No one needed to tell them. They knew what was what. Willi knew he had a round in the chamber.
He knew it, but he made sure anyway. He noted the best place to dive for cover, and also the next best place.

Stallinger and Braun went forward. If the Russians had a machine gun in amongst the barley … If they had a machine gun in there, hell was out to lunch, because they could mow down the rest of the section, too.

Braun knew his business. He didn’t just squeeze off one long burst as he fired.
The muzzle would have pulled up and to the right, and he would have shot over what he was trying to flush out. He fired two, three, four rounds at a time. Willi didn’t know exactly when he hit something. The Ivans might have been disciplined enough to keep quiet when they got shot. But one fellow couldn’t help making the grain around him sway in unmistakable fashion as he toppled over. Tiny
in the distance, Stallinger waved urgently.

Awful Arno waved back.
Get away!
, that meant, but giving the order was easier than following it. The Russians figured out that they weren’t going to be able to take the whole section unawares. They grabbed what they could get, and opened up on Stallinger and Braun. Both men went down. Maybe they weren’t dead, but Willi didn’t like the odds.

He was
already trotting forward before Awful Arno told him to. So were the rest of the
Landsers
. You didn’t let the Russians take your buddies alive, not if you could help it. You didn’t even want them grabbing German corpses. They mutilated them for the fun of it, and to intimidate live Germans who came upon their handiwork.

Bullets reached out toward the advancing men in
Feldgrau
. One cracked past
Willi, viciously close. He had to make himself keep moving by main force of will. His body, animal thing that it was, wanted to throw itself flat, or else to run. The barley still concealed the Ivans.

But not perfectly, not as he got closer to them. He spotted khaki through green going gold. When he raised his Mauser to his shoulder, the Russian showed plainly through the telescopic sight. He
fired. He got a split-second glimpse of most of the man’s face contorted with pain. Then he worked the bolt, lowered the rifle, and trotted on. That enemy soldier wasn’t likely to trouble them any more.

Ambush spoiled, the rest of the Red Army men slipped off to the east. Their rear guard kept firing to make sure the Germans didn’t chase them too enthusiastically. If they wanted to retreat, Willi
was ready to let them. Awful Arno kept yelling for the section to push harder.

Then he yelled again, wordlessly this time. He held his rifle in his right fist. His left arm hung uselessly, blood darkening the field-gray sleeve. “I’m hit!” he said. Disbelief filled his voice. And why not? He’d stayed lucky for going on three years—he must have thought nothing could bite him. Well, that showed
how much he knew.

The
Landser
next to him slapped a wound bandage on his arm. “Go back, Corporal,” the fellow said. “The aid men will patch you up. Can you manage on your own, or shall we send somebody with you?”

“Send somebody.” Willi wasn’t sure he was the senior
Obergefreiter
, but he spoke up anyway. “He can’t handle his weapon one-handed. If we’ve bypassed any Ivans, they’ll do for him if
he’s by himself.”

They took his orders. Baatz and a protector headed for the rear. Willi didn’t know what he’d do without Awful Arno to goad him on. He looked forward to finding out, though.

When the Germans got up to the point man and his comrade, they found Braun dead but Stallinger still very much alive, though down with a leg wound. More men hauled him off to the rear. They buried Braun
in a shallow grave and set his helmet on it. They might have marked the grave with a bayoneted Mauser, too. The PPD-34 was too valuable. Another
Landser
grabbed it and brought it along.

Chapter 19

T
he farther south and east into the Ukraine the Germans and Romanians drove the Red Army, the more familiar things became for Ivan Kuchkov. More of the people spoke Russian, for instance. It was Ukrainian-accented Russian, with guttural h’s replacing proper g’s, but he could more or less make sense of it.
Real Ukrainian hovered right at the edge of comprehensibility for him, which pissed him off.

People farther south and east here didn’t seem so ready to prick up their ears and whinny at the sound of a crappy German oompah band, either. They remembered they were Soviet citizens. Maybe the NKVD had left them too scared to forget. Kuchkov wasn’t inclined to be picky. As long as they didn’t give
the Hitlerite swine a helping hand, he didn’t care why.

He wished more T-34s would come into the fight. “The Fritzes shit their drawers every time they see one of those fuckers,” he said as his section cooked this and that around a fire built from the planks of a blown-up barn. “The pussies’d all run for home if we had enough.”

His men nodded. For one thing, he was obviously right. For another,
arguing with him was a losing proposition. He backed up his words
with fists, knees, teeth, a knife he carried in his boot, and anything else that might come in handy. Even the
politruk
had quit agitating that he should join the Party. In the middle of a war, a political officer could meet an untimely end just like anybody else. And chances were the authorities would be too busy with bigger stuff
to ask a whole lot of questions.

Off to the north, a Soviet machine gun fired a couple of short bursts. No German machine gun answered, so maybe the guy at the trigger was shooting at shadows. Or maybe he’d scragged a Nazi. Kuchkov hoped so.

All of his men had cocked their heads in the direction of the gunfire. When it petered out, they nodded or smiled and went back to whatever they’d been
doing. So did he. That wasn’t trouble. It wasn’t trouble for his section, anyhow, which was the only kind of trouble he worried about. The smart fuckers with the fancy rank badges on their uniforms cared about how the whole front was going. This tiny piece of it was plenty for him.

One of the soldiers turned coarse tobacco from a pouch and a strip of old newspaper into a cigarette. He lit it
with the tip of a burning twig. After blowing out a long, gray smoke stream, he said, “Maybe we’ll get to stay here awhile.”

“Watch your dumb cunt of a mouth, Vanya,” Kuchkov said without heat.

“Huh?” Vanya wasn’t the brightest star in the sky. But even he got it after a couple of seconds. “Oh. Sorry, Comrade Sergeant.”

“
Sorry
’s all right for me. There’s plenty of pricks who’d stick
sorry
right
up your sorry ass, though,” Kuchkov growled, more to make the soldier remember than because he was really angry. Officers went on and on about squashing defeatism wherever it stuck up its ugly head. The NKVD squashed people it imagined to be defeatists, usually for good. If somebody here ratted on poor, slow Vanya … Kuchkov didn’t know there was an informer in his section, but he would have been
surprised if there weren’t. Unlike the poor jerk with the roll-your-own, he understood instinctively how the system worked.