Two Fronts (57 page)

Back behind the lines were gun pits by the dozen, by the score, by the hundred. Seeing so many down there gave Hans-Ulrich pause. The Western democracies might not be thrilled about the war, but they weren’t giving up on it, either. They were just fighting it on the cheap, with shells rather than with soldiers.

They had more flak guns protecting the artillery. Unlike the ones up by the trenches, these were in earnest. Puffs of fire and smoke shaped like armless men sprang into being not far from the Stukas. Hans-Ulrich’s plane bucked in the air after a near miss.

“I see the target,” Colonel Steinbrenner said into Rudel’s earphones. The squadron CO tipped his plane into a dive. “Follow me down.”

One after another, the Stukas did. As Hans-Ulrich started his dive, Sergeant Dieselhorst reported, “Our fighters are mixing it up with the Indians.”

“Let’s hope they can hold them off till we drop our bombs,” Rudel answered. He didn’t know what else he could say. They would certainly be faster and more maneuverable once they’d shed a tonne of explosives and sheet metal. Not fast. Not maneuverable. Not enough to escape enemy fighters. But more of each.

Down below, the heavy English guns swelled from little plasticine toys to scale models to the real things in seconds. The real things, damn them, had still more flak guns interspersed among them. The Stuka right in front of Rudel’s took a direct hit and fell out of the sky. The pilot and the man in the rear seat never had a prayer.

Rudel yanked on the bomb-release lever. The big bomb under the Ju-87’s midline fell free. He pulled the stick back, hard, fighting to bring up the nose. Everything went black for a split second as the blood drained from his head. Then Sergeant Dieselhorst’s exultant shout brought him back to himself: “You knocked that baby ass over teakettle!”

“Good,” Hans-Ulrich said. “Now we have to get out of here in one piece.” He gunned the Stuka for all it was worth—which, unfortunately, wasn’t much. If a Hurricane or a Spitfire broke through the fighter screen higher up and dove on him, he’d go down like the luckless fellows in the Ju-87 right below his.

What made one man die while another lived? It was and wasn’t an odd question to wonder about while racing along just above the treetops. His father wouldn’t have wondered. The stern minister would have said it was God’s will, and that would have settled that—for him, anyhow.

Well, of course it’s God’s will. Everything is God’s will
, Hans-Ulrich thought. But that only shifted the question. Why was God so arbitrary?

Why did He decide one fellow’s time was up and let another, worse, chap live to a ripe old age and father eight children? Where was the justice in that?

Because He was God, and He could. It was an answer of sorts, but not one that brought Hans-Ulrich any comfort.

What brought him comfort was
not
seeing any RAF fighters boring in on his lumbering plane,
not
hearing Dieselhorst’s machine gun go off in what would probably be a futile gesture of defiance as an enemy swooped down on them. Yes, it was amazing how comforting negative information could be.

“C’mon, you whore. Let’s clean your cunt.” Ivan Kuchkov shoved the pull-through into the barrel of his PPD submachine gun. Sasha Davidov was tending to his PPD, too. He raised a dark eyebrow. “You know, Comrade Sergeant, anybody listening to you would think you were talking about something else.”

“Fuck your mother,
Zhid
! Like I give a shit,” Kuchkov told the skinny little point man. His voice held no particular malice. That was just the way he talked, to his weapon and to the people around him. He listened to the phonograph record in his mind of what he had said a moment before and started to laugh. “All right, fuck me, too. That is pretty cocksucking funny.”

Along with the men in his section, he crouched in a clearing in some bushes near a stream. Artillery muttered in the distance. There were Germans within a couple of kilometers, but not far within that distance. Ukrainian nationalist bandits were liable to be prowling around, too. They might be closer than the Fritzes; they were commonly better at sneaking up on things.

They were also dumber than the Fritzes. Couldn’t they see that, regardless of whether Hitler or Stalin won the war, they were going to get it in the neck? Did it really matter to them whether they got it from the
Gestapo
or the NKVD?

For now, without orders to move against the Hitlerites, Kuchkov didn’t intend to do one single goddamn thing but sit here and play with his dick. He fought when he had to. He didn’t mind killing Germans, not even a little bit. But they could kill him, too. Why give them unnecessary chances?

Somebody off in the distance made a noise. Bushes were good for all kinds of things. They kept people on the other side from seeing you, and they warned you when trouble was on the way. Kuchkov quickly reassembled his PPD and slammed the big snail drum of a magazine into place under the weapon. If that noise meant trouble, he could throw a lot of rounds at it before he had to worry about reloading.

His men were all grabbing for their weapons and making sure they had a round chambered. Everybody here had been through several fights—no blushing virgins at this dance.

One of the sentries Ivan had posted around the encampment called out a challenge. Ivan heard some kind of answer, but couldn’t make out what it was. He didn’t have long to think about it, because a split second later a rifle shot rang out.

“C’mon!” Ivan said to Sasha Davidov. As quietly as they could, they scrambled through the bushes toward the gunshot. Kuchkov picked the Jew because his quiet was likely to be quieter than anybody else’s.

And so it proved. Sasha and the sentry coming back to the encampment nearly ran into each other. “
Bozhemoi
, Vitya!” Davidov barked. “I almost scragged you there.”

“I halfway wish you did.” Vitya Ryakhovsky’s face was white as new-fallen snow, his eyes wide and filled with horror. “At least it’d be over quick then. I just shot the
politruk
.”

“Fuck me in the mouth!” Ivan said. He had to bite down hard to keep from adding
You stinking bitch! I wish I’d done that!
However much he wished it, it wasn’t one of the things you came out with, not unless you wanted to hand your buddies your balls forever. Instead, he stuck to business: “What the piss happened?”

“I was there, where I was supposed to be,” Vitya answered. “I’d dug a good foxhole, and stuck branches and stuff in the dirt to hide it. I heard a noise—somebody pushing through the bushes.”

“We all heard it,” Sasha broke in. “I wouldn’t be surprised if they heard it back in Kiev.”

“Uh-huh.” Still pale as death, the sentry went on, “So I challenged. But this guy told me to tie my cock in a knot. That’s not the word, so I fired. I figured he was a Ukrainian bandit or something. And I hit him. Only—”

“It was the political officer,” Ivan finished for him. That stupid, arrogant answer sounded like a
politruk
, all right.

Vitya nodded shakily. “It was. Christ have mercy, I didn’t know!”

“Is he dead?” Sasha Davidov asked.

“He’s dead, all right—dead as
makhorka
.” Ryakhovsky nodded again, grimly this time. “I got him right in the bull’s-eye, just above his nose.”

“Let’s make fucking sure,” Kuchkov said. “Take us to him.” Wounding a
politruk
might be even worse than killing one, if such a thing were possible. A wounded political officer would testify against you, and of course they’d listen to him first and to you not at all. That was how things worked.

But the soldiers wouldn’t have to worry about that here. Maxim Zabelin lay crumpled on his side, his own machine pistol next to him. He still looked pissed off; his features hadn’t relaxed into blankness yet. The hole above his nose was small and neat. Going out, the round from the Mosin-Nagant had blown off most of the back of his head.

“What are we going to do?” Sasha Davidov whispered.

Kuchkov had been worrying at that himself. Reluctantly, he said, “Vitya, we’ve got to take it to the lieutenant. All the bastards at the camp heard your dick shoot off, y’know? We can’t fucking cover it over in hay. Some cocksucker’ll get toasted and blab, and then you’ll catch it ten times as bad.”

“Couldn’t I just run off?” Ryakhovsky asked miserably. He didn’t like the odds, and Ivan didn’t blame him.

But Sasha said, “No, you can’t do that, Vitya. Not this time. They’d think you murdered Lieutenant Zabelin on purpose and then did a bunk. If they grabbed you after that …” He didn’t go on, or need to. Vitya could paint those gruesome pictures inside his own head.

“Listen to him. He’s a goddamn smart sheeny,” Ivan said. “You better come. You got a chance, I think. The lieutenant, he’s a halfway decent prick.”
For an officer
, he thought, but he didn’t say that. Vitya had plenty to worry about without it.

The luckless (or lucky, depending on how you looked at things) sentry came along almost apathetically, as if he knew he couldn’t do anything about whatever was going to happen to him. No, not
as if
. He couldn’t, and that was the long and short of it.

Lieutenant Obolensky and the men with him had camped several hundred meters east of the stream in a ruined farmhouse whose surviving walls would shield his fire from the Germans’ eyes. “What’s up, Sergeant?” he asked when Kuchkov and Ryakhovsky and Davidov came back to him.

“Comrade Lieutenant, we’ve got us one cunt of a problem,” Kuchkov answered. He elbowed Vitya in the ribs. “Tell the lieutenant what the fuck happened.”

Stammering, Vitya did. “I wouldn’t’ve fired if he’d given me the word. Honest to God, Comrade Lieutenant, sir, I wouldn’t’ve!” he wailed at the end.

Lieutenant Obolensky didn’t say anything at all for more than a minute. By his face, he was thinking hard, though. “I believe you,” he replied at last. “But I’m not sure how much good that does you. I’m going to have to report this, too. I’m sorry, but I am.
My
dick gets cut off if don’t.”

“Yes, sir,” Ryakhovsky said in doom-filled tones.

“Don’t give up yet,” the company commander told him. “Zabelin may have been a
politruk
, but he was a jerk, too. The higher-ups in the regiment know it. He’d be plenty dumb enough to try something like that, and of course he paid for it.”

“The higher-ups in the regiment may know it.” Vitya didn’t sound any happier. He had his reasons, too: “But do the Party higher-ups?”

They might not. Ivan knew it, and so did Vitya. Party higher-ups had too good a chance to be jerks themselves. That often seemed part of how you got ahead in the Party.

Lieutenant Obolensky couldn’t say any such thing, of course. He did say, “I’ll do what I can for you. Fuck your mother if I don’t.” With that, Ryakhovsky—and Ivan—had to content themselves. Fighting the Germans was straightforward enough. When you had to deal with your own side, though …

HERMANN WITT BEAMED
at the new panzer. “Isn’t that the prettiest thing you ever saw?” he said. “The prettiest thing without a pussy, anyhow?”

“Sorry, Sergeant.” Adi Stoss shook his head. “A Tiger is the prettiest thing I ever saw that didn’t have a pussy. But this is next best.”

Theo Hossbach found himself nodding. That didn’t count against his daily word ration. A Panzer IV with a long-barreled 75 couldn’t match a Tiger, no. But it pretty much could match a T-34. After the Panzer III with its doorknocker of a gun, that was definitely within shouting distance of heaven on earth.

Lothar Eckhardt, who’d had to try to keep the whole crew alive firing that doorknocker, nodded along with him. “It’ll be nice not to see our shells’ drive bands sticking out of a Russian panzer’s armor for a change.”

“We’re going to have to practice like mad bastards on the sights and fire-control system, though,” Witt said. “They’re a lot fancier than what we’ve been using. They’ve got to be, ’cause we can hit from so much farther away.”

“We’ll do what we need to do,” the gunner told the commander. “We don’t want to get any closer to T-34s than we have to, even in this baby. If we can hit them when they’re likely to miss us, that’s how I like it.”

“You guys back in the turret have all the hard studying to do,” Adi said, a certain gloating note in his voice. “My controls and my instruments are almost the same as the ones in the old III, and Theo’s got the same radio set and the same machine gun as he did before.”

“My coaxial machine gun hasn’t changed any.” But Eckhardt couldn’t help adding, “The cannon sure has, though.”

Theo thought Adi shouldn’t have bragged that way. The same notion must have crossed Sergeant Witt’s mind, because he said, “The suspension and the engine aren’t the same. You guys can take the lead on dealing with the differences.”

“Thanks a bunch,” Adi said. Theo sent him a look that meant something like
I’ll get you later
. Anything that had to do with the suspension—working a thrown track back onto the drive sprocket, for instance—involved backbreaking heavy labor.

“You’re welcome. My pleasure,” Witt said. His grin meant it would indeed be his pleasure to watch somebody else busting his hump over heavy labor like that. But the smile also promised he would get in there and help when the labor did get heavy. He was a good commander, and good panzer commanders did things like that.