Bombs Away (43 page)

“Not a word,” she said. “Not a single, solitary word. Why would you care about a crazy thing like that, anyhow?” She suddenly pointed a forefinger at him. It wasn't quite Balzac's
J'accuse!,
but it came close. “You're getting auto parts out of Norwich!”

“Hush!” He held his own forefinger up to his lips. “I've done no such illegal thing—not so they can prove it, any road. But I have me some friends who have some friends who can lay their hands on this, that, or the other thing—the kind of stuff what's hard to come by these days. I ask 'em no questions, and they tell me no lies.”

Daisy wondered how outraged she should be, and whether she should be outraged at all. Of course scavengers would sneak into Norwich, never mind the Army and Scotland Yard. Autos at the edge of the blast area were more likely to have survived, or at least to be salvageable, than their owners were. You couldn't put a dead man's kidney or spleen on the market. A dead Bentley's pistons or mudguards were a different story.

“You might get yourself one of those Geiger counters,” Daisy said. “If a part makes it click too much, don't buy it or don't use it.”

“There's a good notion!” He looked at her admiringly. “I don't much fancy putting some gears in the gear train and poisoning my customers with 'em. There's the sort of thing that gives your business a bad name.”

“Poisoning yourself whilst you're working on the repairs, too,” Daisy said.

Wilf blinked. “Hadn't thought of that. Should have, shouldn't I?”

“I daresay!” she answered.
Am I killing myself on the job here?
would have been the first thing she worried about. She hoped it would, at any rate. She lit a cigarette.

The mechanic pushed more silver at her. “Have a half on me,” he said. “You might just have saved my bacon there.”

Daisy didn't care for beer so early in the day. But Wilf meant it kindly; she knew that. She filled one of the smaller mugs at the tap. Savoring the bitter, she said, “This
is
a nice barrel, isn't it?”

“You're the publican, sweetheart, so what else are you going to say?” Wilf returned. She made a face at him. He drank again. “I'm not pouring it down the sink myself, you see.”

“You'd better not,” Daisy said, and then, “Would you like another?”

He shook his head. “I'd like one fine, but I've got work back at the garage. I have a pint, it means naught. I have two pints, I'm liable to be clumsy and stupid and make a hash of what should be simple.”

“Do what you need to do,” Daisy said. That was her own motto; she could hardly resent it when someone else felt the same way.

Bruce McNulty came into the pub that evening. It was a noisier, busier, livelier place that it had been earlier in the day. Even so, Daisy asked him about how long metal parts stayed radioactive.

“That's a funny question,” the American flyer said.

“A friend wondered,” she told him.

“A friend?” he echoed, a certain edge to his voice.

“From in town,” Daisy said, nodding. Then she realized the edge had to be jealousy. She felt like clomping the Yank over the head with a pint mug. Taking a deep breath instead, she went on, “For one thing, Mr. McNulty, Wilf was born before the turn of the century and came back from the First World War with a hook doing duty for one hand. And for another thing,
Mr.
McNulty, even if he were our age and handsome as a film star, that would be none of your bloody business.” One more deep breath. “Am I plain enough, or shall I draw you pictures?”

He turned sunset red. She'd hit him too hard. Naturally, she saw that only after she'd gone and done it. “You're pretty plain, all right,” he mumbled.

“Good,” she said. Maybe briskness would help. “Do you know the answer to my friend's question, then? He wants to be able to use auto parts from, ah, around Norwich, but he doesn't want to hurt himself or any of the people whose cars they go into.”

“Black-market parts. Stuff the buzzards bring home in their claws,” McNulty said. To Daisy, a buzzard was a hawk; to the Yank, it seemed to mean vulture. She nodded again anyhow. That was what Wilf was dealing in, sure enough. Bruce McNulty shrugged and spread his hands. “Afraid I can't tell you—or even your
friend
.” His mouth quirked. “I just deliver the junk. I don't know what all it does after it goes kablooie. How radioactive stuff gets, how long it stays that way”—he shrugged once more—“it's not my department.”

“Fair enough. Thanks.” After a beat, Daisy added, “I'm sorry I barked at you.”

“Uh-
huh.
Listen, let me have one for the road, will you?” McNulty set a couple of shillings on the bar. He waved away change and drained the pint at one long pull. Then he said, “See you around, kiddo. It was…interesting, anyway.” He tipped his cap and walked out into the night.

Only after he was gone did she understand that he wasn't coming back. Wherever he did his drinking from now on, it wouldn't be at the Owl and Unicorn.
Well, damn,
she thought as she drew another American a pint. She hadn't meant to offend him. She'd just tried to get an answer for Wilf. Things spiraled out of control from there. He'd had no cause to get jealous. None. But why was she so sorry he was gone?

SOMEWHERE OUT THERE,
Russian tanks were prowling. Gustav Hozzel listened to the filling-shaking rumble of their big diesels. He could hear them, but he couldn't see them.

He was as ready for them as he could be when he did see them. Half a dozen Molotov cocktails stood on the floor of the second-story Dortmund flat, under the shattered window. Gasoline and motor oil and some soap flakes, all stirred together, filled the bottles. Each one had a wick. And Gustav had a Zippo. He'd got it from an Ami for some extra grenades. He admired tools that worked all the time. The American lighter qualified.

He sneaked a look out the window. Still no T-54s in sight. The brick façade of the block of flats across the street had fallen down onto the sidewalk and into the street. He could see into all the apartments over there. That would have been more interesting if fire hadn't gutted the building.

One or two 100mm rounds of HE would bring down the façade on this place, too. They might also bring down the rest of the building, and all the defenders in it. Just the same, he didn't think the Ivans were enjoying themselves in Dortmund, or anywhere else in the Ruhr. Street fighting inside cities melted armies like fat in a hot frying pan. Hitler'd discovered that the hard way in Stalingrad. Now it was Stalin's turn.

A heavy machine gun barked. It was a Russian gun, not an American M-2. Some T-54s mounted them on the turret as antiaircraft weapons. And just because they were billed like that didn't mean they weren't useful all kinds of other ways. The Soviet machine gun powered its mechanism by gas; the American, by the force of recoil. A soldier hit by a 12.7mm slug from either was unlikely to care about the difference—or anything else, ever again.

Gustav glanced out once more, just in time to watch a Red Army soldier duck into a doorway. Another Russian stuck his head up from behind a jeep that some explosion had flipped onto its back. He ducked down as Gustav was ducking back. Gustav didn't think he'd been spotted.

“They're coming!” he called. His fellow emergency militiamen swore. Whenever you thought you could relax for a little while, the damned Ivans started trying to kill you again.

Another quick look showed more Russians sliding forward. Gustav was sure men he couldn't see were moving up with them. Russians disappeared into the woodwork like cockroaches if you gave them half a chance—even a quarter of a chance.

That diesel growl got louder and came closer, too. He nodded to himself. In the open, tanks trampled and smashed through enemy fieldworks so the foot soldiers could follow. But this wasn't the open. Dortmund stood at the eastern edge of one of the most heavily built-up areas in the world. The rules changed when you fought in terrain like this.

Tanks clattering down the streets of Dortmund without infantry guards wouldn't last five minutes. Somebody would shoot a bazooka round into the thin side armor or throw a grenade through an open hatch. Those Red Army foot sloggers were here to clear away the nasty somebodies so the armor could advance.

This particular tank took out the corner of a building when it turned on to the street where Gustav waited. The rest of the building fell down, not that the crew cared. The tank wasn't a T-54 medium. It was a heavy, an IS-3 (the IS stood for Iosef Stalin). It was, in a word, a monster.

It had much thicker armor than a T-54, sloped even more radically. The damned thing carried a 122mm gun, a piece of artillery that wouldn't have been out of place on a destroyer. No wonder even Tiger crews had treated Stalin tanks with respect in the last war. Stalins weren't fast enough to keep up with T-54s in open country, but all that armor gave them extra protection in city fighting like this.

The commander stood up, head and shoulders out of the open cupola hatch. He wanted to be able to see what was going on. He was a good tank commander, a brave man. Gustav could have potted him with his submachine gun, but held his fire. He was after bigger game.

A Russian foot soldier craned his neck up at the block of flats across the street, the one with the missing front wall. He turned to look at the building Gustav was holed up in. If he and his buddies decided to search this one, the Germans on the ground floor would open up on them. Gustav's chance would vanish.

If any of the men in here opened up on the Russians now…But these guys weren't rookies. They'd all learned their business the last time around. They had fire discipline. They knew how to wait.

Here came the Stalin, right past the block of flats at a slow walk. Gustav picked up one of his wicked bottles. He flicked the Zippo. First time, every time. He lit the wick and chucked the Molotov cocktail out through the glassless window.

The hatch on top of the cupola wasn't very wide. He needed to throw well enough to make a basketball player proud. The shot wasn't easy, but, because he was so close, it was a long way from impossible. If he missed, he'd spill fire down the outside of the turret, and the Stalin would probably keep working. It would also probably hose down the second floor here with machine-gun bullets. Better not to miss, then.

And Gustav didn't. The tank commander must have seen the bottle in the air. He ducked. Half a second later, he would have slammed the lid shut. In that half second, the Molotov cocktail followed him down the hatch and broke.

Smoke started pouring out of the turret. Tanks carried fire extinguishers inside, but would a startled crew have the presence of mind to grab one and use it? Even if it got used, would it kill the fire? Not just the gasoline-oil-and-soap mixture in the wine bottle would be burning in there. All kinds of things inside the fighting compartment could catch: paint, insulation, lubricating grease. Pretty soon, the ammunition in there would start cooking off.

But the Russian tank crew didn't wait around for that. As soon as they saw the extinguisher wouldn't stop the blaze, they bailed out. Two of them had their coveralls on fire. Gustav squeezed off a couple of short bursts at them as they rolled in the street trying to smother the flames.

He hit one man—he thought it was the tank commander. The other Ivan scrambled into shelter behind the Stalin. More and more smoke belched from the stricken tank. Machine-gun ammo went off with cheerful popping noises. Pretty soon, the massive shells the main armament flung would go off, too. All that steel, though, would keep the explosions on the inside from hurting the tankmen on the outside.

Foot soldiers started shooting into the room from which Gustav had done his dirty work. The only trouble with that was, he wasn't in there any more. He knew they'd pock the back wall with as many bullet holes as they could. In their boots, he would have done the same thing. What else would you do, with a rifle or a PPD in your hand?

Some of the other Germans in the block of flats started shooting at the Russian infantry. The Russians gave back the fire. That didn't worry Gustav, except in the limited sense that he always worried some about getting wounded or killed. The important thing was, the Red Army wouldn't be bringing any more tanks up this street.

Wham!
The block of flats jerked as if some giant had kicked an upper story.
Wham!
It shuddered again, convulsively. Those were two HE rounds from a 122mm gun. The Stalin had had a friend trailing it, and the friend was cranky. One more might bring the place down.

Wham!
That one almost brought Gustav down. The other heavy tank had lowered its cannon. Another way to flatten a building was to knock out the props so the top fell in.

Coughing, deafened, ghost-white with plaster dust, Gustav didn't wait around for another love tap. He got the hell out of there. He could fight the war from the next building over. If the Russians wanted this one so much, they were welcome to it, as far as he was concerned.

In the last war, he might have won the Knight's Cross for killing a heavy tank with a Molotov cocktail. Here, he got to stay alive. That was a better decoration, in case anybody wanted to know what he thought.

“What's the trouble up there, Comrade Sergeant?” Pavel Gryzlov asked. “How come we aren't going forward any more?”

“I'll have a look, Pasha,” Konstantin Morozov said. He flipped the cupola hatch open and stuck his head up to see what was going on. He knew he needed to keep doing that. He also knew Dortmund was full of snipers. In the last war, Nazi snipers had loved blowing tank commanders' heads off. So had Soviet snipers. Things wouldn't have changed since.

He ducked back down. “Something's burning, dammit,” he said. “I don't know for sure it's a killed tank, but it's that kind of smoke. And a killed tank in a place like this means a traffic jam.”

“I don't like standing still in the middle of a place like this,” the gunner said. “Too many bad things can happen.”

“I know,” Konstantin said. “But unless I crawl up the back of the next tank ahead and start humping it, what am I supposed to do?”

A bullet clanked against the tank's side armor. The people who'd fired it could do that from now till doomsday without hurting anything. But, where there were riflemen, there were liable to be pricks with bazookas. And a bazooka wouldn't clang off the armor. The shaped charge in the rocket's nose would burn through.

With a sigh, Morozov took his PPD off the brackets where it hung and opened the cupola hatch again. He glanced to the left, the direction from which the shot had come. All he saw were ruins. Like the other German cities he'd come through, Dortmund seemed far richer than a Soviet town of the same size. The shops looked fancier. They'd been looted, but even what was left was of higher quality than anything you could get back home. All the cars Morozov saw were abandoned hulks, but there were many more to see than there would have been on a Soviet street.

Dortmund had been heavily bombed during the last war. The Red Army and the imperialists were still banging heads for it now. Not all the old damage was repaired. It had new damage to go with it. The buildings still put to shame the cheap concrete blocks of flats that sprouted like toadstools near the statue of Lenin in any Soviet town's main square.

A foot soldier in Red Army khaki came out of one of those battered buildings. He carried a Kalashnikov in one hand and a bottle in the other. By the way he wobbled as he walked, he'd put a serious dent in the contents of the bottle. A silly smile on his face, he nodded to Morozov. “How the fuck are you, Comrade Tank Commander?”

“Well, I'm here,” Morozov answered. “Looks like I'm stuck here, too, till they clear away whatever's on fire up ahead.”

“That's a shame!” The infantryman was drunk enough so it seemed tragic to him. He looked down at the half-empty bottle in surprise, as if just remembering he had it. He probably was. “You want what's left of this? Can't hurt, not as long as you're stuck anyway.”

“Sure.
Bolshoye spasibo!
” Morozov said.

The foot soldier stood by the tank. Boris leaned toward him. The guy had to toss the bottle. Gribkov caught it. Now that the foot soldier had a free hand, he waved and staggered away. Morozov guessed he was more interested in a place to sleep it off than in meeting the enemy.

More power to him if he is,
Konstantin thought. He ducked down into the tank gain. “Look what I found,” he said. The liquid in the bottle was amber, not clear. He'd drunk schnapps before. He liked vodka better, but schnapps would cure whatever ailed you.

“Good job, Comrade Sergeant!” Pavel Gryzlov gauged the bottle with an experienced eye. “Plenty in there for a good knock for all of us.”

“Just what I was thinking.” Konstantin yanked the stopper, tilted his head back, and drank. The schnapps was harsh but strong. Warmth exploded out of his belly. He passed the gunner the bottle. Gryzlov also drank. He gave Mogamed Safarli the schnapps. Safarli was an Azeri, and so certainly a Muslim. He drank as eagerly as any Christian, though. Then he crawled forward to let Yevgeny Ushakov put paid to the bottle.