Last Orders: The War That Came Early (31 page)

Suddenly lighter by upwards of a tonne, the Pe-2 got faster and more nimble. All the same, Stas stayed low and gunned the bomber for every kopek it was worth. The best way to deal with German fighters was not to hang around anywhere close to them.

But then the machine gun in the dorsal turret chattered. “Eat shit, you whore!” Mechnikov shouted at the fighter he was trying to drive off.

Bullets slammed into the Pe-2. There was no fire. The engines kept running. When Stas cautiously tried the controls, they worked. No hydraulic lines punctured. No wires cut. That was all luck, of course—nothing else but. The German pilot who’d put the burst into the Pe-2 had to be cursing his. He’d done everything right. He just hadn’t managed to knock the bomber out of the sky.

Stas fired a burst at the FW-190 as it streaked past. He didn’t do it
any harm, either. It zoomed away to go after some of the other planes in the squadron. That suited Mouradian fine. “We scared off the son of a bitch, anyhow,” he said.

“That’s right. Fedya must have taught him respect.” Mogamedov spoke with perhaps less irony than he’d intended.

“If he hadn’t been up there banging away, that burst the Hitlerite hit us with would have been longer. It might have done us a lot of harm.” Stas kept eyeing the gauges. Everything was jammed up hard against the emergency lines. Fair enough. If almost getting shot down didn’t qualify as an emergency, what in blazes would?

Mogamedov kept checking the instrument panel, too. It didn’t seem to satisfy him … or he might have had trouble believing it. “The engines sound good, don’t they?” he said, as if by putting it in the form of a question he didn’t have to sound like someone who believed it.

“Pretty good.” Stas didn’t want to admit any more than he had to. A New Soviet Man ought not to believe in outmoded superstitions like tempting fate. Sometimes, though, the unreconstructed old Armenian peeked out from behind the New Soviet mask he wore.

Behind Mogamedov’s goggles, an equally unreconstructed old Azeri checked to make sure the 190 was really gone. So Stas thought, anyhow. He might have been wrong, but he didn’t think so.

Then bursts of flak, black with angry, fiery cores, began buffeting the Pe-2. In his wild efforts to escape the German fighter, Stas had come too close to the rings of antiaircraft guns girdling Minsk. He swung the plane hard to the south once more, away from the city.

“Where did the rest of the squadron get to?” Mogamedov asked.

“Good question. My guess is, we’re scattered over fifty kilometers of sky,” Stas answered. “As long as we see each other again back at the airstrip, we can worry about the details some other time.” Mogamedov thought that over, then nodded.

Off in the distance, a German stuck up his head to see what the French in front of him were up to. Aristide Demange took a shot at the
Boche
. He didn’t think he hit the
con
. He did make him disappear in a hurry, which was what he’d wanted to do.

He also hopped down off the firing step from which he’d fired. A few seconds later, the Fritzes turned loose a burst from a machine gun. Maybe all those rounds would have missed him. It was nothing he cared to find out by experiment.

A
poilu
coming into the trench from the smashed Belgian village behind it grinned sympathetically. “You were lucky, Lieutenant, getting down when you did,” the fellow said, his southern accent nasal and grating in Demange’s ears.

“Lucky, my left one,” Demange said, focusing his usual scorn for all humanity on one human in particular. “Listen, Marcel, I don’t care how stupid you are. Even a Provençal clodhopper like you should be able to see that, when you try and kill somebody, he’s gonna try to kill you, too. So maybe you shouldn’t give him the chance, eh?”

Marcel pondered that. Demange could see, or imagined he could see, the gears going round in the soldier’s head—going round … very … very … slowly.
“D’accord,”
Marcel said at last.

Demange suppressed the urge to clap a hand to his forehead in theatrical despair. The only thing that could have made Marcel act any dumber than he did now would have been for him to chew gum like a cow or an American. The worst of it was, Demange couldn’t ride him as hard as he would have liked. When it came to smarts, Marcel wasn’t the highest card in the deck, no. But he was easygoing and he fought all right. You didn’t expect or even want brains in all the privates.

The ruined village in back of them was the one that had been in front of them a few weeks before. They didn’t need to measure their advance in centimeters per day, but they didn’t need to measure it in kilometers per day, either. At this rate, they’d cross the Low Countries and push on into Germany about when Demange died of old age.

Of course, if he stayed at the front, old age was the least of his worries. He didn’t take idiotic chances, the way fools fresh from basic training and hotheads did. He remembered that the sons of bitches on the other side carried rifles and other tools of mayhem. The less they got to use them on him, the better he liked it.

Some chances, though, you couldn’t help. If some fat general’s secretary told him she wouldn’t suck him off one morning, he was liable to order his brigade to attack the Germans out of sheer spite. That
kind of shit never got into the history books. It happened all the time, though.

He stuck up his head to see if some frustrated German general whose secretary wouldn’t put out was going to get a regiment’s worth of the
Führer
’s finest slaughtered on account of pique. The Fritzes seemed quiet. Demange hadn’t come up in the place he’d fired from. He also didn’t stay up longer than a second or two. Yes, he knew the ropes.

Nobody was supposed to go between the lines. They called the battered ground out there no-man’s-land for a reason. But a Belgian farmer in a worn felt hat, baggy corduroy trousers, and stout Wellingtons ambled along as if he had not a care in the world. Little smoke signals rose from the pipe clenched between his teeth.

Demange had seen such types before, in the last war and in this one. They came out of their holes whenever things quieted down. Sometimes they were harmless. They’d arrange to trade your tobacco for the other fellow’s schnapps, or to take a letter from a granny on one side of the wire to her granddaughter on the other.

Sometimes they were anything but harmless. They’d spy for one side or the other or sometimes for both. While they were going through the motions of trading, they’d scout out the other side’s positions and report back to whoever was paying them. Or the sweet letter from grandmother to little girl would be chock-full of coded messages. You never could tell.

And Demange distrusted Belgians on general principles. Half the Flemings wished they were Germans. The Walloons—even the ones who weren’t Rexist bastards—spoke French with a funny accent, even worse than what a Provençal like Marcel used.

“Hey, you!” Demange yelled at this Belgian. The man slowly looked back toward him, as if uncertain he was being addressed. Demange had seen it done better. Hell, he’d done it better himself. “Yeah, you, shit-for-brains! Get your ugly ass back here so I can talk with you!”

The farmer did his best to pretend he was deaf. His best didn’t impress Demange. Up came the rifle. He wasn’t particularly trying to hit the Belgian, but he wasn’t particularly trying to miss, either.

If a rifle bullet cracking past a meter or two in front of your snoot
didn’t draw your attention, chances were you’d already bought a plot. The Belgian decided he might do better to come back to the French lines after all. A good thing for him, too. Demange would have aimed the next round with care.

A lot of people would have had trouble getting through the drifts of barbed wire in front of the French lines. The farmer knew the secret ways at least as well as Demange did.
Have to change our routes
, Demange thought irritably.

Down into the trench slid the Belgian. He wore a bushy gray mustache. He might have fought in the trenches the last time around. Now he’d gone into business for himself.

“What d’you want?” he asked in his peculiar French.

“What were you doing out there?” Demange returned. “And don’t fuck with me, either. You give me crap, I’ll knock your teeth down your throat.” He sounded as if he looked forward to it. Well, he did. It would turn a boring day halfway interesting.

The anticipation in his voice and on his narrow, nasty face got through to the Belgian. Some people, you did better not to mess with. “I was going to sell the
Boches
some applejack,” the farmer said slowly.

He did not visibly have any. “Where is it?” Demange snapped. “And if you say you were gonna bring it later, you’re in more trouble than you know what to do with.”

“I’ll show you.” The farmer unbelted his pants and let them drop. He wore long johns under them—it was cold out here. He also wore rubber bands around the ankles of the long underwear. He reached into the long johns and pulled out two fat rubber hot-water bottles. He handed Demange one. Demange unscrewed the stopper and sniffed. That was applejack, all right. Demange held out his hand for the other one. Sourly, the farmer passed it to him. He checked. Applejack in both of them, all right.

“Well, it is what you say it is,” Demange allowed. “And since it is, I’ll give you a whole franc for it.”

“A franc!” The Belgian’s mustache quivered with fury. He must have known he’d get screwed, but he hadn’t expected to get screwed that royally.

Because Demange was feeling generous, he said, “Oh, all right—a franc for each bottle.” He tossed the Belgian not one but two coins of yellow aluminum-bronze. “Out of my own pocket, you see.”

“No wonder some of us think the Germans are a better deal,” the farmer said. “You … You …!” Words failed him, which was his good luck.

“Get lost,
cochon
,” Demange said coldly. “I ever see you again, we’ll talk about it with the undertaker.”

Away the Belgian went. If looks could have killed … But you needed a rifle for that.

“Gather round, boys!” Demange told the soldiers he led. “We’d better destroy the evidence, in case he complains to a brass hat or something.” Destroy the evidence they did, and they had a hell of a time doing it, too.

Hans-Ulrich Rudel understood that Stukas had had their day—literally—as dive-bombers. Without fighter cover, they wouldn’t, and didn’t, last ten minutes. And giving them the cover they needed tied up Bf-109s and FW-190s that could have been doing more useful things.

Logically, the
Luftwaffe
should have scrapped them all and given their pilots hotter planes to fly, planes that could fight or flee well enough on their own to get by without escorts. But the higher-ups didn’t want to junk any weapons of war that still had use to them. And so some egghead decided to turn the Ju-87s into night raiders.

It made a certain amount of sense. Even Hans-Ulrich had to admit that much. Planes aloft in the dark were hard to spot and hard to shoot down once spotted. That French bombers built before the war, bombers even more spavined than Stukas, kept coming back from night attacks over the
Vaterland
proved as much.

Finding targets in the dark was also an adventure, of course. But the Ju-87s were no more inaccurate than any other German bombers. You couldn’t dive-bomb when you couldn’t judge when to pull up. You could fly on the level and drop all those hundreds of kilos of explosives where you hoped they’d do your side the most good.

You could, and the Stuka pilots were doing it. They’d struck at ammunition dumps and railroad yards close to the front. They’d also ventured deeper into France. Hans-Ulrich had hit Caen twice and Paris once. He’d bombed them, anyhow. He hoped he’d hit them.

Here he was again, droning along toward Paris. To guide his plane, he had a compass, an airspeed indicator, and a wristwatch with luminous hands. Fortunately, Paris was a big place. Some of the bombers that had been built with this kind of mission in mind—He-111s and Ju-88s, for instance—could be guided toward their target by radio beams. The Stuka carried no such receivers. Maybe groundcrew men would install them one of these days. Hans-Ulrich wasn’t holding his breath.

Before long, he stopped having any doubts about where Paris lay. Flak guns on the ground threw cascades of shells at the
Luftwaffe
planes above them. Muzzle flashes marked thicker concentrations of guns—and, Rudel supposed, thicker concentrations of targets worth hitting.

Tracers climbed up to and past the Ju-87. Their glowing trails and the shell bursts all around put Hans-Ulrich in mind of fireworks displays. Fireworks displays didn’t fill the sky with sharp fragments, though.

From the rear-facing seat, Sergeant Dieselhorst used the speaking tube: “I think they may have an idea we’re here.”

“Do you?” Hans-Ulrich said. “Well, you could be right. Just in case, I’ll give them something to remember me by.” He yanked on the bomb-release lever. The large bomb under the fuselage and the smaller ones under the wings fell away. Big flashes of light down below said other German bombs were already bursting on the capital of France.

He didn’t stick around to watch them. He hauled the Stuka’s nose around and headed back toward Belgium. The plane was friskier without its load. No Ju-87 would ever be either fast or maneuverable, but it came closer than it had.

Not far off to the side, an enemy night fighter ambushed another Stuka. Machine-gun tracers stabbed at the German plane. It caught fire. Stukas carried good defensive armor, but you couldn’t stop everything.
Flame licked across the Ju-87’s wing. The plane began to fall out of the sky. Hans-Ulrich hoped the pilot and rear gunner/radioman were able to use their ’chutes. Hope was all he could do.

No—he could do one thing more. He could mash down the throttle and scoot away from there as fast as he could go. He could, and he did. The farther from the busy French defenses over the capital he got, the less likely he was to meet a shell with his name on it or an enterprising enemy pilot peering into the darkness to spy a shape against the stars or the telltale glow of flames from the exhaust pipes.