Last Orders: The War That Came Early (6 page)

Having considered, he nodded. “
Ja
, I think so. There will be plenty of moonlight to help show them the way.”

“Samuel!” Hanna Goldman said, as if he’d come out with something filthy. Well, in a way he had.

“I’m sorry, sweetheart,” he told his wife. “She asked me what I thought. Should I have lied to her? Then, when the air-raid sirens start screaming, she’ll think
My father is a stupid old fool!
, and she’ll hate me.”

“What happens if the raiders don’t come tonight, though, and everything stays quiet?” Sarah’s mother sounded sure she’d won that one.

But she hadn’t. Father answered, “She’ll think
My father is a stupid old fool!
—and she’ll love me.”

They all laughed. The Nazis did everything they could to make life in the
Reich
as miserable for Jews as possible. They might have done a better job of it than any other gang of persecutors in the history of the world. Try as they would, though, they couldn’t wipe out every single happy moment. Some sneaked past in spite of them.

“If they come,” Sarah said, “maybe they’ll drop some on the
Rathaus
and on the square in front of the cathedral. That would be terrible, wouldn’t it?”

“Dreadful. Frightful,” Samuel Goldman agreed, his voice full of plummy, pious hypocrisy. When you couldn’t be sure the house wasn’t bugged, you didn’t want to give the authorities any excuse to cause you trouble. They could do it without an excuse, of course, but why make things easy for them?

A bomb hit on the
Rathaus
in daylight would blow the
Burgomeister
and the Nazi functionaries who ran Münster straight to heaven—or, more likely, to some warmer clime instead. A bomb hit on the
Rathaus
at any old time might destroy all the city records, including the ones of who was and wasn’t a Jew. Plenty of people in town knew, of course, but Sarah suspected few would squeal on her parents and her if they somehow found an excuse to take the yellow Stars of David off their
clothes. The National Socialist regime was less popular than it had been before it led the
Reich
into an endless, unvictorious war.

Which was why a bomb hit on the square in front of the cathedral would bring few tears to anyone in town. Bishop von Galen had dared to protest against the Nazis’ policy of euthanizing mental defectives (though he’d said not a word about how they treated the Jews). The
Gestapo
had seized him, and the Catholics in town, backed by some Protestants, rioted to try to gain his release. They rose not once but twice. Sarah had almost got shot from accidentally being on the fringes of their second eruption.

These days, armed SS men held the cathedral and the square. If the RAF sent them some presents, wouldn’t that be a shame? Sarah was sure lots of Münsterites were just as worried about it as she was.

She really did worry about bombs coming down close to the house here. In their infinite generosity, the Nazis had decreed that Jews weren’t allowed in public air-raid shelters. They had to take their chances wherever they happened to be.

Her mouth tightened. She’d been married to Isidor Bruck for only a few months when he and his mother and father had to take their chances in the family bakery and the flat above it. She would have taken her chances with them if she hadn’t been out. A direct hit leveled the building and killed them all. Now she was a widow, living with her parents again.

This house had been lucky. Most of the windows still boasted glass panes, not cardboard taped up in their place. But the Brucks had thought the bakery was lucky, too. And so it was … till it wasn’t any more.

The radio blared out saccharine music and Dr. Goebbels’ latest lies about how wonderfully things were going and how happy the German people were under the
Führer
’s divinely inspired leadership. Neither Sarah nor her mother and father felt like staying up late to listen to more of that. They slept as much as they possibly could, Samuel Goldman because he worked so hard in the labor gang and all of them because they didn’t get enough to eat to have much energy.

Sarah didn’t think she’d been in bed more than a few minutes before
the warning sirens began to howl. All the dogs began to howl with them. The sirens scared the dogs, and the animals had learned what happened after those sirens shrieked. They had plenty of reason to be scared.

So did Sarah. Along with her parents, she stumbled down the stairs in the inky darkness and huddled under the sturdy dining-room table: the best protection they could get. Just because it was best didn’t mean it was good.

“
Heil
Hitler!” Samuel Goldman said dryly. That was the punch line to a bitter joke the Germans made about air raids. If you’d grabbed some sleep in spite of the bombers, the next day you greeted people with
Good morning!
If the raid had kept you from getting any sleep and you desperately needed some, you said
Good night!
And if you’d always been asleep, you said
Heil Hitler!

How many thousand meters up there did the bombers fly? Not far enough to keep the drone of their engines from reaching the ground. Searchlights would be probing for them, trying to spear them and pin them down in the sky so the flak guns could get at them. The cannons’ quick-firing snarls punctuated that steady industrial drone.

Here came the bombs, whistling down. The first bursts were a long way off, but they kept getting closer and closer and.… 
Make them stop! Please, God, make them stop!
Sarah wanted to scream it. She swallowed it instead, all but a tiny whimper. God would hear anyway. Or, by all the signs she’d been able to glean, more likely He wouldn’t.

Boom! Boom! Boomety-boom!
The ground shook. The windows rattled. But the house didn’t fall down on top of them. The windows didn’t blow in and slash them. Their neighborhood had missed the worst of it again.

After twenty minutes or half an hour (or a year or two, depending on how you looked at things), the droning faded off into the west. The flak guns kept banging away, probably at nothing. Every so often, a falling fragment from their shells would smash a roof and start a fire or land on some luckless man’s head. A couple of guns went on even after the warbling all-clear sounded.

By then, Sarah was already back in bed. So were her folks. As soon
as they decided nothing was coming down on their heads, they slowly and carefully climbed the stairs again. If you were tired enough, you could sleep after almost anything. They were. They could. They did.

Next morning, Father rolled a cigarette of tobacco scavenged from other people’s discarded dog-ends. A certain predatory gleam lit his eyes as he walked out the front door. “I wonder what we’ll be cleaning up today,” he said.

In smashed houses, the laborers stole whatever they could: real cigarettes, food, clothes. Once,
Herr Doktor Professor
Samuel Goldman would have been ashamed to do such a thing. Not Samuel Goldman the work-gang man. Sarah understood the change only too well. What Jew in Nazi Germany had any room left for shame?

Anastas Mouradian went through the preflight checklist in the cockpit of his Pe-2 with meticulous care. His copilot and bomb-aimer, Isa Mogamedov, sat in the other chair there. He helped Mouradian run down the list.

They spoke to each other in Russian, the only language they had in common. Each flavored it with a different accent. Their home towns lay only a hundred kilometers or so apart, but neither knew or wanted to know a word of the other’s native tongue. Mouradian was an Armenian, Mogamedov an Azeri. Their peoples had been rivals and enemies for a thousand years, ever since the Turkic Azeris invaded the Caucasus. Mouradian had been born a Christian, Mogamedov a Muslim. Now they both had to do their best to be New Soviet Men.

“Comrade Pilot, everything seems normal,” Mogamedov said formally when they got to the end of the checklist.

“Thank you, Comrade Copilot. I agree,” Mouradian replied with equal formality. New Soviet Men had no business quarreling with one another, especially when the Fascist enemy remained on Soviet soil.

Part of Stas Mouradian wanted to believe all the Soviet propaganda that had bombarded him since he was very small. Part of him simply thought some personnel officer had played a practical joke on him by sticking an Azeri in his cockpit. But Mogamedov was plenty capable. With that being true, Mouradian could ignore the rest.

He could, and he had to. Russians didn’t officially dominate the Soviet Union the way they had in the Tsar’s empire. The leader of the USSR, after all, came out of the Caucasus himself—Stalin was a Georgian. But, even though he spoke the country’s chief language with an accent thick enough to slice, Stalin often acted more Russian than the Tsars. Any of the blackasses—Russian slang for the mostly swarthy folk of the southern mountains—who wanted to get ahead needed to do the same.

Mouradian not only wanted to get ahead, he wanted to get airborne. He shouted into the speaking tube that led back to the bomb bay: “Everything good for you, Fetya?”

“Everything’s fucking wonderful, Comrade Pilot,” Sergeant Fyodor Mechnikov replied. The bombardier was a Russian, all right: a foulmouthed thug dragged off a collective farm and into the Red Air Force. He was as strong as an ox—another reason his station was back there with the heavy packages of explosives—and not a great deal brighter.

But if everything looked good to him, too … Stas waved through the bulletproof glass of the windscreen to the waiting groundcrew men. They waved back and spun first one prop, then the other. Smoke and flames burst from the exhausts as the engines bellowed to life. Mouradian eyed the jumping needles on the instrument panel. Fuel, oil pressure, hydraulics … Again, everything seemed inside the normal range.

He waved to the groundcrew men once more. They pulled the chocks away from the Pe-2’s wheels. Mouradian eased up on the brake and gave the plane more throttle. It bounced down the dirt runway west of Smolensk. The runway was barely long enough to let a fully loaded bomber take off. Stas pulled back hard on the yoke. The Pe-2’s nose came up. If anything went wrong now, he’d be dead, and the bombs would make sure there was nothing left of him to bury.

But nothing went wrong. The Pe-2 climbed into the air. The ground fell away below it. The SB-2, the plane this machine replaced, had been a typical piece of Soviet engineering: homely but functional, at least till it went obsolete. Comrade Petlyakov’s bomber, by contrast, was slim and elegant. It had started life as a two-engined fighter, and still wasn’t helpless against Nazi 109s.

Mouradian took his place in the V of planes winging west to pound the Hitlerites’ positions somewhere east of Minsk. The Germans had fallen back a good deal since England and France started up the war in the West again. They didn’t have enough men or machines to do everything the
Führer
wanted.

A man’s reach should exceed his grasp, or what’s a heaven for?
Some foreign poet had said that. Stas couldn’t remember who. Hitler’s reach had exceeded his grasp, and a lot of Germans were going to hell on account of it.

Now I have to make sure they don’t send me to the Devil to keep them company
, Mouradian thought. If you flew long enough, your number was bound to come up. He hadn’t flown long enough yet, the proof of which was that he was still flying.
If I make it through the war, I won’t go any higher than the top floor of a three-story building
.

He felt faintly embarrassed thinking about the Devil or making a wheedling bargain with God. There wasn’t supposed to be room for either in a New Soviet Man’s philosophy. But plenty of others acted the same way. When things went wrong, you’d hear Russians screaming about the Devil’s uncle over the radio. Their fathers would have let out the same curses in the last war, and their great-great-great-grandfathers while fighting Napoleon.

Antiaircraft fire came up at the Pe-2s. Stas did some cussing of his own: they hadn’t crossed the front yet, so that was their own side shooting at them. It happened about every other mission. Maybe the Pe-2 looked
too
slick—the dumb bastards down on the ground figured it had to be German. Or maybe that had nothing to do with anything. Red Army men had fired on Stas in an SB-2, too. Too many soldiers thought any airplanes flying over them had to be dangerous.

“Approaching the target!” The squadron commander’s voice blared in Stas’ earphones, and in Mogamedov’s as well. “Prepare for the bomb run.”

“Acknowledged,” Mouradian answered. Mogamedov slid down to the glassed-in bottom of the nose to man the bombsight.

There it was, all right: a big supply dump by a railroad spur, with trucks and wagons hauling munitions up to the troops who banged heads with their Soviet counterparts. Mouradian pushed the yoke forward,
and the bomber’s nose went down. He used the dive brakes to control and steepen his descent. The Pe-2 couldn’t stand on its nose like a Stuka, but it was a far better all-around aircraft.

“Bombs away, Fetya!” Mogamedov yelled.

“Bombs away!” Mechnikov echoed. “The whores are fucking gone!” And they were. Mouradian heard them tumble out of their racks and felt the plane, suddenly a tonne lighter, get friskier under his hands.

He needed all the friskiness he could find, too. Bf-109s tore into the squadron, pouncing from on high and pounding the bombers with heavy machine guns and cannon shells. A pair of Pe-2s tumbled out of the sky, both burning, one with half a wing shot away. Stas didn’t see any parachutes open. He hoped the flyers died fast and without too much pain.

He hoped he
didn’t
die in the next few minutes. The machine gun in the dorsal turret spat out a long burst, and then another one. Mechnikov was on the job. He probably wouldn’t shoot down a 109 attacking from above and behind. He might make the pilot pull up and spoil the bastard’s aim.

He must have, because the Pe-2 didn’t crash. Half the needles on the gauges were at the edge of the red, but that was because Stas had mashed the throttle hard against the panel wall. The needles didn’t leap crazily into the danger zone, the way they would have if the Nazi had shot the engines full of holes.