The War That Came Early: The Big Switch (12 page)

And a few men—volunteers all, and mostly Norwegians—
would
stay behind, to man Allied machine guns and try to create the impression that everybody was still in the lines. Walsh admired them without wanting to be one of their number. He aimed to go on fighting the war till the enemy was licked. Mooching around behind barbed wire, eating slop and hoping for Red Cross packages, held no appeal. The Norwegians had a chance of getting away and blending in with the scenery. He didn’t.

On the appointed night, he made his way back toward the docks. Engineers often put up white tapes to guide men and machines in the darkness without showing a light. Here, they’d used black ones to stand out against the snow. It was a nice touch. He wondered where they’d got them.

High above the clouds, airplane engines thuttered. Bombs started raining down far behind the German lines. That was another nice touch. Fighters couldn’t make it here from Blighty, but bombers could.
And if the RAF pounded the Fritzes, it would make them think the expeditionary force was staying, not going. Walsh hoped like blazes it would, anyhow.

Through the shattered wreckage of Namsos town, a woman’s voice called out, “Good luck, friends!
Bonne chance, amis!
” The locals still appreciated what the soldiers from abroad had been doing. That counted for something.

“This way! Step lively! This way!” The authoritative voice could only belong to an MP. Sure enough, the fellow guided traffic with disks on sticks that reminded Walsh of the ones tank crews without radios used to communicate.

He shambled up a gangplank. Only when he was up on deck did he realize he’d boarded another destroyer. It could get in and out faster than a merchantman. It couldn’t carry nearly so many men, though.

Or could it? If they packed people on like sardines going into a tin, maybe it could. They didn’t even have olive oil to grease the works. They did have swearing petty officers. “Keep clear lanes, God damn you!” one of that unpleasant breed shouted. “If the sailors can’t get to the guns, what’re your bloody necks worth?”

That was an interesting question. But the fellows loading the destroyer and the ones trying to keep the ship battleworthy worked at cross purposes. Walsh sympathized with both groups. Everyone was trying to do his own job as well as he could. If everyone succeeded, they might get away yet.

Stranger things had happened. Walsh supposed they must have.

Someone whose watch had survived said they left port at half past two. They’d have several hours of darkness to get well out to sea. Nights were still long, though beginning to shorten. They’d be a small needle in a big haystack. It could work. It really could.

Walsh kept telling himself as much, right up to the point where he fell asleep. He was mostly standing up, with his head and arms resting against something metallic. Even through his greatcoat sleeves, he could feel the cold. He didn’t care. He thought he could have slept upside down.

Someone trod on his toe. Someone else planted an elbow in his ribs. Each indignity half roused him, but no more. Even this was better than
life in the trenches. And if that wasn’t a judgment on the war he’d been fighting … He snored on.

He came back to himself with the sky beginning to go gray in the east. Some good Samaritan was shoving his way through the tight-packed soldiers with an enormous pot of tea in each fist. Walsh still had his mess kit. He held out the tin cup, and was rewarded with a weak, lukewarm brew with no milk and not enough sugar. It tasted wonderful.

As day came on, the soldiers looked apprehensively back toward the corrugated coastline from which they’d just fled. The destroyer was going flat out, kicking up an enormous bow wave. But one of the mournful lessons of this war was that ships couldn’t outrun airplanes.

Lots of ocean. Only us here
, Walsh thought. The other ships taking the expeditionary force back from Namsos had scattered. The Nazis would have to find them one by one. Walsh thought that made for good tactics. He wished to God he were more certain.

Sailors looked back toward Norway, too. Some of them had field glasses. One who did shouted out a warning. Walsh wondered why he bothered. The antiaircraft guns were already manned. The escaping soldiers couldn’t go anywhere, because their mates already filled the places where they might have gone.

Walsh’s mouth went dry when he recognized the sharkish fuselage with the inverted gull wings.
A Stuka. We would get a bloody Stuka
, he thought bitterly. He’d seen what they could do. He didn’t want them trying to do it to him … again.

“Only the one bugger,” Dr. Murdoch said beside him. That
was
something. The Germans must have scattered their planes across the ocean, searching for ships. Of course, the sods up there would have a wireless set.…

The Stuka climbed, then dove. Walsh watched in fearful fascination—what else could he do? All the antiaircraft guns on the destroyer went off at once, with a noise like the end of the world. The pilot took his plane down through the shell bursts as if they weren’t there. Fritz or not, he had balls. The bomb fell free. The dive-bomber pulled up almost as sharply as it had plunged.

Blam!
The bomb burst—about fifty yards astern of the destroyer.
The ship jerked as if she’d taken a left to the belly, but kept steaming. Here and there, men peppered—or men ripped to shreds—by fragments shrieked.

“I didn’t see any more bombs under his wings. Perhaps they sacrificed payload for range,” Murdoch said. Walsh hadn’t noticed. The Stuka
didn’t
seem to be coming back for another pass. It droned east, toward Norway, instead.

“We may live to see Blighty again,” Walsh said. A moment before, he wouldn’t have given tuppence for his chances. Hope—and exhaustion—made for a happier drunk than even champagne. He threw back his head and laughed.

ANASTAS MOURADIAN
had got used to the way Russians did things in Europe.
Got resigned to the way they did things
might have put it better. You had to get used to it, get resigned to it, or you’d go mad. There were far more Russians than any other group in the USSR, especially when you added in the Ukrainians and Byelorussians, who weren’t very different from Great Russians. (Great Russians insisted they were only variations on a theme. Ukrainians and Byelorussians disagreed, but usually just among themselves.)

Used to Russian ways or not, Stas didn’t think it was an accident that so many Armenians and Georgians and Jews had risen so high in the Soviet hierarchy. Russians were stubborn. They were brave. They followed orders even better than Germans. From all he’d seen, though, few of them would ever set the world on fire with their brains.

Now here he was in eastern Siberia. It was like finding himself in a satiric movie. All the most Russian traits that annoyed him in Europe were exaggerated here.

Everything was slipshod. Even in Europe, aircraft maintenance hadn’t been what he wished it would be. The Russian attitude was
Oh, what the hell—it’ll probably fly
. Most of the time, it did. But not all the planes that didn’t come back ran into German fighters. Some never should have tried to get off the ground to begin with.

If it was bad in Europe, it was worse out here. Spare parts were in chronically short supply—no surprise, not with the factories thousands
of kilometers away. Most of the best mechanics were thousands of kilometers away, too, facing the Germans and Poles. The ones stuck in Siberia did what they could with what they had … when they were sober, anyhow.

They weren’t sober often enough to suit Mouradian. If you weren’t a Russian, you almost always thought Russians drank like fish. Stas had grown up with wine. He’d learned to handle vodka. If you were going to deal with Russians, that was self-defense. When Russian officers (to say nothing of Russian enlisted men) weren’t up to anything else, they’d drink, often till they fell over.

He’d seen as much in Europe. Drunkenness was worse here, too. For one thing, drunks were liable to get posted to Siberia so they wouldn’t cause difficulties anywhere that mattered. For another, there was even less to do in Siberia than in European Russia. That was doubly true through the long, dark, cold winters. The more you stayed drunk, the less you brooded on how boring everything else was.

And, as Stas had heard from more Russians than he cared to remember, alcohol was antifreeze. He’d heard it so often, he’d said it himself. That didn’t keep plenty of Russian drunks from freezing to death.

Drunks, of course, also didn’t make the best mechanics. The first glimpse Mouradian got of the SB-2s that flew against the Japanese besieging Vladivostok made him blurt, “This must be your junkyard.”

Captain Boris Novikov looked pained. “No, no, no. These are the runners. You’ll get one of them. You want to see the junkyard, come with me.”

He exhaled fog and vodka fumes. He wasn’t immune to the Russian national voice. He didn’t wobble as he walked, though. Like a lot of his countrymen, he could hold his liquor. Was that national virtue or vice? Mouradian had pondered the question for a long time. Nothing he could do about it now.

He followed Novikov down a path that had probably started as a deer track. It wound through snow-draped pines that looked as if they belonged in a Christmas scene—only Christmastime was months gone. Stas was glad he had a good pair of
valenki
. The felt boots would keep his feet from freezing even in weather like this. He hoped.

“Don’t worry,” Novikov said brightly. “We haven’t seen a tiger in weeks.”

“I’m so glad,” Mouradian answered. He was unarmed. Novikov had a pistol. Whether he could draw it if he did see a tiger, and whether it would do any good if he could, were questions the Armenian preferred not to contemplate.

His response made Novikov laugh. Stas wasn’t sure why. They’d come more than half a kilometer. If a tiger did bound out and charge them, no one would hear them shriek. The beast could enjoy a leisurely luncheon.

Suddenly, the path opened out into a clearing. Captain Novikov waved a mittened hand. “Now this, Mouradian,
this
is the fucking junkyard.”

And it was, too. Wrecked planes, bits and pieces of wrecked planes … Stas saw SB-2s, monoplane and biplane Polikarpov fighters, and other aircraft he had trouble naming. Some of the junk was new. Some was ancient and rusty. Some … If that wasn’t a French fighter left over from the last war, Mouradian didn’t know what it would be.

“When we need parts, we just come out here and take them,” Novikov said. “It’s a hell of a lot faster than ordering them from some bigger base that’ll probably just go and pull them out of
its
junkyard, if it bothers answering us at all.”

“But …” Stas tried to put his objections into words: “Quality won’t be very high, will it?”

“It’s a part,” Novikov said patiently. “The fucking airplane will fly better with it than without it, right?”

“That’s the idea, yes,” Mouradian answered, which wasn’t exactly agreement.

If Novikov noticed, he gave no sign. “Well, there you are, then.”

“Yes, Comrade Captain. Here I am.” That wasn’t exactly agreement, either.

They went back to the main base. Groundcrew men were bombing up the SB-2s Mouradian had taken for junk. He met his new copilot and bomb-aimer. Second Lieutenant Nikolai Chernenko was new, all right—he couldn’t have been more than nineteen. They shook hands.
“I’m sure you’ll teach me a lot, Comrade Pilot. Here’s to us!” Chernenko pulled out a flask. He talked with a Ukrainian accent Mouradian found hard to follow.

“To us!” Mouradian sipped vodka. Handing back the flask, he said, “Let’s not drink too much before we go.”

“What else is there to do?” Chernenko asked, honest curiosity in his voice. Stas had no good answer for him.

The fellow who actually dropped the bombs—and who fired the machine gun in the SB-2’s dorsal turret—was a sergeant named Innokenty Suslov. He reminded Stas of Ivan Kuchkov: he was foul-mouthed and burly. He wasn’t so ugly and hairy as the Chimp, but those were just details.

When the engines started up, they sounded better than Stas expected. Maybe Novikov ran a tighter ship than Mouradian thought. Or maybe it was fool luck. He had his opinion, which might or might not be worth anything.

Up into the air the SB-2 went. The formation the bombers flew was ragged, but most Russian formations were. Keeping right in place for the sake of keeping right in place was a German affectation. So the Red Air Force felt, anyhow.

Flying over Siberia’s vast forests showed the sweep of Russia almost as well as getting here on the Trans-Siberian Railway. If not for the compass, Mouradian would have had no idea of his bearing. Everything down below looked the same in all directions.

But only one direction included Japanese fighter planes. The flight leader shouted a warning that dinned in Stas’ earphones. Then he saw the fighters himself: monoplanes with fixed landing gear and wide wings. They were almost ridiculously maneuverable.

But they were supposed to be just as lightly built. And, for once, Intelligence knew what it was talking about. Pursuing another bomber, a Japanese fighter flew right in front of Stas’ plane. He hardly had to aim before firing the forward machine guns. Pieces flew from the Japanese fighter. It seemed to break up in midair, then plummeted in flames toward the snow-covered trees far, far below.

“Good shot!” Chernenko whooped. And it was. Mouradian had just killed a man. He’d worry about it later. For now … For now, he would
try to kill as many more men as he could with the SB-2’s bombs. That was different. He didn’t have to watch them. Or maybe it just felt different.

The SB-2 felt different after the bombs fell from it: lighter, friskier, eager to get away. Stas was also eager to get away. He gunned the bomber back toward the base hacked from the Siberian wilderness. It wasn’t much—he’d already seen that. But going back to it beat the devil out of meeting the ground with a terrible, final thump like that poor goddamn Japanese fighter pilot.

SHOPPING TIME FOR JEWS
in Germany was late afternoon: after the Aryans had got everything worth getting. With the war a year and a half old, Sarah Goldman found she minded that less than she had before the shooting started. She’d felt really deprived then. Nowadays, there was so little for everyone that even leavings weren’t much worse than top of the line.