The War That Came Early: The Big Switch (57 page)

“We fly a course of 260 degrees at 300 kilometers an hour for forty-seven minutes—and then we start groping around like blind men, the way we always do,” replied the other man in the cockpit.

And that was about the size of it. You could make your course as precise as you pleased. You could measure your airspeed well. But you couldn’t be sure how hard the wind was blowing, or from which direction at any given moment. Your dead reckoning would probably put you somewhere close to your target. Finding it on a moonless night like this was liable to be a different story.

“Shall I stick my head out the window for a better look?” Sergei asked when he thought they were about where they were supposed to be.

“If you think it will help,” Federov answered.

The Nazis, or possibly the French imperialists, knew they were around. Antiaircraft fire started coming up from the ground. The tracers and bursts—scarlet and gold—were eerily beautiful. The old SB-2 shook in the air from a couple too close for comfort. But the gunners down below were firing more or less blind. The groundcrew men had painted the bomber’s underside matte black, to make it as hard as possible to spot from below.

Ivan Kuchkov’s voice floated forward through the speaking tube: “Where’s this supply cunt at, anyway?”

“I’m still looking. They hide them, you know.” Afterwards, Sergei felt silly for apologizing to a foul-mouthed supply sergeant. But that was afterwards. It seemed natural enough at the time.

Bombs started bursting down on the ground: red blooms of fire swallowed almost at once by smoke and dust. Were they landing on the dump, or were the aircrews dropping them at random so they could get the devil out of here? Sergei didn’t know. And then, all of a sudden, he did. One of the Soviet bombs must have hit the Germans’ ammunition store. Things down below started blowing up with great enthusiasm. The fireworks show, already spectacular, got ten times better. And, best of all, these pyrotechnics weren’t trying to knock the SB-2 out of the sky.

“
That’s
where we unload!” Sergei and Federov said together.

Sergei steered the bomber toward the continuing coruscations down below. Kuchkov would hardly need the order to let the bombs fall free. Sergei tried to look every which way at once, and wished for eyes in the back of his head. He wouldn’t be the only pilot drawn by those blasts, and he didn’t want to run into any of the others.

Ducking down into the plane’s glazed nose, Federov peered through the bombsight. “Now, Ivan!” he shouted through the speaking tube.

“The bitches are fucking gone!” Kuchkov yelled back. Sergei felt the plane get lighter and friskier. He hauled the nose around and started back toward Soviet-held territory.

He hadn’t got very far when an antiaircraft shell slammed into the SB-2’s wing. Flame spewed forth and licked toward the fuselage. “Oh, fuck your mother!” he exclaimed, and then, his wits starting to work again, “Out! We’ve got to get out!” He yelled through the voice tube, too, to make sure Ivan knew.

And they had to hurry. The controls went from normal to mushy to nonexistent in nothing flat. The fire started invading the cockpit. He had to fight through flames to get out of his safety belt and down to the escape hole Federov had already used. He held his gloved hands and leather-covered arms in front of his face, trying to protect eyes and mouth. Maybe the flying suit was burning—or maybe that was his hide.

Then he was down and falling free. He hoped like hell the wind would put out the flames. He yanked the ripcord—and discovered his unfolding parachute was on fire above him. Only blackness below. Oh, it was a long way down!

ell,
that’s
fucked up.” Lieutenant Demange tried to speak with his usual savage satisfaction. In spite of himself, though, he sounded impressed.

“Oh, just a little,” Luc Harcourt agreed. The Germans had been so sure nothing could happen to their massive supply dump. As far as Luc could see, the Germans were always sure. The trouble was, the damned
Boches
weren’t always right.

A wan, watery sunrise through roiling clouds showed how very wrong they’d been here. Back before the shooting started, some expert or other had gravely warned,
The bomber will always get through
. Two years of fighting had proved that—surprise!—nothing would always do anything. But they also proved that almost anything would sometimes do something. And, this time, the Russian bombers
had
got through.

Smoke still rose from the devastated dump. Some of it stank of cordite—ammo of all sizes from small-arms to 155mm was still cooking off in there. The explosions—sometimes single spies, sometimes in battalions—made the dawn even more nervous than it would have been otherwise. And some of it smelled like the world’s biggest and worst
stew forgotten on top of a fire: probably on top of a forest fire. How many rations were burning up a couple of kilometers away? Enough to turn a quartermaster sergeant irrational.

The Nazis had assigned several French-speaking officers as liaisons with their enemies-turned-allies. Listening to the guttural rendition of his language coming out of one of their mouths did nothing to reassure Luc. Neither did the officer’s arrogance, even if the German might have been more inclined to call it confidence.

“They got lucky,” the fellow in
Feldgrau
insisted. “The advance will go on as if they had not.”

“My left one,” Lieutenant Demange muttered, which pretty much summed up what Luc thought of the German’s declaration. Easier to advance when you had supplies than when you didn’t. That should have been obvious even to a Nazi.

And also easier to advance when it wasn’t so goddamn cold. At first, the Germans had been relieved when the ground froze. It let their tanks and halftracks and motorcycles and trucks move forward again instead of getting stuck in the mud every few meters.

But Russian cold didn’t know when to quit. The winter before had been as cold as any Luc had ever known in France. Now he’d decided he was only a beginner when it came to frigid winters. He also feared he wouldn’t be by the time he came home from Russia—if he ever did. Winters hereabouts were born knowing things their tamer cousins in Western Europe never learned.

If he ever came home from Russia … Neither he nor his countrymen had been thrilled about the idea of taking on the Red Army. A good many Frenchmen were Reds themselves, and not all of them had been weeded out of the expeditionary force, not by a long shot. Even the French soldiers who weren’t Communists would have been happier to keep fighting Hitler’s crew. The Germans, after all, had invaded them.

But their politicians had cut a deal, and this was what came of it. The Russians had dropped leaflets (written in better French than most Germans used) urging the French soldiers to go over to them, promising not just good treatment as prisoners but practically anything else their little hearts desired.

A few Frenchmen did desert. But the promises were so overblown, they roused Luc’s ever-ready suspicions. Anything that sounded too good to be true probably was.

He and his comrades hadn’t advanced against the Russians with any great enthusiasm. But the Russians, no matter how juicy the promises they packed into their leaflets, fought like wild animals. They weren’t skilled military technicians, the way the Germans were. They had no quit in them, though. If you wanted to shift them, you had to kill them. They weren’t about to run away.

And you needed to make sure you killed them all. They had the wild animal’s gift for concealment. If you saw one, you could bet ten more were hiding close by. If you didn’t see one, ten more were liable to be hiding close by anyhow. The Russians had the charming habit of digging foxholes camouflaged from the front and shooting troops who incautiously went past them in the back.

If you walked off into the bushes to take a crap, you were liable to get your throat cut. You were liable to have worse than that happen to you, too. One poor bastard in Luc’s company had been found with a French flag—just the kind you might wave if you were lining the sidewalks at a Paris parade on Bastille Day—stuck up his ass. Luc wondered if that happened to the poor, sorry
poilus
who went over to the Russians with leaflets in hand. He hoped not, but he wouldn’t have been surprised.

One thing the way the Red Army fought undoubtedly did: it made the French fight the same way. When the other bastards were sneaky and murderous and cruel, the international proletarian brotherhood looked a lot less persuasive all of a sudden. You wanted to do unto others as they were doing unto you. Wasn’t that your best chance to stay alive?

The Germans sure thought so. They’d fought a pretty clean war in France: not perfect, but pretty clean. Luc, who’d seen
Landsers
shot while trying to give up, knew his own side hadn’t fought a perfect war, either. Pretty clean, maybe, but not perfect. Here in Russia, the Germans didn’t even pretend to try. They fought at least as foully as the Red Army did. Most of the time, they didn’t bother taking prisoners. When they did, they often didn’t bother feeding them.

They also often didn’t bother feeding civilians in towns they captured. Whatever they got their hands on, they seized for themselves. In a way, that made military sense. In another way …

“They know how to make people love ’em, don’t they?” Luc said after tramping through a village full of hollow-eyed peasants.

“Oh, maybe a little,” Lieutenant Demange said. Somehow, he’d managed to keep himself in Gitanes. Luc, these days, was smoking anything he could find. Russian tobacco was bad; German, worse.

“Tell you one more thing?” Luc went on. Demange nodded and raised an eyebrow, waiting for whatever the one thing was. Luc said, “I’ve always been glad I’m not a Jew, you know? I mean, who isn’t? But what with the way the
Boches
and the Poles treat ’em here, now I’m
really
fucking glad I’m not a Jew.”

“I dunno. If you’d got your cock clipped right after you were born, you wouldn’t’ve had to come here. For some reason or other, the brass doesn’t think Jews and Nazis mix so well,” Demange said.

“Wonder why that is,” Luc said. “Maybe they aren’t as dumb as they look.”

“Couldn’t prove it by me,” the older man answered. “But the other funny thing is, the Germans aren’t doing anything to the kikes in Poland. They can’t stand ’em, and neither can most of the Poles, like you said. But the government there doesn’t want the Nazis fucking with ’em, on account of they’re
Poland’s
kikes. Politics can spin your head around faster’n absinthe.”

“You ever drink that shit?” Luc asked. It had been illegal about as long as he’d been alive, but Demange was old enough to have tried it before it was outlawed … and afterwards, if he respected the laws against it the same way he respected everything else.

“Oh, sure,” the veteran said casually. “Take some mighty strong brandy and smoke some hashish while you’re pouring it down. That’ll give you the idea.”

“Got you.” Luc had no more smoked hashish than he’d drunk absinthe, but he wasn’t about to let on. Demange would have been as ready to scorn lower-middle-class respectability as he was with anything else that drew his notice. Strong brandy Luc did know. He’d heard
about the kinds of things hashish did, so he could make what he thought was a halfway decent guess about absinthe.

If Demange saw through him, the veteran didn’t let on. He didn’t have much time
to
let on: the Russians started shelling the French positions. They might have most of Europe in arms against them, but they showed no signs of giving up. Holland and Belgium, Luxembourg and Denmark had fallen down on their backs with their legs in the air and their bellies showing when the Germans invaded them. Czechoslovakia and Norway hadn’t lasted much longer. Now that they were conquered, they weren’t giving the Nazis much trouble any more.

Only France had fought back hard (with, Luc grudgingly admitted to himself, some help from England). France … and now Russia. France hadn’t—just barely hadn’t, but hadn’t—let the
Wehrmacht
nip in behind Paris. Moscow was a hell of a lot farther from the German, or even the Polish, border than Paris was from the Rhine. The same held for St. Petersburg—no, it was Leningrad these days—and Kiev. The Russians could trade much more space for time than France had been able to.