The War That Came Early: The Big Switch (8 page)

“Be ready when they stop,” he shouted in between explosions. “That’s when the froggies’ll hit us on foot if they’re going to.”

“Right,” Metzger said. “With all this goddamn snow, they’ll be on top of us before we know they’re here.”

“More fun when a girl gets on top of you before you know she’s there,” Willi agreed. Klaus made a face at him. Willi went on, “Why d’you think they’d pick now to try it? I just hope like hell our machine gunners aren’t off playing skat or something.”

“You’re a funny fellow, aren’t you? Funny like the cholera, I mean,” Metzger said.

“That’s me,” Willi said, not without pride.

The mortar bombs quit dropping. Even before officers’ whistles shrilled, urging the men to their posts, Willi was up on a firing step, a round chambered and a fresh clip in his Mauser. Klaus Metzger stood beside him. Both men peered out into the snowstorm.

Was that motion there, or only Willi’s anxious imagination? He didn’t want to wait around and discover he’d made a mistake by getting killed. Nothing up ahead belonged to his own side—he was sure of that. Shoot first and ask questions later, then, just like a Western from America.

Klaus fired a split second after he did. Did the other
Landser
think he saw something, too. Or was he simply following Willi’s lead? One of their bullets—they never did know which—was rewarded with a scream of anguish. The French soldiers sneaking up under cover of the blizzard opened fire then. Willi shot back, working the Mauser’s bolt as fast as he could.

Other men along the line also banged away. The
poilus
weren’t close enough to throw grenades into the trenches. Another minute or two of sneaking and they would have been. Willi slapped a new magazine onto his rifle.

Then the Germans’ MG-34s opened up. The froggies cried out in despair. Machine guns put so many rounds in the air, they didn’t have to be either lucky or good to hit you. They just had to keep firing, keep traversing so their bullets didn’t all follow the same path, and sooner or later a man out in the open would stop one. Usually sooner.

The French attack petered out. Willi didn’t know how many casualties the men in the crested helmets and khaki took. The swirling snow kept him from seeing most of them and let the
poilus
bring them back in their withdrawal. He didn’t think this was a cheap little affair, though.

He turned to Klaus Metzger, who’d stayed steady as a veteran
through it all. “You did good,” Willi said, and clapped him on the back. “Here. Take a knock of this.” He offered his canteen, which held some highly unofficial applejack.

“Whew!” Klaus said after drinking. “That’s got teeth, but it sure hits the spot.” They grinned at each other. Willi hoped he’d just made a friend.

SERGEI YAROSLAVSKY WONDERED
what to make of his new copilot and bomb-aimer. Vladimir Federov looked more like a sergeant—or a private first class—than a second lieutenant. He was short and squat and powerful, with a broad face, high cheekbones, and gray-blue eyes that showed nothing. He cropped his sandy hair close to the dome of his skull.

As an infantryman, he obviously would have been first-rate. As a flyer … Sergei wasn’t so sure. Anastas Mouradian talked too damn much. Stas
thought
too damn much. By all appearances, that wouldn’t be Federov’s problem. But Mouradian was outstanding in the cockpit. Sergei feared
that
wouldn’t be Federov’s problem, either.

A safe question first: “What’s your father’s name, Comrade Lieutenant?”

“Mikhail, Comrade Pilot.” By his accent, Federov came from somewhere near Moscow. Not from in the city, or Sergei didn’t think so, but also not from somewhere in the backwoods.

“All right, Vladimir Mikhailovich. I’m Sergei Valentinovich.” Maybe Vladimir would turn to Volodya, as Anastas had become Stas. Or maybe not. Yaroslavsky shrugged to himself. Time would tell.

“And our bomb-dropper is …?” Federov asked.

“Ivan Kuchkov. He’s a sergeant, a very strong man, and nothing scares him,” Sergei answered. “Of course, he has his quirks, but who doesn’t?”

“Nobody, I’m sure,” Federov agreed politely. “What are some of his?”

“Why don’t you see for yourself? You’ll meet him soon.” Sergei didn’t want to say that the bomb-aimer made the burly Federov svelte by comparison. He also didn’t want to say Sergeant Kuchkov was one of the hairiest men he’d ever seen, not just on his head but all over his
body. People called Kuchkov the Chimp, but not where he could hear them do it: he had a habit of throwing men who used the nickname through windows, doors, walls.…

And Sergei didn’t want to say that Ivan conversed almost entirely in
mat
, the Russian sublanguage of ingenious obscenity. Sergei didn’t even think the bomb-dropper had been a
zek
before the draft got him. If ever a man was made for
mat
, Ivan Kuchkov was that man.

Since he didn’t want to say any of those things, he asked, “How did you become a flyer?”

“Oh, the usual way,” Federov replied. “I was in
Osoaviakhim
when I was a kid, and I did well enough that they kept me at it after I got called up.”

Yaroslavsky nodded. His own story wasn’t much different. Nominally,
Osoaviakhim
was the national organization that trained civilian pilots. The skills a civilian pilot needed, of course, were the same as the ones flying a fighter or bomber required. No one ever said that out loud, which made it no less true. The Germans had used the same dodge to slide around the Treaty of Versailles’ ban on military aviation.

As Sergei had unpleasant reason to know,
Luftwaffe
pilots and bombardiers were mostly excellent. As he also had unpleasant reason to know, his own country’s standards were rather lower.

“How’s the plane?” Vladimir Federov asked. “This’ll be the first time I’ve been in an SB-2.”

That news disappointed Sergei without surprising him. Experienced copilots like Mouradian were getting planes of their own. Inexperienced men were getting experience instead.
And what do I get?
Yaroslavsky wondered. He silently answered his own question:
I get to be a nursemaid, that’s what
.

Aloud, he said, “When we supported the Spanish Republic, people called the SB-2 the fighting bomber—it was faster in the air than any of the fighters the Fascists were using.”

“Yes, I’ve heard that,” Federov answered.

“Well, forget it,” Sergei said bluntly. “It was true when we were going up against biplanes. It sure as hell isn’t true any more. German Messerschmitts are like sharks against mackerel. Even the Polish PZLs will out-fly us and outshoot us. What we do when fighters are around is, we run. Otherwise, it’s
dos vidanya, Rodina.
”

“ ‘So long, Motherland,’ ” Federov echoed. “So when do we get bombers that
can
hold their own against enemy fighters?”

“Probably never,” Sergei replied, which made his new copilot give him a long, slow blink. He explained: “Bombers bomb. Fighters shoot bombers down. Sounds obvious, doesn’t it? But it’s not just obvious. It’s true. Bombers carry more weight, they’re less maneuverable, and they have fewer guns pointing forward. We do our best to hold off fighters, but we can’t play their game. We play our own game instead.”

Lieutenant Federov blinked again, the same way. It was an odd, stagy expression. Sergei wondered what lay behind it. Was Federov an NKVD man building a case against him because he had the gall to point out a plain truth? Too late to worry about it now.

“Come on,” Sergei said. “You want to see the plane? I’ll show you.”

The SB-2 sat in a revetment. A white sheet hid it from prying eyes—and from Nazi reconnaissance aircraft. In the shadow cast by the sheet, a mechanic worked on the starboard engine. He sketched a salute for Sergei and gave Vladimir Federov a curious look: word that Mouradian had been transferred hadn’t got to everybody.

Ivan Kuchkov was sitting in the pilot’s seat when Sergei led Federov into the cockpit. The two men who didn’t know each other stared. “Who are you?” Federov asked, at the same time as Kuchkov belligerently demanded, “Who the fuck are you?”

“That should be ‘Who the fuck are you, sir?’ ” Sergei said, and made the introductions. The Chimp looked at Federov as if to say Red Air Force standards were lower than he’d thought. The new copilot looked at Kuchkov as if to say he hadn’t expected to see one like this outside of a zoo. As meetings went, it wasn’t a success. Sergei could see that right off the bat.

Federov didn’t say anything much. Kuchkov muttered profanely under his breath, but not far enough under it. Sergei, and no doubt the new officer as well, learned that he thought Federov looked like a jerk and talked like a jerkoff. In point of fact, the Chimp expressed himself more frankly.

He expressed himself so frankly that Sergei leaned close to him. “Come on, Ivan,” he said quietly. “You can’t talk about a new crewmate like that.”

“Why the fuck not?” Ivan returned, still not bothering to hold his voice down. “We’re supposed to fly with that whistleass peckerhead? My dick we are! He’ll screw us over some kind of way—you wait and see.”

“How can you tell?” Sergei asked, clinically curious.

“
Bozhemoi!
Just look at the motherfucker. Fuck me in the mouth if he’s not on the lam for something or other.”

Sergei didn’t think Vladimir Federov looked like a robber one jump in front of the law. To him, the new crewman seemed more like a would-be tough guy than the genuine article. Trying to explain that to Ivan would be pointless. It would also be hopeless, because the Chimp was no more inclined to listen than a veritable anthropoid would have been.

Disastrous introduction or not, they flew their first mission together three days later. They—and their squadron of SB-2s—bombed the train station in Bialystok to keep the Fascists from moving men and matériel through it. Federov seemed able to handle the instruments and calculations a bomb-aimer had to use. Sergei wasn’t sure the plane’s bombs hit the station, but they came as close as anyone else’s.

After the SB-2 came back to the airstrip, though, Ivan Kuchkov said, “See? I told you he was a useless cocksucker.” Sergei sighed. Weren’t the Nazis enough trouble? Plainly, Ivan didn’t think so.

arah Goldman and her mother and father stood in a long line outside the Münster
Rathaus
. Everybody in the line—graybeards, younger adults, children, babies—was Jewish. Everyone except the babies (exempt by the tender mercy of the National Socialist German Workers’ Party) wore on his or her clothes a prominently displayed six-pointed yellow star with
Jude
imprinted on it in big, black, Hebraic-style letters.

The Nazis had figured out a brand-new way to make life miserable for Jewish residents in Germany. (Jews were no longer citizens of the Third
Reich
.) They all had to get new identity cards. And on each of those cards would be a new first name branding its possessor as a Jew—as if everything else the
Reich
had done were somehow inadequate.

From now on, her father, Samuel Goldman, would legally become Moses Samuel Goldman. All Jewish men in Germany would have Moses grafted on in front of whatever their first name happened to be. All Jewish women would have a new first name affixed in front of their own, too. For them, it was … Sarah.

“No fair,” Sarah said as the queue slowly advanced. “They shouldn’t
need to bother with me. My card’s already fine. I could have stayed home and twiddled my thumbs instead of coming with you and—”

“Twiddling your thumbs here,” Father finished for her. “Even if you’ve already got the name the government aims to give you, it’s just as well you came along. The new card will probably be different from the old one some other way, too. The people who run things will be able to see who’s, God forbid, using an old ID card, and all the people who are will catch it.”

He’d spent many years in the classroom and lecture hall, passing on his knowledge of ancient Greece and especially Rome. Like an actor, he could put anything he wanted into his voice. A stranger walking by would be sure he approved of all the moves the government made. So would an informer. Sarah knew better. So did her mother. Neither Sarah nor Hanna Goldman said anything, though. Why stir up more trouble? Didn’t Jews in Germany already have plenty?