Two Fronts (33 page)

A glass of tea in front of him might deflect the peripatetic vodka bottles. Or it might not. But he wanted the tea any which way. The thick soup was salty. So was the sausage. Tea helped dilute things.

He’d almost got to the bottom of the bowl when two more officers strode into the mess tent. Like most of the men already inside, he casually glanced up to see if the newcomers were people he wanted to talk to.

They weren’t. They were strangers. But he didn’t go right back to eating, any more than the other flyers in the squadron did. The strangers’ cap bands and collar tabs were bright blue: the color of the NKVD.

They carried identical PPD machine pistols. They had identical Tokarev pistols on their belts. But their arm-of-service color was much more frightening than their weapons. One of them glanced at a scrap of paper in his free hand. “Pyotr Konstantinovich Filimonov!” he barked.

Had Stas been the luckless Pyotr Konstantinovich, he would have run—or else he would have opened fire. It almost surely wouldn’t have helped—he knew that—but he thought he would have done it anyhow. How could they treat you any worse afterwards than they were going to anyhow?

The genuine Filimonov sprang to his feet and came to attention so stiffly, he might have been embalmed—and if he wasn’t, chances were he would be pretty soon. Well, buried, anyhow; they might not bother to embalm him in the Lubyanka or at a camp. “I serve the Soviet Union!” he said, as if the Chekists were about to pin an Order of Lenin on his chest.

They had other things in mind. He must have known as much, even if he didn’t show it. The NKVD man who’d read his name tossed away the bit of paper and ground it under the heel of his boot. Both Chekists looked relieved he wouldn’t cause any trouble. They gestured with their PPDs. “Come along, then,” one of them said, and Filimonov came.

A vast silence filled the mess tent.
Well, it wasn’t me—this time
, Stas thought. He would have bet anything he owned that his comrades-in-arms were thinking exactly the same thing. And when another vodka bottle came his way, he grabbed it and drank like a Russian.

IVAN KUCHKOV SHORED
up the sides of his foxhole with planks from a wrecked hut a few meters away. That helped, up to a point. The muddy walls probably wouldn’t cave in and squish him now. But he was still hunkered down in a muddy foxhole that got muddier by the minute as the autumn rain went on plashing down.

“Fuck me!” he muttered. “This is pure shit!” That was his opinion of most of Red Army life. Before that, the sergeant had had an even lower opinion of Red Air Force life. Flying personnel in the Red Air Force didn’t get a vodka ration when they went on missions, which accounted for the difference.

He glanced back over his shoulder, wondering whether he’d be more comfortable in what was left of that peasant hut. He didn’t think so, which only proved not much of it was left. And, even in the rain, he was liable to get shot if he came out of the foxhole. The Germans had their lines out in the middle of the unharvested fields, and some of them were much too handy with their Mausers and machine guns.

“Stinking cunts,” Ivan said. Most of the time, he’d made a good thing out of his service to the Soviet state. He’d done better for himself as a soldier than he would have as a laborer on a collective farm or a small-time hooligan—he was sure of that.

Most of the time. But squatting in a boggy foxhole wasn’t his notion of fun. Even a real fight would have been better than dicking around here and waiting to come down with trench foot.

So he thought, anyhow, till Lieutenant Novikov, the latest zit-faced officer to command the company, squelched and slithered over to him and spoke in a low voice: “I have a job for you, Kuchkov.”

“What’s up, Comrade Lieutenant?” Ivan didn’t even add
Besides your dick
, the way he would have most of the time. Unlike a lot of punk officers, Novikov seemed to try hard. He didn’t get the vapors when the Hitlerites shot at him, either. So why not give the kid the benefit of the doubt?

He found out why not immediately afterwards: “Division HQ wants to interrogate some German prisoners. Take a few men—take a squad if you think you’ll need to—and go get ’em for us.”

“Fuck me!” Kuchkov said again, this time sorrowfully. He could think of a million good reasons why someone else should lead the raid, or why it shouldn’t go on in the first place. He kept his mouth shut. None of those reasons mattered a fart’s worth when weighed against
Division HQ wants
. What Division HQ wanted, Division HQ got.

Novikov tried to butter him up. “You’re the best man we’ve got for it. Nobody else comes close.”

“Happy cocksucking day.” Ivan knew the rest of the pricks in the company pretty well. The lieutenant was right. That didn’t make him any happier—just the opposite, in fact.

The first guy he snagged for the raiding party was Sasha Davidov. The scrawny Jew let out a sigh the Nazis could probably hear back in Berlin. “What did I do to deserve this, Comrade Sergeant?” he asked resignedly.

“You fucking well stayed alive walking point,” Kuchkov answered. “I ain’t gonna choose one of the dead pussies, y’know? They don’t move any too fuckin’ swift.”

He got the ghost of a chuckle out of Davidov. “Maybe I’ll stay lucky one more time,” he said. “Stranger things must have happened somewhere.” The
Zhid
didn’t sound as if he believed it.

Speaking of luck, Kuchkov had figured it would quit raining before he went prisoner-hunting. If anything made him more likely to get plugged, that would be it. But the rain came down harder than ever.

He waited till the wee small hours just the same. He gulped tea to stay awake, and gulped vodka to feel brave. He didn’t get toasted to the point where he started falling over his own feet, and he didn’t let his fellow raiders get that drunk, either.

To his surprise, Davidov didn’t drink at all. He just smoked
papiros
after
papiros
, cupping them in his hands to keep the rain from dousing them. The Jew didn’t play teetotaler all the time, so Kuchkov asked him, “What’s up with you?”

“I don’t want to miss anything, that’s all,” Davidov answered. “Maybe I wouldn’t with the vodka in me, but maybe I would, too. I’ll drink plenty after we get back—you can bet your dick on that.”

Hearing
mat
from him made Ivan laugh. “We’re all betting our dicks,” he said, and then, “When we grab the fucking Fritzes, you can palaver with ’em, right? I mean, you’re a
Zhid
, so you know Yiddish, don’t you?”

“Yes, Comrade Sergeant,” the point man said patiently. “It’s not the same as German, but it’s not as different as Ukrainian is from Russian. If they don’t kill me, they’ll understand me well enough.”

“Bugger shit-eating Ukrainian,” said Kuchkov, who’d heard more of it down here than he’d ever wanted to listen to. He didn’t notice Davidov’s irony till they were sneaking out toward the German lines. Too late to do anything about it then.

He couldn’t see more than a few meters. He couldn’t hear more than a few meters, either; the rain took care of that. If Mauser rounds cracked past, or if one of the nasty machine guns the Russians called Hitler’s saws started spitting bullets twice as fast as a Maxim gun could, he figured he’d notice that.

Through the rain, Davidov called, “Wire here! Hold up while I cut it.” He pitched his voice perfectly to reach his Red Army comrades and go no farther. Ivan hoped like hell he did, anyway. After a minute (and, presumably, after some snipping Ivan couldn’t hear), the Jew said, “All good now. This way—toward my voice.”

Kuchkov sliced the back of his hand on a barb from the cut wire. He cussed furiously under his breath. “Maybe you’ll get lockjaw, Comrade Sergeant,” one of the Russians said. “What would you do then?” The other raiders all laughed—quietly, but they did. Ivan couldn’t even think about revenge till later. The Red Army men crawled on.

“Hold up!” Davidov hissed urgently from out in front. “I can hear Germans talking.” Kuchkov cocked his head to one side. He still heard no Fritzes. Maybe the point man had stayed alive as long as he had not least because his ears were better than other people’s.

Kuchkov crawled forward. “Where are the dicks?” he asked. The Jew pointed. Ivan could barely make out his arm in the rainy gloom. He knew what he had to do now, though. He held his PPD a little tighter. Odds were it had got muddy. Well, it would work even so. German Schmeissers were much better made, but mud and grit in the works and they turned up their toes.

The Red Army men slithered closer. Now Ivan could hear the Fritzes, too. He couldn’t understand them, but they didn’t sound worried. They had no idea enemy soldiers were in the neighborhood. “Grenades!” he called to his men. “Grenades, and then we rush. Don’t shoot too fucking much. Remember, we gotta bring a couple of these bitches back alive.”

They would remember as long as remembering didn’t put their asses on the line. He was sure of that. He felt the same way. No German ever born—not even a blonde with big tits and legs up to there—was worth getting killed for.

“On three,” he said. “One … Two …
Three!
” Grenades flew. They burst all around the Germans (not busty blondes, he was sure—too bad!) the Russians wanted to grab. “
Urra!
” the Red Army men yelled as they dashed forward and jumped down into the Nazis’ fieldworks.

“
Hände hoch!
” Davidov screamed. Ivan was disappointed. He could
sprechen
that much
Deutsch
himself. But he couldn’t have followed the terrified babble that came back. The point man could, and did: “They surrender. They just want us not to kill them.”

“Tell ’em we won’t. Let’s get the fuck out of here,” Kuchkov said. What the NKVD interrogators would do to the Fritzes once they had them … wasn’t his worry. No, that would be for the
Feldgrau
boys to sweat.

The other Germans came back to life in a hurry. They were pros, all right, damn them. Machine-gun tracers hissed through the wet air. But the Hitlerites fired just a little high. When you were down as flat as your buttons would let you get, a few centimeters mattered. And the captured Germans did their best impressions of squashed snakes, too. They didn’t want their own friends punching their tickets for them by mistake.

Then Ivan had to worry about
his
friends punching his ticket for him. He knew too well the Russians were capable of it. Yes, they knew he’d gone raiding. Yes, they expected (or at least hoped) he’d come back. They might open up anyway.

But they didn’t. After some soldiers hauled the miserable Fritzes away, Lieutenant Novikov pounded Ivan on the back. “I’ll get you a medal for this,” he said happily—his behind would have been in a sling had the raid failed.

“If it’s all the same to you, Comrade Lieutenant, I’d rather have a blowjob,” Ivan answered. “Or at least some extra vodka.”

Novikov let out a startled yip of laughter. “The vodka I can arrange. You’re on your own for getting your dick sucked.” Kuchkov nodded. That was how things worked, all right. The really good stuff, you had to grab for yourself.

HIDEKI FUJITA STOOD
at stiff attention before Captain Ikejiri. Anything less than stiff attention would have doomed him before he started. Even by Japanese Army standards—some of the highest in the world—Masanori Ikejiri was a stickler for discipline. “Yes, Sergeant?” he said now. “You wish …?” By his tone,
he
wished Fujita would dry up and blow away.

But Ikejiri acted as if he wished every enlisted man ever hatched would dry up and blow away. So Fujita didn’t let that worry him—too much. He saluted with mechanical precision. “Please, Captain
-san
, I would like to be placed in a position where I see more action,” he said. He’d thought about calling Ikejiri Captain-sama—Lord Captain—but decided that would be laying it on too thick even for the self-important officer.

“Oh, you would, would you?” Now Ikejiri sounded as if he had trouble believing his ears.

“
Hai
, Captain
-san!
” Fujita saluted again, then resumed his posture of respect.

Captain Ikejiri rubbed his chin. “Well, I don’t hear that one every day,” he allowed. “Most of the time, people come in here to ask me to put them in slots where they
don’t
go into harm’s way.”

“Sir, I serve the Emperor. I
want
to serve the Emperor, may he live ten thousand years. I want to serve him the best way I can.” All of which was true. Fujita didn’t say he was bored green in Myitkyina, although that was just as true if it wasn’t even more so.

“Well, your attitude does you credit.” From Ikejiri, that was no small praise. He glanced down at some papers on the little table that did him duty as a desk.
My service record
, Fujita realized. The captain continued, “No one can complain about your performance since you came to Burma.”

That was why Fujita was a sergeant again. His performance in China, on the other hand, had got him demoted and made the powers that be approve his request for a transfer as soon as he handed it in. If you fouled up, you would pay for it. And he had, and he’d come to this miserable place to atone for fouling up. Now he’d managed that, too. Having managed it, he wanted more, as people have a way of doing.

“You realize, if you see more action, the Chinese will shoot at you?” Captain Ikejiri said.

“Sir, you will know I fought the Russians on the Mongolian border and in Siberia.” Fujita couldn’t sound affronted before an officer, but he wanted to. “After them, I hope I’m not going to hide under the bed on account of the
Chankoro
.” He brought out the scornful Japanese slang for
Chinks
without even noticing he did it. Japan had been taking what she wanted and needed in China ever since the end of the nineteenth century. The Chinese almost always gave way before Japan’s might. When they didn’t, they almost always lost. No wonder Japanese soldiers scorned them and their fighting skills.

“Yes, yes.” Ikejiri’s patience showed, which meant it would fray soon. “But you would be up in an airplane, and they would be shooting at you from the ground. You wouldn’t be able to shoot back. That may not be the kind of action you crave.”