Two Fronts (38 page)

“Don’t I know it!” Vaclav exclaimed. “I can’t even write to anybody back there. It’s like all of Central Europe is a hole in the map.”

“Have you tried writing through the Red Cross in Switzerland?” Halévy asked. “I don’t know for sure, but they might be able to get letters back and forth. Censored and all, sure, but still.”

“Huh!” Jezek said in surprise. “You know, I never thought of that.”

“Like I said, I don’t know—I haven’t had to worry about it,” Benjamin Halévy said. “But if you try and you don’t get an answer back, how are you worse off?”

There was another good question. Vaclav had to scrounge paper and a pencil off the Jew. He scribbled a note to his father. None of the Czechs had an envelope, let alone a Republican stamp. He got those from Chaim Weinberg, the American International whose Yiddish he could more or less follow.

“I write to my folks every now and then, so I’ve got that kind of shit,” Weinberg explained. “My old man thinks I’m
meshiggeh
for being here, but so what? We’re still family, y’know?”

“He thinks you’re what?” Vaclav’s German wasn’t perfect, and he didn’t know that word, or even if it
was
German.

“Some people say
meshuggeh
.” Weinberg tried to be helpful, but didn’t succeed. Then he spun his right forefinger by his right ear.

“Oh.” Vaclav got that, all right. He sometimes thought the Americans was nuts, too, though for reasons no doubt different from the ones Weinberg’s father had.

He addressed the envelope in care of the International Red Cross in Geneva and sent it off. He had no idea whether the Red Cross would answer him or his folks would or nobody would. He was inclined to bet on the last. But, as Halévy said, how was he worse off if that happened?

He did get a card from the Red Cross—the first mail he’d had since he couldn’t remember when. It was printed in German (which he could read) and French and English (which he couldn’t). The German said
We are attempting delivery of your letter. We cannot guarantee acceptance
. Presumably, the message in the other languages was the same.

In the meantime, the fighting ground on. The war in Spain was going on seven years old now. By all the signs, it might last forever. The Republicans advanced bit by bit. They’d gain a couple of kilometers. A Fascist counterattack three days later would throw them back one and a half. They’d regroup and push another thousand meters north and west. Sanjurjo’s men would recapture half of that.

Almost every morning before dawn, Vaclav would sling his antitank rifle, crawl out into no-man’s-land, find somewhere to hide, and wait to see what kind of bastards in yellowish khaki he could pot. His work was so regular, he felt as if he ought to punch a time clock when he went out and came back.

He felt proud of himself when he blew the head off another German officer trying to teach the Nationalists how to fight more like the
Wehrmacht
: shoveling shit against the tide, in other words. He almost pitied the German as he pulled the trigger. That didn’t stop him from killing the man, but did leave him thoughtful.

Spaniards were brave. No way around that. Both Spanish Republican troops and their Nationalist foes attacked and defended with a ferocity Vaclav admired and didn’t want to imitate. But attacks went in late. They didn’t always go in where they were supposed to. Artillery support was haphazard at best, and sometimes didn’t come at all.

Vaclav had fought the
Wehrmacht
. Czechoslovakia had built its armed forces on the German model, of which it had far more experience than people here did. Men in
Feldgrau
didn’t fuck up the way the Spaniards did. They were human, sure. They goofed. But their besetting sins were different, and didn’t include sloppiness. If that bastard from the
Legion Kondor
hadn’t gone out and got smashed every night … Well, he’d never have the chance now.

Whenever Vaclav punctuated someone more than usually prominent, he threw Marshal Sanjurjo’s side into a tizzy. The Nationalists started shooting off machine guns and letting fly with mortars and banging away with their 77mm guns and 105s. None of the Fascist hate came anywhere near him. No one in the enemy trenches must have spied his muzzle flash. That was nice. He might even get another shot from this hiding place.

And he did, toward afternoon, at a fat Spaniard who had to be at least a colonel. To his vast disgust, he missed. The Spaniard dove for the deck; he didn’t topple bonelessly, the way he would have if that muscular bullet had pulled the plug on his drain. You couldn’t win them all. Jezek got pissed off whenever he didn’t, though.

This time, the enemy machine guns probed more accurately. He flattened himself against the dirt as the rounds cracked past not far enough overhead. It would get dark pretty soon, but not nearly soon enough to suit him.

After the sun went down, a Czech picket almost shot him when he didn’t come out with the day’s word fast enough. Factory workers sometimes went through tough days, too. They had shorter hours and better pay, though, and most of them weren’t lousy. Vaclav dropped down into the trenches and lit a cigarette.

WHEN ANASTAS MOURADIAN
exhaled, his breath puffed out in a big white cloud. He’d been in colder places. In Siberia, this would have been a mild winter’s day. In Siberia, it could get cold enough that the water in your breath instantly turned to ice crystals when you let it out. It made a noise when it did: the whispers of stars, they called it there.

Stas had never heard the whisper of stars. He’d heard enough different people talk about it to believe it was real, though. This wasn’t anywhere near that cold. But it was cold enough to freeze the ground so planes could fly again. The fall
rasputitsa
was over.

Lieutenant Colonel Tomashevsky explained the mission in the simplest possible terms: “We’re going to knock the Fascist hyenas’ cocks off. If they want to fuck around with the
Rodina
, we’ll make the cunts pay.” Even Mouradian, for whom Russian was a second language, knew a mixed metaphor when he heard one regardless of whether it was laced with mat. A composition teacher would have left angry red scrawls all over the squadron commander’s paper.

Real life didn’t grade things the same way. The assembled flyers—most of them Russians—laughed and whooped. One or two of them pumped their fists in the air.
Mat
had started out as the slang of hoodlums and lowlifes. The camps and the war were like wicks through which it soaked into the wider Russian world.

“Seriously, though,” Tomashevsky went on, “the Hitlerites are getting new tanks that are giving our boys grief. If we blast the stuffing out of the railroad lines and the train stations, the tanks’ll have a tougher time coming forward. So that’s what we’ll do.”

He stabbed at a map on a folding stand with a pointer. “Bobruisk today,” he said. One corner of his mouth twisted upwards. “A different bombardment unit has been given the honor of heroically attacking the railroad yards at Minsk.”

Stas didn’t let out a big sigh of relief, but several flyers did. Minsk lay farther west than Bobruisk, which meant a longer flight over German-occupied territory. Minsk was a bigger, more important place, too. The flak above it would be fiercer. The Pe-2s would be more likely to meet up with Messerschmitts over Minsk.

Let someone else sweat out the tough mission today
, Mouradian thought.
I’ve had my share of those and then some
. If he could help defeat the Hitlerites by flying a milk run for a change, he’d gladly do that.

The squadron commander whacked the map with the pointer. “We’ll make our approach from the southeast and escape in the same direction,” he said. “Word is that the Nazis have emplaced some new batteries north of the yards.”

Some Party member or Jew had probably risked his life to bring that word to the Soviet authorities. Or maybe it was some Russian peasant whose sister had been raped by a squad of Germans. Hitler’s men hadn’t gone out of their way to endear themselves to the population on the land they’d seized. Just the opposite, in fact. The frightening thing was how many Soviet citizens collaborated with them anyhow. What that said about the glorious wisdom of General Secretary Stalin …

What that said about the glorious wisdom of General Secretary Stalin was not for the likes of Anastas Mouradian to judge. All he had to do was bomb the stuffing out of Bobruisk and try to get back in one piece so he could go bomb some other Fascist-held town tomorrow or the day after.

Sergeant Mechnikov, who would actually yank the levers that let the bombs fall from the plane, had had his own briefing—or maybe, like a lot of sergeants, he knew things without needing to be told. “Bobruisk,” he announced when Stas and Isa Mogamedov met him by the Pe-2.

“That’s right,” Stas said.

“Beats the snot out of Minsk,” the bombardier declared. He’d been plucked off a
kolkhoz
for the military and stuck in the fuselage of a bomber because he had the muscles to do the job. He didn’t care what he said. He came right out with what Stas only thought. Maybe he’d end up in a camp on account of that. Or maybe he was NKVD, and trying to pull something unpatriotic out of the officers he flew with. You never could tell in the USSR. No wonder so many people didn’t see the Hitlerites as worse than what they already knew.…

He won’t pull that out of me
, Stas thought as armorers trundled bombs across the frozen airstrip toward the Pe-2 on four-wheeled carts. Having such thoughts to begin with was dangerous. Letting anyone else know you had them was suicidal.

Stas ran through the mechanical checks on the Pe-2 with his usual care. Young Lieutenant Mogamedov had leaned toward sloppiness on such details till he found Stas wouldn’t stand for it. More often than not polite as a cat, Stas didn’t go around saying things like
you stupid, thumb-fingered Azeri
. Mogamedov, to his credit, didn’t want Stas even thinking things like that.

So many things in war you couldn’t control. If something you could watch out for upped and bit you because you got careless … You’d curse yourself as you hit the silk—if you got the chance to hit the silk.

It all looked good today. The Pe-2 picked up speed as it jounced along the strip. It climbed into the air when Mouradian pulled back on the stick. He spiraled up into the sky and found his place in the formation. The other bombers’ guns would help cover his machine. He would do the same for his comrades. It might even help, a little.

A few scattered tracers rose up at them as they crossed the fighting front. German? Soviet? Both?
Both
was the best bet. The slim, graceful Pe-2s looked more like
Luftwaffe
aircraft than most in the Red Air Force’s inventory. Red Army men commonly tried to shoot down anything they had doubts about. None of the flak troubled the squadron.

“Do you think the Fascists will let their air defenses farther west know we’re on the way?” Mogamedov asked.

“Of course they will,” Mouradian answered. In the Soviet Union, such attention to detail was anything but guaranteed. The Germans made most of their mistakes by being too precise, too complicated—and, fairly often, by taking it for granted that their foes would show the same kind of automatic competence they did themselves.

Lieutenant Colonel Tomashevsky led the squadron by a zigzag path, dodging in and out of clouds whenever he could. Stas approved of not making life easy for anyone trying to track them. Somebody would be, sure as the devil’s auntie.

A railroad line, straight as a stretched string across snow-dappled ground, guided them to Bobruisk over the last few kilometers. Something in the town was burning, obscuring the railroad yards. No, Stas realized: more likely, the Fritzes had got word the bombers were on the way and had sent up smoke screens to make things hard on them. Hitler’s minions were much too good at that.

Their flak was heavy and accurate, too. The 88s that tank crews hated so much could also fling destruction kilometers into the sky. Tracer rounds and black bursts with fiery hearts told the gunners where to send their following volleys. Stas was into his bombing run, and had to fly straight for the yards. The Pe-2 bucked in the air from near misses like a horse ridden for the first time.

The plane just ahead of him in the formation took a hit that tore off half its right wing. Burning terribly, it tumbled toward the ground. Stas hoped the crew could bail out. He had to fly his own machine, and couldn’t look down to see. Sometimes distraction was a blessing: not a Marxist-Leninist thought, but a true one.

“Drop the bombs!” Mogamedov shouted into the voice tube. Away they went. Mouradian swung the Pe-2 around, hard, and jammed down the throttles as he streaked away to the southeast. Another bomber fell out of formation with one engine smoking badly and the prop feathered.

The wounded plane lasted no longer than a lame elk would have among wolves. Messerschmitts tore into it. Down it went, and the German fighters roared after its brethren. But the Pe-2 did have a good turn of speed. The Germans caught only one. Stas thanked the God in Whom he officially didn’t believe that it wasn’t his.