Bombs Away

24

Major Jeff Walpole got up on the firing step to look across the barbed wire at the Red Chinese positions. He got down again in a hurry. A good thing he did, too: a bullet aimed at him cracked past a couple of seconds later. It might have missed. Did you want to find out, though?

The battalion CO had a big grin on his face. Cade Curtis couldn’t see why. The Chinks were too goddamn close and too goddamn aggressive. But Walpole said, “Those bastards have worries of their own.”

“How’s that, sir?” Cade was glad every day the Red Chinese didn’t try to storm the American lines. He wasn’t even slightly sure they wouldn’t break through.

“They’ll be the ones with supply problems for a while,” Major Walpole said. “Didn’t you hear Armed Forces Radio this morning?”

“No, sir,” Cade said. “They were throwing mortars at us this morning.”

“That’s always fun.” Walpole had the ribbon for his own Bronze Star with a V. Cade didn’t know if he’d won it in this war or the last, but he’d be a man who knew something about mortars. He went on, “Anyway, we bombed a couple of the cities on the Trans-Siberian Railway. Blagoveshchensk and Khabarovsk.”

Cade knew Khabarovsk lay north of Vladivostok, or what remained of Vladivostok. He wasn’t so sure about the other place, or about how to pronounce it. Instead of trying, he found a different kind of question: “When you say bombed, do you mean bombed? Like with atoms?”

“With atoms, yeah,” Major Walpole agreed. “So they won’t put Humpty-Dumpty together again in a few days, the way they would if they were fixing up ordinary bomb damage.”

“Yes, sir,” Cade said, but he wondered if Walpole was an optimist. Mao’s men had driven new tracks through the ruins of Harbin way faster than American military intelligence guessed they could. He didn’t care about laborers, only about the labor they did. Was Stalin likely to prove more merciful? When had he ever?

Staff Sergeant Klein ambled up the trench. A cigarette dangled from the corner of his mouth. Nodding to Walpole, he said, “Sir, I hear you tell the lieutenant we dropped some more A-bombs?”

“That’s right, Sergeant. Khabarovsk and Blagoveshchensk.” Walpole could say it.

“Yeah, I know where those are at. That’ll slow the trains down some,” Klein said. If he knew where Blagoveshchensk was, he was one up on Cade. After a meditative puff, he went on, “Any idea where the Russians’ll clobber us for payback?”

“I haven’t heard anything,” Major Walpole answered. “It would be nice if we could keep them from hitting us anywhere.”

“Yes, sir. It sure would.” By the way Klein said that, he didn’t believe it would happen no matter how nice it was. He pulled out his cigarettes. “You guys want a smoke? Look at me-I’m turning into a tobacco shop for officers.”

“I’ll take one. Thanks,” Walpole said.

“Thank you, Sergeant. Me, too,” Cade added. A private had given him the matches he used to light up. They advertised a bar on Hotel Street in Honolulu where you could probably buy the hostesses along with the drinks they served.

The smoke still burned as it went down the pipe and into his lungs. It didn’t make him think he’d lose his last can of C-rats any more, though. And he did get the little jolt of relaxed alertness that made people start using cigarettes to begin with.

“See what you did?” he said to Lou Klein. “You turned me into a junkie.”

Major Walpole laughed. “You mean you weren’t before? I didn’t think there was anybody over here who didn’t smoke like a steel-mill chimney. Christ, even the North Koreans puff away every chance they get, and those sorry bastards don’t have food half the time, let alone tobacco.”

“I’ve never seen ’em short of small-arms ammo, though,” Cade said.

“Uh-huh. The cartridges get through. I think they make their own in Pyongyang, too,” Walpole said.

“Cartridges aren’t hard. Anybody with some brass bar stock and a lathe can crank ’em out,” Klein said. “The Red Chinese ain’t makin’ tanks, but they sure as hell turn out copies of Russian submachine guns and the rounds to shoot from ’em.”

Cade looked down at his own PPSh. “By the maker’s stamps, this one’s from Russia,” he said. “But I’ve seen those Chinese copies, too. They work just as well as Stalin’s specials.”

“Pretty soon, they will make their own tanks,” Walpole said. “Then they’ll make their own planes, and Katie bar the door after that.”

“Unless we bomb the fuckers back to the Stone Age before they get that far,” Klein said.

“If we’re going to hang on to our half of Korea, we may need to,” Walpole said. “We can screw the Russians’ logistics, same way they did with us. But we can’t screw up Mao’s logistics, or not very much. Red China’s right across the goddamn river, for Chrissake. We can make ’em work harder to haul the shit over here, but it’s not like we can stop ’em.”

Cade had had that same unhappy thought. “Mao’s got I don’t know how many hundred million people,” he said. “However many we kill, how much difference will it make?”

“Gotta get ourselves more bombs. Bigger bombs. Sooner or later, we’ll make the Chinks sit up and take notice.” Lou Klein sounded like a man with all the angles figured.

He made a hell of a staff sergeant. He could have run the company better than Cade. They both knew it. So, no doubt, did Major Walpole. If Walpole and all the battalion officers suddenly bought a plot, Klein could probably handle that many men, too.

But, because he could do his part of the military job so well, he thought he could do even more. He reminded Cade of the poets and craftsmen in Socrates’ Apology. They too knew their own business inside and out-, but thought they also knew everything else because they did.

And a fat lot of good explaining all that had done the ancient Greek. Socrates had paid the price then. The whole world was paying it now.

No sooner had that cheerful notion crossed Cade’s mind than the Red Chinese started lobbing some more mortar bombs at the American trenches. Mortar rounds-and the nasty little tubes that fired them-were even easier to make than ordinary firearms and ammo. The tolerances were looser, and the tubes didn’t have to be very strong. Homemade artillery, perfect for a country full of blacksmiths like Mao’s so-called People’s Republic of China.

Curtis threw himself flat. Lou Klein was diving for the mud as soon as he was. Jerry Walpole, who didn’t get to the front as much as the two men of lower rank, stayed on his pins half a second longer. It cost him. When he went down, it was with a howl of pain. He clutched at his left thigh. Red started soaking his trouser leg and oozing out between his fingers.

“Corpsman!” Sergeant Klein yelled. “The major’s down! We need a corpsman, God damn it to fucking hell!”

Cade lay closer to Major Walpole. The first thing he did was grab the morphine syrette out of the pouch on Walpole’s belt and stick him with it. The next thing was to pull his own bayonet from the sheath on his belt and use it to cut away the wounded man’s pants so he could see the wound.

It was a nasty, ragged gash. It was bleeding, but not gushing blood. Cade guessed the fragment hadn’t torn the femoral artery-that could kill you in a couple of minutes. He wished for pins to close the cut. Since wishing didn’t produce them, he did the next best thing: he dusted the wound with sulfa, slapped on a bandage, and taped it down as tight as he could.

“You’ll be okay, sir,” he said, hoping he was right. While he was busy like that, the mortar bombs still coming in seemed more an annoyance than a danger.

Stretcher-bearers with Red Cross armbands that wouldn’t do them any good carried the wounded major away. They also ignored the mortar fire. Cade wondered whether the battalion had any healthy officers senior to him. If it didn’t, he’d just inherited it. Well, if Lou Klein might swing a battalion, so could he-again, he hoped.

–

It was getting close to the top of the hour. Harry Truman turned on the radio on his desk to WMAL to catch the NBC news. It would tell him a little of what was going on in the country and the world. And the way it told the stories would let him judge how big a son of a bitch the people who ran NBC thought he was.

He didn’t care, or not enough to let what they thought of him change anything he did. For better or worse, he was his own man. He might make mistakes-he had made mistakes-but they were his, nobody else’s. The buck did stop here. It had to.

Bong! Bong! Bong! The NBC chimes sounded. “In Washington today,” the announcer said, “Republican Senator Joseph McCarthy of Wisconsin again lashed out at the Truman administration. Here is a recording of some of his remarks.”

A momentary pause, and then Joe McCarthy’s raspy voice poured out over the airwaves: “How much trouble have the Democrats landed us in because they’re soft on Communism? All the Reds we uncovered in the State Department must have told Stalin we were weak. They must have pointed out where our defenses had holes. Otherwise, how could the Reds have hit us so hard? Treason and blindness to treason lurk in too many high places.”

“That was Senator McCarthy,” the newsman said. “He-”

“-has his head wedged,” Truman finished for him, and turned off the radio with an angry twist of the wrist. McCarthy had started his Red-baiting witch hunt even before the Korean War broke out. He’d got shriller since the fighting started, and shriller yet after the A-bombs began to fall.

At first, Truman had figured McCarthy was a stalking horse for Robert Taft and the other Republicans who still wanted to be isolationists. Tail Gunner Joe said the things politer pols like Senator Taft only thought. And he didn’t just say them-he bellowed them at the top of his lungs.

He’d succeeded in convincing Truman he was nobody’s stalking horse. He was for nobody except Joe McCarthy. Did he aim to run for President in 1952? He’d be awfully young. Bob Taft had been waiting his turn for a long time. Or Eisenhower might get the nod, the way U. S. Grant had in 1868.

Truman wasn’t thrilled about the idea of either of those men in the White House. Taft did want to pretend nothing existed beyond the borders of the United States. That was hard in the middle of World War III, but he might try anyhow. And Eisenhower struck the President as an amiable but lightweight executive, someone who might run an auto company but not a country.

Next to Joe McCarthy, though, they both looked like the second coming of Abraham Lincoln. They were reasonably honest. You might not fancy their principles, but they had some. McCarthy…The way it looked to Truman, McCarthy didn’t just want to be President. He wanted to be Führer, and he didn’t care whose toes he trampled on his way to the job.

Lie? Smear? Cheat? Invent? He used all those stunts, and wrapped himself in the American flag while he did it. That was part of what made him so dangerous: if you attacked him, you seemed to attack the country as well.

I have to decide whether I’ll run, Truman thought once more. If it looked as if he would lose and drag the Democrats down with him, then he’d do best to bow out. With this war, he wondered whether he would have a chance against anybody the Republicans put up.

But if he didn’t run, who would? The Democrats hadn’t had a disputed nomination since 1932. He shrugged. If he decided he wouldn’t run, he also wouldn’t need to worry about that any more. No one would care what he thought thirty seconds after he announced he was through. He would turn into the lamest of lame ducks.

Stalin and Mao had no worries like that. They’d give orders till somebody carried them out feet-first. Truman had done his best to arrange that for Uncle Joe, but it hadn’t quite worked out. A damn shame, really. How the Reds would have worked out who succeeded their longtime dictator would have been…interesting.

Muttering under his breath, he fired up the radio again. He did need to hear what was going on. The sound came on almost at once; the tubes were still warm. “Defense Secretary Marshall has declined to comment on Senator McCarthy’s latest accusations,” the newsman said. “McCarthy continues to charge that the war is not being fought hard enough, and that, while Marshall was Secretary of State, he permitted many Communists to join the State Department.”

There had been some Reds in the State Department. A few of them had given Moscow a hand. More were people who’d been Communists in the 1930s, when, if you were young and you hated the Nazis, that was where you were liable to end up. Just about all of them had got over it.

There were also some Reds at Los Alamos and other places that worked on A-bombs. Without their help, Stalin might not have had any of his own yet. That was a crying shame, no two ways about it. Things there had also tightened up, though. Or Truman sure hoped they had.

He telephoned George Marshall. When the Secretary of Defense came on the line, Truman said, “Isn’t it wonderful to be loved?”

“Excuse me, Mr. President?” Marshall said.

“Well, let me put it this way instead-when an SOB like Joe McCarthy comes after you with a meat-axe, you must be doing something right.”

“Oh. Him.” The patrician distaste in Marshall’s voice could have belonged to a Roman senator eyeing a barbarian chieftain sightseeing in the imperial city during Hadrian’s reign.

“Yeah, him,” Truman said. “He’s a snake, and a poisonous one at that.”

“People like him are part of the price we pay for living in a free country.” Marshall paused. “I keep telling myself so. Some days, I have more trouble believing it than others.”

“I know what you mean, and this is one of those days,” Truman said. “This is one of the days when I remember how many people in the Weimar Republic said the same thing about that beer-hall babbler in Munich. His stupid party would never amount to a hill of beans, not in a million years.”

“Oh, yes. That’s also crossed my mind, sir,” Marshall said. “The Nazis didn’t amount to much, not until the Depression gave them a boost. I can hope McCarthy won’t, either.”

“So can I. So do I.” But Truman wasn’t happy with his own answer. Marshall was right: the Depression had let Hitler take off. A national disaster had a way of discrediting the people who were in charge when it happened.

Well, what was World War III if it wasn’t a national disaster? So far, only Maine and the western part of the United States had had bombs fall on them. But Truman knew so far meant just that and no further. The Russians weren’t done. He’d just hit them again. Now they would try to hit back. American defenses would do their best to stop whatever Stalin came up with. And maybe their best would prove good enough, and maybe it wouldn’t.

What would happen if, say, Detroit got it, and Chicago, and Boston, and Miami? Would that be enough of a catastrophe to make the citizens storm the White House and the Capitol with torches and pitchforks and-very likely-nooses? If it wasn’t, what would be?

And wouldn’t that be the kind of tide a power-hungry, opportunistic bastard like Joe McCarthy could ride to power? Tail Gunner Joe was bound to hope it was. Not quite aware he was thinking out loud, Truman said, “That man ought to have himself an accident.”

“Those are Stalin’s rules, sir, and Hitler’s, not ours,” Marshall said.

The President sighed. “Uh-huh. I know. But if Hitler’d had an accident like that in, oh, 1928, the world’d be better off today.”

“Maybe. Or maybe the Germans would have wound up with a dictator who knew what he was doing and didn’t make the dumb mistakes Adolf did,” Marshall replied. “It’s all a crapshoot, and you don’t know what the dice will do till you roll ’em.”

“There’s a cheerful thought!” Truman exclaimed. He’d had too many cheerful thoughts like that lately.

–

Vasili Yasevich walked through the pines toward the Amur. He hadn’t seen many people lately. He didn’t much want to see people right now. He was ragged and dirty and tired and hungry, but he preferred all of those to some friendly fool who’d start asking questions.

Snow crunched beneath his valenki. May or not, it lingered long here under the trees. Back in the day, people had said that tigers lived in these woods. His father had sold what he claimed to be tiger liver and gall bladder-and other, more intimate, parts-to Chinese customers. He’d charged through the nose for them, too, even though he didn’t think they did anything. He knew the Chinese thought they did something, and that was what counted.

A tiger would get it over with quicker than either the Chinese police or the MGB. A tiger would also get it over with quicker than getting caught on the fringes of an atomic blast. He’d been far enough from Harbin not to get hurt when that A-bomb went off. He was traveling through the chilly night a few days before when a flash of light far, far away said another town got fed to that fire. He didn’t know for sure which one, but Khabarovsk seemed the best guess.

Now people there were melted and burned and blinded and going through the hell of radiation sickness. He’d already seen that once. Once was three times too many for a single lifetime.

But the Chinese character that meant crisis combined the ones for danger and opportunity. If he made it to the Soviet side of the Amur, he could claim he came from the outskirts of Khabarovsk and had got away with just the clothes on his back. Most of the time, the MGB would automatically snatch up anybody who couldn’t show proper papers. Even the Chekists, though, had to realize plenty of refugees from cities that got A-bombed wouldn’t have made a point of taking their documents with them.

Danger, yes. From everything his father and mother had said, danger was constant company in the USSR. But also opportunity. He had a chance to fit himself into Soviet life he never would have got if not for the American bombers.

One thing at a time. First he had to reach the far side of the Amur. That might not be so easy. He could already hear it gurgling past in front of him, so he was getting close. He knew it was broad and swift and cold. Trying to swim it was probably asking to freeze or to get swept downstream and drowned.

Half an hour later, he reached the river. He’d come this far. The Chinese hadn’t caught him. That struck him as a miracle bigger than any the priests in the Orthodox church in Harbin blathered about when he was a kid. The pines on the far side of the river belonged to another country, one where his looks didn’t brand him a foreign devil. All he had to do was cross.

The Amur held a few low, muddy islands. They were boat-shaped, with the long stretch paralleling the current. Vasili got the idea that the ones he saw might not be there five years from now, but that others could rise to take their places.

He wondered if he could make a raft and paddle or pole out to one of them. It would be a useful way station…if he could get to it. What he had for chopping down trees, unfortunately, were his straight razor and the little knife in the top of his right felt boot.

He bent down and scooped up a handful of water to drink. The river was bitterly cold, even worse than he’d guessed. No, he didn’t want to swim in it. But how could he cross if he didn’t? He wasn’t Jesus, to walk across on top of the water in one of those priestly miracles.

That water was glassy clear. Fish swam in it-he could see them. His stomach growled. He’d always thought the Japanese were disgusting for eating raw fish. If he could somehow pull one of these out of the water, he didn’t think he’d bother cleaning it before he gulped it. Scales? Fins? Bones? Guts? Down the hatch!

Then he saw the most beautiful thing he’d ever seen. He was sure of it. When you wanted-when you had-to cross a river, what could be more gorgeous than a man with a fishing pole sitting in a rowboat?

Was the man Russian or Chinese? Vasili didn’t know or care. He still had one trade dollar and a little of the opium he’d left Harbin with. What food he’d eaten on the way north, he’d bought with the other silver coin and the rest of the drug. When they already suspected you of peddling it, you stopped caring about what they’d do if they caught you.

Vasili cupped his hands in front of his mouth and yelled “Hey!” as loud as he could. The fellow in the boat kept right on fishing. “Hey!” Vasili yelled again, even louder this time-loud enough so something in his throat started to hurt. He waved his arms. He jumped up and down.

After what seemed forever and a day, the fisherman noticed he was there. The man waved back to him, as if to a friend.

“Hey!” Vasili screamed one more time. He almost added Yob tvoyu mat’, idiot! Almost but not quite: a Russian would understand the obscenity, and even a Chinese on the border might. He did wave again, and beckon, and yell, “Come here!”

Slowly, languidly, the fisherman started rowing toward him. Just the way he did it made Vasili think he had to be a Russian. Chinese didn’t act as if they had all the time in the world. They knew too well they didn’t.

And, sure enough, when the man got close enough to hail Vasili without rupturing his lungs, he called, “Zdrast’ye!” By then, Vasili had seen that he wore a shaggy russet beard. It might help keep him warm through the winters in these parts. Vasili’s whiskers were getting longer and thicker by the day, too.

“How are you?” Vasili answered, also in Russian. “How’s the fishing?”

“Not too bad, not too bad,” the fellow said. He picked up a bottle from the bottom of the boat and raised it to his mouth. His throat worked. Russians ran on vodka the way tanks ran on diesel fuel. “Ah! That’s the straight goods!”

“How about you take me over to the other side?” Vasili said.

“What?” The man stared at him. “You want to go over there?” He jerked a thumb back at the Soviet side of the river.

“Da. That’s right,” Vasili said.

A look of sozzled cunning spread across the fisherman’s face. “How come? What did you do on your side?”

“I got a big shot sore at me. What else do you need to do?”

“Not fucking much. So it’s the same down there as it is on our side, huh?”

“It’s got to be the same all over the world,” Vasili said sourly. “I can give you some silver. I can give you a little opium, too, if you let me have a couple of fish.”

“Opium? I’d rather drink vodka.”

Fool, Vasili thought. Aloud, he said, “I bet you can find somebody who wants it.”

“Maybe.” That shrewd look came back. “How do I know you ain’t trying to get me into trouble?”

“How do I know you aren’t a Chekist?” Vasili returned.

The fisherman guffawed. “Think I’d be out here dicking around if I belonged to the MGB? Those cunts make you do stuff. You can’t just take off and go fishing every time you get a hard-on for it.”

From everything Vasili’d heard, that was true. He said, “I’ll give you a trade dollar for the trip, along with the opium for the fish.”

“A dollar? From America? They’d slice my balls off if I tried to do anything with it.” Now the Russian-the Soviet Russian-looked alarmed.

As patiently as he could, Vasili said, “They call them Mex dollars in China. It’s still silver. It’s still heavy. If you can’t pass it, you can melt it down.” He sounded as persuasive as he knew how, as if he were trying to get a girl into bed with him. “Come on, pal. Take me across and then forget you ever saw me.”

“It’s like that, huh?”

“Of course it’s like that. What, you think I came to China for my fucking vacation? Come on, take me over. It’ll be worthwhile for you, as long as you keep your yap shut.”

If the fisherman decided it was too risky, all Vasili could do was wait till another boat came along. If another boat ever came along. He made himself remember that, and didn’t cuss as hard as he might have. He tried to look friendly and harmless.

He must have managed, because the Russian rowed over. The boat’s nose or prow or whatever you called it scraped on Chinese mud. “Khorosho. Hop in.”

In Vasili hopped. He showed the fisherman the trade dollar and the opium. He also flipped open his straight razor. “I’ll pay you when we get across.”

Not much later, the boat grated on Soviet soil. It sounded the same as the Chinese mud had. Vasili left the coin and the glass jar. He took three trout.

“Thanks,” he said, and got out. The fisherman, whose name he’d never learned, went back into the Amur as fast as he could.

I’ve come home, Vasili thought. Then he found out what raw fish tasted like.

–

Isztvan Szolovits crouched in a foxhole that wasn’t deep enough. Up ahead, a machine gun threw death in his direction. Along with the stream of reports from the gun, every so often a bullet would crack past not nearly far enough over his head. The team running that gun knew what they were doing with it. They traversed it so the rounds streamed back and forth. Anyone who got up and tried to advance on it asked to catch one with his teeth, or maybe with his navel. The gunners were shooting low.

Isztvan wasn’t sure whether the machine gun was in Bochum or Essen. For that matter, he wasn’t sure whether he was in Bochum or Essen. The two German towns west of Dortmund blended seamlessly, one into the other. The only difference between them Isztvan could see was that mail to them didn’t go through the same post office.

He still had no idea why nobody’d killed him. He had to be luckier than he’d ever imagined. The Russians were determined to get as much use as they could from the Hungarian troops they’d brought forward. They thought using soldiers meant using them up, too. As far as the Russians were concerned, men were as disposable as bullets or boots.

That applied to their own troops. It applied even more to soldiers from Hungary or Poland or Czechoslovakia or Bulgaria or Romania. If getting killed advanced the sacred cause of socialism, or if the Russian marshals even suspected it might, they spent troops like kopeks.

Foomp! Foomp! Those were mortars going off. With the evil little beasts, the Hungarians didn’t even have to stick their noses out of their holes to shoot back at the machine gun. Isztvan approved of shooting back without running the risk of getting hurt.

The machine gun fell silent. Isztvan wondered whether the mortar had killed the men who served it or they were bluffing and waiting to shoot down anybody naive enough to try to advance. Such questions were important. If you were a Hungarian soldier fighting in the Ruhr, they were life-and-death important.

In the lull, somebody from the other side shouted in Magyar: “What are you fools doing fighting for Stalin? Come over to the Americans! You’ll be free, and no one will try to kill you or make you do anything you don’t want to do!”

Hearing the man reminded Isztvan how many Magyars had left their own country for the United States in the days before the First World War. It reminded him all kinds of ways, in fact. The American soldier who spoke the language had plainly learned from his folks as a child, not in school. He had a peasant accent from the back of beyond, and an old-fashioned peasant accent at that. Magyar in Hungary had moved on, while his was stuck in the past like a fly in amber.

None of which had anything to do with the price of beer. He might talk like a clodhopper from 1895, but his message was modern as tomorrow. He wasn’t saying anything Isztvan hadn’t asked himself a hundred times. Isztvan didn’t care a filler about the solidarity of workers and peasants all over the world. He was here because Stalin and Stalin’s followers, both Russian and Hungarian, would have killed him or tortured him or jailed him had he tried to refuse. That was the long and short of it.

“Kibaszott szarházi!” Those were Sergeant Gergely’s dulcet tones. How did he know that the Magyar-speaking American was a fucking shithouse clown? Odds were he didn’t, but that didn’t stop him.

“God fuck your stinking, wrinkled whore of a mother!” the guy on the other side yelled back. Isztvan giggled. Maybe he hadn’t learned all his Magyar from his mommy and daddy.

“Yell all you want, dog’s dick,” Gergely said. “We didn’t drop any A-bombs on your country.”

“No, Stalin did. You just suck him off,” the Hungarian-American replied.

Sergeant Gergely spoke to his own men: “You see how we’re all friends together, right?”

Some of the Magyars answered to show him they agreed. Whether in fact they did or not was anybody’s guess. Gergely had to know that. This was his second war fighting for a dubious cause. He had a different dubious cause now from the one he’d aided during World War II, but, as then, Hungary was doing what a great power required, not what it wanted to do itself.

Isztvan Szolovits kept his mouth shut. He didn’t think protestations of loyalty would give the sergeant any more confidence in him. For that matter, he had no confidence in himself. If he found a chance to surrender to the Americans without getting killed, he figured he would jump at it. The Magyar-speaking Yank had that much right.

In the meantime, though, he needed to keep fighting. Chances to surrender didn’t come along every day. The Americans would cheerfully kill him most of the time. The best way to stay alive and wait for the moment he might not find involved shooting back at them when they fired at him.

Which they did, with rifles, machine guns, and artillery. Under cover of all that flying metal, some of them started moving forward through the wreckage of whichever German city this turned out to be. They aimed to flank out the Hungarians and drive them back.

Isztvan was ready to retreat, if he could come out of his hole without getting killed. But half a dozen Soviet T-54s rumbled forward like dinosaurs squashing little mammals under their feet in some prehistoric swamp. Unlike those ancient little mammals, some of the Americans carried bazookas. But when two rockets in a row glanced off the tanks’ turtle turrets without penetrating, the Yanks gave it up as a bad job and fell back to their old line.

An American who’d stopped a machine-gun bullet from one of the tanks with his face lay only fifty meters or so from Isztvan’s hole. Greed overcame caution. He crawled to the dead Yank, took his food and cigarettes and first-aid kit, and slithered back to cover.

After dark fell, he gave Sergeant Gergely two of the three packs he’d looted. “Thanks, kid, but those Russian tankers deserve these more than I do,” the veteran said.

“Could be, but I know you and I don’t know them,” Isztvan said. “Boy, that American who spoke Magyar sure talked funny, didn’t he?”

“Oh, just a little,” Gergely answered. “Like he had cowshit on his boots and rode a donkey to church. I’ll tell you something else, though-you think the Yanks won’t fuck you over same as the krauts and the Ivans, you’re nuts. They’re big. You ain’t. That’s all it takes.”

“Could be,” Szolovits said again.

Gergely couldn’t have seen the expression on his face. It was too dark. He chuckled anyhow, unpleasantly. “Don’t do anything stupid-that’s all I’ve got to tell you,” he said. Isztvan wished it weren’t such good advice.