Bombs Away

7

You got used to things. Vasili Yasevich supposed that was how people kept fighting wars. The horror built up to a certain level, and after that it wasn’t horror any more. It was just something you dealt with every day, the way people who made shoes dealt with the smell of leather.

Going through the wreckage of what had been Harbin was like that. Vasili did wonder how radioactive he was getting and what that was doing to his health now and in the future. Wondering was all he could do about it. If he tried to escape, Chinese secret police or soldiers who were just as radioactive as he was and didn’t seem to wonder about it a bit would have shot him. So he stayed there and he worked.

The bomb had gone off near the center of town. Ever since the early days of the twentieth century, Russians in Harbin had built substantial churches and offices and blocks of flats in that part of the city, so that central Harbin had been a reminder of what a prerevolutionary Russian city was like.

No more. Those buildings were sturdier than the Chinese-style ones surrounding them. They weren’t sturdy enough to survive having a small sun suddenly kindled not far above them. Some of the brick and stone had melted to something very much like glass. Steel and copper had puddled and flowed like water.

And people…Those substantial Russian buildings had substantial Russian sidewalks in front of them. Here and there on the scorched sidewalks, and on walls that hadn’t quite melted and hadn’t quite come down, Vasili saw what looked like the silhouettes of men and women. He didn’t need long to realize that was exactly what they were. The atom bomb’s flash had printed people’s shadows on those sidewalks and walls. Then, a split second later, it seared the people who cast them to hot gas. The shadowprints were all that remained to show they had ever lived.

That was bad. Finding charred, shrunken corpses inside ruins a little farther away from where the bomb went off was worse. You stuffed those into burlap bags and carted them away. With water and fat boiled off, with even bones burnt fragile, you could fit several into one sack. You could, and Vasili did, over and over again.

After the first few days, he wasn’t dealing with the wounded and dying any more. The dying had mostly become the dead. He saw burns worse than anything he’d ever imagined, burns that put him in mind of roast meat forgotten on its spit over the fire. Roast meat, though, didn’t moan and shriek and beg for someone to put it out of its anguish. He took care of that a couple of times, with the knife he wore on his belt. He had dreadful dreams about the things he saw, but not about helping people die. As best he could tell, he was doing them a favor.

Some of the dying on the edge of the blast area escaped that torment to fall victim to a different one. Their hair fell out. They grew nauseated. They pissed blood. It dripped from their rectums, and sometimes from their eyes and even from the beds of their nails. When they vomited, the black, curded crud they heaved up showed they were bleeding inside, too.

Nobody could do anything for them except give them opium so they hurt a little less. The Chinese doctors called it radiation sickness. Some of the people with it lived: the ones who bled least or not at all. But the doctors admitted they didn’t have much to do with that. The only thing that mattered was how big a dose the sufferers got to begin with.

Every evening, when Vasili and the other men and women trying to clean up after the atomic bomb came out of the blast zone, secret policemen searched them. It would have been contrary to human nature not to plunder what the dead needed and protected no more.

But the secret police were as desperately overworked as everyone else near Harbin and the other shattered Manchurian cities. They didn’t find everything the laborers secreted on their persons. And even the secret police were human beings. Some of them would take a cut of what they did find and let the laborers keep the rest. If they confiscated it all, the laborers might stop plundering. Then they wouldn’t get anything.

“What have you got today, round-eye?” a tough-looking Chinese policeman with a PPD asked.

“Here’s your squeeze, pal.” Vasili handed him a jade bracelet and some heavy gold earrings set with pearls and rubies. He spoke the same rough northeastern dialect of Mandarin as his watcher, and spoke it about as well. The older he got, the more he used it. The way things looked, his Russian would be the language that got rusty.

“Let me check these.” The secret policeman took off a mitten and hefted the earrings. A smile spread across his broad, flat face. “That’s gold, sure as the demons! Go on through.”

“Thanks. I’m not dumb enough to try to trick you,” Vasili said. He made as if to shrug off his quilted jacket. “You want to frisk me?”

“No. Just get out of here.” The Chinese gestured with the barrel of the submachine gun.

Vasili got. The secret policeman turned to see what he could extract from the next laborer in line. Vasili walked slowly, as if he were very tired and his feet hurt. He was very tired, and his feet did hurt. One reason they hurt was that he was walking on gold coins he’d stashed under the soles of his feet.

The coins were English sovereigns. Most of them bore Victoria’s jowly profile; a few carried her son Edward’s bearded visage. He couldn’t remember the last time he’d seen any: probably before the Sino-Japanese conflict joined the wider river of World War II. His father had used sovereigns, or maybe gold rubles, to get out of Russia, and to do things he needed to take care of after that.

Even in Mao’s aggressively Communist China, gold was bound to have its place. Gold always had a place. Vasili’s father’d said so more than once, and Vasili didn’t think his old man was wrong. Neither had the people who’d stashed away these coins. But, while gold could do all kinds of things, it couldn’t stop an atom bomb. Those people didn’t need their sovereigns any more. Vasili was sure he’d be able to use them, even if he didn’t know how just yet.

Next stop after the secret-police check was the feeding station. He got a small bowl of rice with a few vegetables on top. No soy sauce-nothing to flavor the mess. Another bowl of the same, or sometimes noodles or a roll, was breakfast. That was it. Along with cash and jewelry, the laborers took whatever canned goods they came across.

“You didn’t fill this bowl as full as the one I got yesterday!” groused the man in front of Vasili. Vasili never complained. Getting along in a country where hardly anybody looked like you was hard enough without doing anything to make it harder.

“You’re right. It isn’t,” the guy on the other side of the kettle answered. “Not as much came in today. With the railroads all smashed up the way they are, it’s heaven’s own miracle we’re getting anything.”

“But I do hard work every day,” the laborer said. “How can I keep it up if I’m hungry all the time?”

“Plenty of people hungrier than you.” The server jerked a thumb in the direction the line was moving. “Get out of here, you greedy turtle. You’re holding up the works.” Glaring, the man walked on. Vasili came up and held out his bowl. Glaring, the fellow with the ladle said, “You going to give me a hard time, too?”

“No, not me.” Vasili definitely knew better than to piss off anybody who worked in the kitchens. Plenty of people around Harbin were hungrier than the laborers. The government was trying to keep them from starving to death. It didn’t worry about anything past that, not yet.

But men and women who handled food never starved. If that wasn’t a law of nature, it should have been. This guy wasn’t fat, but he sure wasn’t starving. If you annoyed these people, they’d find ways to make you sorry. “Well, here, then,” the server said. He gave Vasili a little more than the other fellow’d got.

“Thanks!” Vasili sounded as if he meant it. A little grease on the axle helped the wheels go round.

–

Ihor Shevchenko ate pickles and drank vodka. Pickles, salt fish, meat dumplings…Those were the kind of zakuski that gave the booze some style. He wasn’t smashed yet, but he was getting there.

He raised his glass. “Here’s to good old antifreeze!” he said, and knocked back the snort at a gulp. The vodka was icy cold, which made it burn less on its way down the hatch.

“To antifreeze!” echoed the kolkhozniks drinking with him. They downed their toasts, too. His wife giggled. Anya was a little bitty thing. She didn’t need to drink much to get plastered.

The next guy who stood up was missing half his left hand. One look at Volodymyr’s face, though, would have told you he was a veteran. You didn’t need to see the mutilation to know. “To our glorious leader, Joseph Stalin, and to victory!”

“To Stalin! To victory!” everyone chorused, louder than people had toasted antifreeze. You had to show your enthusiasm for the glorious leader. Someone would notice and rat on you if you didn’t. Bad things were liable to follow soon after that.

Before too long, the snow would melt. The land would turn to soup for a while. Then it would be time to plow and plant. There’d be more work to do, even if no one would do it with any marked enthusiasm. There wouldn’t be so many chances for a bunch of people to get together and get drunk. (It was a Soviet collective farm. There would always be some.)

Ihor eyed Anya. Maybe later on he could get her off by herself, and then…. Or maybe, by the time they got done here, he’d be so fried he couldn’t get it up with a crane. He wasn’t going to worry about it now. He wasn’t worrying about anything now.

Pyotr stood up, glass clutched in his meaty fist. He was a Russian, but people on the kolkhoz mostly didn’t hold it against him. “Here’s to the soldier’s hundred grams!” he said loudly, gulping the toast.

Everyone whooped and cheered at that one, especially the men who’d fought in the war, which was almost all of them. They’d gladly gulped their hundred grams every day then. You needed something to numb you and make you not think so much before you rushed the Germans’ trenches. After a while, there weren’t enough Germans left to stop the Red Army, but the Hitlerites always made their khaki-clad foes pay a hefty butcher’s bill.

Was the Red Army still feeding soldiers the daily dose? The Americans wouldn’t be much fun without it, would they? You could toast victory all you wanted, but they’d dropped an atomic bomb inside Soviet territory. Yes, the radio said the USSR had retaliated, but even so….

What would the Hitlerites have done if they’d had atomic bombs? Ihor didn’t need to think about that one much; the question answered itself. The Germans would have dropped as many of them as they could on the Soviet Union. Hitler didn’t just want the Russians and Ukrainians and Byelorussians and Poles conquered and subdued. He wanted them exterminated. He hadn’t had the tools for the job. They were here now.

“To smashing all of Germany!” the next man up said, and drank the toast. Ihor followed suit. It matched his mood and his worries. It also gave him the license to numb himself up some more.

Olga Marchenkova-Volodymyr’s wife-turned on the radio. After a couple of minutes of music, a familiar voice said, “Attention, Moscow is speaking.” Yuri Levitan had broadcast the news from Moscow all through the war. He was still doing it, even though he was a Jew, and Stalin had cooled on them in recent years. Levitan went on, “Here is the latest from around the world on Friday, February 15, 1951.”

The more sober kolkhozniks started shushing their drunk comrades, some of whom were singing and shouting and carrying on. When the news was over, they could start making a racket again. Now? No. The news suddenly mattered once more, mattered the way it had when Moscow teetered on the brink of falling to the Nazis. Listening to Yuri Levitan then had been a capital crime-the Ukraine already lay under the Germans’ harsh yoke. People did it anyhow. Some died for doing it.

“I regret I must inform you that the forces of imperialist aggression have struck new and harsh blows against the European states helping the Soviet Union to advance the socialist vanguard of humanity,” Levitan said in somber tones. “The United States uses as a pretext for its murderous onslaught the Soviet Union’s destruction of Elmendorf Air Force Base in Alaska. They choose to forget that the cleansing of Elmendorf came in direct response to their unprovoked attack against the harmless village of Pechenga.”

Why would the Americans drop an atom bomb on a harmless village? Ihor wondered. Even with vodka fuddling him, he could see that that didn’t add up. But it was one of those questions you thought of without asking. You did if you aimed to stay out of the gulags, anyhow.

“American atomic bombs have leveled Zywiec in Poland, Szekesfehervar in Hungary, and Ceske Budejovice in Czechoslovakia,” Levitan continued gravely. He was a professional; he didn’t stumble over any of the difficult names. “The United States claims these cities were chosen because they are transport hubs through which Soviet troops and those of the fraternal socialist people’s republics flow westward toward the frontier between the socialist world and its reactionary opponents. Simple blood lust seems the more likely explanation.”

When Ihor was a little boy, his parents would sometimes cross themselves on hearing grim news. It was a dangerous habit in the God-fighting USSR. They trained themselves out of it, and trained Ihor out of it, too. He couldn’t remember the last time he’d slipped. But his hand started to move that way now.

Some of the soldiers from the Kiev Military District, the men he’d talked to not so long ago, probably would have gone through one of those towns or another. If not for his own lamed leg, he might have been summoned back into the Red Army himself. In that case, he might have gone through one of those towns. And if he had…what? Chances were, little pieces of him would be making a Geiger counter chatter right now.

He reached for a vodka bottle and swigged. No one had proposed a toast, but he didn’t care. He wanted not to think about that kind of fire blossoming above his head. If he’d had a bottle of ether and a rag, he would have used them instead of the hooch. When you thought of permanent oblivion, temporary oblivion was the only foxhole you had.

He expected Yuri Levitan to go on talking about the American atrocities. Instead, the suave newsreader told of Stakhanovite shock workers in Voroshilovgrad who produced twice as much aluminum as their quota required. “Even then, they refused to leave their posts,” Levitan said. “They insisted on doing everything in their power to aid the revolutionary proletariat on the march and on dedicating themselves to glorifying our beloved Comrade Stalin.”

That was laying it on with a trowel. With a shovel, even. Or Ihor thought so. And, despite Volodymyr’s toast, Stalin wasn’t widely beloved, not in the Ukraine. Too many people here had died. He was respected. Anyone who’d beaten Hitler had to be respected. Besides, Hitler had proved himself what seemed to be impossible: an even worse bargain than the Soviet leader. And Stalin was feared. People feared him the way chickens feared the chopping block, and for the same reason. But beloved? No.

All the same, at least half the kolkhozniks in the common room were nodding at Levitan’s words. Maybe they wanted to be seen agreeing with what he said. Maybe they were just patriots. Love of country was the biggest part of why people didn’t abandon Stalin in the Great Patriotic War’s blackest days.

Whatever their reasons, they were nodding. And Ihor decided he had better nod, too. You didn’t want to stick out from what everyone else was doing, no matter what that happened to be. If you stuck out, you got noticed. And if you got noticed, you commonly regretted it.

–

One of the guys in Tibor Nagy’s squad came from Szekesfehervar. He was as sure as made no difference that the American atom bomb had incinerated his whole family. Part of the time, he didn’t want to do anything but roll himself in his blanket and weep and wail. The rest, he wanted to grab his rifle, charge across the border between the Russian and American zones in Germany, and kill all the Yankees on the far side singlehanded.

Right now, Tibor had drawn the short straw in talking him out of taking warfare into his own hands. “You can’t, Ferenc. You just can’t, no matter how much you wish you could,” he said, as reasonably as possible. “Come on-don’t be stupid. Give me your piece.”

Ferenc clung to the rifle the way a little kid would cling to a velveteen rabbit. “Won’t,” he said, as if he were about to stick a thumb in his mouth.

Tibor wouldn’t have minded if he did-it might have calmed him down. “Hand it over, dammit.” He let his patience show. “I know what happened. I’m sorry about what happened. But you can’t go shooting up the countryside on account of that.”

“Why not? The Americans did.” Ferenc just wanted to hit back.

“But they’re a country. You’re just one fellow. You aren’t even a general or anything. You’re just a fucking private like me. You’d get yourself killed for nothing. And if anybody you’re related to is still alive, they’d roast ’em over a slow fire to pay you back for going off the rails.”

Ferenc’s eyes filled with tears. “It isn’t fair,” he whimpered. “It isn’t right.”

That was undoubtedly true. What it had to do with the price of beer was liable to be a different story, though. As far as Tibor could see, very little that had happened since he and Ferenc were born was either fair or right. Fair and right were for big countries, like Russia and America. Germany had been big enough to make Hungary dance to its tune-but, as things turned out, not big enough to keep playing it. Otherwise, the Germans wouldn’t have rival foreign armies stationed on their soil.

And if Ferenc was getting weepy…Tibor reached out and grabbed his squadmate’s Mosin-Nagant. “There you go, pal,” he said. “Just take it easy for a while. Sooner or later, things’ll look better.”

“Later,” Ferenc said, in tones that might have come from the Mask of Tragedy brought to life.

Tibor didn’t care, or not very much. He had the rifle. That was what counted. Unless the Russian generals masterminding this operation sent their Hungarian allies over the border in the next couple of hours, Ferenc didn’t need it. He’d be as soppy as that “Gloomy Sunday” song for a while. The other soldiers just had to make sure he didn’t hang himself or do anything else stupid that he couldn’t take back.

Sergeant Gergely noticed Tibor carrying the rifle. “That’s not yours,” the noncom barked. He might be-he was-a son of a bitch, but he was one goddamn observant son of a bitch.

“No, Sergeant.” Tibor agreed to what he couldn’t very well deny. “It’s Ferenc’s. He was talking about going after the Americans again.”

“I wouldn’t mind if they shot him. It would serve him right.” The milk of human kindness was sour cream in Gergely. Shaking his head, he went on, “But he can’t go starting a war all by himself, can he? And Schmalkalden is close enough to the border to give him a chance of doing it.”

He pronounced the name of the German town perfectly. Tibor would have, too; they both spoke German well, even if they didn’t always want their allies to know it. Hardly anyone in the world but Hungarians knew Magyar. German was Hungary’s window to what the rest of Europe was saying, and had been for as long as Hungary had been joined to Austria at the hip.

“Well, he won’t now, not till he gets the rifle back,” Tibor said.

“You do a good job of handling him,” Gergely said. Tibor gaped; the noncom wasn’t in the habit of doling out praise. Gergely went on, “Well, you do. I’ve noticed. You know who else does?”

“No, Sergeant.” Tibor wasn’t used to the older man in a talkative mood. It unnerved him.

“Szolovits,” Gergely said. “Yeah, the sheeny. Ain’t that a kick in the nuts?” A twisted smile on his face, Gergely bobbed his head and went about his business, almost as if he thought he’d been talking with a fellow human being.

After a little thought, Tibor was less surprised than the sergeant that Isztvan Szolovits might have a better idea than most about what Ferenc was going through right now. When the Nazis overthrew Admiral Horthy and used the Arrow Cross as their puppets, lots of Jews had headed for death camps.

That didn’t happen till 1944, late in the war. More Jews survived in Hungary than in countries where the SS had got to run wild sooner. Even so, how many relatives had Szolovits lost? Chances were he understood Ferenc’s misery better than most of the other soldiers.

The company got a night’s pass. They piled into a couple of ancient buses and went into Schmalkalden to see if German beer was as good as people said. The town had been bombed in the last war, but there weren’t a whole lot of towns between the Atlantic and Moscow that hadn’t been. It was shabby but orderly. The civilians on the street wore clothes that were mostly old, but well-tended. Tibor hardly noticed that; it was the same as he was used to at home.

“Bier, bitte,” he told the barkeep as soon as he found a tavern (it didn’t take long).

“Here you go.” The man gave him a curious look as he served him. “You’re not Russian, are you?”

“No, I’m Hungarian,” Tibor answered. “How did you know?” His German would have an accent different from a Russian’s. His uniform was of a greener khaki than the Red Army used, and of what he thought was a smarter cut.

But the bartender told him, “You said please. Next Ivan who does that in here will be the first. And because you did, that one’s on me.”

“Danke schön!” Tibor exclaimed. He sipped. It wasn’t great beer, but it was pretty good. That it was free made it taste even better.

“You didn’t fight in the last war, did you?” The German shook his head as he answered his own question: “Nah. Of course you didn’t. You’re too young-you’re just a kid.”

Since Tibor was just a kid, he couldn’t even resent that. He said, “My sergeant did.”

“That a fact?” The bartender paused to light a cigarette. By his harsh, rasping chuckle, he went through a lot of them. After blowing out smoke, he continued, “So he’s one of those sock people, is he? Hell of a lot of ’em around these days.”

“Sock people?” Tibor echoed. He wasn’t sure he’d heard straight. If he had, he feared he’d tripped over an idiom he didn’t understand.

But the bartender nodded. “Sockeleute, ja. You know the kind I mean. I call ’em that ’cause they fit on either foot just as easy.”

“Oh!” Tibor giggled like a girl when he got it. He wondered what Sergeant Gergely would have to say if he came out with that. Something interesting and memorable, he had no doubt. He might try it-on a day when he was feeling more suicidal than poor Ferenc did right now. Taking his courage in both hands, he asked, “Did you fight in the last war?”

The bartender looked about forty-five, not that Tibor was any too good at guessing ages. But every German too young to wear a long white beard was likely to have carried a Mauser or a Schmeisser at some time between 1939 and 1945.

“Ach, you bet I did, sonny,” the man answered. “You can’t see, but my left leg is gone a little below the knee. I get around all right, even if I’m not what you’d call quick any more. Shell fragment nailed me when we were pulling back from Kiev at the end of 1943. And after I was on my feet-well, my foot-again, I got to sell drinks to the Russians who blew me up. Life is full of shit sometimes, you know? But what are you gonna do?”

“What is there except the best you can?” Tibor said. His own country lay under Stalin’s heavy thumb. It had lost a city, lost it utterly and forever, because it did. Here he was in Germany, about to go to war for Stalin’s cause, which mattered not at all to him. Doing the best he could, he finished his beer and slid the seidel across the bar for a refill.

–

Days were starting to get longer now. The sun went to bed later and got up earlier at the end of a week than it had at the beginning. But night still stretched plenty far enough for the Red Army tankmen to peel the camouflage netting off their machines, to make sure they had plenty of fuel, and to do all the checks they could in the dark.

Konstantin Morozov didn’t know what would happen to a soldier who flipped the switch on a flashlight or even struck a match to get some extra light by which to examine something. The Chekists wouldn’t shoot the poor imbecile. That would be too merciful. No, they’d take him away to dispose of him at their leisure. Better the attack should go in short one tank than that a fool or a traitor should give everything away.

He hadn’t slept all night. Little white tablets made sure he wouldn’t. He still had most of them left. He didn’t expect to sleep for the next couple of days. His heart thumped in his chest. His eyes opened very wide. Every time he blinked, his eyelids reminded him how dry and sandy they were. The pep pills were on the job, all right.

He checked his watch again. It was 0454. The last time he’d looked down at his left wrist, it had been 0451; the time before that, 0447. He expected to check a couple of more times in the next six minutes.

“You’re ready to go, right, Misha?” he demanded of Mikhail Kasyanov.

“Da, Comrade Sergeant!” The driver sounded absurdly confident. Only somebody who had no idea what war was all about could seem so relaxed at a time like this. Kasyanov figured it would be a walkover. He couldn’t imagine anything going wrong.

Konstantin Morozov, unfortunately, could. At the end of the Great Patriotic War, the Red Army had massively outnumbered its Hitlerite foes. It had tanks and planes and men and fuel and ammo falling out of its asshole. And attacks still got screwed up. The Germans would fall back a couple of kilometers so artillery barrages fell on empty ground. Then they’d hit you when you came forward expecting them to be knocked flat. Or they’d open up a lane in their defenses to invite you through, then jump you from the flanks and rip up your striking column. They had more tricks than a trained circus dog.

If Misha thought the Americans didn’t and wouldn’t, he was using his dick instead of his brain. Well, he’d have sense knocked into him soon enough. 0457 now. Beside Konstantin, Pavel Gryzlov was a wide-shouldered shadow. Lower and farther back, Mogamed Safarli hardly seemed there at all.

0459. Any second now, unless his watch ran fast. Any second, any second, any…

0500. Nothing happened. “Yob tvoyu mat’, you stupid watch,” Morozov snarled. He stared at the luminous tip of the second hand crawling around the dial.

Ten seconds past 0500. Still nothing. Fifteen seconds past 0500. Still nothing. He wanted to smash the watch against the breech of the 100mm gun. That would teach the cheap, worthless thing a lesson.

Seventeen seconds past 0500…and the world exploded. It might not have been as loud as the roar of an atomic bomb, but it was the loudest thing Konstantin had ever heard. He’d been there when the final assault on the Seelow Heights kicked off, just east of Berlin. That had been so loud, it beggared words like thunderous. This, he thought, outdid it.

He had no idea how many Katyusha batteries and big guns the Red Army had right here. He had no idea how many covered the whole length of what the imperialists called the Iron Curtain. Lots was a pretty fair guess for the first of those, lots and lots for the second. Even with the tank buttoned up, the noise was a palpable blow against the ears.

Konstantin had to remind himself to shout, “Gun it, Misha!” over or through the impossible din. Either Kasyanov heard him or he remembered they were supposed to get moving as soon as the bombardment started. They were at the very tip of the point of the Soviet spear.

Rockets and shells were still flying west as fast as the crews who served the weapons could send them. The artillerymen had to be as happy as clams right now. They were laying Germany waste, always the dream of any Red Army soldier. The T-54 began to vibrate: the motor was running. Normally, it made a considerable racket. Now, the cannons and the rocket launchers ensured that Morozov knew he was going only through the seat of his coveralls.

The tank clattered west, along with the rest of the machines from Captain Gurevich’s company, the rest of the machines from the regiment, the rest of the machines from the Guards Tank Army…the rest of the machines from whatever large fraction of the Red Army Stalin had committed to the attack against Western Europe.

“Next stop, the Rhine!” Morozov whooped. That wasn’t literally true, but it was the operational goal of this enormous onslaught. Once they’d cleared out the western zones of Germany, they would decide whether the Low Countries and France deserved a dose of the same medicine.

Hitler’d given it to them. And Hitler’s forces, not quite eleven years ago, had been nothing, nothing at all, next to the swarm of steel and soldiers roaring west now. The defenders might be more ready to do their jobs than they had been in 1940, but Konstantin didn’t dwell on that. Forward! was all he cared about.

Go as fast as you can and blow up anything in your way. That was what the attack orders amounted to. Bogging down was the worst thing that could happen. The Germans had in 1941, when mud and then snow made them fight in ways they hadn’t planned for. It ended up costing them victory.

There were worse dangers now to bogging down and bunching up than there had been during the last war. If you concentrated like that, you gave the enemy a perfect chance to drop an atom bomb on your head. That would slow up your advance like nobody’s business.

Captain Gurevich had said the Americans wouldn’t do that to territory they were supposed to be defending. No: he’d said he hoped they wouldn’t do that to such territory. Konstantin hoped the same thing. Oh, did he ever! After all, he was betting his life on that hope.

Misha steered the tank around the burning carcass of one that had stopped something. It happened, however much you wished it wouldn’t. Not even the most overwhelming barrages knocked down all the enemy’s defenses and gave you a walkover. Konstantin had seen that too many times against the Fritzes. Defenders were like cockroaches; you couldn’t kill them all.

A lance of flame brewed up another Soviet tank. Konstantin nudged Pavel Gryzlov as he traversed the turret with his other hand. “Give them a burst of machine-gun fire there,” he told the gunner. “That’s a goddamn bazooka team.”

“I’ll do it,” Gryzlov answered, and he did. Brass cartridge cases clattered down onto the floor of the fighting compartment. “We’re over the frontier, then, Comrade Sergeant?”

“We must be,” Morozov said. “It’ll get light pretty soon. Then we’ll be able to see what we’re doing.”

Before long, enough fires were blazing so he didn’t need to wait for sunrise to have a pretty fair notion of what was going on. A lot of those fires came from smashed T-54s, T-34/85s, and heavy Stalin breakthrough tanks. The Soviet theory was that you couldn’t make an omelet without breaking eggs. Tanks were as disposable as machine-gun rounds. So were tank crews, something Konstantin didn’t like to think about.

But enemy tanks blazed, too. The American machines were taller than their squat Soviet counterparts. Their armor wasn’t so well sloped, either. As the Nazis did before them, though, they had excellent fire control. They scored hits from ranges a T-54 was unlikely to match. Only one thing to do about it: get in close and slug. Along with the rest of the Red Army, Morozov’s tank did it.