Coup d'Etat

Chapter 14

Theo Hossbach knew the way to Smolensk. Whenever his Panzer III and the other machines in the regiment turned toward the Soviet stronghold, the Ivans fought twice as hard as they did the rest of the time. And, considering how much trouble they made any time at all…

He didn’t think the old Panzer II in which he’d gone through so much with Hermann Witt and Adi Stoss would have survived this campaign. No sooner had that gone through his head than he laughed at himself. Of course the old panzer wouldn’t have survived the campaign. It damn well hadn’t.

So now he’d had to get used to two new crewmen. All things considered, he would have been happier charging a Red Army machine gun with a Luger. The Russians could only kill him. They wouldn’t want to try to get to know him.

He had new duties, too, but that wasn’t so bad. Now he sat up front in the panzer, next to Adi, with the radio set between them. He could see out. He needed to see out, because he was in charge of the bow machine gun as well as the radio. He could use them both at once if he had to, controlling the gun with a padded mount that accommodated his forehead.

Getting used to two new people’s habits seemed much harder. Kurt Poske liked to sing and whistle to himself. Sometimes the loader didn’t even realize he was doing it. Theo wanted to reach back and smash his kneecap with a wrench. It might have been better had Poske managed to stay on key. On the other hand, it might not. He still would have been there.

Lothar Eckhardt, by contrast, cracked his knuckles. Everybody probably did that once in a while, but the gunner did it all the time. It sounded like gunfire coming from behind Theo. He could have come up with a million noises he would rather have heard.

A Panzer II’s turret had room for only one man. Sergeant Witt had had to command the panzer and load and fire the cannon and the coaxial machine gun. That left him as busy as a one-armed paper hanger with the hives, but he did it for a long time. He didn’t need to any more, not with this bigger, more modern machine. But everything seemed to come with a price.

Driver and bow gunner/radioman could talk to each other without their crewmates’ hearing. They could, but mostly they didn’t. Theo didn’t talk much no matter what. Adi made more noise, but he respected his comrade’s peculiarities. That was one of the things that made soldiering beside him a pleasure.

As they rattled along one morning, Theo found a question escaping him: “You all right with the new guys?”

Adi glanced over in surprise. A sentence from Theo was like a couple of chapters from anybody else. “Ja,” he answered, pitching his voice so it wouldn’t carry back to the turret. “Pretty much. We’d all be dead by now if they didn’t shoot straight.”

He had that right, no two ways about it. Eckhardt had been a pretty good gunner before he got this slot. The Reich ’s training centers took care of that. And Sergeant Witt, with his own wealth of experience, made the kid better than he had been. Except for singing and whistling, Poske did all right in action, too. Loader was the most junior position in the five-man crew.

None of that had much to do with what Theo meant, though. He tried again: “They give you a hard time?”

“Nah.” Stoss shook his head. “No worse than usual. Nothing a guy can’t handle, know what I mean?”

Theo nodded. Even the usual kind of ragging could rub a man raw. If Heinz Naumann, the guy who commanded the old Panzer II before Sergeant Witt, hadn’t got killed, he and Adi would have fought it out. Theo was sure of that. He was also pretty sure Adi would have done for the late sergeant. Lucky it didn’t happen-lucky for everybody but Naumann.

One more question formed in Theo’s head. He didn’t ask it. Like a cat, he had a very clear sense of limits.

An authoritative voice spoke into his earphones: “Look for Ivans ahead, map square Red-6.”

“Red-6. I hear you,” Theo responded, and relayed the news to Witt.

A brief pause followed. No doubt the panzer commander was checking his maps. German maps of Russia weren’t nearly so good as the people who printed them thought, but you did the best you could with what you had. Profanity followed the pause. “Now they tell us,” Witt said. “We’re already in square Red-fucking-6.”

As if on cue, machine-gun bullets clattered off the right side of the Panzer III’s hull. If not for the hardened steel, some of them would have punctured Theo. They sounded like pebbles tossed onto a corrugated-iron roof-but not enough like that. Pebbles on an iron roof might startle, but they wouldn’t scare the piss out of you.

Though he had a vision port over there, he didn’t want to open it. That might have let in a bullet or two, and he would rather have dealt with angry wasps. Wasps only made you wish you were dead. The Russians used old-fashioned, heavy, water-cooled machine guns, like the German Maxim from the last war. They weren’t very portable, which didn’t mean they wouldn’t chew holes in you once they did get set up.

“Panzer halt!” Sergeant Witt ordered, and Adi Stoss hit the brakes. The turret slewed sideways. Witt gave crisp commands. Eckhardt fired-once, twice. Shell casings clattered at the bottom of the fighting compartment. The stink of cordite filled the panzer. Witt grunted in satisfaction. “Forward again, Adi,” he said, and traversed the turret so it faced the front once more.

That machine gun wouldn’t bother anyone else. Theo still wondered how many other Ivans lurked over to the right. German foot soldiers would find out-probably the hard way. No trees off in that direction, so there probably weren’t any Red Army panzers lurking there. He could hope not, anyhow. He could-and he did.

He peered out through his forward vision port. That one boasted thick armor glass, like the stuff in a Stuka’s windshield. It also had a steel shutter to keep the glass from getting nicked when bullets started flying. Scars and divots on the armor glass said the shutter didn’t always get used. You needed to know what was going on… didn’t you?

Back in the Panzer II, Theo had never known what was going on, or no more than the radio and his crewmates told him. Now he could see out. Monkey curiosity made him keep doing it, too, though as often as not he couldn’t change anything. He could, and did, tell himself it was line of duty. He had the machine gun, after all. But a lot of the time he was just nosy.

He stiffened in dismay at the same time as Adi let out a horrified yip: “Fucking Ivans!” Where the devil did they come from? One second nothing, the next a swarm of riflemen springing from the ground like the warriors old what’s-his-name, the Greek, got when he sowed the dragon’s teeth.

Well, Theo had some dragon’s teeth of his own. The bow machine gun chattered, spitting brass out of the side of its mouth. The turret machine gun hammered away, too. The Russian infantrymen went down in waves like threshed barley. But the ones who didn’t get shot kept coming. They were brave, too, damn them.

And they wouldn’t just have rifles. Some of them would carry Molotov cocktails. Theo didn’t want to think about blazing gasoline dripping into the panzer-no, not even a little bit. So many things that would catch fire, from paint to explosives to precious flesh. They’d have grenades. One of those through a hatch could ruin your day. Or bigger charges would blow off a track. A stuck panzer was like a hamstrung bull waiting to be slaughtered.

Firing short, steady bursts wasn’t easy. He wanted to burn out the MG-34’s barrel so he could kill as many Russians as fast as he could. Discipline held, though. In its own harsh way, Wehrmacht training was a marvel.

So was whatever the Ivans did to their men. Theo was sure he would have run away. The Russians stolidly kept coming… till two Stukas screamed down out of the sky and landed big bombs on them, close enough to the Panzer III to make it try to rear. That did the trick. Not even the Reds could take a dive-bombing in stride. The handful still on their feet-none near the panzer-skedaddled.

Adi laughed shakily. “All in a day’s work,” he said.

“Aber naturlich,” Theo answered.

After refueling and resupplying at Narvik, which the Kriegsmarine had quickly fitted out as a bare-bones U-boat base, Julius Lemp took the U-30 back up to the Barents Sea. He understood why the navy wanted to use the little town; it lay pretty close to the Barents Sea itself.

As far as he was concerned, that ended its advantages. The U-boat had got what it needed at Narvik. His men hadn’t. They couldn’t drink and screw and blow off steam there. A U-boat base without a brothel! What was the world coming to? There was a club for sailors, but it seemed a halfhearted affair, with bad, watery beer and not enough of it. No wonder the ratings grumbled when they put to sea again. In their shoes, Lemp would have grumbled, too. He would have grumbled in his own shoes, except a skipper had no one aboard to grumble to.

He intended to take care of that when he got back to the Reich. He didn’t want to put anything in writing, but some of his superiors would get an earful.

The one good thing was, his men were too busy to complain as much as they would have with more time on their hands. Here up past 70° north latitude, the sun stayed above the horizon most of the summer. Perpetual daylight kept everybody hopping all the time. You never knew when you might spot a British convoy bound for Murmansk or Arkhangelsk-or when it might spot you. Prowling Russian seaplanes were another danger. Lemp had met one of those in the Baltic. He didn’t care to repeat the experience.

Topside watches took all the concentration a man had. You couldn’t stretch people out past two hours. With unending daylight to face, ratings who’d never stood a topside watch before got the chance to try it. Lemp got the chance to worry that they might miss something an old hand wouldn’t have. He gulped bicarbonate of soda to soothe an acid stomach, wondering why he’d ever wanted to become a naval officer.

Navigation also got… interesting. The compass deflection was enormous. Accurate sun shoots became vitally important. With no stars in the sky, the sun was the only clue to direction they had. None of the manuals talked about times like this-U-boat men hadn’t needed to worry about them in the last war. That was another discussion Lemp wanted to have with his superiors.

And, even in summer, the ocean was bitterly cold. Without the Gulf Stream, it would have been colder yet. Without the Gulf Stream, Murmansk and Arkhangelsk-and likely Narvik as well-would have been as icebound as Antarctica. Then I wouldn’t have to come up here, Lemp thought. That wouldn’t be so bad.

Black-and-white auks and puffins and murres bobbed on the sea, now and then diving after fish or taking off with small, hard-working wings. They weren’t quite penguins, but they came close enough to satisfy anybody this side of a relentless nitpicker.

The Kriegsmarine sent out a coded message that a convoy had sailed from Aberdeen, bound for one Russian port or the other. Lemp admired the British sailors’ courage and decided his own superiors weren’t the only ones with problems. That convoy would have to face not only U-boats but also land-based planes from Norway. Talk about running the gantlet…

Sure enough, the planes soon found the convoy. Not only did they raid-they also shadowed, relaying its position, its course, its speed. Diesels thrumming through the soles of his shoes, Lemp brought the U-30 southwest to block its path.

He had to be careful. Destroyers or corvettes would be escorting the convoy. On the surface, they could sink him. And he wouldn’t be able to submerge, then come back up later and escape under cover of darkness. Here there was no darkness.

So he made sure he had men who knew what they were doing up on the conning tower when the U-30 neared the advancing convoy. That convoy had already taken damage-he didn’t know how much. U-boats transmitted only when they had to, to keep the enemy from using their signals to work out where they were.

One thing he was sure of: the freighters in the convoy would make more smoke than the U-30 did. He’d find the British ships before they knew he was around. After that was when things would get interesting.

The sun skimmed low above the northern horizon when one of the ratings spotted the smoke from the enemy. Lemp changed course so he could attack with the sun at his back. The harder he could make things for the English, the happier he would be-and the better his chances of doing it again soon.

Up went the Schnorkel ’s stovepipe. By now, Lemp took the gadget for granted. More and more of the Kriegsmarine ’s U-boats used it these days. It wasn’t a punishment any more. It was a tool of war, one he’d come to rely on.

But the Royal Navy had its own tools of war. Sharp, almost musical pings echoed through the U-30’s hull after the boat went to Schnorkel depth. “What the fuck is that?” Gunter Beilharz asked, reaching under his Stahlhelm to scratch his head.

“They have an echo locater,” Lemp answered. “It’s mentioned in my latest briefing reports. It isn’t perfect, but it’s better than anything they used before.”

Beilharz eyed him in something approaching horror. “They can get range and bearing from the echoes?”

“That’s the idea,” Lemp allowed. “Their toy isn’t everything it ought to be, though.”

“It had better not be,” the Schnorkel officer said. “If they can find us whenever they please, they’ll sit on top of us and drop ash cans till we either cave in or have to come up and fight it out on the surface.”

A U-boat that got into a surface engagement with a warship designed to fight up there was dead meat. Everybody knew it. Lemp would have been happier not to get the reminder. And he would have been much happier if the periscope hadn’t shown him a Royal Navy corvette speeding his way with a bone in her teeth. That damned echo locater did work.

He didn’t want to take on a warship. He could sink her with an eel before she got close enough to hurt him. He could… if he was good enough, and if he was lucky enough, and if he felt like telling the other English warships where he was. Ping! Ping! With that miserable gadget, they already had a pretty good notion.

But then other noises came through the U-30’s steel hull: the unmistakable heavy crump! of a torpedo exploding, and after that the sound of a ship breaking up. That dreadful creaking and crackling made any man who went to sea flinch.

It also made the Royal Navy corvette spin through as tight a turn as she could make and dash back toward the vessels she was shepherding. Half a dozen men inside the U-30 gave forth with various profane variations on What’s going on?

“Well, I don’t know for sure,” Lemp answered, “but unless they’re sinking their own ships I’d say we aren’t the only U-boat in the neighborhood.” An elk struggling through deep snow would draw a pack of wolves. A convoy crossing dangerous waters might draw a pack of submarines.

Another torpedo slammed into a freighter. This ship, by the sound of it, didn’t break up right away. Maybe the sailors would have a chance to make the boats and get picked up. For their sake, Lemp hoped so. The poor devils wouldn’t last long bobbing in the Barents Sea.

Those two hits made the enemy forget all about Lemp’s boat. The escorting warships were hellbent on hunting down the wolf that had already bitten them. With the Schnorkel, getting into range of a fat freighter belching coal smoke was almost unfairly easy. She even obligingly zigzagged to present her flank.

“Torpedo one — los!.. Torpedo two — los!” Lemp commanded as soon as he had the shot lined up. Twin wet whooshes meant the eels were on their way. Both hit. One was a dud; it thunked off the coal-burner’s flank. But the other eel tore a hole in her stern before Lemp really started swearing. She soon began to settle in the water.

By then, Lemp and the helmsman had swung the U-30 toward another target, this one a bit more than a kilometer off. A longish shot, but he launched only one torpedo: he saved the last one in the forward tubes for self-defense. Reloading was a slow, sweaty job, and his boat wouldn’t stay forgotten now that he’d announced himself.

Cheers echoed through the U-boat when the eel struck home. As soon as it did, Lemp pulled away from the convoy. The snort let him go twice as fast underwater as he could have without it. And you had to sense when you shouldn’t get greedy. There would be plenty of other chances-provided he didn’t throw himself away on this one.

Had Corporal Hideki Fujita stood any straighter and stiffer, anyone seeing him would have thought he’d been carved from wood. But would a sculptor have included a saluting mechanism of such mechanical perfection?

“Requesting permission to speak to you, Captain- san!” Fujita said, his voice an emotionless rasp.

Captain Masanori Ikejiri returned the salute. “Hai? Nan desu-ka?” He could have just told Fujita to dry up and blow away. That he asked him what it was instead showed he didn’t despise the very ground on which the demoted noncom walked. That was something, anyway. It was more than most of Fujita’s superiors seemed willing to admit.

“Please excuse me, sir, but I am not useful here now that my bungling has made me lose face.” If Fujita was going to grovel, he’d grovel as hard as he could. No sense to half measures, not here, not now. And he was sure groveling was his only chance to escape this humiliating situation-unless he killed himself, of course. That was always a possibility, but he didn’t want to die, not yet. “Let me serve the Empire somewhere else in some different way. Please, sir, let me go forth with my rifle and kill the Empire’s enemies.”

Ikejiri eyed him. If the captain wasn’t from a noble family, Fujita would have been amazed. He had the air of effortless ease and style plenty of people tried to imitate, but rarely with much luck. You needed to be born to it, to take it for granted, to bring it off as you should.

He also had any Japanese officer’s uncompromising attitude. “If you fail, you must take the consequences,” he said coolly.

“Yes, sir. But here at this place I don’t have much chance to make up for failing,” Fujita replied. “Put me in front of the enemy, Captain- san, and I’ll show the Emperor what I can do.”

“There are more kinds of courage, Corporal, than the one it takes to charge a machine-gun position,” Ikejiri said.

“Captain- san?” All Fujita really heard was his new, reduced rank. Corporal was a grade a man should hold on the way up to something better. Holding it again, on the way down from something better, burned like lye.

“You have to be brave, don’t you, to do your job in spite of any trouble you had?” the captain said. “Yes, other people will know what happened. But your duties here at Pingfan are still important.”

“Sir, I want to kill something!” Fujita blurted desperately. “Even the maruta laugh at me.”

“Hard to be laughed at by a log,” Ikejiri said in musing tones. “Can’t you make them afraid to open their mouths while you’re close enough to hear them?”

“Oh, yes, sir. And I do.” Fujita’s hands folded into reminiscent fists. “But the sons of assfucked whores go on laughing at me behind my back. I know they do.” You couldn’t pound a man into the ground for an amused glint in his eye, even if the man was also a log. American maruta were too scarce and too valuable to let guards smash them around for the fun of it. Some of the bacteriologists’ experiments required subjects in good condition. Prisoners at Pingfan often got plenty to eat because of that, not the starvation rations men base enough to surrender deserved.

“Hmm.” Captain Ikejiri rubbed his chin. “We don’t usually give men back to the ordinary military once they get stationed here. They know too many things that are nobody else’s business.”

“I wouldn’t blab, sir! By the Emperor, I’d never say a word! Not a peep!” Fujita had been proud of knowing things about Japan’s war effort that not many people knew-even if, as a noncom off a farm, he didn’t understand much about the scientific details. Now he would gladly have forgotten everything.

In another army, Ikejiri might have mentioned the risk of his getting captured. To do so here would have been an unbearable insult. The captain knew Fujita would rather die.

Again, he could have just told Fujita to shut up and do as he was told. Fujita had been more than half expecting that. Maybe he would have obeyed. Maybe he would have obeyed for a while and then blown his brains out. Even he wasn’t sure. And if he wasn’t, how could Captain Ikejiri be?

Rubbing his chin again, the officer said, “How would you like to get away from this encampment for a while, Corporal?”

“Doing what, sir?”

“You know we are making weapons here-weapons to use against the Chinese and the Americans and anyone else who stands in the way of the Co-Prosperity Sphere.”

“Oh, yes, sir.” Fujita nodded, remembering the ride deep into the country to test the germ bomb on the Russian maruta. Relief filled him. He’d feared Ikejiri would give him something worthless, something useless, to do. But finding out how to kill Chinese in carload lots sounded important.

“All right, then.” Captain Ikejiri spoke quickly now, with the air of a man who’d come to a decision. “You may do that. We have air bases that deliver special weapons where they are needed. I will transfer you to one of those.”

“Thank you, sir! Oh, thank you!” Fujita said, all but jumping for joy. With any luck at all, the people who served on that air base wouldn’t know what kind of bakayaro he’d been here. One thing sure: he wouldn’t have prisoners laughing at him any more.

“Maybe you shouldn’t thank me just yet.” Masanori Ikejiri’s voice was dry. “You will be going into more danger than you’re likely to face here. Make sure your rifle is clean and well oiled.”

“It is, sir!” Fujita assured him. “All I have to do is throw a few things in my duffel and I’m ready to leave.” He’d been eager to come to Pingfan. Now he was even more eager to get away.

“Don’t get too excited-it won’t happen quite so fast.” The captain’s voice stayed dry. “We have to go through the proper channels, and the paperwork will take a while. But I’ll put in the transfer right away.”

Something in his tone said right away meant as soon as you quit bothering me. For a wonder, Fujita realized as much. He wanted to grab the officer’s hand and kiss it. For another wonder, he had sense enough to see that wouldn’t do him any good. He saluted again-a salute extravagant enough to come out of a movie and to make a drill sergeant snarl curses at him. He figured Captain Ikejiri had earned this one.

The only person he told about the upcoming transfer was Senior Private Hayashi. They’d served together for a long time, and Hayashi had, or at least showed, more sympathy than most soldiers. “Good luck,” he said. “I hope the fellow who takes your slot isn’t too big a chucklehead.”

“Why should you worry?” Fujita said with a wry grin. “After all, you’ve had enough practice putting up with me.”

“You aren’t bad. You’ve never been bad,” Hayashi said. “You beat us when we’d earned it, but not just for the sake of showing us what a big cock you’ve got. What more could a private want from a noncom?” By the way he said it, wanting even that much-or that little-was an exercise in optimism.

And so it was. Back before Fujita got promoted, plenty of brutal corporals and sergeants thumped him for no better reason than that their rank gave them the right. That was how things worked in the Japanese army. Fujita couldn’t imagine things working any other way.

Getting the transfer took longer than he thought it should. Only fear that Captain Ikejiri would rescind it if Fujita bothered him kept the corporal from asking what had gone wrong. He made himself wait. He couldn’t think of many tougher things he’d done as a soldier.

At last, the precious form came through. With it came a note that said a truck would take him to Harbin. Once there, he would ride the train and then… well, it got complicated then. He’d end up in Yunnan Province, or maybe in Burma, depending on how things went before he arrived. He couldn’t have found Yunnan on a map to save his life. He wasn’t so sure about Burma, either.

He didn’t care. He could go to the other end of the world for all the difference that made to him. More than half of him hoped he would. If nobody knew him when he finally arrived, wherever that was, wonderful. What more than a fresh start could a man down on his luck hope for?

They pinned the Order of the Red Star on Anastas Mouradian for shooting down a Flying Pencil. He wished winning the medal would have meant more to him. What it did mean boiled down to two things. First, he’d taken a chance and lived through it. And, second, the authorities might cut him a little more slack with the medal than they would have if he hadn’t won it.

Sadly, he understood he couldn’t count on the second one to hold true. If the NKVD decided he was a nuisance, he’d end up in a gulag or dead as fast as the Chekists could arrange it. If they only wondered, the medal might make them give him the benefit of the doubt.

Well, it might.

With the war not going so well, he needed any good-luck charm he could grab. The powers that be in the Soviet Union were like bad-tempered children. When they didn’t get their way, they threw tantrums. Bad-tempered children smashed toys, or maybe dishes. Bad-tempered Soviet commissars and their flunkies smashed people instead.

Mouradian didn’t worry about his own side more than he did about the Germans. Hitler’s minions were actively trying to kill him. The NKVD wasn’t. He didn’t think it was, anyhow.

Still, he couldn’t help noting that, in a perfect world, he wouldn’t have had to worry about his own side at all. What? This world was imperfect? What a surprise! What a disappointment!

If this were the perfect world, or even a better world, the Nazis and their parasites wouldn’t be closing in on Smolensk. But they were, despite the Soviet armed forces’ best-certainly most fervent-efforts to stop them. Radio Moscow tried its hardest to deny that. These days, though, Luftwaffe bombers could reach the USSR’s capital. Once, they’d knocked Radio Moscow off the air for several hours. Only once, but Stas didn’t take it for a good sign.

And, if this were the perfect world, or even a better one, the Soviet move against Romania would have bothered the Fascists more. A blow against their soft underbelly… Only the underbelly turned out not to be so soft. These days, the fighting wasn’t in eastern Romania. It was in the western Ukraine. No doubt because it was, Radio Moscow mentioned it as seldom as possible.

So Stas relied on things he heard unofficially. You couldn’t always rely on such things. Then again, you couldn’t always rely on Radio Moscow, either, though saying so, or even lifting an eyebrow at the wrong time, could cost you your life. Unofficially, some Ukrainians were greeting the Nazis as liberators, giving them bread and salt and strewing flowers in the path of their armored personnel carriers.

Unofficially, things in the Ukraine had been very bad before the war. Soviet authorities were bound and determined to liquidate the kulak class. And well they might have been-the richer peasants hadn’t cared to give up their land and flocks and tools and join collective farms. The authorities broke them. Nobody knew how many Ukrainians died-starved or shot-in the collectivization process. Or, if anyone did know, he wasn’t talking.

If some of the survivors didn’t act like good Soviet citizens now, whose fault was that? Theirs, of course, or it would be if the USSR won. Then they’d look down the barrel of another round of retribution. In the meantime, maybe they were getting some of their own back.

Stas did wonder how much. He also heard unofficial things about how the Germans behaved in Soviet territory. Some of those things were hard to believe. If the Nazis acted that way in the Ukraine, they’d wear out their welcome in a hurry. Maybe they wouldn’t be so stupid down there.

Or maybe they would. Stas wouldn’t have been surprised. It wasn’t as if Stalin hadn’t acted like a bloodthirsty monster enforcing his will there.

The Armenian flyer sighed after he got back to his tent. He was alone there-it was safe enough. As safe as anything could be these days, anyhow. No, when Stalin behaved like a bloodthirsty monster, he wasn’t acting. He was showing what he really was. And so was Hitler.

Which one made the worse bloodthirsty monster? Stas was damned if he knew. The English had had an affair with Hitler and decided they would rather dance with Stalin. The French, by contrast, stayed in bed with the Nazis. So did the Poles… but they would have slept with Stalin had Hitler jumped them first.

Stas almost welcomed the next mission. Wasn’t a clean chance of getting killed better than the muddy ocean of doubts that had filled his thoughts lately? He could make himself believe it… right up till the moment when shell fragments slammed into the Pe-2. As soon as that happened, he discovered how much he wanted to live.

The engines still sounded all right. There was no fire. He gave the instrument panel a quick, frightened once-over. The fuel gauge stayed steady. So did oil pressure. He cautiously tried the controls. All seemed in working order. “Bozhemoi!” he said-with feeling. “I didn’t think we’d be that lucky.”

Another German antiaircraft shell burst close to the bomber. The Pe-2 staggered in the air, but no more clangs or rattles warned of another hit.

Ivan Kulkaanen frowned. He fiddled with his earphones. His frown deepened. “Radio’s out,” he reported.

No one was talking in Stas’ earphones at the moment, either. Was that because no one was talking or because nobody could get through? Mouradian did some fiddling of his own. Then he eyed the set’s dials. He hadn’t done that before-he’d had more urgent things to worry about. Sure enough, every needle lay dead against its peg.

“Well, it could be worse,” he said. “We can get back without a radio, and they’ll slap in another one or splice the cut wires or do whatever else needs doing.”

“Sure.” Kulkaanen nodded. “Nobody can order us to do anything stupid now, either.”

“No one would ever do anything like that.” Virtue overflowing filled Mouradian’s voice. He and the young blond Karelian in the other seat exchanged amused looks. Of course their superiors were always wise and careful. Of course.

No one would warn them if Messerschmitts attacked the squadron, either. Stas spent the rest of the flight wishing for eyes in the back of his head. Wishing failed to produce them. He got back to the airstrip anyhow, and put the Pe-2 in the hands of the repair crews.

He hadn’t been down long before the squadron commander summoned him. Saluting, he said, “I serve the Soviet Union!”

“Do you?” Lieutenant Colonel Tomashevsky growled. “Then why didn’t you move up in the formation when I ordered you to, dammit?”

“Sir, I never heard that order.” Mouradian explained what had happened, finishing, “You can check with the groundcrew men. They’ll tell you I’m not making any of this up.”

Tomashevsky eyed him. “I won’t check. But if I ever find out you were lying, you’re dead. No demotions. No camps. No punishment details. Dead.” He spoke without melodrama. Stas might have wished to hear some. That would have left him less than sure the squadron commander meant it. As things were, he had no room for doubt.

Tomashevsky kept looking at him, waiting for him to say something, willing him to say something. So he did: “Sir, if I ever lie, it won’t be about anything where you can catch me.”

“I should hope not,” the senior officer said. “You’d have to be stupid to do something like that. Dark-haired men aren’t stupid. They have other things wrong with them, but they aren’t stupid.”

Russians often lumped Armenians and Georgians and Jews together that way. Stas mildly resented it. So did most Armenians and Georgians and, he supposed, even Jews. With a crooked smile, he answered, “Sir, I didn’t come here to pick your pocket. I came here to blow up Germans.”

“Always a worthy cause,” Tomashevsky agreed dryly. “But if a pocket walks by begging to be picked, will you hold back?”

“Maybe not,” Stas admitted. “But then, would you?” For a moment, he feared he’d cut too close to the bone. But the squadron commander laughed and waved him away. Away he went, before Tomashevsky could change his mind.