Coup d'Etat

Chapter 18

Stas Mouradian’s latest airstrip lay not far in front of Smolensk. The Germans and their allies kept coming forward, despite everything the Red Army and Air Force could do to stop them. If Smolensk fell… Stas wasn’t a member of Stavka, the Soviet General Staff, but he could see how bad that would be. Smolensk was the great bastion on the road to Moscow.

If Moscow fell, the game would be up. He could see that, too. Maybe Stalin would find refuge somewhere beyond the Urals. Having traveled the width of the USSR, Stas knew how vast the country was. But could you keep fighting with your capital gone? Would anyone follow your orders if you tried?

But that was a worry for another day, probably a worry for another year. The red flag with the gold hammer and sickle still flew over Smolensk. The swastika was still hundreds of kilometers from Moscow. That Stas could wonder what would happen if the capital fell said things weren’t going the way Soviet authorities wished they would.

It wasn’t that serious yet. Maybe it wouldn’t get that serious. But if Stalin hadn’t been greedy, if he hadn’t decided he could take Wilno away from Poland on the cheap, the war between the USSR and the Reich might well have stayed a war in name only. Till Smigly-Ridz asked Hitler for help, the Soviets and the Nazis couldn’t get at each other without violating some buffer state’s neutrality. That would have been more dangerous than it was worth.

Would it have been more dangerous than thinking that Stalin’s greed had led him into an enormous mistake? Now there was an interesting question for any Soviet citizen to contemplate! As long as you kept your mouth shut, you had a chance of staying safe (from the NKVD, anyhow; the Luftwaffe was a different story). But Mouradian had heard-as who in the Soviet Union had not? — of people arrested for no better reason than an expression some Chekist didn’t fancy. Those people went into a camp as readily as the ones brave or crazy enough to criticize the regime out loud. They came out of the camps as readily, too: which is to say, just about never.

The distant rumble of artillery distracted Stas from such gloomy reflections. He cocked his head to one side, listening. Those were Russian guns. That was good. No-it was better. He would really have had something to worry about if he heard German guns from here.

But the squadron had been flying out of this airstrip for only about a week. When the Pe-2s got here, you couldn’t hear anybody’s guns. Stas had been used to fields farther forward. He’d been used to, if not happy about, the sound of guns. Once or twice, he’d had to fly off a runway enemy artillery was suddenly able to reach. Being out of earshot of the front had felt relaxing.

Now he wasn’t any more. He wasn’t so relaxed, either.

At the edge of the airstrips, a technician wearing earphones manned a sound detector that looked like nothing so much as half a dozen enormous hearing trumpets. They could pick up approaching enemy planes at distances greater than the naked eye could reach. They could some of the time, at any rate. When everything went just right. When other noise didn’t distract or confuse the technicians.

There has to be a better way, Stas thought. If he knew what that way was, they’d pin a Hero of the Soviet Union medal on him in a flash. At a guess, it had something to do with radio. Everything modern and scientific seemed to. His guesses stopped right there. He was a pretty good pilot, but he’d never make an electrical engineer.

The technician jerked off the earphones and ran to a bell mounted on a nearby post. He rang the bell as if his life depended on it. And his life was liable to, for he shouted, “They’re coming! They’re coming!”

A kicked anthill would have shown more chaos, but not a lot more. People ran every which way. Antiaircraft gunners manned their cannons and pointed them west. The technician was pointing in that direction, but Stas couldn’t tell whether the gunners followed his lead or simply knew German planes were most likely to appear from that direction. Pilots and groundcrew men jumped into zigzagging trenches to shelter from the expected attack. Some of them had rifles. If they fired at the Luftwaffe planes, it might make them feel better. It was unlikely to do anything else.

Stas realized he was the only man just standing there. He wasn’t running. He wasn’t jumping. He wasn’t training an antiaircraft gun in the desired direction or chambering a round in his Mosin-Nagant.

Now he could hear the ominous drone of German airplane engines without the fancy sound detector. Their note was different from that of Soviet powerplants. It seemed deeper, and somehow imbued with sinister purpose. Maybe that was Stas’ imagination. On the other hand, he knew he was far from the only Soviet fighting man who imagined the same thing.

“What the hell are you doing there, you stupid fucking idiot? Growing roots like a beet?” a groundcrew sergeant shouted. “You don’t get your cock in gear, they’ll plant you, all right!”

Where the rising drone from those bombers hadn’t unfrozen Stas, the sergeant’s profanity did. That might have been because it was aimed at him personally, unlike the bomb loads that would come whistling down any second now. He sprinted toward the closest trench.

He hadn’t even got there before the antiaircraft guns started pounding away for all they were worth. He jumped in. Somebody down below caught him and steadied him. “Thanks,” he said, without noticing who.

“Any time.” Lieutenant Colonel Tomashevsky didn’t even sound sarcastic. Squadron commanders caught on the ground in a bombing raid needed to run for their life like anybody else. When they jumped into a trench, they had to hope somebody would grab them and keep them from falling on their face. It was, of course, simply an application of the Golden Rule, no matter how much scorn a good Marxist-Leninist would heap on the book from which that Rule came.

During the last war, someone had claimed there were no atheists in the trenches. Stas didn’t know if he would have gone that far. He did know he had to make a conscious effort to keep from crossing himself when the Luftwaffe bombers came overhead. You didn’t dare reveal too much. His hand twitched, but that was all it did, even when the bombs started bursting on and around the strip.

“Lord, have mercy! Christ, have mercy!” A man in mechanic’s coveralls was too scared to worry about what he gave away. He crossed himself again and again, as if possessed. He was only a corporal. Maybe he thought he was too small a fish for the NKVD to care about. If so, he was an optimist. Or maybe he believed none of the other frightened men in the trench with him would betray him to the NKVD. Well, he had a chance of being right about that. How good a chance? Stas wasn’t willing to risk it.

Something not far enough away blew up. “The ammunition store for one of our guns-maybe for a battery,” Lieutenant Colonel Tomashevsky said.

Mouradian nodded. That was what it had sounded like to him, too. Something else was on his mind: “Where are our fighter planes, Comrade Colonel?”

He didn’t think they could possibly be where Tomashevsky suggested. For one thing, he’d always supposed the Devil was male. But wherever they were, they weren’t here. And that was a crying shame. Of all the German bombers, only the Ju-87 had anything close to the Soviet Pe-2’s performance. The Do-17s and He-111s overhead would have been easy meat for even biplane Polikarpov fighters, let alone their monoplane cousins or the hotter, faster new MiGs. Would have been… Some of the saddest words in Russian or any other language.

At last, after doing what they’d come to do, the Germans went away. Soviet fire had brought down one of them. The shattering roar when its whole bomb load blew as it hit the ground almost shook Stas’ fillings loose. But when he stuck his head up to look around, he grimaced. For all the destruction the Nazis had worked, they hadn’t paid much of a price. Most of the buildings around the airstrip were either gone or burning. The strip itself was cratered like photos of the moon. And four columns of greasy black smoke marked Red Air Force bombers’ funeral pyres. Stas hoped none of them was his. Without revetments, it would have been worse. Even with them, it was plenty bad enough.

And Stas had no idea if any bombs had come down in the trenches where men huddled. He also had no idea where the squadron would fly its next mission from. He was sure of only one thing: it wouldn’t be from here, not for a while.

Little by little, Narvik improved as a U-boat base. As far as torpedoes and diesel fuel and repair facilities went, there had never been anything wrong with it. You couldn’t take on as much fresh food there as you could at a base in Germany or even farther south in Norway. That made the ratings grumble-it made Julius Lemp grumble, too-but it wasn’t the end of the world.

But a U-boat base, a proper U-boat base, didn’t just tend to the boats. It also took care of the men who sailed them. When sailors came back from a long, uncomfortable cruise where, like as not, their lives had been in deadly danger, they wanted to blow off steam. They needed to blow off steam. They wanted good booze and bad women. Bad booze would do in a pinch, but good women were right out.

In Germany and the Low Countries, of course, there were brothels in towns full of sailors. People in those towns might not have been proud of that, but they understood it was part of the way things worked.

Norway was different. The locals didn’t even approve of drinking. Like America, the country went through a spasm of prohibition after the last war, though Norway gave up on it in 1926.

As for friendly fornication, or even fornication for hire… Narvik wasn’t a big city like the ports farther south. You couldn’t be a whore here without all of your neighbors knowing and most of them disapproving. Narvik was probably a nice place for kids to grow up (assuming they didn’t freeze to death or go berserk during a long winter night), but the town had never heard of privacy.

Drinking at clubs supported by the Kriegsmarine took the edge off the one problem. The authorities didn’t seem to know what to do about the other.

“I’ll tell you what to do, by God,” Lemp said to the base commandant after the U-30 came back from its latest cruise in the Arctic Ocean. “Bring in enough girls from Germany to keep the crews happy.”

The commandant was a commander named Robert Eichenlaub. He outranked Lemp, but the U-boat skipper was irked enough not to care. And being sure they’d never promote him again because of his earlier foul-ups gave him an odd advantage. He was free to speak his mind. Unless he got himself chucked in the brig, they couldn’t do anything to him worse than what they were already doing.

Commander Eichenlaub looked pained. “It’s not so easy as you make it sound, Lieutenant.” He bore down on Lemp’s rank, trying to put him in his place.

Lemp was in no mood to let him get away with that. “Why not, Commander?” He bore down on the commandant’s rank just as hard. “You can get volunteers in Kiel or Wilhelmshaven and ship them up. Or you can just grab some. They’re only prostitutes, for heaven’s sake.” By the way he talked about them, they might have been gaskets or valves or anything else you requisitioned from the quartermaster. That was how he thought of them, too.

“It wouldn’t work. We don’t even have female secretaries here-and if we did, they wouldn’t want to associate with the working girls,” Eichenlaub said. “Neither would the Norwegians.”

“I’ll bet some of them would,” Lemp retorted shrewdly-and lewdly.

“No doubt-but that doesn’t help us, either,” Commander Eichenlaub said.

“So you’re worried about keeping the whores comfortable and happy, then,” Lemp said.

“They may be whores, Lieutenant, but they’re also human beings,” Eichenlaub answered.

“How about worrying about keeping my men comfortable and happy, then?” Lemp snarled. “They may be U-boat sailors, Commander, but they’re also human beings, too. I’m pretty sure about most of them, anyway.”

They glared at each other. Maybe Commander Eichenlaub wasn’t sure why Lemp seemed immune to disapproval from on high, but he could see that the junior officer was. He didn’t like it, either. “I know the U-boat service takes wild men, Lemp, but you go over the line,” he said, his voice starchy with distaste.

“Why? Because I’m trying to make my men think this is a place they might want to come back to, not Dachau with polar bears?” Lemp said.

“That will be quite enough, Lieutenant Lemp. A note on this conversation will go into your file,” the commandant snapped.

Lemp left. But he left laughing, which was bound to delight Eichenlaub all the more.

The U-30’s diesels were getting an overhaul. That, the base at Narvik could handle. Lemp went out to the docks to see how things were going. He found that another U-boat had come in while he was having his useless discussion with Commander Eichenlaub. He’d known the skipper, a short-and short-tempered-fellow named Hans-Dieter Kessler, for a long time.

“Here we are. Happy day!” Kessler said. “This place is a goddamn morgue. It’s an icebox even in the summertime-it sticks us on a shelf and freezes us out of the fun.”

“What fun?” Lemp asked.

“Good point!” Kessler agreed. “They ought to do something about it. Either that or they ought to give us enough leave so we can go down to some place where they remember how to have a good time.”

Julius Lemp smiled a slow, conspiratorial smile. “Why don’t you go tell the commandant exactly what you think, Hans-Dieter?”

Kessler cocked his head to one side and studied his fellow skipper. “What? You think I fucking won’t? You think I don’t have the balls?”

“No, I think you will, and I know damn well you’ve got the balls,” Lemp answered truthfully. “And I think Commander Eichenlaub needs to know I’m not the only guy who figures his men get a raw deal every time they have to put in here. He may not want to listen to you once you get going.”

“Aha!” Kessler pounced. “So you just reamed him out, did you?”

“Who, me?” Lemp said. Kessler laughed. He headed off toward Eichenlaub’s office with purposeful strides. Of course, he had more of a career to lose than Lemp did. He’d never been so careless as to sink an American liner by mistake. The powers that be might still visit higher rank upon him.

Lemp climbed the iron ladder to the top of the U-30’s conning tower, then descended into the submarine’s hull. They’d had all the hatches open for days, airing the boat out. They’d cleaned in there as they never could at sea. And she still stank. The reeks of diesel fuel and puke and sour piss and unwashed men and stale food were in her paint, or more likely in her steel.

He liked the mechanics working on her engines. They reminded him of his own ratings: they were utterly indifferent to spit and polish, foulmouthed, and damn good at what they did.

An enormous brawl broke out that night in one of the taverns the Kriegsmarine maintained. For a while, it was touch and go whether the shore patrolmen would be able to put it down. One of them had to fire a shot in the air to make the drunken, riotous sailors pay attention to him and his comrades. Not a few men from the U-30 distinguished themselves-if that was the word-in the action.

Commander Eichenlaub wasted no time summoning Lemp back to his office. “Do you know how much damage your, your hooligans-your barbarians-have done?” the commandant snarled.

“Not to the pfennig, sir,” Lemp answered. “I do know”-expecting the summons, he’d made a point of ascertaining-“they weren’t the only U-boat’s crew in the scuffle. Are you calling in the other skippers, too?”

“Scuffle? Sweet Jesus Christ! It was about three centimeters this side of an insurrection! And never mind the other skippers. I’m talking to you.” But Eichenlaub suddenly didn’t sound so self-righteous. Lemp knew he’d made a shrewd guess.

“Yes, sir,” he said, his voice mild as boiled milk.

Eichenlaub told him he was a bad boy, and that he commanded a pack of savages. Lemp nodded, not without pride. The commandant fretted and fumed till he got it out of his system. Lemp knew it wouldn’t come to anything in the end. He saluted and left. As far as he was concerned, the unhappy sailors had made his point for him better than he could have done himself.

“It’s a boy!” Chaim Weinberg passed out cigars-harsh, twisted, coal-black cheroots, which were what he could get-to the Abe Lincolns in the trenches northwest of Madrid. The news had just come up from the city. He swigged from a flask of brandy, too, and offered it to his buddies along with the stogies.

“What are you gonna name the little bastard?” Mike Carroll asked.

“He’s no bastard. We did it by the numbers, La Martellita and me,” Chaim said.

“If you didn’t do it by the numbers, you wouldn’t’ve knocked her up,” Mike said. “And I don’t care if you and her did tie the knot. Any kid of yours is bound to be a bastard, right?”

“Ahh, your mother,” Chaim growled, and started on down the trench. He would have tried to murder a lot of guys who said anything like that. But he and Mike had been in Spain together a hell of a long time. If anybody’d earned the right to razz him, Carroll was the guy.

“Hey, wait a second!” he called after Chaim. “What are you gonna name him?”

“Carlos Federico Weinberg,” Chaim answered. “Isn’t that the goddamnedest handle you ever heard? His mother wanted to name him for Marx and Engels, and how could I tell her no?”

“Wouldn’t be easy,” Mike agreed. Unspoken in the air between them floated the thought that you’d probably get purged if you tried to tell a Party functionary she couldn’t name her son for Communism’s founding fathers. Carroll did ask, “What would you have called it if it was a girl?”

“Carla Federica.” Chaim spread his hands, as if to say What can you do? When La Martellita made up her mind, it was by God made up. Nothing this side of the end of the world would make her change it-and maybe not that, either.

“Well, mazel tov,” Mike said. Where did he pick up the Yiddish? Probably from Chaim. He found one more question before his buddy went away. “How come you don’t look happier, man?”

“Oh, I’m happy. I just didn’t tell my face about it.” As if to prove as much, Chaim took a big gulp from the flask. Then he got out of there in a hurry, before Mike could ask him anything else he didn’t want to answer.

La Martellita hadn’t married him because she loved him. No matter how drunk he got, he knew better than that. She’d married him so her kid would have a name-a curiously Catholic notion in a staunch Red, but there you were. And here Chaim was. Carlos Federico Weinberg had his name, all right.

Which meant… what? Chaim knew too goddamn well what it meant. It meant La Martellita didn’t need him for anything at all any more. Divorce had been next to impossible in pre-Republican Spain. In the parts of the country Marshal Sanjurjo ruled, it still was. In the Republic, it was easy as pie.

So Chaim figured the next piece of news he got from Madrid would be that La Martellita was dropping him like a live grenade. If she hadn’t got so drunk she needed him to get her back to her flat, if she hadn’t been so drunk she didn’t say no when things went on from there…

Ah, c’mon, you shlemiel. You knew this wasn’t gonna have a Hollywood ending even while you were shtupping her. Chaim nodded. Yeah, he’d known, all right. He just hadn’t given a rat’s ass. And he couldn’t think of any man who would have when he poised himself between her open legs, either.

So this is what you bought, dumbfuck. He nodded again, and answered his scolding self: Yeah, yeah, yeah, but now I’m doing the paying, goddammit.

Well off to the left, an enormous report rang out. Chaim nodded again, this time in mere recognition: that was the crazy Czech who went sniping with his antitank rifle. He was a pretty good guy, which didn’t mean he wasn’t meshuggeh. You had to be nuts to lug that huge, heavy hunk of almost-artillery across half of Europe. All the same, Chaim hoped he’d hit whatever he was aiming at. He also hoped the Fascist on the receiving end was at least a major.

The bastard must have been, and that Czech must have blown his reactionary head off, too. The Nationalists didn’t get their knickers in such a twist when a sniper exterminated one of their ordinary assholes. Machine guns sprayed sudden death toward the Republican positions. A moment later, Sanjurjo’s big guns started shelling the Republican trenches. The Fascists wanted payback, and they wanted it bad.

Chaim didn’t want to be part of the payback. He dove into a scrape someone had dug in the forward wall of the trench. It wasn’t a proper bombproof, but it was better than nothing. If a 105 came down right on top of it… Chaim made himself not think about that. Getting buried alive wasn’t the way he wanted to cash in his chips.

If the Nationalists followed up the shelling with an infantry attack, he was in more trouble than he knew what to do with. He didn’t have his rifle with him. He had the brandy and cigars instead. Would one of Sanjurjo’s men take a cigar in exchange for not bayoneting him? They didn’t make deals like that, sad to say.

But the Nationalists would have taken casualties in an infantry attack. They didn’t want that. They wanted to dish them out so they could avenge whichever officer the Czech had potted with his honking big rifle.

They got what they wanted, too. Wounded Abe Lincolns screamed and moaned. Some were Americans, some the Spaniards who filled out the ranks of all the International Brigades these days. All wounded men sounded pretty much the same, regardless of country or politics.

In a rational world, something like that would convince people all men were brothers. They wouldn’t try to kill one another any more. But who ever said the world was rational? And even being brothers might not make men like each other any better. Look what Cain did to Abel, after all.

Chaim shook his head. The Bible was just another book of myths and superstitions. There never were any such people as Cain and Abel. He had no trouble believing that with the top part of his mind. The part with roots down to the core of him, the part that wasn’t Marxist-Leninist, had other ideas.

If La Martellita heard about this bombardment, would she hope a shell killed him? Then she wouldn’t have to go through the paperwork of divorcing him. She could get on with her life as the widow of a heroic soldier. She could milk it for all it was worth.

After a moment, Chaim shook his head. His ladylove was no hypocrite. If she wanted him dead, she’d come right out and tell him so. She might do him in herself.

No, she just wanted to be rid of him. He hated that. And he hated the certain knowledge that he couldn’t do anything about it even more.

Almost everybody went through life wishing he could get what he most wanted. From the moment Chaim set eyes on La Martellita, she was what he most wanted. He’d got her, too, even if she was so smashed the first time he did that she hardly knew he was doing it.

And he’d made the all too common discovery that getting exactly what you wanted could hurt even worse than mooning after it forever. As long as you kept on mooning after it, you always thought it was perfect. Once you got it, you were much too likely to discover what a jerk you were for wanting it to begin with.

Beautiful women were there to be wanted, of course. To men, they often seemed to be there for no other reason. But how many of the men who actually got one stayed happy afterwards? Not many, unless Chaim missed his guess. He knew too well he wasn’t.

What were you supposed to do? Turn into a queer? Even if you could, wouldn’t you get into the same kind of stew about gorgeous guys? Besides, he wasn’t a queer. He liked women. He liked the beautiful kind better than the homely ones, too. He didn’t know anybody who didn’t. You couldn’t win. You didn’t have a chance.

The Czech with the antitank rifle fired again. Some Fascist shithead probably discovered he didn’t have a chance. Whether he laid beautiful women or homely ones, he’d be laid out now. Hasta la vista, fucker, Chaim thought.

No barrage followed. Maybe this time the sniper just blew out a corporal’s insides. If ever a movement prided itself on class consciousness, it was Sanjurjo’s, but for all the wrong reasons. Or maybe the Czech missed. Stranger things had happened. Damn right! Chaim thought. I’ve got me a kid named Carlos Federico! He swigged from the brandy flask again.

In Russia, the sky seemed wider than it did anywhere else Willi Dernen had ever seen. That might have been because the countryside seemed-and was-wider, too, but Willi wasn’t so sure about it. He wasn’t sure about anything any more. He’d been here too long and done too much, and victory still looked as far away as whatever lay under the far end of that vast Russian sky.

He had other reasons for keeping an eye on the clouds drifting across the wide sky, too. Adam Pfaff noticed him doing it as they tramped along a dirt road-once you got out of the cities, Russia had no other kind. “What’s up?” Pfaff asked. “You can’t do anything about the weather.”

“My ass, I can’t,” Willi said. “I can worry about it, and I damn well do. It’ll start pouring rain pretty soon, and all these shitty roads’ll turn to glue. Then we freeze our nuts off for the next six months. Some fun, huh?”

“Well, sure. What would you rather be doing?” Pfaff said. “Drinking and fucking. What else is there?” Willi sounded honestly surprised.

His friend considered. “Well, there’s…” Pfaff shook his head. He thought some more. “Or there’s…” Another rejection, this time with a thumbs-down. “Nah.” More thought still. He grinned ruefully. “You’re right. That’s about all there is that’s worth doing. Oh-maybe filling up on mutton stew, too.”

“There you go,” Willi said. “But we get to do this crap instead. Aren’t we lucky?”

“We’re lucky if we come through alive,” answered the man with the gray Mauser.

“Dernen!” Arno Baatz shouted. “Are you lowering Pfaff’s morale?”

“Not a bit of it, Corporal,” Willi said. “He’s lowering mine.” Beside him on the dusty road, Pfaff giggled softly.

Awful Arno didn’t. “Think you’re funny, don’t you? Well, you listen to me. Just because nobody’s made a charge stick on you yet doesn’t mean nobody will. You mark my words.”

Willi was about to tell Baatz where to put his words-sideways-when the section point man came trotting back toward the main body of men. Johann Stallinger made a good point: he was short and skinny and anxious. He nodded ahead, in the direction from which he’d just come. “Something’s in those fields,” he said. “The way the grain was moving, it’s not from the wind.”

“Are you on the rag again, Stallinger?” Awful Arno asked.

“If you don’t like the job I do, Corporal, you can put somebody else up there,” the point man answered. Whatever else he might have thought, his pale, pinched face didn’t show it.

You could watch Baatz working through it. You could, and Willi did. Arno did want to go forward. “If you’re having vapors…” he growled. But he knew Stallinger might not be. Johann was point man for a reason. If the fields were full of Russians, the section was asking to get bushwhacked. Baatz’s pudgy features cleared as he made up his mind.

“Braun!”

“Yes, Corporal?” Gustav Braun’s face said he wished he were a thousand kilometers away from here.

“You got that big drum on your machine pistol. Let Stallinger take you up to the fields he’s having spasms about, and you shoot the whole thing off. If that doesn’t flush the Ivans, nothing will, on account of there won’t be any there,” Baatz said.

Willi blinked. The order actually made good sense. He wouldn’t have thought Awful Arno had it in him. Braun carried a Russian PPD-34 submachine gun instead of a Schmeisser. The Russian piece came with a drum that held seventy-one rounds. It took 7.62mm cartridges instead of 9mm, but the Germans had captured plenty. The big magazine made it heavy to cart around. Every once in a while, though, you needed the extra firepower. This looked to be one of those times.

Even Braun could see as much. “Right, Corporal,” was all he said. If he didn’t sound thrilled… Well, Willi wouldn’t have been thrilled with an order like that, either, no matter how much sense it made.

Stallinger did have a Schmeisser. A point man often found himself in positions where he needed to spray around a lot of lead in a hurry. He also seemed less than delighted about going back to where he’d sensed trouble, but hey, there was a war on. You did all kinds of things you weren’t delighted about.

The rest of the Landsers spread out into a loose skirmish line. Nobody told them to. No one needed to tell them. They knew what was what. Willi knew he had a round in the chamber. He knew it, but he made sure anyway. He noted the best place to dive for cover, and also the next best place.

Stallinger and Braun went forward. If the Russians had a machine gun in amongst the barley… If they had a machine gun in there, hell was out to lunch, because they could mow down the rest of the section, too.

Braun knew his business. He didn’t just squeeze off one long burst as he fired. The muzzle would have pulled up and to the right, and he would have shot over what he was trying to flush out. He fired two, three, four rounds at a time. Willi didn’t know exactly when he hit something. The Ivans might have been disciplined enough to keep quiet when they got shot. But one fellow couldn’t help making the grain around him sway in unmistakable fashion as he toppled over. Tiny in the distance, Stallinger waved urgently.

Awful Arno waved back. Get away! that meant, but giving the order was easier than following it. The Russians figured out that they weren’t going to be able to take the whole section unawares. They grabbed what they could get, and opened up on Stallinger and Braun. Both men went down. Maybe they weren’t dead, but Willi didn’t like the odds.

He was already trotting forward before Awful Arno told him to. So were the rest of the Landsers. You didn’t let the Russians take your buddies alive, not if you could help it. You didn’t even want them grabbing German corpses. They mutilated them for the fun of it, and to intimidate live Germans who came upon their handiwork.

Bullets reached out toward the advancing men in Feldgrau. One cracked past Willi, viciously close. He had to make himself keep moving by main force of will. His body, animal thing that it was, wanted to throw itself flat, or else to run. The barley still concealed the Ivans.

But not perfectly, not as he got closer to them. He spotted khaki through green going gold. When he raised his Mauser to his shoulder, the Russian showed plainly through the telescopic sight. He fired. He got a split-second glimpse of most of the man’s face contorted with pain. Then he worked the bolt, lowered the rifle, and trotted on. That enemy soldier wasn’t likely to trouble them any more.

Ambush spoiled, the rest of the Red Army men slipped off to the east. Their rear guard kept firing to make sure the Germans didn’t chase them too enthusiastically. If they wanted to retreat, Willi was ready to let them. Awful Arno kept yelling for the section to push harder.

Then he yelled again, wordlessly this time. He held his rifle in his right fist. His left arm hung uselessly, blood darkening the field-gray sleeve. “I’m hit!” he said. Disbelief filled his voice. And why not? He’d stayed lucky for going on three years-he must have thought nothing could bite him. Well, that showed how much he knew.

The Landser next to him slapped a wound bandage on his arm. “Go back, Corporal,” the fellow said. “The aid men will patch you up. Can you manage on your own, or shall we send somebody with you?”

“Send somebody.” Willi wasn’t sure he was the senior Obergefreiter, but he spoke up anyway. “He can’t handle his weapon one-handed. If we’ve bypassed any Ivans, they’ll do for him if he’s by himself.”

They took his orders. Baatz and a protector headed for the rear. Willi didn’t know what he’d do without Awful Arno to goad him on. He looked forward to finding out, though.

When the Germans got up to the point man and his comrade, they found Braun dead but Stallinger still very much alive, though down with a leg wound. More men hauled him off to the rear. They buried Braun in a shallow grave and set his helmet on it. They might have marked the grave with a bayoneted Mauser, too. The PPD-34 was too valuable. Another Landser grabbed it and brought it along.