Coup d'Etat

Chapter 22

When you came out of the line here, you couldn’t toddle off to an estaminet to soak up some wine and chat up the barmaid. This was war without distractions, and Alistair Walsh missed them.

Even the Italians weren’t much of a distraction. That was the only good part of the fighting here. As Sergeant Billings had said, some of their units weren’t too bad. Most, though, didn’t really have their hearts in the fight. When English forces outmaneuvered them, they would surrender with smiles on their faces. It happened again and again, because the English had more tanks and far more lorries than Mussolini’s boys.

“You have to understand, sir, it doesn’t work this way all the time,” Walsh told Lieutenant Preston when another band of Italians waved white flags after the briefest exchange of fire. “For those dagos, it’s nothing but a game. You come up against Fritz, though, and you’ll find out he means it.”

The subaltern nodded, with luck in wisdom. “Quite,” he said. “It is a bit like playing football when the other side’s down to nine men, isn’t it? Hardly seems sporting.”

“Bugger sporting… sir,” Walsh said earnestly. “You lose men here, they don’t get up again after the referee blows his bleeding whistle. It’ll take the Judgment Trump to set ’em on their pins again.”

Wilf Preston stared at him. The youngster’s eyes were blue as sapphires. They were also red-tracked with weariness, just like Walsh’s. Sun and wind and sand had burned and chapped Preston’s fine, fair skin. “I do grasp the difference, Sergeant,” he said, his voice starchy with indignation.

Devil you do. But Walsh couldn’t say that. “Yes, sir” would have to do. “Besides,” Preston went on, “wouldn’t you sooner have it easy than rough?”

Maybe he wasn’t a complete twit. Walsh sketched a salute. “Now that you mention it, sir,” he answered, “yes.”

Only later did he wonder how true that was. Had he asked Ronald Cartland to stay in England and help turn young hooligans into proper soldiers, the MP would have arranged that as effortlessly as he’d seen to this. And Walsh would have done something useful to King and country, something where he could have lived comfortably and where he would have been most unlikely to catch a packet.

Instead, he’d requested service here, and here he was. A fat black fly landed on the back of his hand. He squashed it before it could bite him. It had a nasty smell, like shit mixed with blood. And you couldn’t kill them all. There were just too many. Beelzebub-lord of the flies. He’d had the Bible pounded into him when he was a boy, same as most Welshmen. Till this campaign, though, he’d never realized what a dark and terrible god old Beelzebub must have been.

Lieutenant Preston wasn’t immune to the flies, either. Could you bring the bugs up on charges? Officers, disrespect to — something like that? Preston didn’t try to smash his flies. He just waved his hands over them so they buzzed away. That might have been a better idea. He didn’t need to fret about the mess and the stink. Of course, the bloody things would come back…

He still had his pecker up: “If we keep going the way we are, we’ll take Tobruk away from Musso’s lads before long. What will they do then?”

“They’ll be in even more trouble than they are already, that’s what,” Walsh answered, liking the notion. Tobruk was the big Italian base in eastern Libya. If it fell, the enemy might have to fall back to Benghazi, or maybe all the way to Tripoli. Without it, the dagos sure as dammit wouldn’t be able to mount another attack on Egypt.

They seemed to know that, too. Some of them even seemed to care. Their resistance stiffened as they pulled back into the works surrounding the Mediterranean port. No doubt about it, they were better at fighting a static campaign than one that called for movement.

And now they had ships bringing supplies straight in to them. That beat the stuffing out of the English truck convoys that started way the hell back in Alexandria. Italian tanks might be laughable, but one army’s 105mm howitzer was about the same as another’s. If the other buggers could bring in more ammo than you could…

In that case, you dug trenches and laid barbed wire in a ring around his trenches and barbed wire and you settled in as best you could, because grabbing Tobruk was liable to take a while after all. But for the weather and the scenery, it might have been 1918 over again.

In 1918, biplanes had dueled above the trenches. And so they did again here in 1941. RAF Gloster Gladiators fought Fiat CR-42s high overhead. Planes and pilots seemed evenly matched. When one side or the other won a dogfight, a cheer went up from its troops on the ground.

These days, pilots wore parachutes. They mostly hadn’t in 1918. God, what a long, hard way down! Every time Walsh saw a silk canopy blossom in the sky, he remembered Rudolf Hess bailing out of his Bf-110 over Scotland. What a mess that had made! Not for the first time, Walsh thought, I should have bashed his brains in with a rock.

Both RAF flyers and their Italian foes were sporting. When a pilot hit the silk, they didn’t machine-gun him while he floated helplessly. The same courtesy had been observed most of the time in Western Europe. From things Walsh had heard, the Russians and the Japanese didn’t play by those rules. Neither did the Fritzes in Russia. Fair play? Verboten!

Italian bombers sometimes came over the English lines by night. They weren’t very accurate-they cost the Tommies more in lost sleep than in damage or casualties.

Little by little, the besiegers assembled a striking column to try to break through the Italian lines. The Italians had to defend everywhere, so they spread themselves thin. Without tanks, an attack on their position would have been suicidal (remembering 1918, Walsh knew that might not have stopped the donkeys with the red collar tabs from ordering one anyway). With tanks, a breakthrough had a chance. That was one of the things tanks were for: punching holes in positions too tough for infantry to crack by itself.

The Italians didn’t do much to hinder the English concentration. Walsh got the idea that, like a tortoise bothered by a dog, they weren’t going to stick their heads out of their fortified shell unless and until they had to. The English generals must have got the same idea, because they took their own sweet time readying their attack.

As things turned out, they waited too long. Walsh’s regiment wasn’t in the main striking column. It went to a smaller one that would deliver a feint to make the Italians commit their reserves to the wrong part of the semicircle around Tobruk.

Just after dawn two days before the feint was supposed to go in, he heard unfamiliar engine noises in the air. Then, all of a sudden, they weren’t the least bit unfamiliar-only unexpected and out of place, which, unfortunately, wasn’t the same thing.

He grabbed Lieutenant Preston’s arm. “Sir-that’s the bloody Luftwaffe -109s and Stukas, heading this way!”

“What? You’re daft!” the subaltern exclaimed… perhaps five seconds before the Messerschmitts started strafing the feinting column. A few seconds after that, Stukas dove down out of the sky like ugly falcons, their Jericho Trumpets screaming fit to jolt a man’s soul right out of his body. And in case the Jericho Trumpets fell down on the job, 500kg bombs weren’t half bad for spreading terror around, either.

Walsh dove under a lorry-the best cover he could find. He would roll out to fire a shot or two at the planes overhead, then duck back again. Those weren’t Italian pilots flying German planes. Black crosses and swastikas declared who was at the controls. For reasons of his own, Hitler had decided to jump into the war in Africa.

With both feet, too-manmade thunder off to the east said the real striking column was catching hell, too. Tobruk might fall, but it sure as the devil wouldn’t fall day after tomorrow.

Rain in Russia meant panzers went nowhere fast. Theo Hossbach knew that as well as any German soldier in the USSR. With the wider Ostketten, his Panzer III was less likely to bog down, but swift thrusts and dashes were a thing of the past.

The Ivans slowed down in the mud, too. Their ponderous KV-1s had as much trouble with it as any German panzer. T-34s, though, chugged through goop Theo wouldn’t have wanted to try even with Ostketten. Adi was right-the T-34 wasn’t a perfect panzer. But it was kilometers out in front of whichever machine ran second.

And so, for the time being the Wehrmacht would try to hang on to what it had already gained instead of pushing deeper into Russia. Maybe, once a hard freeze came, the Panzertruppen could have another go at Smolensk. In the meantime, units settled down in villages and on collective farms to wait out the mud time.

A couple of platoons from Theo’s company based themselves on a kolkhoz southwest of Smolensk. A few of the buildings remained more or less in one piece. The Ivans who’d fled the farm had slaughtered some of their livestock and driven the rest with them when they headed east. Hitler planned on turning European Russia into Germany’s breadbasket. No one in the Reich had seemed to realize Stalin would have plans of his own. The Germans might gain ground, but they’d draw as little benefit from it as the Russians could manage.

Like any sergeant worth the paper he was printed on, Hermann Witt believed idle hands were the Devil’s playground. “If our panzer isn’t going anywhere for a while, then by God we’ll make sure it goes like anything when we do start moving again,” he declared.

Theo wasn’t the only one who had no trouble containing his enthusiasm. “What? Stand in the rain and sink into the mud while we screw around with the engine?” Adi Stoss said.

“In a word, yes,” Witt answered. “Do you think I won’t be there with you, passing you spanners and pliers and fan belts and whatever else you happen to need? I’ll be messing with the ironmongery, too, you know.”

Adi nodded-reluctantly, but he did. So did Theo. Sergeant Witt was not a man to stay dry where his crew got wet, nor a man to stay clean where they got dirty. He made a good panzer commander, in other words. That didn’t mean he couldn’t be a pain in the fundament.

The new guys were no more enamored of busting their humps in the rain and the ooze than the crew’s old-timers. “If I had a pretty girl there with me, now, not some hairy, smelly old sergeant-” Kurt Poske said.

“You’d come down venereal in about a minute flat,” Witt broke in.

Affronted, Poske shook his head. “I can last a lot longer than that.”

Once they got the bitching out of their systems, they fell to work. They tore down the engine, rain or no rain, mud or no mud. They bore-sighted both machine guns. Lothar Eckhardt calibrated and adjusted the sights for the main armament. They checked every link of their tracks, and got the track tension left and right to just where Sergeant Witt and Adi wanted it.

And Theo serviced his radio set. It still worked all right, but a couple of the tubes plainly wouldn’t last much longer. He swapped in a spare for one, but couldn’t match the second. To his annoyance, none of the other half-dozen radiomen at the kolkhoz had-or would admit to having-that tube, either. He’d gone and talked to all those relative strangers, and they hadn’t been able to help him? It hardly seemed fair.

Unhappily, he reported his difficulty to Sergeant Witt. Witt rubbed his chin, considering. “How long will the old one last?” he asked.

Theo shrugged. “A day? Six months?” He shrugged again. As usual, he talked as if he had to pay for each word expended.

“All right. Next time a Kettenrad comes along, hop a ride back to regimental HQ and snag a new one,” Witt said. “Snag more than one, if you can. Maybe we can swap some of the spares for other stuff we need.”

Muttering didn’t count as words. Neither did Theo’s resigned sigh. Most of the men at regimental headquarters were real strangers, not the relative kind. He would rather have tackled a T-34 with a Panzer II than have anything to do with them, no matter how much sense Witt’s order made.

Two days later, a Kettenrad — a motorcycle with a track instead of a rear wheel-brought mail up to the kolkhoz. When it started back, Theo sat in the sidecar. He carried his Schmeisser. You never could be sure the Wehrmacht had cleared out all the Indians (the common German name for enemy soldiers).

He didn’t have to use the machine pistol on the way to the village the regimental bigwigs had taken as their own. Babushkas cooked for the headquarters staff. Old men with Tolstoyan beards cut their firewood. Younger women probably served them other ways.

Theo didn’t have to ask questions to find the machine shop. Following his ears toward a smithy’s clangor got him there. He stood and waited to be noticed. Eventually, one of the mechanics asked, “Well, what do you need?” He held out the failing tube. The mechanic turned and yelled, “Hey, Helmut! Here’s a guy for you!”

The bespectacled Helmut plainly cared more about radio sets and their parts than about his fellow human beings. Theo got on fine with him, in other words. And he had and could spare four tubes of the model Theo needed. Theo stowed them in his greatcoat pockets.

He wondered how he’d get back to the kolkhoz. Witt hadn’t said anything about that. He was walking up the village’s muddy main street (all the other streets were muddy, too) when someone called, “Hey! Yeah, you-the goalkeeper!”

That made Theo stop. He turned. At first, he didn’t recognize the Landser coming toward him. Then, to his dismay, he did. It was the fellow who claimed he’d seen Adi play football before the war. Theo would rather have met up with a Russian ambush.

“How are you doing?” the guy asked, as if they were old friends. Theo doled out a shrug. He didn’t want to talk to this fellow, who was nothing but trouble-and worse trouble because he had no idea how much trouble he was. Sure as hell, he went on, “And how’s your buddy, the footballer?”

Several possibilities ran through Theo’s mind. The truth was among them, but he didn’t let it bother him for long. Saying Adi’d been killed seemed better, but Mr. Snoopy here might suspect that and try to check it out. How about some play-acting instead?

With a guttural growl, Theo raised the Schmeisser and pointed it at the Landser ’s belly button. The safety was still on, but he didn’t figure the other guy would notice fine details. “You fucking son of a bitch!” he ground out. “So you’re the asshole who tipped him to the blackshirts, and now you’re here to gloat? I ought to blow your balls off-if you’ve got any.”

The guy in Feldgrau went whiter than skim milk. “N-N-N-” He couldn’t manage a “Nein!” till the fourth try. Desperately, he went on, “I didn’t do that! I wouldn’t do that! I’m no rat! On my mother’s name, I swear it.”

What Theo said about his mother would have got him murdered if he weren’t the one holding the machine pistol. “And that’s bullshit, too,” he added.

“It isn’t! Honest to God, will you listen to me?” the Landser said. “That time after the game, I just wanted to say how good he was. How was I supposed to know he’d get his long johns in a twist?” That was what Theo thought he said, anyhow. To a man from Breslau, the other guy’s broad Bavarian dialect came within shouting distance of being a foreign language.

“ Somebody reported him. You sure looked like a good bet.” Theo let his synthetic anger cool. He lowered the Schmeisser-a little. “Why don’t you just fuck off? I still don’t trust you. And if I ever see you again, you’ll wish I hadn’t.”

Gabbling thanks and apologies and who knows what, the other fellow beat it. Theo spotted another Kettenrad. He’d been talking. A little more wouldn’t hurt… much. Damned if he didn’t get himself a lift back to the kolkhoz. Every once in a while, words had their uses.

And Sergeant Witt beamed when he displayed the four tubes. “There you go!” He clapped Theo on the back. “And you’ll save the one that’s going bad, too, right? If it isn’t all the way dead, you can get a little more out of it.” Theo nodded; he’d already thought of that. Witt went on, “Anything else going on at HQ?”

“Nah.” With a slow smile, Theo squeezed out the one word.

Honolulu again. Pete McGill hadn’t wanted to see it. He’d hoped to see Manila once more instead. No such luck, though. The U.S. Navy would have had to win the big Pacific slugfest to make that happen. Far from winning, the great fleet the USA sent west from Hawaii had barely got to play. The planes that rose in swarms from Japanese-held islands and from Japanese carriers didn’t give the American ships the chance to close with the Imperial Navy’s battlewagons.

Wildcats buzzed above Pearl Harbor now. Like the Jap-occupied islands farther west, Hawaii made an enormous, unsinkable aircraft carrier. If anything was going to hold the Japanese Navy away from Pearl, it would be air power.

Meanwhile, Pete and the other Marines aboard the Boise joined her sailors in repairing battle damage and getting her ready to go out again and do… well, something, anyhow. The damage wasn’t anything big-metal dented and torn by near misses from Japanese bombs. The light cruiser hadn’t been a major enemy target. No light cruiser would storm into Tokyo Bay or anything like that. Sensibly, the Japs had gone after the American ships that could do them the most harm.

More planes-fighters, bombers, reconnaissance-came into Hawaii almost every day by ship. So did more tanks, more soldiers, and more everything else. If the United States had to fight Japan starting from San Diego and San Francisco and Seattle, the war would be far longer and harder-if it could be won at all.

But no new Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor came. Word got back that planes from Japanese carriers were helping to bombard Singapore. Besieged and isolated, the British bastion at the southern tip of Malaya seemed likely to fall. Everything else from Guam to the border between Burma and India already had.

“I bet the Aussies are sweating bullets,” Joe Orsatti remarked as he and Pete lugged five-inch ammo aboard the Boise. The light cruiser had replenished at sea from the Lassen — ammunition ships, fittingly enough, were named for volcanoes-but she’d shot off almost all of what she’d taken aboard then. Her main armament, by contrast, hadn’t fired a shot.

“I bet you’re right. I sure would be, anyway,” Pete said. His leg and his shoulder still pained him when he worked hard. He wondered if they always would. Every time something in either place twinged, he thought of Vera. If the aches lasted the rest of his life, so would his memories of their time together in Shanghai.

“Gettin’ more stuff through to them, it’s like running the gantlet,” Orsatti said. He set a wooden case that held two shells down on the deck.

With a grunt of relief, Pete laid his burden down, too. Something in his back clicked when he straightened. That had nothing to do with his injuries, or he didn’t think it did. It simply came from hard work.

As other leathernecks knocked the casings apart and stowed the shells, he said, “You’re right twice running. You ought to quit while you’re ahead.”

“Funny. Funny like a dose of the clap,” Orsatti said.

“I ain’t seen your mother lately,” Pete retorted. Orsatti flipped him the bird while they walked down the gangplank to pick up more shells. Neither man hurried. The job would get done, but it didn’t have to get done right away. The Boise wasn’t heading into action again any time soon. Pete went on, “We’ve got to try it, though. They’re screwed if we don’t.”

“Yeah, I guess.” Orsatti picked up another two-shell case: a hundred pounds of brass and explosives, plus the weight of the wood. He lugged it back toward the cruiser.

Pete did the same. His shoulder and his leg really complained. He didn’t listen to them. He could do the work. He’d proved that aboard the Boise. If he hurt, he hurt, that was all. He had a bottle of aspirins he’d bummed off a pharmacist’s mate in sick bay. When he got especially sore, he took a couple. Sometimes he thought they helped. Sometimes they didn’t seem to do anything.

After he set down his next crate, he said, “We could use some liberty, you know?”

“What? You’d rather drink and fuck than haul shit around like a draft horse? What kind of Marine are you, anyhow?” Orsatti demanded in mock anger.

“One with my head on straight, that’s what,” Pete answered. “They don’t pay you to drink and fuck,” the other sergeant pointed out.

“They don’t pay me enough to do this shit all the goddamn time when I’m in Pearl,” McGill said. “When I’m on board ship, okay, fine. I’m stuck there. I ain’t stuck here-except I need a pass.”

“People in hell need mint juleps to drink,” Orsatti told him. “You had all that soft China duty, where you could eat like a pig and screw like a lord. You aren’t in a good place to piss and moan, you know?”

Pete shut up. China duty was soft, especially to somebody who’d spent most of his time in the Corps on one ship or another. Servants, good food all the time, cheap whorehouses-what more could a Marine want? But when it went bad, it went as bad as it could. He wondered how many of the leathernecks he’d served with in Peking and Shanghai were still alive. He hoped they’d made the Japs pay a high price for bagging them.

A few days later, he did snag a pass into Honolulu. He got drunk, he went to Hotel Street, and he got laid. Then he drank some more and got laid again. In the course of drinking more still, he knocked an Army sergeant cold with a left to the belly and a right to the jaw. He walked out of that joint before the Shore Patrol showed up, leaving the Army three-striper on the floor. The jerk would be sadder when he woke up, but probably no wiser.

He made it back to the Boise on time. Next morning, it was black coffee and some of those aspirins. He hardly remembered coldcocking the Army guy. Nor was he the only man just back from liberty who seemed a little the worse for wear.

For his sins, the Boise steamed out into the Pacific later that day for live-fire exercises with towed targets. Aspirins or no aspirins, when the guns started going off he thought his head would explode with them. Before long, he hoped it would.

The other guys at the gun razzed him every time he flinched. Since he flinched a lot, he got several weeks’ worth of razzing all in the space of a few hours. “Hangovers and big booms don’t mix,” Joe Orsatti observed.

“Thank you, Albert Einstein,” Pete replied. After a moment, he added, “Fuck you, Albert Einstein.”

His jimjams didn’t keep him from passing shells to the loader when planes brought targets overhead. If slow-moving strips of orange cloth had dive-bombed the Boise, the Marines at her secondary armament would have blown them out of the sky.

A Navy lieutenant warned, “Keep an eyeball peeled for submarines. We aren’t within safe waters.”

He outranked the leathernecks-a two-striper was the equivalent of a Marine Corps captain. So they couldn’t say much while he was in earshot. Once he’d gone… That was a different story.

“What? He thinks we’re too dumb to look if he don’t tell us to?” Orsatti groused.

“He must figure we’re like ordinary swabbies,” Pete put in. That got some laughs. Marines were convinced sailors were idiots in training to be morons. Of course, it worked both ways, which was one of the reasons sailors and Marines from the same ship sometimes brawled when they got liberty at the same time.

One of the other guys in the gun crew just said, “Whistleass pecker-head.” That summed things up as well as any other two words Pete could have thought of.

No one saw a periscope, or even imagined he saw a periscope. The hydrophones didn’t report any contacts. There was talk that the Boise would get a fancy new version as part of her refit. Sonar was the name Pete had heard. He didn’t know much about it, but he was in favor of anything that would help keep them from stopping a torpedo.

They made it back to Pearl undamaged. That young lieutenant seemed convinced they got back for no other reason than his own enormous heroism. The leathernecks laughed behind their hands. Otherwise, they kept their opinions to themselves.

Ivan Kuchkov hated squelching through the mud. He hadn’t had to do that when he was in the Red Air Force, or not nearly so much of it, anyhow. But his only other choices were falling behind and letting the Nazis capture him (a bad bet) or getting wounded or killed (a worse one). So squelch he did.

Ukrainian mud seemed particularly oozy and bottomless, too. Everybody said Ukrainian soil-the famous black earth-was fertile beyond compare. He supposed that was so: this country was all kolkhozes. But, when the rasputitsa came, the black earth also turned goopy beyond compare.

“Avram!” Ivan called. Then he raised his voice to yell “Avram!” again, louder this time. The point man was well out ahead of the section, the way he was supposed to be.

He stopped when he finally heard Kuchkov. “What do you need, Comrade Sergeant?” he shouted back. He could afford to make some noise, as Ivan could; no Germans were in the neighborhood. Or if the Germans were, things were even more fouled up than the brass wanted to admit. Kuchkov guessed-no, on second thought he was sure-that was possible, maybe even likely.

He slogged forward through the muck to catch up to Sasha Davidov. If there were Fascists around, he didn’t want to call the point man back. Then the whole section might run into them without warning. That he might run into them without warning occurred to him only when he’d almost reached the Jew. He hung on to his PPD-34 a little tighter once it did.

And the first question out of his mouth was, “Any fucking sign of the pricks?”

Avram shook his head. “Not around here, Sergeant.” He pointed ahead. “Once we get over that swell of ground, we’ll be able to see farther. Of course, if there are any Germans on the far side of it, they’re liable to spot us, too.”

Ivan grunted. Normally, he would have had no more use for a skinny, swarthy little kike than any other Russian of peasant stock did. But times weren’t normal-not even a little bit. The game had changed as soon as the USSR and the Nazis actually came to grips. Some Russians and more Ukrainians and people from the Caucasus liked Hitler better than Stalin. They’d desert if they got the chance. Not even the politruks could stop them all the time.

You didn’t need to worry about the Jews, though. They were in the fight to the last bullet. They had to be. If the Nazis caught them, they’d get a bullet, all right. A Russian might be able to surrender. No guarantees, but he might. Zhids didn’t have a prayer. The Germans casually murdered them, the same way they got rid of the political officers who fell into their hands.

Pointing to that same swell of ground, Kuchkov asked, “Can you haul your sorry ass to the top and over without letting the Fascist pussies spot you?”

Avram was no braver than he had to be. But then, people who were braver than they had to be had a way of not living long. He tossed a papiros into the mud-he didn’t want some alert Fritz noticing the coal or the smoke. He nodded: not with any great enthusiasm, but he did. “I can do it.”

“All right. You go ahead, then. But some of the clumsy cuntfaced bitches in our outfit, you know they’d trip over their dicks if they tried, right?” Ivan said. He waited for the Jew to nod again before he went on, “So I’m gonna lead our assholes around to the left. If it’s clear, you fucking meet up with us there. Got it?”

“ Yob tvoyu mat’, Sergeant,” Davidov assured him.

Ivan burst into raucous laughter and slapped him on the back. Literally, what the Jew said meant Fuck your mother. In a different tone of voice or at a different time, it might have made Kuchkov try to murder him. But the filthy phrase lay at the bottom of mat. It could have a multitude of meanings, foul or fair. What Avram was getting across here was You bet your ass.

Fair enough. He was betting his own ass that he could do what he said he could do. “Go on, then,” Ivan told him. “You get into trouble, I’ll send some of the shitheads after you.”

Davidov nodded and went on. If he got into trouble, Ivan’s promise probably wouldn’t do him any good. He had to know that, but he moved up anyhow. He might be a kike, but he was all right.

The rest of the section took its own sweet time catching up to Kuchkov. The men weren’t fools. They could tell they were pretty safe where they were. The farther ahead they moved, the better-or rather, the worse-their chance of bumping into Nazis with guns.

Kuchkov profanely explained how they were going to skirt the swell of ground ahead. He also told half a dozen soldiers to rush to Avram’s rescue if the point man’s luck ran out. “You fuck that up, you better be more scared of me than you are of those German walking foreskins,” he added. The soldiers nodded. Anyone who wasn’t afraid of Ivan didn’t know him very well.

It had been drizzling. The rain started coming down harder as he took his section where it needed to go. In a way, that was good: the Germans would have more trouble noticing them. In another, not so good: the Red Army men would have more trouble spotting the Fascists.

Avram carried a PPD-34, too. You wanted to be able to throw a lot of lead at the bad guys in a hurry if you came across them when you didn’t expect to. Ivan kept his head cocked toward the top of the low hillock. He’d hear that snarl through the rain’s plashing.

It didn’t come. He got the rest of the section where they needed to go. Then he waited. Avram Davidov materialized as if out of thin air. “I think there are some Germans in the trees along the stream up ahead,” he said.

“You sure?” Ivan asked him.

“Pretty sure, Comrade Sergeant,” Davidov answered. “I don’t have any field glasses, but they looked like Germans, sure as the devil.”

“Bugger the cocksucking Devil,” Kuchkov said. He turned to another Red Army man. “Yuri!”

“ Da, Comrade Sergeant?”

“Go back and tell the company CO that we’ve bumped into the fucking Fascists. Ask him if he wants to reinforce us for a proper attack or if we should just sit tight and keep an eye on the pussies. You got me?”

“Da,” Yuri said again, and accurately gave back what Ivan had said. Like his sergeant, he could no more read and write than he could fly. He relied on his memory in ways people who could write never did. He was also pretty good at traveling cross-country-not so good as Avram, but good enough. Off he went, at the fastest clip the mud allowed.

Ivan didn’t need to order his men to start digging foxholes and camouflaging them. The soldiers automatically did that when they saw they wouldn’t be moving up for a while. The foxholes here would be nasty places, and would start filling up with water soon. The men dug anyhow. If German machine guns or artillery were going to probe for them, they wanted somewhere to hide.

Yuri probably wouldn’t make it back for a couple of hours. It might be dark by the time he did, which would put things off till tomorrow. Ivan didn’t mind; he was in no hurry to get shot at. He just hoped the Nazis weren’t readying their own onslaught. They might not need to wait hours to set up something good-sized. The bastards had radio sets falling out of their assholes.

Night came before either Yuri or a German attack. Yuri did manage to find his way back in the dark, and the jumpy sentries managed not to shoot him when he did. “Reinforcements will come up in the morning,” he reported. “The captain wants us to sit tight till then.”

“Khorosho,” Ivan said. The order let him to what he already wanted to, which suited him fine.

But, as Avram discovered, the Germans reinforced under cover of darkness. The Soviet attack never went in. Instead, the Red Army pulled back another kilometer or two and tried to draw a firm line in the mud.