Coup d'Etat

Chapter 25

Lieutenant Demange sidled up to Luc Harcourt and murmured into his dirty and none too shell-like ear: “Be ready.”

“Be ready for what?” Luc asked irritably. “I’d sure be ready for a holiday on the beach at Nice or somewhere like that, I’ll tell you.” The flat Russian landscape he saw at the moment wouldn’t have reminded him of the Riviera even if it weren’t draped in snow.

“Funny. Funny like the crabs,” Demange growled, the usual Gitane in the corner of his mouth jerking as he spoke.

“I don’t know if I’ve got crabs or not. I don’t give a good goddamn, either,” Luc said. “I’ve got regular lice, though, and fleas, and bedbugs. So who cares about the papillons d’amour?”

“It’s war. What d’you expect?” Demange’s narrow, bloodshot eyes flicked now this way now that. Luc tried to look every which way at once, too. The Ivans off to the east were supposed to be pretty quiet right this minute. But you’d never live to get old by counting on what the bastards on the other side were supposed to be doing. Demange went on, “Yeah, it’s war, but the political wheels are spinning again. That’s what you’ve got to be ready for.”

“Oh, God! Are we going through another round of that merde?” Luc looked around again, this time off toward the left. His regiment was stationed at the French expeditionary force’s left flank. Next to them in the line were the Boches. If he suddenly didn’t have to worry about the Russians any more, he would have to worry about the Fritzes instead.

“Could be,” Lieutenant Demange answered. “What I hear is, Daladier’s been talking with the English. If he decides they look like a better bet than Hitler, things here get sticky in a hurry.”

“No kidding!” Luc exclaimed. After a moment, he added, “You know, some of the guys in my section really do hate the Russians. You stay here for a while and they keep trying to kill you, that’ll happen.”

“Sure it will. So what?” Demange said. “We came here on account of some French jackass with a white mustache and fancy embroidery on his kepi told us to. If that same jerk, or another con just like him, says Stalin’s the hottest lay since Josephine Baker and we should make nice with him from now on, we fucking well will. That’s how the game is rigged, and you know it as well as I do.”

Luc’s sigh brought out fog almost as thick as the lieutenant’s cigarette smoke. “Yeah, I guess so,” he said unhappily. “You want I should warn the men something may be cooking, then?”

“Hold off a while longer. Like you say, some of the dumb shitheads like the Nazis better than the Reds. Wouldn’t do if one of ’em spilled the beans and brought the Germans down on our heads before we were ready to go over to the Russians.”

“You’re right.” Luc sounded more unhappy yet-and he was. “So you don’t think I’d do that, huh?”

“If you even thought about it, I’d blow your fucking head off before you got the chance to try,” Demange replied.

“Love you, too, Lieutenant.” Luc teased a few syllables’ worth of sour laughter out of Demange.

If the Red Army knew the French were thinking about changing sides, it didn’t let on. The Russians always had-sometimes quite literally-more artillery than they knew what to do with. They also had their horrible new barrage rockets that could lay a square kilometer waste in nothing flat. Winter weather troubled such toys much less than it interfered with infantry actions. The Russians pounded the French positions again and again.

Luc wondered if they were trying to tell the French generals that they could hurt the troops those generals commanded worse than the Nazis could. If they were trying to do that, he didn’t think it would work. Yes, the Russians could punish the expeditionary force. But the Germans could invade France-could invade, and had invaded, and might invade once more if France did switch back to England’s side.

None of which made him cower any less in the shallow scrapes he hacked out of the frozen ground when the Red Army pounded his countrymen’s positions. Shell fragments whined maliciously not far enough over his head. Blast from the rockets picked him up and slammed him down till he felt as if he’d lost a fifteen-rounder to Joe Louis.

The shelling did send one of the most pro-Nazi soldiers in his section away with a nasty thigh wound. Seeing the mess, Luc guessed the poor groaning bastard would lose the leg. He didn’t wish that kind of anguish on anybody-and Marcel had been a brave fellow even if he was a Fascist.

Two days after Marcel got hit, Lieutenant Demange quietly told Luc, “Now you can let your guys in on it. They need to know.”

“Oh, they do, do they?” Luc said tonelessly. He wasn’t at all sure he needed news like that himself. He glanced off to the left again. The closest German detachments were only a few hundred meters away. No barbed wire separated them from the French, as it did from the Russians. They were allies, after all… for the time being, anyhow.

Demange’s eyes slid in the same direction. He nodded glumly, as if at a question Luc hadn’t asked. “Yeah, it’s liable to get a little hairy,” he said. “We may end up playing flank guards. Doesn’t that sound like fun?”

“Fun. Right,” Luc said, still with no expression in his voice. Demange chuckled, thumped him on the back, and went off to brief some more noncoms.

Luc spread the word through his section. He quietly told off a few reliable poilus to keep an eye on the handful of others who might give them away to the Wehrmacht. “It’s politics, my dears,” he said over and over again. “Nothing we can do about it but roll with the punches.” He wished he had a better line. That one reminded him too much of the way the Russian rockets knocked him around.

“We’re crossing into the Reds’ lines, right?” one of his men asked. “How do we know when we’re supposed to do that? If we go too soon, the salauds ’re liable to machine-gun us instead of letting us through.”

“They’ll give us the signal to move on.” Luc hoped like nobody’s business he wasn’t lying.

And, as a matter of fact, he turned out not to be. “When it’s time for us to go, the Russians’ll fill the sky with green flares,” Lieutenant Demange said. “Just like fucking traffic lights, Harcourt. Even the dumb-shits in your section ought to be able to remember that.”

“Here’s hoping. Some of those dimbulbs wouldn’t remember their heads if they didn’t have ’em stapled on,” Luc said. Demange grunted something that might have been laughter. How many times had he talked about ordinary soldiers the same scornful way? Sure as hell, Luc had got most of what he thought he knew about being a sergeant straight from the horse’s mouth.

The Russians shelled the stretch of German line that abutted the French positions. Perhaps for the sake of verisimilitude, perhaps just to remind the French that they weren’t buddies yet, they also shelled Luc’s regiment. A couple of luckless men got killed; a few more picked up wounds. French 75s and 105s indignantly joined the German guns that gave back counterbattery fire. Luc hoped like anything that they murdered some Ivans. He didn’t want anybody’s artillery coming down on his head.

The Red Army signaled early one frigid morning (there was no other kind in Russia at this season of the year), just as night was giving way to daybreak. One second, the predawn stillness held. The next, it might have been a Bastille Day fireworks show, except that all the stars and rockets and flares flying up in the east were green.

“Let’s go!” Luc called. “There’ll be ways through the wire. The flank guards will hold off the Boches while we move.” While France and Germany played at friendship, you weren’t supposed to call the Feldgrau boys Boches. It was an order widely ignored-he ignored it himself-but an order even so. The flank guards still weren’t supposed to fire until fired upon, which would probably get some of the poor bastards killed.

Luc carried his rifle at high port as he hurried across the snow-covered fields toward the gaps in the barbed wire that had better be there. No firing came from in front of him. That was encouraging. But, all at once, he heard MG-34s and Mausers open up off to the left. Swearing under his smoking breath, he hunched over and tried to hurry faster.

“Green flares,” Oberleutnant Wolfgang Gruber told Willi Dernen and the other men commanding squads in his company. “That’s what you’ve got to look for from the Russian lines. That’s the signal for the froggies to try and fuck us over.”

“What do we do then, sir?” Willi asked. To his surprise, he found he liked leading a squad. Because Awful Arno had done it for so long, he’d assumed he would hate the job. But no-and he didn’t think he was doing it badly. He added, “I mean, I won’t be sorry to get the Frenchies off our flank-I was always scared the Ivans would push through them to flank us out. Still…”

“When they turn their coats, we’ve got to make them pay,” Gruber answered. “Till then, we have to make nice. I guess there’s still some chance the guys in the striped pants and the cutaways can straighten things out again. I mean, I don’t want them on our flank any more than you do, Dernen, but I don’t want a hole in the line four divisions wide, either.”

Willi grunted and nodded. The Wehrmacht had managed to patch things up and keep going when the English turned traitor. Maybe the General Staff could figure out how to do it again, especially since they seemed to have some warning. But that wasn’t a game you wanted to play once, much less twice.

Gruber looked from one corporal and Obergefreiter to the next. “Any other questions?” he asked. Nobody said anything. Willi had asked the only one that mattered. The company CO nodded. “All right, then. Let your men know what’s going on.”

Adam Pfaff nodded cynically when Willi passed along the news. “No big surprise, is there?” he said. “Anybody who ever counted on a lousy Frenchman was just asking to get his pocket picked.”

“That’s how it looks to me, too,” Willi said. “We got as much as we could out of the no-good pigdogs. Best thing we can do when they fly the coop is remind ’em why screwing around with the Reich is a bad idea.”

Pfaff nodded again. Most of the other guys in the squad bobbed their heads up and down, too. At the time, Willi thought he’d been plain enough. Later, though, he was faintly appalled at what had come out of his mouth.

Sharing a cigarette with the Obergefreiter with the gray Mauser, he explained why: “I sounded just like that cocksucking Baatz! Just like him, you hear me?”

“Take an even strain, man,” Pfaff said. “If you’re a noncom or making like a noncom, you’ve got to come out with that bullshit every now and then. You couldn’t do your job if you didn’t.”

“I don’t want to sound like Awful Arno,” Willi said. “Why couldn’t I sound like a good corporal instead?”

“Because you’ve had the dumb turd blabbing in your ear since the war started, that’s why,” his buddy answered. “Some of it’s bound to stick, the way shit sticks to the hair around your asshole.”

“There you go!” Willi liked the comparison. “Thanks. Now you made me feel better.”

“What are friends for?” Pfaff said modestly.

One thing friends were for, as far as Willi was concerned, was staying with you through thick and thin. The French flunked that test. The Germans started unobtrusively patrolling their right flank, where their positions adjoined those of their alleged allies. Willi noticed the froggies doing some unobtrusive patrolling of their own, keeping an eye on what the Landsers were up to. When Germans and Frenchmen couldn’t avoid noticing one another, they still waved and swapped smokes and rations, but it wasn’t the same as it had been.

Willi wondered what would happen if he asked some French noncom about green flares. He figured it was even money whether the guy had kittens or tried to murder him on the spot. Probably just as well he didn’t know enough French even to frame the question. Of course, he might run into a Frenchman who could verstehen some Deutsch…?

He never did so much as find the chance to ask. Patrolling got more dangerous: Russian artillery fire picked up. He noticed that the Ivans were also hitting the French positions off to the right of where the German part of the line ended. He hoped they were killing bunches of the men who were plotting to go over to them. It would serve the French right, by God!

All he really wanted to do was get out of Russia-eventually, get out of the war-in one piece himself. If doing that involved massacring every Ivan from here to Omsk, he would. If it involved sitting on his ass instead, he’d do that. He wasn’t fussy. He didn’t know anyone who’d been at the front for a while and didn’t feel the same way.

So he didn’t complain when the Russian artillery fire eased off again. If the Reds were hauling their guns twenty kilometers north to hit the Germans there, that was all right with him. His boys had been taking it in the neck for a while. Now it was some other poor bastards’ turn.

And then, one clear, cold morning, a new fish named Erich Something-or-other shook him awake. “Sorry to bother you, Herr Obergefreiter,” the kid said: to an ordinary rifleman, even Willi’s picayune rank mattered. Erich went on, “They’re shooting off green flares. Bunches of them, in fact.”

“Ah, fuck!” Willi said, wriggling out of his blanket like a bad-tempered butterfly emerging from its pupa. He looked eastward. Sure as hell, green fire was everywhere. He sighed and swore and lit the day’s first smoke. “All right. We’re on with the French again, then. Are the rest of the guys awake?”

“Most of them,” Erich answered. “We didn’t want to bother everybody, in case this wasn’t what you warned us about.”

“Give the sleepyheads a good, swift kick in the ass, in that case. This sure won’t be anything else.” Willi grabbed for his scope-sighted rifle. The longer the range at which he could pick off treacherous froggies, the better.

Oberleutnant Gruber spoke to most of the company: “The French figure they can get away with yanking the Fuhrer ’s mustache. We’re going to make them sorry, you hear me? The more poilus we kill here, the more we kill right now, the fewer we’ll have to worry about on the Western Front later on. So let’s go get ’em!”

The Landsers raised a cheer. Willi joined it, but he had the feeling he’d heard something most of them had missed. If France was back in the war, there would be a Western Front again, wouldn’t there? The Wehrmacht had come so close, so goddamn teasingly close, to Paris. Well, close only counted if you were chucking hand grenades. He had a couple of potato-mashers on his belt. He’d use them if he couldn’t get rid of the enemy from farther away.

He trudged south and east through the snow, toward the boundary between the German and French sectors. Shooting had already broken out. As he remembered from the fighting in France, it was easy to tell whose machine guns were going off. MG-34s fired a lot faster than the crap the froggies used. French rifles didn’t sound the same as Mausers, either. He hadn’t had to worry about them for a while, but all that stuff came back in a hurry.

There was a Frenchman, scurrying east to the vodka and borscht the Reds would give him for turning his coat. Willi dropped to one knee, to steady his aim and to make himself a smaller target. Exhale… Don’t squeeze the trigger. Touch it gently, like a tit… The Mauser pushed back against his shoulder. In his scope, the Frenchman staggered, stumbled, and fell.

He worked the sniping rifle’s downbent bolt and slogged forward again. He knocked over a couple of more poilus, both of them from a range where an ordinary Mauser without a scope probably would have missed. He felt sorry for them. How could he not, when it was a risk he took himself? But he knew they would have shot him without a qualm. Do unto others before they could do unto you. If that wasn’t war’s Golden Rule, it should have been.

A French noncom up ahead was trying to rally his section. It was another long shot, but Willi didn’t hesitate. Down went the noncom. His men scattered like partridges. Willi slapped a new clip into the rifle.

As he did, a bullet cracked past his head. Not all the froggies were running, dammit. He flattened out in the snow. Where was that French son of a bitch? Willi couldn’t spot him. That was scary. You always hated it when the guy who was trying to kill you was good at what he did.

Aristide Demange peered balefully across the snowy fields. That damned Boche had disappeared. With a white snowsuit and a whitewashed helmet, he was almost impossible to spot as long as he kept his head and his hands out of sight.

In front of Demange, Luc Harcourt’s blood steamed in the snow. The Germans were still well over half a kilometer away. It had taken one hell of a shot to punch Harcourt’s ticket for him. Well, punched it was; that one had torn his throat out. He’d lie here till the wolves found him.

Which didn’t mean Demange wanted to lie here with him. The veteran glanced back over his shoulder, working out what he needed to do next. The stupidest thing you could do was move before you decided where you were going and how you intended to get there.

He crawled backward, trying his best to keep Harcourt’s body between him and the German sniper. Acting as cover was the last favor the kid could do him or anybody else. When Demange had gone about as far as he could go that way, he scrambled to his feet and sprinted for the cover of some snow-covered bushes.

A Mauser bullet snapped past him, viciously close. He dove behind the bushes, his breath harsh in his throat. I’m getting too old for this crap, he thought. All those chain-smoked Gitanes… He spat out the butt he had in his mouth now. The last thing he wanted was for that fucking Nazi to spot cigarette smoke yelling Here I am!

Can I take him out? he wondered. He had a lot of practice with a rifle, but he was only a good marksman, not a great one. And his piece wasn’t all that accurate out past three or four hundred meters. If the guy who’d potted poor damned Harcourt wasn’t carrying one of their man-hunting fancy Mausers, Demange would have been astonished. All of which meant that, in any kind of long-range duel, the odds were on the other fucker’s side.

Then a Hotchkiss machine gun opened up. Puffs of rising snow traced its stream of bullets across the ground. Demange loved machine guns… when they were shooting at the other clowns. He wasn’t nearly so fond of them when they tried to put his lights out.

Now the sniper would have to keep his head down, though, unless he craved a round in one ear and out the other. And if he couldn’t fire, or would be rushed when he did, now looked like a terrific time to put some more distance between him and the lieutenant’s precious, irreplaceable self.

He used the bushes to screen his movements from the Boche. The asshole might be willing to pop up for a shot if he got a good target. Best not to give him one, then. All the same, the spot between Demange’s shoulder blades, that stretch of skin right above his spine, itched madly as he hustled toward the Red Army lines.

№ 7.92mm round ripped through that spot, or any other. Demange thanked the God in Whom he’d long since quit believing. He hadn’t stopped anything big in this war, not yet. He sure as hell did in 1918. The more you know about getting shot, the less you wanted to do it again.

A horrible clanking monster rumbled straight at him: a whitewashed T-34. It looked as if it could make canapes out of every French tank ever manufactured. The reason it looked that way was simple: it could. The commander rode with his head and shoulders out of the hatch. Recognizing Demange as a Frenchman, the Ivan waved a mittened hand as the T-34 clattered past.

“Watch out for a sniper up ahead!” Demange yelled. He doubted the Russian heard, or understood if he did hear. He’d tried, though. What else could you do?

He soon discovered he should have warned the driver to watch out for one of the Germans’ fearsome 88mm multipurpose guns, but he’d had no idea the damn thing was in the neighborhood. The Boches hadn’t wasted it on anything so trivial as foot soldiers. A T-34, now, that they took seriously. A big armor-piercing round slamming into steel plate sounded like an accident in a steel mill. The T-34 slewed sideways and started burning. A diesel engine didn’t go to blazes the way a gasoline-powered one did, but there were limits to everything.

Demange wasted maybe a second and a half feeling sorry for the unlucky cons inside the T-34. Then he trotted on toward the Russians’ lines. Whatever the tank wouldn’t do now that it had been intended to, it had got the Germans off his back for a while. From his point of view, what more could he want?

As promised, there were lanes through the barbed wire. The Ivans had even gone to the trouble of marking them with strips of red cloth. Never a trusting soul, Demange yelled “Friends! We’re friends!” as he came forward. He didn’t want his new comrades potting him by mistake.

A Russian appeared out of nowhere. One second, he wasn’t there. The next, he loomed up in front of Demange, a snowman with a submachine gun. Instead of mowing the lieutenant down, he pointed with the stubby barrel. “You go that way,” he said in bad, palatal French.

“I will go that way,” Demange agreed, speaking slowly and clearly. Afterward, he thought the Red Army man understood his obedience better than his reply.

He spotted a few more Russians as he tramped along. A couple of them gave him and the poilus who’d come in more brusque directions. He wondered how many more of the snowsuited cochons he wasn’t seeing. The Russians knew things about camouflage other people didn’t even suspect. Their strength was like an iceberg: nine-tenths of it hid below the surface.

Finally, he came to an officer-a captain, by his collar tabs-who wore khaki. He relaxed a bit himself then, deciding he was out of any possible sniper range. The captain carried a clipboard and a pencil. His French was pretty fair: “Give me your name, your rank, and your pay number,” he told Demange.

“Whatever you want.” Demange rattled them off. He assumed half a dozen Russians he couldn’t see crouched somewhere nearby, ready to gun down anybody stupid enough to argue or complain.

The captain wrote things down in a language and a script Demange couldn’t begin to follow. He also took the information from the enlisted men who trailed Demange. Then he gestured with the pencil, the same way the guy in the snowsuit had with his machine pistol. “Go that way, past the trees, another kilometer. Get into one of the trucks you find.”

Demange sketched a salute. “You got it.” He turned to his men. “Come on, you lugs. One more lousy kilometer, then we’re done marching for a while.”

“At least they aren’t taking away our rifles,” one of the French soldiers said.

He was right. Demange found that mildly encouraging, too-but only mildly. If the Russians wanted to slaughter them from ambush, how much would their rifles help?

The trucks gave Demange pause, much the same way as the sight of his first T-34 had some weeks earlier. They were big, sturdy, broad-shouldered machines that made every design engineer in France, Germany, and England look like an amateur, and a half-assed amateur at that. If the Russians made trucks like these and tanks like those, how come they were still such fuckups?

Then he saw letters of his own alphabet on the trucks’ grillwork. STUDEBAKER, they proclaimed. The Russians hadn’t made these trucks. They’d got them from the Americans. That was something of a relief. The Americans had a real talent for manufacturing things. He remembered that from the last war, that and their puppyish enthusiasm. They were new to the fight, and still eager for it. All the French soldiers left alive then had long since shed such stupidity.

Another moon-faced Ivan with a submachine gun waved him and some of his men into the back of one of the Studebakers. Three or four Frenchmen were already inside. Before long, the compartment was packed as tight as a tin of anchovy filets. “Anybody know where they’re going to take us?” asked one of the fellows who’d got there ahead of Demange.

“As long as it’s away from the front, who gives a damn?” the lieutenant returned.

He was as grimy and unshaven as any enlisted man. His greatcoat hid his rank badges. The men who didn’t know him treated him the same way they would have treated one of their own. That suited him fine; he’d never wanted to be an officer to begin with.

The truck’s engine rumbled to life. The driver put the big beast in gear. Wherever they were going, they were on their way.

In the summertime, the stinking Fritzes pressed forward and Soviet forces fell back. Ivan Kuchkov had seen that in all three summers of the war. During the winter, though, all bets were off. The Nazis weren’t such hotshots once snow started coming down. They were soft pussies, the Germans. All the good weather in Western Europe spoiled them rotten.

As far as Ivan was concerned, the Ukraine had pretty easy winters. It got a hell of a lot colder and snowed a hell of a lot more farther north. But even the weather here was plenty to screw up the Fascist bastards. Their tanks didn’t want to run. Sometimes even their gun oil froze up.

When you killed a guy who couldn’t shoot back because the bolt on his Mauser was stuck tight, you had to feel a little sorry for him. But you blew his head off anyway, and you were a jackass if you felt more than a little sorry while you did it. What was he doing hundreds of kilometers inside your country except trying to murder you and fuck your sister and steal everything you ever had or would have? Ivan was a jackass all kinds of ways-he even recognized some of them-but he wasn’t a pitying jackass.

West of Kiev, the German and Soviet positions looked more like interlaced fingers than anything resembling a line. A Stavka officer who planned and proposed dispositions like those would have got sent to the gulag or a punishment battalion in nothing flat. None of this had been planned; like a lot of war, it just happened. The Russians had gone ahead where they could. The Germans hung on to villages, and to the roads that let them keep the villages supplied.

To complicate things even more, Ukrainian bandits in the woods bushwhacked Russians and Germans almost impartially. A lot of them would have been pro-Nazi if only the Nazis gave them the chance. But the Germans liked Ukrainians no better than they liked Russians. More often than not, they couldn’t even tell them apart, or didn’t bother trying. So the bandits took potshots at them, too.

One of the reasons so many of the bandits would have gone over to the German side if only the Germans wanted them was that they hated Jews even more than most Russians did. Kuchkov had no great love for Zhids himself. Guys like Avram Davidov, though, got more useful in this kind of country. Avram knew what to be nervous about. The short answer was, everything. And when the short answer was everything, the long answer didn’t matter.

The Ukrainian nationalists’ big disadvantage was that they didn’t have an actual country on their side. No factories made rifles and mortars and hand grenades just for them. No trains and trucks made sure weapons reached them in-literally-carload lots. They had to make do with hunting rifles and whatever they could steal from the Germans and Russians.

On the other hand, they were desperately in earnest. The only reason most of the Red Army men and their foes in Feldgrau wore their country’s uniform was that they would have got it in the neck if they’d tried to say no to the fat sons of bitches who’d conscripted them. The bandits went out to fight because they felt like fighting. They didn’t have a country on their side, but they sure wanted to. It made a difference.

Right now, Ivan and his men crouched in amongst some trees that wanted to be a proper forest but didn’t quite know how. Avram’s eyes flicked across a field to some more trees that might have been an orchard before Stalin started tearing the Ukraine a new asshole but had plainly stood forgotten ever since. The little Jew didn’t point; the Red Army men’s cover wasn’t all that great.

“ Somebody’s in there, Comrade Sergeant.” Davidov sounded as spooked as a guy wandering the corridors of a haunted castle in some bad horror film.

“German cunts?” Kuchkov asked. That was his first guess because his officers said there were supposed to be Nazis around here somewhere. He let them do his thinking for him. He knew he wasn’t real good at it himself.

Unhappily, Avram shook his head. “I think they’re Banderists.” He was hardly ever cheerful. Now he looked and sounded even gloomier than usual. Stepan Bandera was the bandit chief in charge of most-not all, but most-of the jerks who wanted to fly the gold-and-blue flag, stamp their stupid trident on everything that didn’t move, and go around grunting in their almost-Russian language.

“Fuck,” Kuchkov said. “You sure?”

“Two or three of them showed themselves there for a few seconds.” Davidov still didn’t point. He did add what he plainly thought was a clincher: “One of ’em was wearing a cloth cap.”

“Fuck,” Kuchkov repeated. Real soldiers would wear helmets, or maybe service caps or berets. Only a yokel off a farm would dress like a yokel off a farm. Ivan went on, “We don’t need this extra fucking shit, you know?”

“Sorry, Comrade Sergeant.” Sasha sounded as if he meant it. He was like anybody else: getting shot or ripped to pieces by artillery fire didn’t appeal to him one hell of a lot. After a moment, he asked, “What shall we do?”

Ivan only grunted. He had no idea how many Ukrainians were lurking over there. He didn’t want to have to attack them across open ground. If they had a machine gun, or maybe even if they didn’t, they could murder every one of the men who’d come at them.

He grunted again. Then he picked up a branch not quite as long as he was and tied his snow smock to it by the arms: not much of a flag of truce, but he had to hope it would do. “I’ll parley with the bitches,” he said. “If they don’t turn me loose, or if anything else gets fucked up, send somebody back to regimental artillery and have ’em blast the living shit out of those trees. Got it?”

The Jew nodded. If anybody in this section could be counted on to take care of something like that, he was the guy. Waving the improvised white flag, Ivan started across the field toward the forgotten orchard. It was a long, slow, lonely walk. They could kill him if they wanted to. No-they wanted to kill him, and they could. It wasn’t the same thing.

After a while, a shout came from the leafless fruit trees: “Hold it right there, you cocksucking Red!”

“Ah, fuck your mother. You haven’t got a cock big enough to suck,” Ivan answered without much rancor. But he did stop.

“You’ve got some nerve, talking like that out in the open.” The Ukrainian in the orchard made enough of an effort to speak Russian that Kuchkov could follow him well enough. “What do you want?”

“My guys have a radio.” Ivan lied without compunction. “All we have to do is call, and the big guns’ll fuck your position over. If you cunts clear out peaceable-like, we won’t call. I’ll give you half an hour.”

“Why should I believe a guy who licks Stalin’s balls?” The Ukrainian was almost as foul-mouthed as Kuchkov himself.

“ ’Cause I’m standing here, that’s why,” Kuchkov answered. “You think I’d let you shoot my dick off for nothing better’n bullshit?”

“With a Russian, who the hell knows what you’d be dumb enough to do?” the bandits’ spokesman said darkly. Ivan stood out there in the cold wind. He’d figured he would have to wait. The bandit couldn’t just give orders, the way a proper sergeant could. He had to talk his buddies into doing shit.

Ivan made as if to look at a watch he wasn’t wearing. “Twenty-eight minutes now,” he called. “Don’t sit there jerking off. Get your nuts in gear.”

He waited some more, occasionally checking that nonexistent wristwatch. After a while, the Ukrainian said, “All right. Keep your old galoshes on. We’re leaving.” Ivan chuckled. Old galoshes was Russian slang-not quite mat, but close-for a used rubber. Hearing it made him think the bandit meant what he said.

When Ivan did wave his section forward, only half his men came out of their positions. If that wasn’t Avram’s doing, he would have been amazed. You always wanted somebody in reserve. They occupied the orchard with no trouble-the bandits really had gone away. Kuchkov swigged vodka and lit a papiros to celebrate. A bloodless victory was the best kind.