Coup d'Etat

Chapter 3

Sergeant Luc Harcourt shivered as he led his squad into the Russian village. That wasn’t fear; the village lay several hundred kilometers behind the line, and was unlikely to have holdouts in it. No, Luc was just cold. French greatcoats and other winter gear weren’t made for weather like this.

If not for the felt boots he wore over his own clodhoppers, he would have been colder yet. He’d stripped them off a dead Russian, and they were lifesavers. The Ivans had to deal with this crap every year, poor bastards, and they knew how.

He’d noticed that German soldiers wore valenki whenever they could get hold of them, too. That left him obscurely amused. So the Master Race didn’t know everything there was to know about winter warfare, either? Well, good!

Daladier might declare that France and Germany were allies against the Bolsheviks now. Luc might have taken a train trip through the Reich so he could get at the Red Army. But before that he’d spent two years shooting at the Nazis and trying like hell to hide when they shot back. Some Boche had shot his father during the last war. No matter what fucking Daladier declared, Luc didn’t love the Germans. No, sir, not even close.

A lot of Russian villages the Germans and their allies had overrun were empty. The locals had cleared out instead of sticking around to see what occupation would be like. Luc sympathized. Plenty of Frenchmen and — women had fled when the Germans invaded, too. And there were lots of Jews in these parts. If he were a Jew, he wouldn’t have stayed under German rule for anything.

Not everyone had run away from this place, though. A few men and women came out of their battered shacks to eye the soldiers trudging down the main street-an unpaved track with some of the dirty snow trampled into the frozen ground. All the Russians, regardless of sex, had valenki. Luc thought they were foolish to put the overboots on display. Some of his men were liable to steal them right off their feet.

A fellow with a graying, stubbly beard wore a wool scarf, a sheepskin cap and jacket, and baggy wool pants stuffed into the tops of his valenki. He surprised Luc by asking, “You’re Frenchmen, aren’t you?” in fluent French.

“That’s right,” the sergeant answered. “Where did you learn our language?”

The Ivan smiled a sweet, sad smile. “Once upon a time, I studied medicine. I learned French then. I learned German, too.” The smile got sadder still. “I used to think I was a cultured fellow.”

“Well, what the devil are you doing here?” Luc asked. This miserable village was as far from culture as anything could get.

“Tending my garden,” the Russian said, as Candide might have done. He went on, “What I grow in my own plot, I get to keep and sell. The state takes what we grow on our collective lands, of course. And I still do what I can when someone gets hurt or comes down sick.”

“Why aren’t you a doctor in some big city?” Luc inquired.

“The council of workers and peasants was going to send me to a labor camp for being an intellectual,” the Russian answered, as calmly as if he were talking about someone else. “But they decided I could work out my antiproletarian prejudices here on the kolkhoz instead. I’ve been here since 1922.”

“Well, now we’ve come to set you free.” Luc trotted out the propaganda line the Germans had fed their new allies to see what this cultured Russian would make of it.

By the way the fellow looked at him, he might have pissed in the baptismal font-except the building that had been a church before the Revolution was currently a barn. “If you’d come here in 1923, I would have welcomed you with open arms,” the Russian said. “So would almost everyone else. But now? No. We’ve spent a generation building up and getting used to the new ways of doing things. You want to tear down everything we’ve managed to do and tell us to start over one more time. We would rather fight for General Secretary Stalin than go through that again.”

He didn’t make fighting for Stalin sound like a good choice-only like a better choice than starting from scratch. Chuckling, Luc said, “Maybe I ought to shoot you now, then, to keep you from making trouble later on.”

“It could be that you should.” The Russian wasn’t joking. “I see that, because you are French, some shreds of civilization still cling to you. The Nazis would not talk like that. They would just start shooting and burning. It has happened here in the Soviet Union many times already. No doubt it will happen many more.”

Luc wanted to tell him that was all a pack of lies: nothing but garbage served up by the propaganda cooks in Moscow. He wanted to, yes, but the words stuck in his throat. After all, the Germans had invaded his country twice since 1914. They weren’t gentle occupiers either time. From all he’d heard, they were more brutal now than they had been a generation earlier. Why would he expect them to be gentle here in the East, then?

Uneasily, he said, “International law gives them the right to be hard on francs-tireurs.” If you picked up a rifle without being a soldier, any army in the world that caught you would give you a blindfold and-if you were lucky-a cigarette and then fill you full of holes.

Of course, the Germans took hostages if francs-tireurs troubled them. They murdered them by dozens or scores to remind the people they were fighting not to get frisky. Here in the East, they probably executed hostages by the hundreds. Would such frightfulness intimidate the Russians or only make them hate harder?

Looking into the doctor-turned-peasant’s pale eyes, Luc didn’t like the answer he thought he saw. “Keep your nose clean, or you’ll be sorry,” he said, his voice rougher than he’d intended.

“Oh, but of course, Monsieur,” the Russian said, his tone so transparently false that Luc wondered whether he should plug him right there.

A Nazi would have. The Ivan understood as much. So did Luc. It was the biggest part of what stayed his hand. He didn’t have his men camp inside the village, as he’d intended when they approached it. Instead, he led them on for another kilometer. They were grumbling by the time he finally let them stop.

He didn’t feel like listening to them. “Put a sock in it, you clowns,” he said. “We go to sleep in one of those houses, we’ll wake up with our throats cut.”

“We’ll freeze here in the middle of nowhere,” one of the poilus retorted. “Is that so much better?”

“We won’t freeze. We’ll just be cold. There’s a difference,” Luc said. He knew what the men would be saying about him-that he wouldn’t feel it because his heart was already cold. He’d said the same kind of thing about his sergeant back in the days before he wore any hash marks on his sleeve.

Sergeant Demange was Second Lieutenant Demange now. A veteran noncom from the last war, Demange didn’t want to be an officer. But the know-it-alls above him kept getting shot, and he finally won a promotion whether he liked it or not. The way he chain-smoked Gitanes said he didn’t. Or maybe not-he’d smoked like a chimney as a sergeant, too.

Luc told him about the French-speaking Russian back in the village. “You should have scragged the asshole,” said Demange, who had very little use for his fellow man. “It would’ve given the rest of the shitheads back there something to stew on.”

“The Gestapo would be proud of you, sir.” More than two years of serving Demange had earned Luc the right to speak his mind.

Up to a point. “Fuck you,” Demange answered evenly. “Fuck the Ivans, too. You want to make sure they don’t cause trouble, you’ve got to boot ’em in the balls. Oh, yeah-and fuck the Gestapo. Fuck ’em up the ass, except the ones who like it that way.”

“Merde alors!” Admiration filled Luc’s voice. “You hate everybody, don’t you?”

“Close enough,” Demange said. “With most of the bastards you run into, it just saves time.” He was looking at-looking through-Luc right then.

If that wasn’t a hint, Luc had never run into one. “Don’t worry, sir. Everybody loves you, too,” he said. Sketching a salute, he went back to his squad. Behind him, the reluctant officer chuckled.

In the middle of the night, the Russians dropped a swarm of mortar bombs on the village… and on the poilus who’d paused there for the night. Several soldiers got hurt. Luc’s squad was far enough from the buildings that nothing came down on them.

He didn’t point that out to the men he led. If he had, they would have figured he was blowing his own horn. If they figured it out for themselves, though, they’d see what a clever fellow he really was. Back in his days as a sergeant, Demange would have played it the same way. Luc had learned more from him than he would ever admit, even-maybe especially-to himself.

The hacked-up boards the Landsers fed into the fire came from a house a Russian shell had knocked flat. The gobbets of meat they toasted over the flames came from a horse that had hauled a 105mm howitzer till another shell broke its leg. Willi Dernen had shot it to put it out of its misery. He’d long since lost track of how many enemy soldiers he’d killed or wounded, but he couldn’t stand to see or listen to an animal suffer.

He took a bite. The meat was half charred, half raw. It was also gluey and gamy. It was horsemeat, in other words. It wasn’t the first time he’d had it, and he was sure it wouldn’t be the last. He turned to his fellow Gefreiter — senior private-and said, “I’ve probably eaten enough horse to let them enter me in next year’s Berlin steeplechase.”

Adam Pfaff shook his head. “Not fucking likely, Willi. I’ve eaten plenty of pussy, but nobody’s gonna put me in a goddamn cat show.” While Willi was still digesting that, so to speak, his buddy added, “Besides, have you taken a look at yourself lately? You’re no three-year-old, believe me, and no thoroughbred, either.”

“Oh, yeah? And you are?” Willi said. They grinned at each other. Like the rest of the men in their section-like the rest of the German Frontschweine in Russia-they were scrawny and filthy and badly shaven. A crawly itch under Willi’s whitewashed Stahlhelm said he was lousy again, too. One of these days, he’d get deloused. And he’d stay clean till the next time he went through a Russian village. Say, half an hour after he left the delousing station. Then he’d have company once more.

“Who’s got some tobacco he can spare?” Corporal Arno Baatz asked.

Willi had a nice little sack of makhorka — Russian tobacco, cheap and nasty but strong-in a trouser pocket. He would have bet Adam Pfaff had a similar stash. Adam knew what was what about keeping himself supplied. Neither Gefreiter said a word. Willi had had to put up with Awful Arno since the war started. Adam was much newer to the regiment, but he’d rapidly learned the Unteroffizier made a piss-poor substitute for a human being.

“Here you go, Corporal.” A private named Sigi Herzog gave Baatz a cigarette. Willi had already pegged him for a suckup. One more suspicion confirmed.

“Good.” Awful Arno didn’t bother thanking Sigi. He took such tribute as no less than his due. Another reason to despise him, as far as Willi was concerned: one more to add to a long list. Were Baatz a gutless wonder, everything would have been perfect-and the company would have had a perfectly good excuse for shipping him back behind the lines where he could annoy people without risking lives. But he actually made a decent combat soldier. It was everything else about him that Willi-and anyone else who got stuck serving under him-couldn’t stand.

He lit the cigarette and sucked in smoke. His plump cheeks hollowed. How any German on the Eastern Front stayed plump was beyond Willi, but Awful Arno managed. He shaved more often than most Landsers bothered to, but he was still plenty whiskery right this minute.

After blowing out a stream of smoke and fog, he let loose with a blast of hot air, straight from the Propaganda Ministry: “As soon as the weather gets even a little better, we’ll roll up the Ivans like a pair of socks.”

That he believed-and, worse, parroted-such bullshit was also on the list of reasons why he’d got his nickname. Willi rolled his eyes. Adam Pfaff rounded on Sigi. “What did you put in that smoke you gave him, man? Has to be better than tobacco, that’s for sure. If you’ve got more, give me some, too.”

Baatz sent him an unfriendly look: about the only kind the corporal kept in stock. “So what are you saying, Pfaff? Are you saying we won’t roll up the Reds?” he asked. “That sounds like defeatism to me.”

Defeatism could get you tangled up with the SS, the last thing anybody in his right mind wanted. Pfaff shook his head. “Don’t talk more like a jackass than you can help, Corporal. Anybody who’s seen me in action knows I’m no defeatist. Is that so or isn’t it?”

“If you make other soldiers not want to fight their hardest, that’s defeatism, too,” Baatz said stubbornly. “And you’d better remember I’m not too big a jackass to know it.”

Pfaff didn’t back down. “Nobody here’s gonna run home to Mutti on account of anything I come out with. And we all know we’d better fight hard, or else the Russians’ll cut off our cocks and shove ’em in our mouths.”

“Do they really do that shit?” asked a kid who’d come up to the front only a few days earlier. His uniform wasn’t so patched and faded as the ones the other Landsers wore. But for that, there wasn’t much to choose between him and the rest.

“They sure do,” Pfaff replied. Awful Arno nodded-they agreed on that much, anyhow.

Willi nodded, too. He’d seen it for himself, however much he wished he hadn’t. “You don’t want to let the Ivans take you prisoner,” he said. “Save a last round for yourself. Maybe the guys they do that to are already dead, but you don’t want to find out for yourself, do you?”

“So what do we do with the Russians we capture?” the new fish asked.

The veterans squatting by the fire eyed one another. Nobody said anything for a little while. At last, Willi answered, “Well, sometimes we send ’em back to a camp like good little boys, the way we would have in the West.” We would have most of the time in the West, anyway, he thought. The French and English weren’t perfect about sticking to the Geneva Convention, either. Aloud, he went on, “Sometimes, though…” He shrugged. “It’s a rough old war. I don’t know what else to tell you.”

“If we catch commissars or Jews, we do for them right away,” Awful Arno said. “Pigdogs like that don’t deserve to live.”

Not every commissar or Jewish Red Army man died right away. The Wehrmacht kept some alive for questioning. The ones who did live for a while probably wound up envying their comrades who perished on the spot. German interrogators weren’t likely to be gentler than their Soviet opposite numbers.

The kid chewed on that for a few seconds. Then he asked, “If we treat them rough, doesn’t that give them an excuse to do the same to us?”

Arno Baatz laughed at him. “You want to spout the Golden Rule, sonny, you should put on a chaplain’s frock coat before you start.”

He waited for the other men who’d been through the mill to laugh with him. Sigi Herzog did, but he was the only one. Awful Arno scowled at the others. Willi stonily stared back at him. The kid had a point of sorts.

But only of sorts. “Look, when this fight is over, either we’ll be left standing or the damn Russians will,” Willi said. “You fight a war like that, and who has room to be a gentleman?”

“Isn’t that what the Geneva Convention’s for?” the new fish asked. “To keep things clean on both sides, I mean?”

Awful Arno laughed some more-a mean, nasty laugh. “Didn’t they tell you anything before they shipped your sorry ass up here? Yeah, that’s what the Geneva Convention’s all about. When we fought the Tommies and the frogs, we played by the rules, and so did they. But you know what? The fucking Bolsheviks never signed the fucking Convention! ”

“Oh,” the kid said in a small voice. And that was about the size of it. There were no formal rules in the fight between the Third Reich and the Soviet Union. They could go at it however they pleased. They could, and they did. The kid made one more try: “If we told Stalin we’d follow the Convention whether we have to or not, wouldn’t he almost have to do the same?”

Baatz laughed one more time. However little Willi wanted to, he found himself laughing along. It was either laugh or weep, and laughing hurt-a little-less. “Stalin doesn’t have to do anything he doesn’t want to do,” Awful Arno said. “What he wants to do now is kill all the Germans he can.”

He was right about that. Of course, Hitler didn’t have to do anything he didn’t want to, either, and what he wanted to do was kill carload lots of Russians. Which left the soldiers in Feldgrau or khaki stuck in the middle between them in one hell of a rough spot.

Like I didn’t know that already, Willi thought. His bayonet got most of its use as a belt knife. He hacked off another hunk of horsemeat with it. Then he skewered the meat and held it over the fire. At least his belly would be full, anyhow.

Chaim Weinberg liked having the Czech holdouts around. They might not be Marxist-Leninists the way he and most of the Internationals were, but they were good, solid men. The American Jew had nothing against Spaniards. He wouldn’t have come to Spain to fight for the Republic if he had.

Spaniards-Spaniards on both sides, dammit-were extravagantly brave. They put up with shortages and fuckups with good humor he could only admire, because he sure couldn’t imitate it. But they were flighty. They were temperamental. They could be cruel for the fun of it (he’d never got used to bullfighting). And they liked to talk. Jesus H. Christ, did they ever!

It wasn’t as if he didn’t enjoy the sound of his own voice. He did. He argued and converted and preached the Red faith with as much zeal as any friar taking on the latest jungle tribe who knew not the word of God. But when it came to passion, Chaim had to admit the Spaniards had him beat.

He’d fallen hard for La Martellita, a Party organizer in battered Madrid. He would have said (hell, he did say, to anyone who would listen) he’d fallen in love with her. The emotion involved, though, sprang from an organ south of his heart. She was tiny. She was stacked. She was gorgeous, in the blue-black-haired, high-cheekboned, flashing-eyed Spanish way. She had what he couldn’t help thinking of as a blowjob mouth. And the way she painted it said she knew as much, too.

She wouldn’t look at him for the longest time. It wasn’t that he was no movie star himself, even if he was no movie star himself. He was not too tall, kind of dumpy, and looked as Jewish as he was. But what really bothered her was that he wasn’t ideologically pure enough. He had the American gift, or curse, of thinking for himself, not blindly swallowing the latest twist in the Party line out of Moscow.

He got into her bed by the oldest, most time-tested method in the world: he waited till she got smashed, went back to her place with her, and had his fun while she was too loaded to care-almost too loaded to notice. She was anything but delighted to discover him next to her the next morning, and her lethal hangover had only a little to do with it. But he’d tended to the hangover and sweet-talked her till she let him back in bed fully conscious; he owned the memory forever.

Then she found out she was pregnant.

She could have got rid of it easily enough. The Republic had probably the most progressive social policies in the world. But she didn’t want to. Maybe a strict Catholic upbringing still lurked in the unexamined basement of her soul. No, she wanted her little surprise to carry a proper surname.

And so Chaim found himself a married man. He felt like Brer Rabbit in the briar patch. La Martellita-her revolutionary name meant The Little Hammer, and suited her all too well-promised she’d divorce him after the baby was born. Divorce was even easier here than abortion. And, unlike abortion, it didn’t trouble her tender conscience.

In the meantime… It could have been a white marriage, like one between a fairy and a dyke wearing masks for the sake of the world’s good opinion. La Martellita, though, was as thorough in marriage as she was in everything else. And she had discovered that Chaim wasn’t half bad in the sack. It surprised her, as it had quite a few other women before her.

“I may not be pretty, but by God I can screw,” he said, not without pride.

“You may be able to screw, but by God you’re not pretty,” La Martellita answered, not without truth.

Despite such devastating candor from his more-or-less beloved, he went back into Madrid from the front as often as he could. And he returned to the front less and less worried that she hoped he would stop something up there so she could give the baby a name as a respectable widow and not have to go on worrying about the messy details that went into marriage.

Little by little, the Republicans were driving the Nationalists back from the northwestern edge of Madrid. There’d been months of bitter fighting over the corpse of the university. Now those battered buildings lay several kilometers behind the line. Pretty soon, most of Madrid would be out of artillery range for Marshal Sanjurjo’s thugs.

Mike Carroll had served in the Abraham Lincoln Battalion for as long as Chaim had. Mike was tall and fair and lean and handsome. Chaim should have hated him on sight. Instead, they’d been buddies since the moment they met. Like so many buddies, they sassed each other all the time.

“You’re the only Abe Lincoln who doesn’t want us to advance any more,” Mike said one chilly morning, a certain gleam in his eye.

“My ass!” Chaim retorted. “The fuck that supposed to mean?”

“Means the farther the front goes from the city, the tougher the time you have getting back there and getting your end wet,” Carroll answered.

Chaim suggested that one way he could achieve such an objective was by having his comrade-in-arms perform an unnatural act on him. Said comrade-in-arms made reference to his mother, and also to the possibly relevant body parts of a ewe. Chaim surmised that the ewe might be diseased due to earlier intimate acquaintance with said comrade-in-arms. If they both hadn’t been laughing their heads off, they would have tried to murder each other.

After the filthy jokes ran thin, Chaim said, “Seriously, man, we better push the Fascists back as far as we can. I’ve got the bad feeling this summer won’t be a hell of a lot of fun.”

“Amazing, Sherlock!” Mike said. “What leads you to this deduction?”

“Ah, cut the crap. You know as well as I do,” Chaim answered.

“We aren’t licked yet,” Mike said, which wasn’t a ringing denial.

Everybody on the Republican side knew what was wrong. As in a sickroom where the patient still seemed strong but was plainly sinking, no one wanted to talk about it. Now that England and France were backing Hitler’s push against Stalin, Republican Spain was definitely the girl they’d left behind. The Republic was lucky to have got those Czechs, and the handful of French Jews who’d come with them. Not many more soldiers would make it over the Pyrenees.

Not many more supplies would, either. France and England didn’t want to sell to the Republic any more. Stalin did, but he had his own war to worry about and a swarm of enemies between him and Spain. Meanwhile, nobody was stopping the Fuhrer and the Duce from shipping Marshal Sanjurjo all kinds of goodies.

“Maybe FDR will come through,” Mike said.

“And rain makes applesauce,” Chaim returned. “I’ll believe that when I see it.”

America was at war with Japan, not with Germany. Roosevelt hadn’t even tried to get a declaration of war against Germany through Congress. Had he tried, he would have failed. The USA had been selling billions in weapons to the so-called Western democracies… till the big switch. After that, FDR pulled the plug. The munitions makers might have found a market in Spain to take up some of the slack-if the new war against Japan hadn’t got them going full speed ahead again.

Chaim paused to scratch. Why wasn’t it too cold for bugs in the trenches? Because they lived on nice, warm people-that was why. “Even if we are fucked, we’ve lasted three years longer than anybody thought we could,” he said. “The government was going to take the Internationals out of the line, remember, ’cause we’d done all we could do. Or we thought so, anyway, till Hitler jumped on the Czechs and all of a sudden England and France liked the Republic again.”

“And now they don’t any more, and we’re fucked again,” Carroll said. “Till the roulette wheel stops on a new square, we are. I wish Hitler would’ve declared war on America. That would have fried his fish for him.”

“Boy, you got that straight,” Chaim said. “Can you imagine all the shit that’d pour into Spain then?” He imagined it with the dreamy, half-hopeless awe a starving prospector gave to striking the mother lode.

“In the meantime…” Carroll poked him in the ribs. “In the meantime, you’ve got your little cutie back in town. If she doesn’t give you something to fight for, you’ve got to be dead.”

Chaim would no more have called La Martellita a little cutie than he would have hung the same handle on a 155mm shell. It wasn’t obvious which was more dangerous, or more explosive. Still, some guys did talk about weapons that way, even if he didn’t. His features softened for a reason different, if related.

“I’m gonna have a kid. A half-Spanish kid, a kid who’s gonna live here in the country we end up making,” he said softly, his eyes dreamy and far away. “That, now, that gives me somethin’ to fuckin’ fight for.”

Some German propaganda sheets lay next to the bubbling samovar when Anastas Mouradian walked into the Red Air Force officers’ meeting room. He could tell what they were right away. For one thing, even by Soviet standards, the paper they were printed on was amazingly cheap and cruddy. For another, the font the Nazis had chosen looked like something from before the last war.

The Armenian bomber pilot wondered why they’d picked something so outdated. Maybe they didn’t have any more modern type. Or maybe, since the alphabet wasn’t their own, they were just style-blind. It wasn’t the alphabet Stas had grown up with, either, but he saw it all the time. Couldn’t Hitler’s clowns have found a defector to fill them in on their own stupidity?

Most likely, they hadn’t even gone looking. Germans were so convinced of their own superiority, they often didn’t bother asking advice from anyone else. Sometimes they paid for their arrogance, too.

He picked up one of the sheets. A misspelled word and some bad grammar leaped out at him. The Nazis were trying to persuade non-Russians in the USSR to go over to them. You thought the tiranny of the Tsars was bad. Stalin’s is even worser! the flier said. No, no one would take you seriously if you stuck your foot in your mouth as soon as you opened it.

A Russian pilot paused at the samovar to pour himself a glass of tea. He chuckled when he saw what Mouradian was looking at. “So, Stas, you going to fly your plane over to a Hitlerite airstrip?” he inquired.

He was joking. Stas knew that perfectly well. All the same, the Armenian set down the propaganda sheet as if it burned his fingers. “Not me!” he declared, sincerity ringing in his voice. “Only thing I’ll give them is a thousand kilos of high explosive!”

The trouble with jokes was, you never could tell who was listening to the answers. Stas had no reason to think Boris there belonged to the NKVD or informed on his fellow officers. He had no reason to think that about any of the other flyers sitting down with tea and hard rolls and fatty pork sausages and papirosi, either.

But he couldn’t afford to joke back with the Russians, because there was always the chance… He didn’t care to see the Lubyanka, the NKVD headquarters in Moscow, from the inside. He didn’t want to go to a labor camp in Turkmenistan or Siberia just on account of a misunderstood joke. He didn’t want to go to a place like that at all, but especially not for such a stupid reason.

And so, remarking, “This stinking thing wouldn’t even make a good asswipe,” he poured himself a glass of tea, too, and walked away from the table without a backward glance at the propaganda sheet.

His copilot came in a few minutes later. Ivan Kulkaanen also picked up one of the sheets. After a quick glance, he put it down again. “Fascist bullshit!” he said loudly, and got himself some tea and a roll.

It was Fascist bullshit-no possible doubt about that. With better propaganda, the Nazis might have had more chance of prying people away from the Soviet regime. Not everyone in the USSR loved it; not even close. If you had to choose between Stalin and his henchmen on the one hand and people who turned out crap like that on the other, though, you turned into a Soviet patriot almost by default.

Lieutenant Colonel Tomashevsky came in. The squadron commander waved to his men, telling them not to bother to jump up and salute. Discipline in the Soviet armed forces had tightened up since the war started. Leaders had discovered that, while a revolutionary military sounded good, a hierarchical one performed better. They’d found the same thing in Spain. They’d rediscovered it after the French Revolution. No doubt Spartacus, that Soviet hero, had had to learn the lesson, too.

After snagging tea and breakfast, Tomashevsky said, “Looks like we’ll fly today, Comrades.” He sat down. By the way he shoveled sausage into his chowlock, action didn’t leave him too nervous to eat. Anastas Mouradian felt the same way. He wanted some ballast in there when he went up. Some people worked differently. They’d puke or get the runs if they went into combat with a full stomach. They weren’t cowards. They just came equipped with anxious insides.

“What’s our target, Comrade Colonel?” someone asked.

“There’s an enemy concentration east of Vitebsk,” Tomashevsky said. “Mostly Englishmen and the French, Intelligence says.” His lip curled in fine contempt. “If they want to play these games, we have to show them the price. And if we smash them up before they get to the front, that’s one thing less for the Red Army to worry about.”

Groundcrew men were bombing up the Pe-2s and making sure their machine guns had full belts when Mouradian and Kulkaanen went to their plane. Some of the bombs had slogans chalked on the casings: For Stalin! and Death to Fascists! and the like. The only way the enemy would find out about one of those was if the bomb proved a dud. But the groundcrews did that kind of thing all the time. It made them happy and didn’t hurt anything, so why not?

Fyodor Mechnikov profanely directed bomb stowage. The blocky sergeant reminded Stas a lot of Ivan Kuchkov, with whom he’d served before getting promoted away. He wasn’t quite so hairy or quite so ugly, and he didn’t have quite such a foul mouth, but he came close on all three counts.

“We’ll give ’em hell, right?” he said to Stas.

The Armenian nodded gravely. “That isn’t borscht we’re dropping on them.”

“Borscht.” The bombardier didn’t need long to decide what he thought of that. “You’re weird… sir.”

“It could be,” Mouradian agreed. “It probably is, in fact. But as long as I get the plane there and back, as long as we deliver the load, what difference does it make?”

“When you put it that way, not fucking much,” Mechnikov allowed.

Flying the Pe-2 was a pleasure. It had so much speed and maneuverability, people called it the fighting bomber. Of course, they’d said the same thing about the SB-2, the plane Stas had learned on, only a few years earlier. The state of the art had passed the SB-2 by. One of these days, the Pe-2 would also grow obsolescent. But it hadn’t happened yet.

“If we’re gong after the English and French, we won’t have to worry so much about 109s, will we?” Kulkaanen asked as they reached cruising altitude.

“I hope not,” Stas said sincerely. Calling a Pe-2 a fighting bomber meant it had a chance against a Messerschmitt. A good chance? Well, no. From what he’d heard, English fighters were about as good as the 109, French machines not quite. Neither country had swarms of them in these parts, the way the Nazis did.

The squadron droned on toward the west. A few antiaircraft guns fired at them as they crossed the front. Russian? German? Both? No one got hit, so it didn’t matter. Somewhere down there in the snow…

“Approaching the target.” Tomashevsky’s voice echoed in Stas’ earphones. The pilot wondered how he could tell. Then he saw fairly well camouflaged tents below-and antiaircraft fire abruptly picked up.

“Let ’em go, Fedya!” he called to the bombardier through the speaking tube.

Away they went. All at once, the bomber grew nimbler. It needed to, for English Hurricanes-Mouradian thought they were Hurricanes-tore into the formation less than a minute after the Pe-2s turned for home. Tracers scored deadly, fiery lines across the sky. Two bombers spun earthward, one after the other. A Hurricane went down, too, flames licking back from the dead engine toward the cockpit.

Stas didn’t see a parachute open there. He didn’t look very hard, either. He was too busy throwing his plane around the sky, trying to keep any Hurricanes from getting on his tail. Mechnikov fired a burst from the belly machine gun. No answering storm of lead tore into the Pe-2, so maybe he scared off the enemy. Or maybe he was shooting at nothing. Stas didn’t care. As long as he got away, he didn’t care about anything else.