Coup d'Etat

Chapter 8

Before coming to Pingfan, Hideki Fujita had never had anything to do with Americans. The only white men he’d dealt with were the Russians who’d tried to kill him in Mongolia and Siberia, and the Russian prisoners on whom the Japanese microbiologists and biochemists experimented here.

You had to watch yourself with Russians. They were tough, and they were sneaky. If they saw an opening, they would grab it in a heartbeat. But as long as you made sure they recognized they couldn’t get away with anything, they grew docile enough.

Pingfan held tens of thousands of Russians. Most of the men who’d surrendered around Vladivostok were marched here afterwards. Not all of them made it here-nowhere close. Fujita had been one of the soldiers herding them along. He knew how many fell by the wayside. He also knew how fast the Japanese scientists were using them up. Still, the experimental station had plenty left.

Americans… Americans were different. They were different all kinds of ways. There weren’t very many of them. The U.S. Marines had had only small garrisons in Peking and Shanghai. A lot of the Marines in both places had made the Japanese kill them after war broke out between the two countries. Despite being insanely outnumbered, they’d killed a lot of Japanese, too. You had to respect men like that.

In the end, though, some of the Marines did surrender. Perhaps to pay them back for the fight their comrades put up, they got shipped straight to Pingfan. The Japanese scientists were excited to have them. American POWs let them try to tailor germ-warfare weapons against Anglo-Saxons in particular.

Which was fine-for the scientists. Fujita and his soldiers had to ride herd on the Americans in the meantime. They had to keep them from making trouble, and they had to keep them from escaping. And Fujita didn’t need long to figure out that Americans were born troublemakers.

Russians would escape if you gave them half a chance, too. And Chinese! No one in his right mind would trust Chinese to stay where they belonged unless you kept your eye on them every second-and they knew you were keeping your eye on them every second. Then they couldn’t behave better.

But the Americans played games with the system that Fujita wouldn’t have believed if they hadn’t been messing around with him. The essential feature in controlling them was the count. They stood in ranks of ten, which made it easy for the guards to know exactly how many of them there were on any given morning or evening.

Or it should have made things easy. Somehow the Marines managed to convince the Japanese that there were three more of them than there were supposed to be. How? Fujita didn’t know. Obviously, they were moving around in the ranks, but not where anybody could catch them at it.

He’d already worked out that one of the chief nuisances was a big, burly fellow named Szulc. The American didn’t understand Japanese, of course. He didn’t understand Chinese, either-Senior Private Hayashi was a smart fellow, and knew quite a bit.

“I am very sorry, Sergeant- san, but I think he really is ignorant and not faking,” Hayashi reported to Fujita.

“How could he be?” Fujita asked irritably-everything about Szulc irritated him. “These Marines serve in China for years. They must learn some of the language while they’re there.”

“It seems not, Sergeant- san. Please excuse me, but it does.” Hayashi didn’t want Fujita working off that irritation on him.

Fujita growled like an angry tiger. A sergeant could do pretty much as he pleased with-and to-the men under him. But thumping Hayashi wouldn’t tell him how the Americans were pulling off their stupid stunt. Neither would thumping Szulc, if nobody could understand him when he yelled as he got thumped.

Sudden inspiration struck. Fujita snapped his fingers in delight. “Some of our scientists went to the university in America, neh? They’ll know English, and they’ll be able to talk to this Szulc.” He couldn’t even pronounce the round-eyed devil’s name. In his mouth, it came out something like Shurutzu.

“That’s right! They will!” Hayashi said. When a sergeant came up with a halfway decent idea, of course a senior private sounded enthusiastic.

“Good. Glad you think so, too.” Fujita pointed to Hayashi. “So you get one of the scientists to find out how the Americans are doing whatever they’re doing. It’s gone on for four days now. That’s too stinking long.”

“Me? Why me?” Shinjiro Hayashi yipped, but his heart wasn’t in it.

“You’re the educated fellow,” Fujita answered remorselessly, as Hayashi must have known he would. “So go use some of your education for a change.” Fujita himself felt like an idiot whenever he had to talk to one of the microbiologists. That, no doubt, was a feeling they did nothing to discourage.

Sighing as if to say he didn’t think life was fair, Hayashi went off to do as he was told-a definite good point in a subordinate. Fujita already knew life wasn’t fair. He’d had his nose rubbed in it again and again before he made sergeant. Life wasn’t fair now, either, but most of the time he found himself on the other end of the stick for a change.

Hayashi eventually came back with a man who wore spectacles and a white lab coat as if they were extensions of his skin-the way, say, Fujita wore a uniform. “Here is Dr. Doi, Sergeant- san,” Hayashi said. “He will ask Szulc the questions you need.”

“Good.” Fujita bowed deeply to Doi, inferior to superior. “Thank you very much for your help, sir.”

“You are welcome. I am glad to assist. I am also glad for the chance to practice my English. When you do not speak a language for a while, it gets rusty.”

Armed guards brought Szulc over to the compound. He towered over them. He’d be a rough customer in a fight. But who wanted to fight a man who’d thrown away his honor by surrendering? To Dr. Doi, Fujita said, “Please ask him how the Americans are making the count come out wrong.”

Doi spoke English. Fujita could hear that he sounded slow and uncertain. Szulc’s reply was a quick bass rumble that couldn’t have sounded more different from the Japanese scientist’s reedy tenor if it had burst from the throat of a buffalo. Dr. Doi frowned. “He says he does not understand what I say.”

Fujita frowned, too, ominously. “Is that likely?”

“No one will ever think I am an American, but he should be able to follow me,” Doi answered.

That was about what Fujita had expected. “All right, then,” he said, and nodded to one of Szulc’s guards. The man gave Szulc one in the side of the head with his rifle butt. Szulc yelled and staggered, but he didn’t fall over. He didn’t dab at the blood running down his cheek and chin, either. He did give Fujita a hate-filled glare. Fujita cared nothing for that. “Please ask your question again, Doi- san. Please also tell him he’ll get worse if he keeps playing the fool.”

More English from the bacteriologist. Whatever Szulc said this time, it was different from before. It seemed less scornful. A rifle butt to the side of the head would do that, as Fujita had reason to know. “He says he understands now, but he knows nothing about how the count is disarranged,” Doi reported.

“That’s funny, but not funny enough to laugh about,” Fujita said. “Tell him this, very plainly-the next time the count is out of order, we’ll kill enough Americans to set it right.”

“That would waste an important resource,” Dr. Doi protested in Japanese.

“Please tell him anyhow, sir. Let him and the others think we will do it. That will make them behave themselves. I can hope so, anyhow.”

“Ah. All right. I understand.” Doi returned to English. Szulc studied Fujita, as if sniffing for a bluff. Fujita gave back his stoniest stare. On his own, he certainly would kill POWs who complicated his life. Why not? It wasn’t as if prisoners of war were human beings any more. They were just… maruta. Szulc muttered something. Doi said, “He will take word of this back to camp, even though-he claims-he knows nothing of the scheme.”

“He claims, hai.” Fujita gestured to the guards. “Take him back.”

As usual, Fujita had two different men run the count that evening before supper. One reported the proper number of Americans, the other one Marine too few. Fujita lost his temper. He had all the Americans lie down so they couldn’t move without being instantly noticed. He used gestures to explain to them that they’d get shot if they were noticed. This time, the count came out three men light.

“Zakennayo!” Fujita shouted. “How long ago did they get away, and how big a start on us do they have?”

Those were both good questions. He had an answer for neither. Big, strong white men should have been conspicuous around Pingfan. Were the locals sheltering them from the Japanese? Another good question. Fujita wasn’t sure he had an answer for that one, either, but he could make a pretty good guess.

“We need to report this,” Senior Private Hayashi said regretfully.

“I know,” Fujita answered, more regretfully still. They’d catch it for allowing an escape, and catch it again for not noticing right away. But they couldn’t cover it up. Somebody’d blab. Even the American Marines might, to get their guards in trouble. “Zakennayo!” he yelled again, even louder this time.

Out of the frying pan, into the fire. That was how Peggy Druce thought of it, anyway. As soon as the people in Philadelphia discovered she really could stir folks up about the war, they sent her out to do it again and again.

After York, Lancaster. Red Roses instead of White. When she made that crack in Lancaster, somebody told her the two towns’ bush-league baseball teams actually did refight the War of the Roses every time they took the field against each other. She laughed, but later she wondered why. That showed more of a sense of history than was common in the United States.

Not in Europe. They had a sense of history there, all right. Everybody could give you all the reasons for the past 900-or sometimes 1,900-years that showed why he deserved to kick his neighbor in the teeth with a steel-toed jackboot. And his neighbor had reasons just as numerous and just as ancient for kicking him.

And the Japanese were responding to something ancient, too. For hundreds of years, Europeans and Americans had lorded it over the proud, ancient, weak empires in Asia. They’d had the warships and the guns and the military doctrine that let them do it. They’d had the arrogance that let them do it, too. What was that sign in the Shanghai park supposed to say? NO DOGS OR CHINSESE, that was it. Maybe the sign really was, or had been, there. Maybe it was just a story. Either way, it showed an attitude that was definitely there.

Now the Japs had licked the Russians twice. So they thought they were strong enough to swing the bat against the white men’s first team. The United States was going to have to throw a high hard one right at Hirohito’s head to convince them they weren’t ready for the big leagues yet.

Or maybe they were. The war news coming out of the Pacific was uniformly lousy. The Philippines were falling. A bomb from a Japanese plane was said to have blown General MacArthur into dog food. The Japs claimed that at the tops of their lungs. The USA said nothing one way or the other. Peggy’s time in Europe had made her sensitive to the nuances of propaganda. You didn’t talk about what you didn’t like.

By the same token, the American papers weren’t saying much about the way Japan was overrunning Malaya and the Dutch East Indies. You heard occasional stories about how heroic the handful of American ships in the area were. If you paid close attention and checked a map, you notice that fewer and fewer U.S. Navy vessels got mentioned by name. Even the survivors were reported as being heroic farther and farther south.

But how many people checked that closely? How many Americans knew off the tops of their heads whether Borneo was south of Java or the other way around? Peggy hadn’t, not till she looked, and she’d traveled a lot more than most folks. Timor? Sumbawa? Cerami? They sounded like the noises your stomach made after you ate bratwurst and sauerkraut. (At least it wasn’t Liberty Cabbage in this war. Then again, Germany still remained officially neutral toward the USA.)

Peggy didn’t blame the administration for minimizing failures and playing up whatever small successes it could find. If she had, she wouldn’t have gone to Reading, to Easton, to Scranton, to Altoona, to Williamsport… You did what you needed to do, and you tried not to tell too many lies while you were doing it. If you couldn’t help telling a lie, you tried not to make it a whopper.

She stuck to the principles she hoped the administration was also using. It worked. She got big hands everywhere she went. War bond sales at her rallies were bigger yet. So were contributions to the Democratic Party. An election was coming next year, after all. It seemed as if an election was always coming next year. If it wasn’t, it was coming this year instead.

The one place she didn’t go was Pittsburgh. The world had a North Pole and a South Pole. Pennsylvania, by contrast, had an East Pole and a West Pole. Philadelphia was bigger and older and richer and snootier than Pittsburgh. Pittsburgh was tougher and grittier-and if you didn’t believe it, all you had to do was ask anybody who came from there. Pittsburgh prided itself on coal and steel the way Philadelphia bragged about the Main Line. If Chicago hadn’t called itself the City of the Big Shoulders, Pittsburgh would have.

And so, even though Pittsburgh was a more reliably Democratic town than Philadelphia, Peggy wasn’t welcome there. She got an invitation from Wheeling, West Virginia, so she traveled through Pittsburgh going and coming back, but she didn’t get off the train there.

She also went to Erie. Pennsylvania’s only Great Lakes port, Erie cared nothing for either Philadelphia or Pittsburgh. It might have turned its back on both of them. It was a low, spacious city, with only one fourteen-story skyscraper projecting above the three- and four-story business buildings in the center of town.

She made her speech. It went over as well in Erie as it had anywhere else. It might even have gone better there than most places. A plump, prosperous fellow who sold real estate came up to her after she was done and spoke in tones of wonder: “I don’t recollect the last time Philadelphia remembered we were alive, much less did anything about it.”

“We’re all one state. We’re all one country. If a war doesn’t remind us of that, what will?” Peggy said.

“Well, I don’t know. My guess was that nothing would,” the real-estate man answered.

After he went away, a weather-beaten woman in her late sixties came up to Peggy and introduced herself as Matilda Jenkins. The name was as ordinary as she was. “You spoke very well,” she said, her voice almost painfully genteel. “No wonder you impressed my son so much.”

“Your son?” Peggy didn’t remember meeting anybody named Jenkins at one of her earlier rallies. But that might not prove anything; she didn’t have a pol’s photographic memory for names and faces.

“Yes, of course,” Mrs. Jenkins said-she wore a thin, plain gold band on the ring finger of her left hand. “My son Constantine, at the American embassy in Berlin. He thought you were the cat’s pajamas, he did.”

“Oh!” Peggy blurted. She felt herself blushing. She had no idea when she’d last done that. Now that she looked, she saw the resemblance. But the suave embassy undersecretary-so suave, she’d guessed he was queer-seemed more than an ocean removed from this mousy woman clinging so hard to lower-middle-class respectability. Something more than Oh! seemed called for. Peggy tried again: “How about that? He helped me a lot.” The second part was true, the first usually safe.

Matilda Jenkins beamed. “He said you knew what you wanted and how to go about getting it. Just listening to you, I can see that. He said you were mighty sweet, too. Constantine usually knows what he’s talking about, all right.”

“How about that?” Peggy repeated, this time through clenched teeth. Exactly how much about her had Constantine Jenkins told his mother? He wouldn’t have bragged about… that, would he? Not to his mother!

“He said you had such a good time at the opera and afterwards,” Mrs. Jenkins went on, oblivious-Peggy sure hoped she was oblivious, anyhow. After the opera in Berlin… What Herb didn’t know wouldn’t hurt him-she hoped. Matilda Jenkins kept burbling: “Such a pleasure to get the chance to meet you. I never dreamt I would.”

“How about that?” Peggy said one more time, wondering how soon she could get the hell out of Erie.

Colonel Steinbrenner looked at the Stuka pilots in his squadron. Hans-Ulrich Rudel looked around at them, too. Not many faces were left from the ones he’d seen when the balloon went up in Czechoslovakia. He’d been shot down once himself, and thanked heaven he’d been able to bail out. Too many of his former comrades hadn’t been so lucky.

“Things are heating up again,” Steinbrenner said. “Our infantry and armor can move forward now that the roads are drying. They need air support.” He grinned wryly. “We have a chance to give it to them, too, because the runways are drying.”

Rudel chuckled, though it wasn’t as if the squadron CO were kidding. Planes flying off forward airstrips had to deal with mud just like panzers and trucks and foot soldiers. There were times when nobody could deal with it. At times like those, the Ju-87s stayed on the ground.

At times like those, he always wished he could hop on a train and go back to Sofia in Bialystok. If he couldn’t do the Reich any good at the moment, why shouldn’t he enjoy himself instead? Unfortunately, Luftwaffe higher-ups disapproved of such little jaunts. As far as they were concerned, it would always turn thirty Celsius tomorrow-day after at the latest-and the deep Russian mud would magically dry up so the flyers could get back to walloping the snot out of the Reds.

Well, it had finally happened, or enough of it had. It wasn’t thirty Celsius-it probably wasn’t even twenty-and the mud hadn’t cleared up by magic. But it wasn’t twenty below any more, and neither was it pouring rain. The Stukas could get back to walloping the Ivans.

After lighting a papiros — German quartermasters weren’t too proud to dole out captured stocks of smokes-Steinbrenner went on, “The Russians tried to knock us back from our bridgehead in the direction of Smolensk during the winter, but they couldn’t bring it off. So we-and our allies-are going to keep pushing that way. Once Smolensk falls, I suspect it will be time to start thinking about Moscow.”

Moscow! Driving Stalin out of his lair, taking the lair away from him? No wonder an excited hum rose from the flyers. Napoleon had taken Moscow away from Tsar Alexander, but he hadn’t had much joy afterwards. He couldn’t fight a winter campaign, not in weather like what they got here he couldn’t. The Wehrmacht had already proved it could.

“Questions?” Steinbrenner asked. He pointed toward a pilot who raised his hand. “What’s on your mind, Helmut?”

Helmut Bauer was big and blond and broad-shouldered; he seemed almost too wide to fit inside a Stuka cockpit. But fit he did, and he flew with nearly as much reckless enthusiasm as Hans-Ulrich himself. Now he asked, “Colonel, with Romania in the war, what happens when things down south get screwed up?”

“You’re assuming they will,” the squadron commander said, his voice dry.

“Damn straight I am… sir,” Bauer agreed. “I know what the Romanians’ve got. It isn’t much, and they aren’t what you’d call eager to use it, either.”

Heads bobbed up and down, Rudel’s among them. He didn’t care for having Polish allies. You couldn’t say the Poles lacked guts, but most of their equipment was junk. The Romanians mostly used junk, too, and precious few Germans had ever figured them for heroes. Hans-Ulrich sure didn’t.

Even more dryly than before, Steinbrenner answered, “There may just be a few German soldiers along with the Romanians, to help remind them how to play the game and why they’re playing it.”

The flyers chuckled. Hans-Ulrich knew why the Romanians were playing the game: the Fuhrer had promised them the Black Sea port of Odessa and the adjoining lands on the far bank of the Dniester. If nothing else could get somebody moving, good old greed would often turn the trick.

“I do understand that, sir,” Bauer said. “But still… The Ukraine’s a hell of a big place, if you know what I mean. I hope we’ll have enough men and equipment in place to bite off the chunks we need-and to keep the Ivans from bunching up down there and biting our flank.”

“Helmut, if they decide to move the squadron down to the Ukraine to support our men and the Romanians, you can’t do anything about it, and neither can I,” Colonel Steinbrenner said. “I’m sure you’ll be able to find yourself another lady friend, though.”

More chuckles from the pilots, and a snicker or two to go with them. “Oh, so am I,” Bauer said, unmistakable complacency filling his voice. Hans-Ulrich wasn’t nearly so sure he could find another girl he liked as much as Sofia.

You’ll be safer if you find one who isn’t half a Jew, he told himself. The SD didn’t like such liaisons. Neither did the National Socialist Leadership Officer standing at Steinbrenner’s elbow. Building a case against someone who wore the Knight’s Cross and who wasn’t shy about saying he backed the Fuhrer wouldn’t be easy, but it wouldn’t necessarily be impossible, either. Nothing was impossible if somebody important enough decided to build a case.

“Can we get on with the war we are fighting, not the one we may be fighting some day?” Steinbrenner asked. Nobody told him no, so he did: “The Ivans have a concentration in front of Studenets, southwest of Smolensk. Our forces are in the neighborhood, and so are the French. If we bomb the enemy’s infantry and shoot up his panzers, word will get back to Paris that the froggies would be smart not to think about changing horses again. So we’ll do that, gentlemen, if it’s all right with you.” Again, nobody told him no. He nodded briskly. “We take off in forty-five minutes.”

And they did, the first Ju-87 kicking up dust from the unpaved strip and climbing into the air right on time. Hans-Ulrich pushed back his leather flying glove and the sleeve to his fur-lined flight suit to check his watch and make sure. “Ready, Albert?” he called through the speaking tube.

“Not me,” Sergeant Dieselhorst answered. “I’m still soaking in the bathtub, and after I get out I’ll go pick flowers so I keep on smelling nice and sweet.”

Hans-Ulrich snorted. Dieselhorst did deadpan even better than Colonel Steinbrenner. When his Stuka’s turn came, he goosed the throttle. The Ju-87 rattled down the runway, then sedately got airborne. The weight and drag from the underwing gun pods made the ungainly plane even more so.

“Studenets,” Rudel repeated to the rear gunner, as if they hadn’t gone over it before takeoff.

“Gesundheit,” Dieselhorst said, so it was going to be one of those missions.

Messerschmitt Bf-109s clustered around the Stukas. The 109s had plenty of other things to do; dive bombers got escorts only when the Luftwaffe feared the Red Air Force had fighters of its own in the neighborhood. And the Reds did: blunt-nosed, stumpy Polikarpov Po-16 monoplanes. They were a long step slower than the Messerschmitts, but they could have made mincemeat out of the lumbering Ju-87s had the bombers had no friends. As things were, one of them tumbled to the ground, trailing smoke. Two more made halfhearted runs at the Stukas and then peeled off. The rest decided to go somewhere else, to some place where misfortunes like 109s never happened.

After that, the Stukas worked over the Ivans’ positions in front of Studenets with only ground fire to worry about. That wasn’t negligible, however much Hans-Ulrich wished it were. One Ju-87 took a direct hit from a flak shell and never pulled out of its dive, exploding in a fireball when it hit the ground. You had to ignore such things and do your job.

Rudel did. He shot up four panzers. A couple of rounds of small-arms fire clanged into the plane, but none of the instruments showed any damage. The panzers were all ordinary Soviet models. He didn’t see any of the KV-1 mastodons that made German panzer men break out in a cold sweat. What you didn’t find, you couldn’t kill.

Which, given Russian camouflage methods, might or might not mean something. But he’d done what he could. Having done it, he flew off to the west again. Studenets looked as if it would fall soon.

Sullenly, the Red Army pulled out of Studenets. The Wehrmacht moved into the town from straight out of the west, the French expeditionary force from the southwest. Luc Harcourt saw a couple of men in khaki uniforms trotting away in the distance. He raised his rifle to his shoulder and fired at them. One of the men ran faster. The other, a smarter fellow, dove behind a battered wall and thus out of sight.

He wished he still commanded a machine-gun team, as he had when he was still a corporal. But that was beneath a sergeant’s dignity. Dignity or no, a burst from the Hotchkiss and those Ivans wouldn’t have got away.

If they were Ivans. The range had been long. He might have seen Feldgrau through the sights, not faded Soviet khaki. He wasn’t the only French soldier who thought of the same thing at the same time. With a sly chuckle, one of his men said, “Wouldn’t it have been a shame if those cochons were really Boches instead of Russians?”

“Oh, but of course, Jacques. That would have been a real pity.” Luc could only have sounded more sardonic had he been Lieutenant Demange. Demange was somewhere not far away; Luc could hear him swearing at somebody in the company.

Jacques laughed out loud. “A pity you didn’t hit ’em, you mean?”

“I didn’t say that. You did.” Now Luc did his best to seem severe, though Jacques was right-scragging a couple of Fritzes “by accident” wouldn’t have broken his heart. But he also had his reasons for sounding the way he did: “And watch what falls out of your big, fat gob, all right? The Germans are in town, too, remember, and more of those cocksuckers know French than you’d figure.”

“I’m not afraid of them.” Jacques was all nineteen-year-old bluster.

“Then you’re an even bigger con than I give you credit for, and that’s saying something. I sure am,” Luc answered. Jacques’ eyes widened. Luc didn’t care. He’d been through enough to admit fear without fearing to seem a coward. And it wasn’t as if he were lying. Anybody who didn’t fear Germans with weapons in their hands hadn’t seen enough to know which end was up.

The Boches were in town, too. Like the French, they were cleaning out the last few Red Army holdouts. Mausers banged off to the north. Their reports sounded harsher than those of French MAS-36s. Luc thought so, anyhow. There definitely was a difference, whether it lay in harshness or what.

And then an MG-34 opened up. That fierce snarl still gave him the willies, even if his country and the Nazis had the same enemy nowadays. The German machine gun fired so much faster than a Hotchkiss-and faster than anything the English or the Russians made-that you couldn’t possibly mistake its malignant roar for anything else. The noise went hand in hand with agony and maiming and limb-sprawled death.

Jacques was a new conscript. He’d never had to glue himself to the ground like a slug while MG-34 bullets kicked up dry leaves and slammed into tree trunks and spanged off stones, all the while trying to let the air out of his precious, irreplaceable self. He didn’t get how very deadly that German toy was. You dumb, lucky fuck, Luc thought scornfully.

As the firing around here eased off, Russian civilians started coming up from their cellars and showing themselves. A plump, apple-cheeked babushka in a head scarf smiled, showing a mouthful of startling gold teeth. “Amis!” she said, which startled Luc again. He didn’t care about making friends with her. Her granddaughter, now, if she had one…

Not all the people emerging from cellars and from under the bed and from wherever the hell else in Studenets were Russians. Some were Jews, the men dark and bearded and hook-nosed in long black coats, the women just as swarthy in scarves of their own and in even longer black dresses.

The Russians looked relieved to be alive. The Jews looked relieved to be alive and even more relieved to be in a part of town the French had overrun. Like the babushka, they said, “Amis!” And they said “Kameraden!” and much else in Yiddish and in more standard German. Luc understood little of that, but some of the French soldiers here would follow more. As he’d told Luc, many Germans could parler francais- and probably just as many Frenchmen could Deutsch sprechen.

An old Jew with a beard down to the second button of his shirtfront handed Luc a bottle that sloshed. “Here. You take. You like,” he said in broken French. “Me, I have nephew in Paris. He drive taxi.” He mimed steering motions.

Luc did take the bottle. He did like it, too. He’d expected vodka, potent but next to flavorless. But no. He got plum brandy, fiery and sweet at the same time. He gave Jacques a quick nip, then went looking for Demange. The lieutenant would make him sorry if he didn’t share a prize like this.

Lieutenant Demange had men going through a warren of little shops for holdouts. They seemed to be flushing out nothing but unarmed Jews. Demange cradled a Soviet PPD submachine gun. It was ugly, but good for killing lots of people in a hurry-quite a bit like the veteran himself. The inevitable Gitane in the corner of his mouth twitched when he saw Luc’s offering. “What have you got there?”

“Jew with a white beard gave it to me.” Luc held out the bottle.

Demange took it and drank. A slow smile spread across his skinny, ratlike face. “Heyyy! That’s the straight shit, all right. Let’s hear it for the kike.”

“Yeah. Let’s hear it,” Luc said, not quite comfortably. He thought there were a couple of Jews among the men Demange commanded. But Demange wasn’t an anti-Semite, or not particularly. The race he despised was the human race.

He passed the bottle back to Luc, who killed it and tossed it in the rubble. Two stiff knocks of brandy didn’t get him drunk. They did mean he eyed the wreckage that was Studenets with a slightly less jaundiced eye.

Demange pointed toward where the center of town ought to be. “Bring a few guys with you. We’d better make contact with the Nazis. Long as everything stays nice and official, the chance for some dumb fucking accident goes down.”

“Happy day,” Luc said, his enthusiasm distinctly tempered. It wasn’t that Demange was wrong, because he wasn’t. But Luc wanted to pretend France was at war with the Russians, and there weren’t any Germans around for hundreds of kilometers. They’d come closer to killing him than the Ivans ever had, and he’d sure done for his share of them… Muttering, he shambled off to obey.

He muttered even more when he saw that the Germans in the town square didn’t belong to the Wehrmacht. They came from the Waffen-SS: they wore the SS runes on the right side of their helmets and on the right collar patch of each man’s tunic. They looked like tough assholes; the few times he’d faced Wafen- SS troops, they’d fought like tough assholes, too. He still would rather have shot at them than at the Ivans.

A few more SS men herded some Jews into the square. One of the Jews might have been brother to the guy who’d given Luc plum brandy. Laughing, an SS sergeant drew his Luger and raised it to the back of the Jew’s head.

Maybe he just meant to scare the graybeard. Maybe. Luc didn’t wait to find out. He had his rifle pointed at the SS noncom’s belly button in nothing flat. “Halt!” he yelled. He didn’t speak much German, but he had that one down solid.

Slowly, his mouth dropping open in disbelief, the SS man lowered the pistol. An SS officer spoke in badly accented French: “But this foolishness is. We are allies, n’est-ce pas? And these are only Jews.”

Other SS men looked as ready to fight their “allies” as Luc was to plug that sergeant. Lieutenant Demange dove behind some shattered masonry. He shouted in German probably as lousy as the SS officer’s French. Then he translated for Luc: “I told ’em I’d give ’em the whole fucking drum of ammo if they didn’t leave the damn Hebes alone.”

The Waffen — SS officer quivered with outrage. “Tell me your name,” he snarled at Demange. “I shall to your superiors report you.”

“Fuck off and die,” the lieutenant replied auf Deutsch, not breaking cover. Luc got that fine. Demange said something else in German, then repeated it in French: “You want to report us for stopping a murder, you’ll be at war with every Frenchman in Russia by this time tomorrow.”

Luc nodded. So did the poilus he’d brought along. The SS man swore in his own language, but he let the Jews go. And nobody reported the confrontation to anybody’s superiors.