Fallout

17

The more Cade Curtis saw of Captain Pak Ho-san, the less he liked him. True, the ROK officer wasn’t a bugout artist. Since too many of his countrymen were, that counted for something. In every other way, though, Pak made Cade wonder why the United States wanted anything to do with a country that produced the likes of him.

He vented his spleen with Howard Sturgis. “It’s the Lord’s own miracle one of those Korean privates doesn’t toss a grenade onto his sleeping bag. What happens to those sorry SOBs is a shame and a disgrace. The sergeants beat on ’em like drums, and old Pak, he just watches and smiles. What kind of noncoms are those? What kind of officer is he?”

“Japanese,” Lieutenant Sturgis said. “Remember, I told you that the day the ROK, uh, guys”-he didn’t quite say gooks-“came into the line.”

“Shit, that’s right,” Cade said. “You did.”

“Uh-huh.” Sturgis nodded. “Remember, the Japs ran the show here for forty years. Assholes like Pak, when they saw soldiers, what kind of soldiers did they see? They saw the fuckin’ Japs. And the way the Japs treated their enlisted men, if I did that to a dog, the SPCA’d take him away from me.”

“Yeah,” Cade said thoughtfully, and then, “I didn’t know they let Koreans be real soldiers.”

“That’s right-labor gangs were pretty much it,” Sturgis said. “I don’t think there were any Korean officers, just noncoms. But we were an English colony, and our army still does a lot of things the way England did. Korea was a Japanese colony. Who were the Koreans gonna copy?”

That made more sense than anything Cade had thought of on his own. All the same, he said, “We don’t do that kind of crap, and we beat the hell out of the Japs. Next time I see Pak or anybody under him knocking some poor damned draftee around, I’m not gonna put up with it.”

“You’ll piss off the brass if you mess with our allies,” Sturgis warned.

Cade threw back his head and guffawed. “What’s the worst thing they can do to me? They can put me in the line in Korea! I’m already in the line in goddamn Korea. Why should I worry?”

“They can bust your ass down to private if they feel like it.”

“Big deal. I’d be a private in the line in Korea.”

“Okay, sir.” By Howard Sturgis’ tone of voice, it wasn’t. Sure enough, he added, “Don’t say I didn’t warn you.”

Once Cade made up his mind and decided to do something about the way Captain Pak and the men he led treated the ordinary South Korean soldiers, he figured he wouldn’t have long to wait before they gave him a gold-plated chance. He wasn’t wrong, either. The very next day, Pak Ho-san screamed at a private for having mud on his uniform. The whole trench was muddy. When it wasn’t, that was because the mud had frozen or was covered in snow. Cade didn’t speak Korean, but the way the captain kept jabbing at the spot on the poor private’s tunic with his index finger left him in no doubt about what was going on. Then Pak smacked the private across the face, hard enough to draw blood at the corner of his mouth.

Cade squelched down the trench. His own uniform was muddy, too. So were most of his men’s. He didn’t get his bowels in an uproar about it. There was a war on, dammit.

“Hey!” he said sharply. “Yeah, you, Captain Pak! Knock that off!” His voice went louder and deeper than he usually made it. It was, though he didn’t quite realize it, the voice of an angry, fully mature man, the kind of man other men didn’t care to trifle with.

Pak Ho-san didn’t quite realize that yet, either. “What you say?” he asked, as if he couldn’t believe his ears. He went on poking the ROK private.

“I said, knock that off. Leave that man alone. He hasn’t done anything worth screaming at him like that or slugging him. So leave him alone.”

“He my man,” Pak said. “He not your man. None of your fucking business.”

“He’s a man,” Cade said. “That makes him my business. Cut out your crap, you hear me? Or you’ll be sorry.”

Plainly, no American officer had ever talked to Pak Ho-san like that before. He didn’t laugh in Cade’s face, but he might as well have. “Oh?” he jeered. “Who make me?”

Cade carried his PPSh. He carried it everywhere, all the time, except when he was sleeping or eating or taking a crap. Then it lay right beside him. He swung it so it bore on Pak Ho-san’s belly button. “I’ll make you,” he said. “It’d be a pleasure.”

Arguing with a submachine gun took more in the way of intestinal fortitude than arguing with a kid captain. Pak opened his mouth. Then he closed it and stormed away. He got mud on his own trousers. Would he gig himself for it? Cade didn’t think so.

The ROK private stared at him. It wasn’t gratitude. It was more like terror. What would happen to him as soon as his protector went away? Nothing pretty, that was for sure. Cade realized he’d just adopted a puppy. He gestured toward his own men with the PPSh. A smile broke out on the Korean’s face like sunshine through clouds. He hustled to join the grimy dogfaces.

Cade dug into a can of chili and beans. He grinned at Howard Sturgis. “The condemned man ate a hearty meal.”

“You’re gonna catch it,” Sturgis predicted dolefully.

“If I do, somebody else can run this madhouse.” Cade was still grinning. He felt great. “Maybe it’ll be you.”

“They won’t give a lieutenant a battalion,” Sturgis said.

“I had one for a little while with only one bar.” The great feeling went away. “Those guys are dead now. I would be, too, only I was on a pass when the Russians dropped that bomb.”

He got summoned to Division HQ, back in Kaeryong, that very afternoon. The summons included a jeep ride, so he could get in trouble faster. “What did you do, sir?” the driver asked. “They usually let you guys walk.”

“I believed in democracy and the rights of the little man,” Cade replied.

“Hoo-boy!” The driver clapped a hand to his forehead. “No wonder you’re in deep!”

“No wonder at all,” Cade said.

When he told the clerk-typist in the headquarters prefab who he was, he found himself escorted forthwith into the august presence of Brigadier General Randolph Hackworth, who was commanding the division. Hackworth sported a cigar, a chestful of medals from the last war, and a steely glare, which he fixed on Cade. “Captain, what the hell do you mean by interfering in the way our ally conducts his military business?” he rasped.

By then, Cade didn’t care what happened to him any more. “Sir, what the hell does our ally mean by treating his soldiers like peasants out of the War of the Roses?”

The Havana jerked in Hackworth’s mouth. “You are insubordinate, young man.”

“No, sir,” Cade said. “If Captain Pak Ho-san were an American, you’d court-martial him so fast it’d make his head swim…sir.”

“You are an American,” Hackworth said. “I can do that to you.”

“Go ahead, sir. After what I’ve seen, it’s no wonder Kim Il-sung’s men fight harder than the Koreans on our side. The guys who give them orders weren’t taking orders from the Japs ten years ago.” Cade silently thanked Howard Sturgis for that bit of intelligence.

“How does Leavenworth sound, Captain?” Hackworth asked.

“Sir, after better than a year here, it sounds like a vacation,” Cade said. “But I wouldn’t go, not once my Congressman got my letter.”

The brigadier general went so dusky a red, Cade wondered if he had heart trouble. “You don’t have the proper attitude,” he said.

“I guess I don’t, sir. If we aren’t fighting for the idea that every man is just as good as every other man whether he’s rich and connected or not, why don’t we just jump into our boats and let the Reds have this stinking place?” As it did with Pak Ho-san, his voice took on its mature timbre. Even Cade had no idea how intimidating he sounded.

Hackworth stared at him. “Get the hell out of here,” he said at last.

“Am I under arrest, sir?”

“No. Just get out. I’ll fix things with the ROK mucky-mucks. Beat it!” Out Cade went. He didn’t know if he’d won, but he didn’t think he’d lost.

–

Konstantin Morozov stared at his “new” tank. He stared at the sergeant in the tank park who’d led him to the machine. “You’re tying my dick in knots,” he said.

“Comrade Sergeant, it’s a runner,” the tank-park sergeant answered. “Half the machines I’ve got here are just like it. Somebody’s going to take it. Your turn happened to come up.”

Behind Konstantin, Juris Eigims and Vazgen Sarkisyan looked as appalled as he felt. So did Demyan Belitsky, the driver they’d added to their crew, and Ilya Goledod, the bow gunner. Seeing the dismay in their eyes stiffened his spine.

“Give it to the Devil’s nephew. It’s bound to be older than he is,” he said. “I know fucking well it’s older than you are.”

Even though the tank-park sergeant was a fresh-faced kid, the T-34/85 wasn’t older than he was. They hadn’t started making them till the end of 1943. He wasn’t wrong that he had a lot of them in the tank park, either. None of that had anything to do with anything.

“I don’t care if that piece of shit is a runner or not,” Morozov continued furiously. “It’s a coffin, is what it is. Put it up against a Pershing or a Centurion and we’re all chopped to sausage meat and burned to charcoal ten seconds later.”

“We use what we have, Comrade Sergeant.” The guy at the tank park tried to stay reasonable. He could afford to. His balls weren’t on the line. He went on, “The Americans are using Shermans, I’ve heard. The English are using Cromwells and Churchills. Any tank is better than no tank.”

“Even the Nazis killed these things last time. I ought to know-I was in a couple of them. My men and I didn’t recover from radiation sickness to go back to duty in a horse and buggy!”

“I’ll bring the lieutenant over here if you want,” the tank-park sergeant said.

As soon as Konstantin heard that, he knew he and his crew were stuck with the T-34/85. When an officer poked his beak into something like this, what would he do? Back the guy he worked with, of course. And he would order the crew into the obsolescent tank instead of just giving it to them.

“Fuck you. Fuck your mother. Fuck both your ugly old grannies, one in the mouth and one up the ass. Fuck your father up the ass,” Konstantin said wearily. “You’re sending us out there to get us killed.”

The tank-park sergeant only shrugged. “You aren’t the only ones in machines like this one. I told you that before.” How many other tank commanders who got an ancient rustbucket had cussed him up one side and down the other? How many of them were still alive?

“Come on, boys,” Morozov said to his crew. “Let’s see what we can do with this pile of garbage.” He’d feared this would happen as soon as he saw they’d given him a bow gunner. The T-34/85 had a machine gun at the right front of the hull and one coaxial with the cannon. The T-54 carried only the coaxial machine gun.

As soon as he climbed into the tank, the faint smell of kerosene filled his nostrils. He knew what that meant. They’d swabbed out the fighting compartment with it to get rid of the stench of death. How many crews had already bought a plot in here? Better not to wonder about that.

“Crowded in here,” Juris Eigims remarked.

“You think this is bad, you should’ve seen the first T-34, the one with the 76mm gun,” Konstantin said. “Really small turret, and the commander had to aim the gun along with everything else. The Germans could shoot three times as fast as those babies could.”

“This sight is junk, too,” the Balt said, as if he hadn’t spoken. “The one on the T-54 isn’t great, but this….How are you supposed to hit anything with it?”

“Do your best, please.” Morozov tried the intercom to the forward part of the tank and discovered it didn’t work. He only wished that surprised him more. He shouted into the speaking tube instead: “Start the motor, Demyan.”

“Right, Comrade Sergeant.” Demyan Belitsky’s voice came back brassily. The diesel farted to life, belching black smoke. Konstantin swore under his breath. If it had refused to go, he could have claimed another tank. But that would have been a T-34/85, too, unless they had something older. You couldn’t expect favors after you proposed fucking somebody’s father in the ass.

“Take us up to the regimental tank depot,” Morozov said. “They’ll tell us what to do when we get there.”

“I serve the Soviet Union!” Belitsky said, and put the tank in gear.

Konstantin stuck his head out of the cupola to look around. It was safe enough; they were still a good ways behind the front. The shape of the tank, so much more angular than the turtle-topped T-54, was as familiar to him as the look of an old lover’s body after he hadn’t slept with her for several years. She might have got long in the tooth, but he still understood her moods.

Whether that would do anything at all to keep him breathing was liable to be a different question.

Tank tracks had chewed up the paving on the road Belitsky was using. Most of the buildings Konstantin saw had been blown up or burned or blown up and burned. In one T-54 or another, he might well have helped to knock some of them down. Now he was going over the same ground again for another round of destruction. The Americans’ A-bombs had let the enemy retake a big chunk of western Germany.

He shuddered. He knew he still wasn’t a hundred percent himself. Somewhere not far away, someone fired a ripping burst from a PPD or a PPSh. Konstantin ducked down into the turret and closed the cupola hatch. It was cold out there, and starting to rain.

The major in charge of the tank regiment was a veteran named Kliment Todorsky. He actually seemed glad to see Morozov’s crew join his unit. “I’m using T-34s as point vehicles in my platoons,” he said. “They develop the opposition, and the T-54s behind them deal with it.”

“I serve the Soviet Union!” Konstantin said, because he couldn’t tell a major to go fuck his father in the ass. By develop the opposition, Todorsky meant draw enemy fire. Any enemy fire a T-34/85 drew in this day and age was all too likely to leave it a smoldering hulk, and the men inside it mangled or dead.

Had he commanded the regiment, though, he knew he would have been as ruthless. One of these tanks could still make any infantry around run. It just wasn’t up for a fight against another tank.

“We have to be quick, and we have to stay lucky,” Morozov told his men. “I went through this the last time. I was always scared of Tigers and Panthers. They could kill me easier than I could kill them. It’s the same thing now, only more so.”

They pushed on toward Paderborn. The rain came down harder, with snow mixed in. Visibility dropped to a couple of hundred meters, even though Konstantin stuck his head out of the hatch again. He wouldn’t spot trouble till it was on top of him. Then again, the T-34/85 couldn’t hurt a more modern tank at anything but point-blank range.

When trouble came, it didn’t come from an enemy tank. A man with a rocket launcher popped up from behind the corpse of a Volkswagen by the side of the road. The intercom didn’t work, dammit. Konstantin had to duck inside to scream to the bow gunner: “Ahead and a little to the right! Fire! Now!”

Ilya Goledod spat death in that direction. Konstantin popped out again, just in time to watch the enemy soldier launch his rocket. But the machine-gun rounds were enough to spoil his aim. The deadly missile flew past the T-34/85 instead of burning through its frontal armor. A moment later, Juris Eigims put an HE round into the dead VW. The guy with the bazooka tumbled away. He wouldn’t cause any more trouble. But how many more like him were still around?

–

Weed, California, was up near 3,500 feet above sea level. That wasn’t enough to make Marian Staley notice the altitude when she breathed or anything. Winters were colder and harsher than they would have been lower down, though. As soon as summer ended, she’d found out about that. She and Linda had no clothes to suit the weather.

Thick jackets. Wool watch caps. Wool socks. Long johns. Waterproof boots. She didn’t like spending the money, but she liked shivering even less.

Logging slowed down in the wintertime. It didn’t stop, but the men with the axes and saws had a harder time getting to the trees they were supposed to fell and a harder time getting them away from where they’d fallen once they did go down.

Big, snorting trucks hauled trunks secured with chains to long trailers. When the snow started falling and when rain turned to ice after hitting the ground, the trucks and trailers got chains on their tires, too.

And sometimes that helped, and sometimes it didn’t. The men who ran Shasta Lumber wanted to do as much cutting and as much hauling as they could, so they made as much money as they could. The other lumber bosses in and around the town felt the same way. If their men had accidents, that was part of the cost of producing the most board-feet possible.

It was to the men who ran the outfits, anyhow. To the ones who sawed away in the snow or drove the steep, twisting, icy roads…

Marian was typing one chilly afternoon when the front door flew open. A logger in a dark green plaid Pendleton shirt and Levi’s staggered into the office. Everyone gasped or squawked when he did-he had a bloody nose and a gash over one eye.

He seemed unaware he’d been hurt. “Tom put truck number three down a scree slope,” he gasped. “Threw me clear, so I’m okay”-he was anything but-“but he’s still back there, and he’s tore up pretty good. I made it back to the road an’ flagged down a car. Somebody call Doc Toohey to go up there and give poor Tom a hand.”

Glancing down at the list of telephone numbers she might be expected to use fairly often, Marian saw one for Dr. Christopher Toohey among them. Before she could dial it, one of the other secretaries beat her to the punch. “Yes, come here first,” she told the doctor. “Billy Hurley’s here, and he’ll show you where the accident’s at.” She hung up and nodded to the logger. “Doc’s on the way.”

“Swell,” he said, as if time had stopped in 1928.

Marian pulled tissues from the box on her desk and went over to Billy Hurley. “Here,” she said, dabbing gently at the cut. “Let me clean this up if I can. You may need stitches-I don’t know. Hold some of these to your nose, too.”

“What’re you talking about?” He sounded irritable. “I’m okay. It’s poor Tom who got crunched up.”

“You’re not okay.” She showed him the bloody Kleenexes.

He gaped. “Well, swap me pink and call me Bluey. No wonder I got a headache!”

“No wonder at all,” Marian agreed. “Dolores, get me some more of these, will you please?”

“Sure thing,” the other secretary said, and did.

Dr. Toohey rushed in no more than a minute later; nowhere in Weed was very far from anywhere else. He had his black bag in his hand. “Let me patch up that cut first of all,” he said.

“Never mind me, Doc. Slap a Band-Aid on it or somethin’. Tom Andersen’s the one who needs you bad,” Hurley said.

“If he’s worse off than you, then he must,” Toohey said. They hurried out together. Two car doors slammed. An engine roared.

Marian stared at the handful of soggy, bloody tissues she was holding. With a small, disgusted noise, she threw them in the nearest wastebasket, then went into the ladies’ room and washed off Billy Hurley’s blood. None of the high mucky-mucks down the hall had even noticed the commotion out front.

“That was fun,” she said after she came out. “Does this kind of thing happen all the time during the winter?”

“Not all the time, but it happens, yeah,” Dolores answered. “You did all you could for Billy there. That was great.” The other office workers nodded.

“I was closest to him, that’s all. Anybody else would’ve done the same.” Marian looked down. “We’ve got blood on the rug.”

“Cold water. Lots of cold water,” Dolores said. “That’s not the kind of reminder we need.”

Billy Hurley came back to the office a couple of hours later. He wasn’t bleeding any more. His nose had stopped, and he had a bandage wrapped around his head-so much for slap a Band-Aid on it. “Doc dropped me off. He’s taking Tom down to the hospital in Redding,” he reported. “Says he’s got some busted bones he can’t deal with here.”

“How far is it to Redding?” Marian asked.

“Eighty miles-something like that,” Dolores said.

“Poor Tom!” Marian wouldn’t have wanted to spend all that time in a car jouncing down US 99. She’d known Weed had no hospital, but she hadn’t thought about what that meant till now. If something went badly wrong…“There’s not even an ambulance that could take him?”

“Nope,” the logger said. “Doc’s it, pretty much.”

“You ought to-we ought to-be able to do better. Logging’s dangerous work. People get hurt.” Marian glanced down the hall. The bosses were still busy doing whatever bosses did.

“Stuff like that costs money, though,” Billy Hurley said. “Who’s gonna fork it over? Lord only knows how Tom’ll come up with the cash for whatever they got to do to him down in Redding.”

The lumber companies ought to pay, Marian thought. They’re the ones whose people go off the roads in the snow or have trees fall on them or get hit in the leg by an axe that goes wrong.

But even though she thought it, she didn’t say it. She knew what would happen if she did say it. Shasta Lumber would fire her. They might not open the door before they kicked her through it, either. They’d call her a Red and a radical. No one else in town would hire her after they canned her. She and Linda would have to move away. The way things were these days, that kind of reputation, deserved or not, was liable to follow her, too. Political arguments made everybody insanely suspicious.

She got less done the rest of the day than she would have liked, even if nobody else complained. Weed wasn’t a bad place. It had reasonably nice people and a breathtaking view. After Camp Nowhere, it had seemed like heaven on earth. But it wasn’t.

Had it been just her, she might have packed up and left from sheer annoyance at the lumber barons. Linda was settling in pretty well, though. She’d already had her life torn up by the roots twice this year-three times if you counted finding out that her father was dead. Little kids shouldn’t have that happen to them. Sometimes they did, in spite of everything, but they shouldn’t.

On the way home from work, she stopped at the office of the Weed Press-Herald, the town’s weekly. The editor was a tall man named Dale Dropo. “Yeah, I heard Tom got hurt,” he said. “It’s a shame, but logging’s a tough business.”

“I’ll tell you what’s a shame,” Marian said. “It’s a shame the town doesn’t have an ambulance, much less a hospital.”

Dale Dropo couldn’t have been more than thirty-five. He wasn’t more than a few years older than Marian, in other words. He might never have worried about the lack of such things before. Till today, she hadn’t. He scratched at one ear. “You know what?” he said. “You’re right.”

“Would an editorial light a fire under anybody?” she asked.

His grin was sour. “I only wish it were that easy. Weed would have a lot of things it doesn’t if people paid any attention to my editorials. But I was wondering what I’d put in the one for next Friday’s paper. Now I know. I’ll give ’em something else to ignore me about. Thanks.”

“Any time,” Marian said. “Any time at all.”

–

Ihor Shevchenko was an old soldier. He was also an old soldier who acted like an old soldier: he did no more than he had to do to get by. The way he looked at it, he’d done everything he needed to do to serve the Soviet Union during the Great Patriotic War. He had the scar and the limp to prove it. If the Soviet Union wanted more from him now, that was the rodina’s hard luck.

His attitude did not endear him to Sergeant Prishvin. Of course, he could have been a Stakhanovite for extra duties and worn a Hero of the Soviet Union’s star on his chest, and that wouldn’t have endeared him to Anatoly Prishvin, either. Since he was a Ukrainian, dying was the only thing that would have endeared him to Prishvin.

“You’re a lazy, worthless cunt,” the sergeant said. Ihor stood mute. He was willing to cop to lazy, but not the rest of the abuse. Prishvin went on, “They should stick you in a penal battalion. See how you’d like being lazy then.”

Penal battalions were for getting rid of soldiers and officers who’d screwed up in a major way. If you lived, your sins were expiated. But the whole point to penal battalions was using the bodies of the men in them to smother the fires the enemy started. Men went in where things were hottest. Most of them, by the nature of things, didn’t come out again.

Prishvin went right on glaring. “Well? What have you got to say about that?”

“Nothing, Comrade Sergeant,” Ihor answered. Anything he did say would only inflame the Russian more.

Saying nothing didn’t help, either. “You’re too lazy to even talk to me, huh? No wonder you and that cocksucking blackass hang around together. I bet he smokes hashish to make him like he is. What’s your excuse?”

Ihor made a small production of starting to clean his AK-47. He’d always kept his weapons in good shape. That helped you stay alive, which he approved of. He hadn’t trained on the Kalashnikov, but you hardly needed training to take care of it. The mechanism was about as simple as it could get and still work. It was so simple, it would go on working even if you didn’t bother cleaning it.

Not quite idly, Ihor swung the muzzle toward Anatoly Prishvin. That was just to take the edge off his own feelings. He couldn’t reassemble the rifle, release the safety, and pull the trigger here and make it seem like an accident. When they went into action against the Americans, though…A corpse shot by an AK-47 looked the same as one shot by an M-1, especially after it had a few days to swell up and change colors and stink.

He did wonder how many stupid, vicious officers and fuckheaded noncoms had died at their own men’s hands during the Great Patriotic War. The tally wouldn’t include only the fuckheads who served the Soviet Union badly. Plenty of Fritzes who gave orders were vicious and stupid, too. Ihor had developed a healthy respect for the ordinary German soldier. Here and there, Landsers would have weeded out their assholes, too.

He supposed even Americans could see it might be better to arrange an untimely demise for a captain before the bastard got his whole company killed.

Eventually, Prishvin went off to make the other men in the section love him even more than they already did. Aram Demirchyan ambled over to where Ihor was sitting and said, “Here. Have of these some.” He held out his canteen.

“Thanks.” Ihor took a cautious sip. It wasn’t hashish, but it was pretty good schnapps. Aram might speak only mangled Russian and no German at all, but he had a scrounger’s gift for coming up with useful things.

“Sergeant, he big metyeryebyets.” No matter how mangled Demirchyan’s Russian was, he had no trouble with the obscenity.

“Think so, do you?” Ihor said dryly. The Armenian thought that was funny. After the schnapps mounted to Ihor’s head, he did, too. How could anyone not think Prishvin was exactly what Aram had called him?

A couple of days later, they went into action outside of Paderborn. The enemy hadn’t wasted any time retaking a large stretch of northwestern Germany after the A-bomb kicked the Red Army in the teeth. Ihor crouched behind the burnt-out hulk of a T-34/85, a survivor from the last war that hadn’t made it through this one.

He didn’t want his head to end up like the killed tank’s turret, which lay upside down ten meters away from the hull. He thought he smelled charred meat along with all the other battlefield stenches, but it might have been his imagination. He could hope so, anyhow.

Soviet artillery slammed the American lines on the eastern outskirts of the German town. “Forward!” Sergeant Prishvin shouted. “Forward for the great Stalin!”

“For Stalin!” the men yelled as they ran toward the Yanks’ foxholes and trenches. Even Ihor yelled, though he’d somehow lived through what the great Stalin had done to the Ukraine.

An American heavy machine gun in a house with an east-facing window opened up. Ihor did a swan dive behind a rock and started digging in. All around him, other Red Army men flopped to the ground and slithered toward whatever cover they could find. A couple of luckless fellows got hit before they could hit the dirt. They went down, too, bonelessly, as if they’d taken one on the button from a heavyweight. A round from that baby could punch through a couple of centimeters of hardened steel. What it did to mere flesh and blood hardly bore thinking about.

The USSR had fielded large-caliber machine guns during the last war. The Hitlerites hadn’t, so this was Ihor’s first time on the wrong end of one. He could have done without the honor.

Red Army men popped up every now and again to take shots at the house. But the heavy machine gun could kill them out past a kilometer, and they couldn’t hit back at that range. A couple of guys in the section carried rocket-propelled grenade launchers, but they didn’t have a prayer of getting in close enough to use them. So Ihor thought, anyway.

Sergeant Prishvin had a different view of things. He called “Forward!” again, adding, “We can get that fucker!”

He wasn’t a coward. That wasn’t what was wrong with him. He ran toward the house with flame and death spitting from the shattered window. So did some of the men he led. Ihor got up and gained thirty or forty meters; the bare-branched bushes he chose for shelter didn’t conceal him as well as he would have liked, but they were ever so much better than nothing.

One of the RPG men launched an optimistic round. It fell far short, blowing a hole in the muddy ground. Ihor fired a few times himself, though he knew he was only wasting ammo. The AK-47 wasn’t made for long-range combat. Even a sniper with a scope-sighted Mosin-Nagant would have had trouble hitting the American machine gunners from where he was.

“Forward!” Prishvin roared. “Everybody forward! Come on, you cunts, you whores, you needle dicks! We will take out that gun! For Stalin!”

Forward he went. Forward the other soldiers went, too, some of them firing from the hip as they ran to try to make the Yankees keep their heads down. Ihor bent to stick on a new magazine. One of those big, fat bullets from the machine gun cracked over his head.

And one of them hit Aram Demirchyan and knocked him to one side as if he were a crumpled sheet of newspaper. Crimson blood soaked his dun-colored tunic. He thrashed feebly for a second or two, then lay still.

Ihor yanked back the charging handle and chambered the first round. He fired several shots, first high, then lower.

“The sergeant’s down!” someone yelled. “Bozhemoi! He won’t get up again, either!”

“We better fall back!” someone else said. “We need a mortar to shift that goddamn machine gun!”

Nobody argued with him. Retreat was almost as dangerous as advancing had been. Ihor hoped no one else knew how Sergeant Prishvin had fallen. One more chance he’d have to take.