Fallout

26

Along with Dolores and the rest of the women who typed and filed and answered the phones in the Shasta Lumber Company’s front office, Marian Staley walked down the long hallway to Mahogany Row. Each of them carried a copy of the ambulance petition from the Weed Press-Herald. Taking all the petitions together, they had several hundred signatures.

Dolores looked at the others. “Well, here goes nothing,” she said, and knocked on Carl Cummings’ door.

“What is it?” the executive said, his voice muffled by the barrier. Thus encouraged, Dolores opened the door. Seeing the crowd in the hall, Cummings raised an eyebrow. “Looks like Grand Central Station out there,” he remarked. “What’s going on?”

“Mr. Cummings, sir, you’ll have seen the petitions for an ambulance in the paper,” Marian said, hoping she sounded less scared than she felt. “We need-uh, Weed needs-ambulances for when bad things happen, so they won’t be as horrible as they were with poor Leroy van Zandt. We’ve all gathered signatures for these petitions, and we wanted to give them to you so you can see how the whole town feels about it.”

“That’s right,” Dolores said. The other four women nodded.

“If Shasta Lumber joins up with the other outfits in town, it won’t cost any of you too much money, and it’ll save lives for years,” Marian finished. “Who knows, Mr. Cummings, sir? One of them might even be yours.”

“So that’s what we’re here for,” Dolores put in. “We want to give you these here petitions, like Marian said. Just so you know, sir, I’ve got Doc Toohey’s John Hancock on mine. He thinks it’s a great idea, Doc Toohey does.”

She walked into the paneled office. The rest of the clerical workers followed her. One by one, they set the petitions on Cummings’ desk. That was also of mahogany, unlike the cheap painted-steel desks at the other end of the hall.

“I did know about the petition drive, yes. I couldn’t very well not know about it, could I?” Cummings paused to glance at some of the sheets of newsprint. Marian’s petition had, among other people’s, Dale Dropo’s signature, and Fayvl Tabakman’s, and Babs’ from the diner, and that of Miss Hamilton, who was Linda’s teacher.

“Have you, um, talked with people from the other lumber companies, sir?” Marian asked, that seeming more polite than barking So what are you going to do about it, you filthy capitalist, you?

“As a matter of fact, I have,” Carl Cummings said. Marian braced herself for what she feared was coming next. And you’re all fired, for having the gall to try to tell us what to do was what that boiled down to. The executive paused to light a Pall Mall, which only made her want to fidget more. After his first drag, he went on, “And we all think it’s the best idea anybody’s had for years. We know we’ve got a problem here. This lets us take a shot at fixing it without costing anybody too much. We’ve already started talking with an outfit down in Sacramento that sells ambulances. One ought to be here inside of a month.”

“You do?” Marian hardly believed her ears.

“You have?” Dolores sounded just as astonished.

“It will?” So did Claire Hermanson, who ran the switchboard.

“Absolutely,” Cummings said, and all at once he didn’t seem anywhere near so filthy to Marian. Still a capitalist, yes-who but a capitalist in Weed would have worn such an elegant gray pinstripe suit (or any kind of suit, for that matter: jeans and Pendletons were the usual menswear)? But maybe not one to spark a proletarian uprising. He nodded to Marian. “You know this Tabakman fellow who came up with the notion, don’t you?”

“Uh-huh.” She nodded, still dizzy at how easy it had turned out to be. “We knew each other up in Washington before the bomb hit, and in the camp there afterwards.”

“Good for you. Good for him. He’s got a head on his shoulders-not like Dale Dropo.” Carl Cummings rolled his eyes. “That maniac thinks he can say whatever he wants because he runs the Press-Herald. He doesn’t understand that it’s a newspaper, doggone it, not a blackjack.”

Marian prudently kept her mouth zipped tight. Without the petitions in the Press-Herald, the lumber bosses might well have gone on thinking they could ignore what Weed needed. The blank forms in the paper must have been enough to get them going. They hadn’t waited for the ones full of signatures like those on Cummings’ desk.

“You’ve given us good news, Mr. Cummings, sir. Thank you.” Dolores still seemed flabbergasted, too. “I guess we’ll go back to work now.”

“Okay.” The executive nodded briskly. “Why don’t you close the door again on your way out?” He was already reaching for the telephone as the clerical staff beat a retreat.

Out in the hall, with the solid door closed behind them, the women clasped hands and hugged. “We did it!” Marian exclaimed. “We really did it! We went and belled the cat!”

“Yeah!” Claire Hermanson started back to her station. “I’m gonna call Doc Toohey. He’ll shit a brick when he hears, swear he will!” Marian wouldn’t have put it that way, not even after her spell at Camp Nowhere, but that didn’t mean she thought Claire was wrong.

At lunch, she headed for the diner to tell Babs the news. Babs had already heard, which wasn’t a shock, either. “That skinny Hebe made the big shots act like they weren’t jerks,” the waitress said. “Who woulda thunk anybody could?” She eyed Marian. “Tabakman, he’s sweet on you. You know that?”

“Who, me?” Marian said. Babs cackled. Marian went on, “Yes, I know. He knows I know. I’m still putting myself back together, though. He understands that. He doesn’t rush me or anything.”

“Don’t wait too long,” Babs said. “Men ain’t patient critters.” That was bound to be good advice, even if Marian wasn’t ready to take it yet.

She stopped at the Rexall on the way back to work. As she had in the Shasta Lumber hallway, she said, “We did bell the cat.”

Heber Stansfield was the one who’d first used that figure of speech. He nodded now. “That’s good. That’s mighty good. They got to do it without looking like they was bending too much. But with the whole world coming to pieces around our ears, who knows how much it’ll matter in the end?”

A radio behind the counter was giving the news. “What’s the latest?” Marian asked. “Do I want to know?”

“Murmansk. That Archangel place-somethin’ like that, anyways. Odessa.” Stansfield spoke of death and devastation with sour approval. He could afford to. He’d never known for himself what an atom bomb was like. “And they’re shootin’ looters in Boston and Washington.”

“Not in New York City?” Marian asked.

“From what the radio reporters say, in New York City, the looters, they shoot back.” The druggist spoke as if no iniquity coming out of New York City was too big for him to credit.

Marian bought a package of Life Savers to keep him sweet, then walked down the block to Fayvl’s cobbler’s shop. He looked up from an upside-down logger’s boot. “Hallo, Marian,” he said. “It’s an ambulance.”

“It sure is!” she agreed. “Everybody in town is going on about how smart you are, to come up with a way to make it an ambulance.”

“Foosh!” Tabakman waved that aside. “Anybody what thinks I’m smart, himself he ain’t so.”

“Don’t sandbag.” Marian wasn’t sure he’d get that. But he did. She realized that if he’d played a lot of cards to get his stake to come here, he would have to. She added, “I think you’re way too smart to be doing this for a job.”

“Why for you think that? It’s honest work. It ain’t such a bad living. And I enjoy it. So why I shouldn’t do it? What should I do instead?”

“I don’t know, not when you put it that way,” Marian said.

“Anything I used to did, I would think it was from God a blessing. Then the Nazis came, and God forgot about us if He was ever there at all,” Fayvl said. “So now I do what I feel like doing because I feel like doing it. It’s the same as before, only without God and without the blessing. I get by.”

Without God and without the blessing. Marian found herself nodding. “Me, too, Fayvl. Me, too.”

–

Vasili Yasevich wanted to pay a call on David Berman to see how the old Jew’s “niece” or “cousin” or whatever they decided to call her was coming along. He knew better than to do it, though. Unless Berman found work for him to do, someone would wonder why he was visiting him. He didn’t want anybody asking himself a question like that.

He might not have lived in the Soviet Union for long. He knew how police states operated, though. The Japanese in Harbin had been at least as ruthless as the MGB was here. So had Mao’s men, once Manchukuo went back to being Manchuria. The best way to get along with secret police was never to draw their notice.

So he did his odd jobs. He kept an eye out for Grigory Papanin, but Papanin seemed to have decided leaving him alone was the better part of valor. He also kept an eye out for Gleb Sukhanov. Whether he’d wanted to or not, he’d already drawn that Chekist’s notice.

Vasili stood in the town square, listening to Radio Moscow’s news broadcast coming out of the speaker mounted on the pine pole. Roman Amfiteatrov alternated between bragging about the ruin Soviet bombers dealt to cities on the East Coast of the USA and moaning about the ruin American bombers had visited on Russian cities in response.

If you listened to Amfiteatrov, the Soviet bomber crews were heroes. They represented the vanguard of the proletariat and struck a mighty blow on behalf of the oppressed masses and the advance toward a classless society. The Yankee bomber crews, by contrast, were the lapdogs of plutocracy and warmongering imperialists who delighted in massacring workers and peasants and their children.

If you listened to Amfiteatrov…Vasili could see that, regardless of ideology, when you dropped an atom bomb on a city you knocked it flat and killed tens if not hundreds of thousands of people. How many others here could see the same thing? Either there weren’t very many of them or most of them, like Vasili himself, knew better than to show they could think for themselves.

“Zdrast’ye, Vasili Andreyevich.” There was Sukhanov, right beside him. While he’d been listening, he hadn’t been watching. The MGB man went on, “He sure does talk funny, doesn’t he?”

“Oh, hello, Gleb Ivanovich.” Vasili did his best to sound as if Sukhanov were an ordinary friend, one who had nothing to do with the Ministry of State Security. “He doesn’t have an accent like mine, that’s for certain. Your jaw still doing all right?”

The Chekist touched the side of his face for a moment. “Hasn’t given me any more trouble since Yakov Benyaminovich yanked that stupid tooth, thank heaven. But I want to thank you one more time for the poppy juice you gave me. That kept me going till he was able to work on me. I owe you a big one there.”

“Nah.” Vasili shook his head, even as he was thinking Bet your dick you do. Will you remember when it counts? If you had to ask yourself a question like that, chances were you wouldn’t like the answer. Still casually, Vasili asked, “How’re things otherwise?”

“For me? Well enough. And you?”

“Not too bad, thank you very much,” Vasili said.

“I’m glad to hear it,” Sukhanov said. “I need to tell you something you may not be so glad to hear, though.”

“Oh? What’s that?”

“You were listening to Radio Moscow just now. The war keeps going. It’s heating up, in fact. The way the Americans kill cities, they may as well be tigers killing elk,” the Chekist replied. Did he remember that the USSR had also struck at the USA? If he did, he didn’t show it. He went on, “Conscription calls are heating up, too. The ever-victorious Red Army has to get more men if it’s going to keep winning those victories.”

“If the rodina needs me to serve it again, of course I will serve it again.” Though Vasili bore down on the lying again, he wasn’t at all sure he meant that. Mean it or not, he had to say it. Saying anything else meant he’d serve the Soviet Union in a gulag like the one from which Maria Bauer had escaped-maybe in that very same one.

“Khorosho,” Gleb Sukhanov said. “So far, your name hasn’t shown up on any lists. If it does, maybe I can lose it. But I can’t promise I’ll be able to do that. All I can do is try.”

“Whatever you manage, I’ll be grateful for.” Vasili wondered whether he’d be better off letting the Red Army draft him or disappearing into the woods if it did. Either way, he was much too likely to have unfriendly strangers shooting at him.

“The other possibility I need to warn you about is, I may not be able to do anything at all for you. I may not be here to do anything for you,” the MGB man said. “My name may be on those conscription lists, too.”

But you’re a Chekist! Vasili thought. Then again, that might not matter. How many Soviet cities had the Americans incinerated? The ever-victorious Red Army did have to get its men somewhere. If it couldn’t lay its hands on enough ordinary people, chances were it would start grabbing secret policemen.

Aloud, Vasili said, “It’s a rough old world, Gleb Ivanovich.” He wanted to sound sympathetic without sounding as if he were criticizing Stalin. If you did that, you were unlikely to make any other stupid mistakes afterwards.

“It sure is.” Sukhanov set a hand on Vasili’s shoulder. Maybe he does like me, Vasili thought in surprise. The MGB man added, “Take care of yourself,” and ambled off.

Roman Amfiteatrov was still blathering away. He’d worked through the world news while Vasili talked with Sukhanov. Now he was praising the record aluminum output from shock labor gangs in Omsk. That did tell Vasili Omsk probably hadn’t made the acquaintance of an atom bomb yet. Whether the shock workers had really made all that aluminum was a different question. So was whether they even existed.

Down a side street off the square was one of the little unofficial markets the authorities grudgingly allowed. Babushkas sold strawberries and eggs and onions and golden cheeses they’d made themselves: that kind of stuff. You had to spend money there, but you could find much nicer things than you could in the state-run stores.

There stood David Berman, hefting a big white onion as if it were a grenade. “Dobry den, David Samuelovich,” Vasili said. “How’s the world treating you?”

“Oh, hello,” the old Jew said. He looked less…less disheveled than he had when Vasili brought Maria to his door. His clothes sat on him the way they were supposed to, and Vasili thought he’d run a comb through the scraggly tangle of his beard. “The world is…not too bad for me, anyhow. How is it for you?”

“?‘Not too bad’ sounds right.” Vasili drew Berman away from the onion stand so the babushka wouldn’t overhear. “And how’s your niece from way off in the west?”

“She seems to be settling in pretty well, thanks,” Berman answered. “You know how it is with young people. Or maybe you don’t, since you are one yourself. Sometimes it’s like we don’t quite speak the same language. But she’s a nice girl, mighty nice. She’s friendly.” He nodded, as if pleased with his own choice of words. “Yes, very friendly.”

“Good. I’m glad for you,” Vasili said. If that meant what he thought it meant, Maria was fucking David till he couldn’t see straight. And if it didn’t mean that, too bad for him.

“Don’t just walk off with that onion there,” the babushka said. “You want it, you got to pay for it.” Pay for it David Berman did. Vasili thumped him on the back. He lit a Belomor, happy with the way that was working out.

–

Daisy Baxter stood outside the chemist’s shop, waiting for Bruce McNulty to pick her up. She could see a few of the brighter stars-Mars shone bright and bloody, low in the southeast-but it wasn’t true dark yet. It wouldn’t be for a while, either; as spring advanced toward summer, twilight lingered late and then came again early the next morning.

Not many motorcars moved along East Dereham’s narrow, twisting streets. Civilians had a devil of a time getting petrol. Bruce, of course, was no civilian. He could fuel whatever machine he got at the unfailing tap of a U.S. Air Force motor pool. If he wouldn’t be using it for military purposes…he didn’t care.

Air-raid sirens began their warbling screech. Daisy said something that would have made Simon Perkins look as if he’d just bitten into a green persimmon. The Russian Beagle bombers got bolder by the day. They zoomed across the skies of eastern England like malevolent bats, dropping bombs here and there and then disappearing.

“Run for the shelter!” a man who was taking his own advice shouted to Daisy.

Antiaircraft guns went off in the distance. The tracers arcing across the sky put her in mind of Guy Fawkes’ Day. She knew she was taking a chance staying out in the open. But it wasn’t a big chance. A Beagle might target East Dereham. There wasn’t anything about the place that would really tempt one of the marauders, though.

Here came a jeep. “Hey, good-lookin’!” an American voice called. “Wanna come for a ride with me?”

“I’d love to!” She hopped in. She was getting used to the right side’s not holding the driving seat. She leaned over to kiss Bruce-who would see her while she did it?

He put the jeep in gear. More antiaircraft guns bellowed. More tracers scribed lines of fire overhead. Bruce chuckled. “Maybe we should’ve worn-what do you call ’em over here?-tin hats, that’s it. Don’t want fragments coming down on our heads.”

“I wasn’t fretting about it,” Daisy said. “All I was thinking about was you, and us, and us later on.”

She could still see his grin. “I like the way you think, babe.” He swung the jeep onto the road that led southwest. “And now, on to wonderful, historical Watton.”

“Oh, rubbish!” Daisy said. “There’s no history to any of the little towns and villages around here. That means Fakenham, too, or it did before the bomb hit. People live in places like these because they want nothing to do with history. Only sometimes it comes calling whether you want it or not.”

“I guess so,” Bruce said. How much history had he carried in his B-29’s bomb bay? On whom had it fallen, whether they wanted it or not? He wasn’t thinking about that now. He went on, “The combo playing at the dance is Freddy Cullenbine and His Smokin’ Five. How come that sounds familiar?”

“Weren’t they the band at Yaxham, the first time we-?” Daisy felt herself blushing. She didn’t go on.

“You could be right.” Bruce set a hand on her knee. “I wasn’t paying much attention to what their name was. I had other things on my mind.” The hand moved higher.

With a laugh, Daisy knocked it away. “While you’re driving, kindly drive.”

Watton was bigger than Yaxham, smaller than East Dereham. It thought it had history-it boasted, and boasted of, a clock tower from the seventeenth century. A sign in front of the tower-barely readable now, as the light was failing-said the clock had got a new face in the 1930s. The dance was at the town social hall, a few doors down from the gray stone tower.

Freddy Cullenbine did prove to be the pot-bellied trumpeter who wished he were Satchmo. If he lacked genius, he and his bandmates had plenty of enthusiasm. Bruce steered Daisy out onto the dance floor.

“You’re perkier than you were before,” he said after a while. “You don’t fold up after a couple of numbers the way you used to.”

“I’ve got my strength back, or most of it,” she said.

He squeezed her. “I’m darn glad you do.”

“I wouldn’t mind sitting the next one out, though,” Daisy said. “I could use a pint of bitter-maybe even two.”

“Now you’re talking, honey!” Bruce said.

This was better bitter than they’d served in Yaxham, though not, to Daisy’s thinking, a match for what she’d sold at the Owl and Unicorn. To Bruce, who’d grown up with bilgewater like Pabst and Schlitz, all English bitter was a revelation. He downed two pints in quick succession.

“It’s stronger than you think,” Daisy said. “Will you be all right to drive?”

“I’d worry about it if there was gonna be any traffic,” he answered. “The way things are, the biggest thing I’ve gotta watch out for is running over a sheep in the dark.”

She laughed. “Fair enough.”

Sweat gleaming on his broad expanse of forehead, Freddy Cullenbine worked as hard as any of the dancers. He eventually took a break and got himself a pint. “Louis Armstrong would never do that,” Bruce said, clucking in mock disapproval. “He’d have a bourbon instead.” That made Daisy laugh some more. She liked laughing with someone. She squeezed Bruce’s arm.

Then jet engines roaring low over the social hall made everyone inside think twice about the contrast between the good time they were having and the deadly game of hunter and hunted in the sky above. “I hope they get him,” Daisy said.

“Yeah, me, too,” Bruce replied. But how far did he mean that? The Russians in their Beagles were part of his guild, as it were. The RAF and USAF fighter pilots belonged with the men in MiGs who harried invaders of their airspace. Daisy started to ask him, then decided she didn’t want to know after all.

Getting out of the crowded, smoky, sweaty social hall was a relief. It was a relief in several senses, in fact; Daisy paused to spend a penny in the ladies’ loo. Bruce smoked a cigarette waiting for her to come out. “You should have eased yourself, too,” she said.

“I’m okay,” he answered. “I can always stop and go behind a tree if I have to.” He drooped out his tongue like a panting dog and mimed lifting a leg. She giggled.

It was cool and clear outside. The moon had set not long before. With lights all across the country blacked out, though, stars sparkled bright and clear. The Milky Way gleamed, ghost-pale. Daisy squeezed Bruce again. They’d just driven the jeep out of town when more jet engines howled and antiaircraft guns thundered rage at them.

“Maybe it’s not such a hot night to stop anywhere,” Bruce said. “If you want, I’ll take you straight back to your place.”

“Don’t be silly!” Daisy shook her head. “You’ll do no such thing!”

“Okey-doke.” This time, he slid his hand under the hem of her dress and slid it up her stockinged thigh toward his target. He knew all about bull’s-eyes, too. “Then we’ll do something else.”

Which, when they found a secluded lane near a pear orchard, they did. More fireworks kept going off in the sky, but they had fireworks of their own. Daisy hardly noticed the show overhead, or even the roars of bombs going off. If Bruce did, he gave no sign she could sense, and all her senses were straining.

Afterwards, though, he did say “Lousy Beagles are busy tonight” as he peeled off his rubber. Then he laughed. “Now, if you’ll excuse me, I am gonna walk over to one of those nice trees. Beer does take its revenge.”

Daisy’s manners were too good to let her tell him I told you so. She was distracted a moment later, anyhow. Another jet roared low over the quiet English countryside. Two more were right behind, shooting off machine guns and underwing rockets.

One of those rockets scored a hit. The fleeing plane-the Beagle?-blew apart in midair. Flaming wreckage pinwheeled toward the ground. One big blazing chunk flew straight at the jeep. Daisy watched it, open-mouthed…for a split second too long. Then she started to jump out.

–

Lieutenant Stanislav Kosior ran around keeping an eye on the men in his company like a mother hen herding along a new brood of chicks. “Come on!” he called. “Come on, come on! Into the trucks! Hurry up! Pile on in! You can do it!”

“Do you know what’s going on, Comrade Lieutenant?” Ihor Shevchenko asked him.

“They’re pulling this whole division out of the line,” Kosior said. “They have some other duty in mind for us. What that is, they haven’t told me yet. Whatever it is, I serve the Soviet Union, Comrade Corporal, and so do you.”

“Yes, sir.” Ihor thought of the move a little differently. Whatever it was, he was stuck with it. He helped some of the guys from his squad climb aboard a truck, then scrambled in himself. It was getting dark outside the canvas-covered bed of the truck. That pleased him. Motor convoys on the road in broad daylight made tasty, tempting targets for fighters with guns and rockets.

Away they went. In the darkness, of course, the driver couldn’t see the potholes and dodge them. Ihor suspected he could barely see the road-or maybe the trouble was that he barely knew how to drive. They headed east when they set out, which made sense: everything west of where they had been belonged to the imperialists. But they kept going, much farther and much longer than Ihor had expected.

“I think we’re back in the German Democratic Republic,” one of the soldiers said after a while.

Ihor needed a few seconds to remember that that was the official name for the part of Germany the USSR had kept after the Nazis got finished off. German Communists ran it these days, but Communists from the Soviet Union ran them. None of the Soviet satellites could do much without permission from Stalin and his henchmen. The German Democratic Republic could do next to nothing.

The soldiers piled out at a town called Juterbog. A man who’d fought in Marshal Koniev’s army had gone through it in 1945. He said it lay south of Berlin. Ihor couldn’t see much of it. What he could see told him the Fritzes hadn’t rebuilt it since Koniev’s troops overran it.

They got black bread and salted herrings there, with tea to wash them down. Once they’d eaten, the lieutenant gathered the company together. “Well, boys, now I know what we’ll be doing next,” Kosior said.

“What’s that, sir?” several men asked, Ihor among them.

Kosior paused to light a match to get a papiros going. The flame briefly lit his earnest features from below and made him look harder and tougher than usual. “There’s a reactionary uprising in the Polish People’s Republic,” he answered. “The crypto-Fascists have been lying in wait, hoping for their chance. Now they think they’ve found it. They want to detach Poland from the roster of progressive states and bring back the squalid military dictatorship from the years of Pilsudski and Smigly-Ridz. But we won’t let them get away with it, will we?”

“No, Comrade Lieutenant!” the Red Army men chorused. Ihor made sure Kosior heard his voice. The less eager you really felt, the more eager you had to show yourself to be.

“Khorosho. Ochen khorosho. I wouldn’t expect anything less from good Soviet men like you,” Kosior said. “Now I need to tell you, along with counterrevolutionary soldiers you may also find reactionary civilians they’ve seduced with their lying propaganda. Some of them may speak Russian. Pay no attention to anything they tell you. They’re in the pay of American and English spymasters. We liberated Poland from the German Fascists in the last war. Now we have to clear out the Polish Fascists who hid their venom till they thought they could hurt us the most.”

“We serve the Soviet Union!” the soldiers said as one.

They got to unroll their blankets and stretch out on the ground in Juterbog. That beat the devil out of trying to sleep sitting up in a truck bouncing along rough roads. After more bread and herrings and tea in the morning, they got rolling again. They were far enough inside the zone of Soviet control to make attack from the air only a small fear.

As soon as they got into Poland, the paving petered out and the road turned into a dirt track. They hadn’t gone far before Ihor, looking back through the opening in the canvas at the rear of the truck, saw a burnt-out T-34/85 in a field. It might have been sitting there since 1945. But that was about thirty tonnes of steel. They would have salvaged it between then and now…wouldn’t they? And the carcass looked fresh, not all rusty and dusty.

Bare-chested Red Army artillerymen served 105s and 155s in gun pits plainly just dug. The guns boomed. Cartridge cases jumped from the breeches. Loaders slammed in fresh rounds with fists clenched so they wouldn’t snag their fingers in the mechanism. Ihor remembered noticing that trick during the last war.

Then a machine gun opened up on the front of the column. It was an MG-34, the MG-42’s older and almost equally fearsome cousin. Maybe that meant the Poles using it were indeed Nazis. Or maybe it just meant they could get their hands on leftover German hardware.

Whatever it meant, Ihor’s truck jerked to a stop. “Out!” he said. “Out and down! We’ll hunt the fucker to death!”

Not fifteen seconds after the soldiers bailed out of the truck, a burst from the machine gun punched holes in the canvas cover-and, by the clanks, in the driver’s compartment and engine as well. Ihor cautiously raised his head a few centimeters as he dug in with his entrenching tool. Flashes came from behind some bushes in the meadow.

“There it is!” he yelled. “Riflemen, make the gunners keep their heads down. Submachine gunners, forward with me!” With his Kalashnikov, he could have hung back and fired from this longer distance. But the red stripe on each shoulder board told him he had to set an example.

Bullets cracked past him. He flopped down after his rush and squeezed off a short burst at the MG-34. The guys with PPDs and PPShs were firing, too, but they were too far away to have much chance of hitting anything. He wasn’t.

“Go home, you Russian pigs!” a Pole yelled. Ihor had no trouble following him. He wasn’t so sure the Great Russians could. The Pole sounded more Ukrainian than Russian. Maybe he’d come from eastern Poland when it turned into the western Ukraine after the revived Polish nation saw its borders shift several hundred kilometers westward.

“Keep going! Fire and move!” Lieutenant Kosior called. The veterans in the company already knew how. They’d done it before often enough. The machine gun didn’t have enough friends and couldn’t fire every which way at once. Before long, three dead Poles lay behind it.

“Murderers! Russian fucking bandits!” other Poles shouted. “Freedom for Poland! Freedom, damn you!”

“Death to the Fascists!” Lieutenant Kosior shouted back. Some people truly believed whatever their superiors told them.

He did succeed in infuriating the Poles who were trading fire with the Red Army men. “Fuck Stalin!” some of them yelled, while others shouted, “Death to Stalin!” One man added, “He’s a worse Fascist than Hitler ever was!”

“What are you bastards doing shooting Poles inside of Poland?” still other rebels called. “This is our country. It’s not yours. Go home!”

Ihor wouldn’t have minded. Only the certainty that an MGB man would put a bullet into the back of his neck without even smiling if he tried to abandon his post kept him banging away with his Kalashnikov-that and the equally grim certainty that the Poles would shoot him if he didn’t shoot them first.

“No one insults the great Stalin!” Stanislav Kosior dashed forward with his PPSh, as furious as if the Poles had cursed his mother, not his political boss. Then he spun and crumpled. He tried to drag himself back to cover. Two more bullets slammed into him and made his body jerk. He lay very still after that.

Another old German machine gun in Polish hands snarled to life. Ihor dug like a mole. These are our socialist allies, too he thought as the dirt flew. Christ have mercy if our enemies ever get this mad at us!