Hitler's war

Chapter 2

It was six in the morning in Peking, which meant it was yesterday afternoon back in New York City. Corporal Pete McGill and several of the other Marines at the American Legation clustered in front of a shortwave set, listening to the World Series. The Yankees were up on the Cubs, two games to none. They were leading in game three, too. Joe Gordon had already singled with the bases loaded and homered, and Hoot Pearson was cruising along on the mound.

“Cubs are history,” McGill said happily-he was from the Bronx. “Three straight Series for the Yanks, it’s gonna be. Nobody’s ever done that before.”

None of the other leathernecks argued with him. He would have liked to see them try! When the Cubs got done losing today (or yesterday, or whatever the hell day it really was), they would have to sweep four to take the championship. Nobody did that, not against the Bronx Bombers!

A Polack named Herman Szulc-which he insisted was pronounced Schultz -said, “I bet they won’t be as good next year.”

“Oh, yeah, wise guy? How come?” McGill had brick-red hair, freckles, and the temper that went with them. And if you affronted his team, you affronted him, too.

“Only stands to reason. Shit, look at Gehrig,” Szulc said. “He didn’t even hit. 300 this year. He’s getting old, wearing out.”

“Nah, he’ll be back strong. You wait and see,” McGill said. “Sheesh! A little bit of an off year for one guy, and you want to write off the ball-club.”

Before the argument could go any further, a Chinese servant brought in a tray with coffee and sausages and rolls stuffed with this and that for the Marines. None of it except the coffee was what McGill would have eaten in the States, but it would all be tasty. Duty at the Legation was as sweet as it got.

“Sheh-sheh, Wang,” Szulc said as the servant set the tray down on a table. That meant thank you in Chinese. McGill had learned a few phrases, too. They came in handy every once in a while.

Wang grinned a toothy grin. Several of his front teeth were gold. A twenty-four-carat smile meant you were somebody here. “Eat,” he said-he knew bits of English, the way the Marines knew bits of Chinese. He waved at the tray. “Hao.” That meant it was good.

And it was. “Wonder what’s in the sausages,” somebody said with his mouth full.

“Your mother,” somebody else came back, which almost made Pete squirt coffee out his nose.

“The Missing Link,” Szulc suggested. That wasn’t even so far-fetched. They’d found prehistoric human bones in these parts that were God only knew how old.

It also wasn’t so far-fetched for another reason. Chinamen would cook and eat damn near everything. You could get snake. It was supposed to be good for your one-eyed snake. You could get dog, which was also supposed to make John Henry perk up. You could get fried grasshoppers. McGill had eaten one once, on a bet. It wasn’t even bad, and he picked up five bucks crunching it.

Out went the Cubs again. A singing commercial came on. Szulc fiddled with the radio dial. “What the hell you doing?” McGill asked.

“Seeing if I can find some news between innings,” Szulc answered. “Check what’s up with the war.”

“Oh. Okay,” McGill said. The war was as important as the Series. Back in the States, people wouldn’t have believed it. McGill was sure of that. But back in the States, people weren’t right around the corner from the Japanese Legation and its garrison of tough bastards-not as tough as Marines, McGill was sure, but tough. Back in the States, people were doing their best to forget the Japs had bombed the crap out of the Panay the December before, even though she was flying the American flag.

Japan apologized, didn’t she? She paid an indemnity, didn’t she? That made everything all right, didn’t it? Maybe so-back in the States. Not in Peking. Not even close.

Back in the States, people forgot the Japs had a zillion more soldiers sitting in Manchuria. Manchukuo, they called the puppet state there these days. If they decided they wanted a war with the USA, how long would this garrison last? Hell, back in the States, most people didn’t know it existed.

If the balloon goes up with the Japs, it’s my ass, McGill thought.

Szulc got a couple of bursts of static. Then he found the BBC. The announcer had a much posher accent than most of the Royal Marines at the British Legation. They called themselves leathernecks, too, and they made damn fine drinking buddies even if they did talk funny.

“-vakia continues to offer stout resistance to Hitler’s aggression,” the announcer said. “Russian volunteers and aircraft have begun appearing in Ruthenia and Slovakia. Both Poland and Romania deny consenting to their crossing.”

“Fuck, I would, too,” Szulc said. “Picking between Hitler and Stalin’s gotta be worse’n the devil and the deep blue sea.”

“Shut up already, if you want to listen to the news,” somebody told him.

That supercivilized-sounding BBC announcer was continuing: “-another day of fierce air raids against Prague. Civilian casualties are said to be very heavy. The Czechoslovak government has condemned what it calls ‘the barbarous German onslaught against defenseless non-combatants.’”

“Nice war,” McGill muttered. Blasting the crap out of anything that got in your way wasn’t anything the Marines hadn’t heard about and seen before. The Japs did it all the time here, now that their war against China had heated up. But you expected better from Europeans, somehow. Then again, the difference between what you expected and what you got made a pretty good measure of how fucked up the world was.

“Czechoslovakia insists that reports of unrest in Slovakia are greatly exaggerated. Uprisings by the so-called Hlinka Guard”-the announcer read the name with fastidious distaste-“are being suppressed in Bratislava, Radio Prague declares, and elsewhere in that area.”

“C’mon-put the ballgame back on,” said a big, burly PFC named Puccinelli and inevitably called Pooch.

“In a second,” Szulc said. “He’ll get to the rest of the shit, and then we’ll go back.” Pooch muttered to himself, but didn’t reach for the tuning dial himself.

“France continues its advance into Germany. German resistance is termed light,” the BBC newsman said. “France has occupied the Warndt Forest, and seized the towns of Lauterwald and Bubingen.”

“Wherever the hell those are,” McGill put in. He’d never heard of either one of them before. That probably meant you could piss across them.

The limey’s voice grew stern. “For the second night in a row, air pirates from Spain bombed Hendaye and Biarritz in southwestern France. It is not yet known whether the bombers were flown by native Spanish Fascists of the Sanjurjo junta or by Nazis of the Condor Legion mercenary group. In any case, French aid to the rival Spanish Republican government, including men, munitions, aircraft, and tanks, continues to flood across the Pyrenees.”

“Yeah, it floods now, after the frogs and the limeys spent years keeping it out.” Max Weinstein was a rare duck: a pink, almost Red, Marine. He wasn’t real big, but he was tough. With politics like his, he had to be. He got into more than his share of brawls, and won more than his share, too.

“Prime Minister Chamberlain was in Manchester today, reassuring anxious citizens that, despite the long, difficult road ahead, victory will inevitably-”

Herman Szulc turned back to the World Series. The Cubs had one out in the seventh. They were going down the drain, all right, the same way the Giants had in ‘36 or ‘37.

“Wonder whether the Japs are listening to the Series or the BBC,” McGill said. It wasn’t obvious. Japan was crazy for baseball. On the Fourth of July in ‘37-three days before the fighting between Japan and China broke out for real-a Marine team had played a doubleheader against a squad from the Japanese garrison. They’d split two games rougher than any John McGraw’s Orioles played back in the ‘90s.

“Wonder whether Japan will go after Russia like she means it if the Russians start going at it hot and heavy with Hitler,” Szulc said.

“That would be just like the damn Japs,” Max said, and for once nobody wanted to argue with him. Japan and Russia had been banging heads for a couple of years now, up on the border between Manchukuo and Mongolia. Most of the official bulletins talked about Manchukuan and Mongolian soldiers, but anybody who knew anything knew better. The puppets wouldn’t dance that way without their masters pulling the strings.

“Hey, I hope the Japs do go north,” Pete said. Weinstein gave him a furious look. Before the champion of the Soviet workers and peasants could start screaming, McGill went on, “If they don’t, they’ll hit the USA, and everybody here is fucking dead meat if they do.”

Max opened his mouth. A moment later, he closed it again. Nobody could say Pete was wrong there. Japan occupied northern China these days. She occupied all of Peking except the Legation Quarter. If she went to war with the United States, the few hundred Marines in the garrison wouldn’t last long.

Japanese soldiers were little and scrawny. Their equipment was nothing to write home about. But they were rugged sons of bitches, and there were swarms of them. Oh, America would eventually kick the snot out of them. Eventually, though, was way too late to do anybody here any good.

* * *

Sergeant Hideki Fujita hated Manchukuo. He hated Mongolia even more. And getting sent to the border between the Japanese puppet state and the one the Russians propped up combined the worst of both worlds.

Japan claimed the border between Manchukuo and Mongolia lay along the Halha River. The Mongolians and Russians insisted it belonged a good many kilometers farther east. Japan and Russia had banged heads along Manchukuo’s borders before: here, and along the Amur River, and near Korea, where Russian territory dipped down as far as Vladivostok.

The Mongolians had found a new game to get on their neighbors’ nerves. They would light grass fires near the frontier-wherever the hell it was-and let the prevailing westerlies sweep the flames into Manchukuan territory. Naturally, that made the locals come running to the Japanese, screaming that they should do something. When you set up a puppet, you had to hold him upright or else he wasn’t worth anything.

Not that Fujita thought the Manchukuans were worth anything. But their country-to give it the benefit of the doubt-had more timber than anybody knew what to do with. It raised lots of rice and wheat and millet, too. And it drew ever more Japanese colonists, people who wanted more land and a better chance than they’d ever get in the overcrowded home islands. Whether the Manchukuans did or not, real Japanese people needed protecting.

Trouble was, even if the border lay on the Halha, the way Japan said it did, the Mongolians and Russians still had the better of it. The land west of the Halha, on the Mongolian side, stood fifty or sixty meters higher than it did over here. High ground counted, same as always.

Only a couple of days earlier, on October 4, the Mongolians had fired from the high ground at two dozen Japanese surveyors riding through what was plainly Japanese territory…if you accepted the Japanese view of the frontier, anyhow. Sergeant Fujita did, of course.

One of the other men in his little detachment, a corporal named Masanori Kawakami, asked, “Excuse me, Sergeant- san, but would the Mongolians harass us if the Russians didn’t want them to?”

“Not bloody likely,” Fujita said with a snort. He was short and squat and tough-the kind of noncom whose men hated and feared him but couldn’t help respecting him, too. “The Mongols can’t wipe their raggedy asses unless some Russian commissar says they can.”

“Hai.” Kawakami nodded. He was younger than Fujita, a conscript rather than a career soldier. “That’s what I thought.”

“Funny they would do it with the war in Europe heating up,” Superior Private Shinjiro Hayashi said.

“What’s that got to do with anything?” Fujita rumbled ominously. He wanted to boot Hayashi around, but sometimes even a sergeant in the Imperial Japanese Army had to be careful. Yes, Hayashi was a conscript, with no rights or privileges to speak of. Yes, he was clumsy and four-eyed, and so deserved thumping more than most of the other soldiers.

But he was also a university student. He talked like a damn professor. A guy like that was bound to have connections. If he complained, Sergeant Fujita was too likely never to see anything but the dusty Mongolian frontier for the rest of his days.

Hayashi smiled now. He liked explaining things. “If the Russians really are fighting in Czechoslovakia”-a name that sounded very strange in Japanese-“why would they also want to fight us? A man with two enemies at the same time has trouble.”

“Maybe,” Fujita said with a grudging nod. “You can see that-but you’re almost as smart as you think you are.” He wouldn’t give any praise without putting a sting in its tail. “Are the dumb foreigners clever enough to see it, too?”

“I think so, Sergeant- san.” Hayashi knew better than to piss Fujita off on purpose. “Lots of countries know the rules of diplomacy and war.”

Corporal Kawakami pointed west. “I think I just saw something move, Sergeant…There, about one o’clock.”

“I’ll check it out.” Fujita wore binoculars on a leather strap around his neck. Japanese optics were some of the best in the world. He’d looked through captured Russian field glasses, and they were crap. Pure junk. He’d also seen fancy German binoculars-from Zeiss, no less. Those were okay, but not a sen’s worth better than his own pair.

He scanned the plain on this side of the Halha. Yellow dirt, yellowish-green grass, the occasional bush-that was about it. The steppe rolled on for countless kilometers. Then he spotted the horseman.

A Mongolian, he thought at once. He had trouble knowing how he was so sure. Manchukuan cavalrymen rode the same kind of shaggy little steppe ponies. They carried carbines slung on their backs, too, and wore the same mix of uniforms and native garb. Then Fujita realized why he knew. The horseman kept glancing back over his shoulder, toward the east. If he expected trouble, it was from this direction, yet he was the only man in sight.

“Let’s reel him in,” Fujita said. “Hayashi! Fire two shots in the air.”

“Two shots. Yes, Sergeant- san.” Superior Private Hayashi obeyed without question. Bang! Bang! The reports rolled across the steppe.

Fujita kept the field glasses on the rider. When the fellow heard the gunshots, he jerked in the saddle, looked around wildly in all directions, and started to grab for his weapon. Then he checked himself. “Two more shots, Hayashi,” the sergeant said. “And we’ll show ourselves. If he comes in, fine. I think he will. But if he doesn’t, we just have to deal with him.”

Bang! Bang! The sergeant and the men from his squad stood up. He waved. He hoped the shots wouldn’t draw artillery fire from the other side of the river. If the horseman was what Fujita thought he was, the bastards over there might want to see him dead even if he was on this side of the line…not that they admitted the Halha was the line, anyway.

The Mongolian looked back toward the other side of the river again, too. He wore a fur cap with earflaps up right now-the day was mild. After reaching under it to scratch his head, he rode slowly toward the Japanese soldiers.

As he got closer, he waved his hand to show he was friendly. Then he must have decided that wasn’t enough, because he threw down the carbine. He shouted something in his own language. It sounded like dogs barking to Fujita.

“I don’t know what the devil you’re talking about,” the Japanese sergeant yelled back. “Come ahead anyhow, though.” He gestured emphatically.

When the Mongolian called again, it was in a different tongue. “That’s Chinese, Sergeant,” Hayashi said.

“You understand it?” Fujita asked. Maybe the four-eyed guy was good for something after all.

And Hayashi nodded. “I studied it in school.”

“All right. Talk to him. Find out what’s what.”

Whatever Hayashi said was only singsong gibberish to Fujita. But the Mongolian understood it. He answered eagerly. He and Hayashi had to go back and forth and round and round-neither was exactly fluent. After a bit, the senior private turned back to Fujita. “About what we would have guessed, Sergeant. He thought they were going to purge him, and he figured he’d better bug out while he was still breathing.”

Fujita grunted. “The Mongolians are crazy, and they caught it from the Russians.” Russia had been purging its officer corps for a couple of years now. People just disappeared. Captains, colonels, generals…It didn’t matter. And, since Marshal Choibalsan’s Mongolia imitated Stalin’s Russia in all things, Mongol officers started disappearing off the face of the earth, too. More and more of the ones who feared they might be next fled to Manchukuo instead-which made Choibalsan look for still more new traitors.

This fellow said something else in his hesitant Chinese. Fujita looked a question to Hayashi. “He says-I think he says-he can tell us a lot about their dispositions on the far side of the Halha.”

Hearing that improved Fujita’s disposition. “Can he? Well, he’ll get his chance. We’ll take him in, and he’d better sing like a cricket in a cage. Tell him so, Hayashi.”

“I don’t know if I can say that in Chinese, Sergeant- san.”

“Shit. Tell him we’ll cut his balls off if he doesn’t talk. That ought to do it.”

Hayashi spoke slowly. The Mongolian officer’s face didn’t show much. He was darker than most Japanese, maybe because he was born that way, maybe just because he was weathered, which he certainly was. Left in the oven too long, Fujita thought scornfully. The Mongolian did gnaw on his lower lip for a moment before answering. “He says he’ll tell us whatever we want to know,” Hayashi reported. “He says he knew all along he’d have to do that.”

“All right. Good. You and Kawakami take him back to our officers.” Fujita held up a hand. “Wait! Ask him one thing first. Ask him if the Russians and Mongols aim to jump us any time soon.”

Hayashi put the question. The deserter shook his head. He said something. Hayashi translated: “No, Sergeant. He says they’re just hoping we leave them alone. The Russians are almost pissing themselves about what’s going on in Europe, he says.”

“Ichi-ban!” Fujita said enthusiastically. “That’s good intelligence. If they’re afraid we’ll jump on them, maybe now’s the time to do it, neh?”

Senior Private Hayashi shrugged. He wasn’t about to argue with a superior. He and Corporal Kawakami just took the Mongolian back toward battalion headquarters.

* * *

Armorers wheeled bombs toward Lieutenant Sergei Yaroslavsky’s Tupolev SB-2. The medium bomber would hold half a dozen 100kg bombs or one big, hefty 500kg firework. The big bombs were in short supply, though. Yaroslavsky was glad the armorers had enough of the smaller ones to fill up the bomb bay.

He was a stolid, broad-faced blond, getting close to thirty. He’d had a tour against the Fascists in Spain. Now he was doing it again, flying out of a field near Poprad in eastern Slovakia. Officially, he was a volunteer, aiding the people of democratic Czechoslovakia against the Nazi invasion. And, in a way, he supposed he had volunteered. They would have shot him if he’d said no. They were shooting lots of officers these days. They were jumpy as cats in a rocking-chair factory. They’d shoot you without any excuse if they felt like it. If you gave them one, you were dead for sure.

Of course, the Germans were liable to shoot him, too. Things were simpler and safer in Spain. Back in early 1937, the SB-2 could outrun anything the Spanish Nationalists, the Condor Legion, or the Italians put in the air.

It wasn’t like that here. The Messerschmitt 109 was a very nasty piece of work. It was faster than both Russian flat-nosed Polikarpovs and biplane Czech Avias. It was a hell of a lot faster than an SB-2. The best recipe for not getting shot down was not getting seen.

The armorers were Czechs. When they talked with one another, Sergei could almost understand them. He really could follow Ruthenian, which was just Ukrainian with another name. Slovak? He didn’t know about Slovak. Sentries around the airstrip kept Slovaks away. The squadron was flying out of Slovakia, but the place wasn’t exactly loyal to the country of which it was supposed to be a part.

Clanging noises said the bombardier was closing the bomb bay. “We ready, Ivan?” Yaroslavsky called.

“Da, Comrade Lieutenant,” Ivan Kuchkov replied. He was dark and stocky and muscular and hairy. People sometimes called him “Chimp.” Not very often, though, not after he broke a man’s jaw for doing it. He had the right slot-a bombardier needed muscle.

“Start them up, Anastas,” Sergei told the copilot.

Anastas Mouradian nodded. “I will do it.” His throaty Armenian accent grated on Yaroslavsky’s ears. Damned swarthy bastards from the Caucasus…But you couldn’t say that, not when Comrade Stalin was a Georgian. Better not even to think it.

At least the Georgians and Armenians were Christians, not Muslims like the Azerbaijanis and Chechens. In the officially atheist USSR, you weren’t supposed to think things like that, either. But, while Sergei might be a New Soviet Man, he was also and always a Russian.

The two M-100A radial engines thundered to life. The props blurred into invisibility. Yaroslavsky checked the instruments, one after another. Everything looked good. The mechanics were Czechs, too. They were better than any Russian mechanics he’d ever had. They seemed to care more about the work they did.

Five more bombers were also warming up on the airstrip. They were going to give the Nazis one right in the eye. Sergei hoped so, anyhow. More than a week into the war, and the Germans still hadn’t cut Czechoslovakia in half. Lots of the Czech army was pulling back into Slovakia to keep up the fight here-and to sit on the pro-Fascist Slovaks.

Down the runway bounced the SB-2. It was made for taking off from grassy fields. Paved runways were as rare as capitalists inside the Soviet Union.

Sergei pulled back on the stick. The bomber’s nose came up. No more bouncing-he was airborne. He’d shake again soon enough, when they started shooting at him. Best to enjoy the calm while he could.

If running didn’t help, he could shoot back. Mouradian was in charge of two machine guns in the SB-2’s nose. Kuchkov had a machine-gun blister on the back of the airplane and another in its belly. Those looked like a good idea. Bombardiers were rapidly discovering, though, that you had to be lucky to hit anything with either gun. If you weren’t lucky, you might use the dorsal gun to shoot off your own tail. At least one intrepid bombardier had already done that.

If he’d lived, they would have court-martialed him and then shot him. As things were, he saved them the trouble.

“All good,” Mouradian shouted, pointing to the instruments. He wasn’t in the front glasshouse yet. With 840 horsepower roaring away to either side, you had to yell to make yourself heard.

“I see ‘em.” Sergei nodded. “Let’s hope they stay that way.” The SB-2 was a robust warplane. It could take a beating. Sergei didn’t want it to this time around.

On he flew with his buddies. Down below, bursting shells and bombs told when they entered the combat zone. The Czechs were still pulling back through the gap between the Nazi armies advancing from the north and south. If the Czechs got enough men and materiel into eastern Moravia and Slovakia before the Germans finally sealed that gap, they could keep fighting a while longer.

When Sergei said as much to Anastas Mouradian, the copilot-who also served as gunner and bomb-aimer and navigator-nodded. “Da,” he said, for all the world as if he were a real Russian. Then he added, “If they don’t, they’re fucked.” Any Russian might have said that, too. He sure wouldn’t have been wrong if he did.

Antiaircraft fire started bursting around the bombers. Yaroslavsky jinked, going up and down to the left and right at random and slowing down and speeding up to keep the German gunners from being able to lead him like a duck. When a shell filled the air with nasty black smoke close by, it was as if he drove over a big pothole. His teeth came together with a click.

Mouradian growled something in what had to be Armenian. Then he came back to words Sergei could understand: “Too damn close.”

“No kidding,” the pilot said. Just then, another shell went off even closer to the SB-2. A fragment clanged off-or, more likely, bit through-the fuselage. Yaroslavsky checked the controls to the rudder and elevator. They answered-no cables cut. He yelled into the speaking tube to the bombardier: “You all right, Ivan?”

“Khorosho,” Kuchkov answered. “A little draftier, but no damage.”

“Get ready,” Sergei told him. “We’re almost there.”

They were almost there if Mouradian’s navigating was worth a kopek, anyway. He’d got them where they were supposed to go before. The target this time was just outside of Brno, the biggest factory town in Moravia. The Czechs were still holding out there, still holding up the Nazis. If 600 kilos of high explosive could help them hang on a little longer, Sergei would deliver the goods.

That thick cloud of smoke ahead had to be Brno. Who needs navigation? Sergei thought wryly. The Germans were bombing the crap out of Czechoslovakian civilians. Thousands and thousands were supposed to be dead in Prague. Brno was catching it, too.

“So where’s our target from here?” Yaroslavsky asked.

“Southwest, Comrade Pilot,” Mouradian answered from the nose-he was ready to fight now.

That made sense: it was the direction from which the Nazis were advancing. Sergei didn’t want his bombs coming down on the Czechs’ heads. He spotted something ahead that looked like a division HQ. “Aim for those tents,” he ordered. “I’ll bring us in low and straight.”

“We’ll get ‘em,” Ivan Kuchkov said. And maybe they would, and maybe they wouldn’t. But they’d scare the crap out of the Nazis if they didn’t.

The bomb bay opened. The extra drag slowed the SB-2 and made it sluggish in the air. At Mouradian’s shouted command, the bombs tumbled free, one after another. The plane would be livelier with them gone: they made up about a tenth of the weight it was carrying.

And the Tupolev bomber would need to be livelier, too. German fighters jumped the Russians just as they were finishing their bombing runs. These Messerschmitts were terrifying. They could have been more maneuverable, but they were well armed and fast as the Devil’s godson. And diving down on the SB-2s made them faster yet.

One of the bombers fell out of the sky. By the way it dove, the pilot was dead at the controls. Fire filled the left wing. Another SB-2 fled east with smoke trailing from one engine. Maybe it could get down safely in Czech-held territory. Maybe the Germans would hack it down first.

Sergei couldn’t worry much about the other SB-2s. He had to worry about his own. The Chimp started blazing away from the dorsal turret. Tracers snarled past the bomber from behind.

But Ivan made the 109 pull up. From the nose, Mouradian squeezed off a long burst at the lean, predatory shape. The enemy fighter didn’t catch fire or go down. But it didn’t try another attack, either.

With all the throttle he could use, Sergei got out of there. Then he had another bad moment, when two Czech Avias buzzed up in what might have been another attack. At the last second, they saw he was no Nazi and swung away. One of the pilots waved from his cockpit. Yaroslavsky returned the compliment.

Then he had to find the airstrip again. Mouradian came back to help him. Between them, they figured out where the hell Poprad was. They got down smoothly enough. One other plane from the flight came in a few minutes later. Sergei could hope some of the rest had landed elsewhere. The one that had plummeted to the ground…He shuddered. Better not to think of such things.

He had to, though, because he needed to report to his superiors. “One of our planes damaged, one definitely lost,” he said.

They nodded. All part of the game, as far as they were concerned. “We’ll keep banging away,” one of them said. Till you’re expended, too , Sergei thought, and made himself nod.

* * *

Vaclav Jezek dug like a mole. What was left of his company was trying to hold the Germans out of Kopecek, a little town six or eight kilometers northeast of Olomouc. In and of itself, Kopecek hardly mattered. But Olomouc did. Olomouc was the last surviving northern rampart against the Nazi flood. The Czech army was pulling back to the east between Olomouc and Brno. If Hitler’s bastards closed off that passageway…

Then we’re fucked, Jezek though, making the dirt fly with his entrenching tool. Czechoslovakia was probably fucked anyway. No, scratch probably. Czechoslovakia was fucked anyway. But the stubborn Czechs were making Germany pay a hell of a high price.

Artillery came down in and around Kopecek. The Nazis were shelling the pilgrimage church. It stood on a hill a couple of hundred meters above the plain, and made an observation post dangerous to them. Vaclav would have been surprised if his side didn’t have some guns of its own around the church.

“Hey, Corporal! Got a smoke?” Otakar Prsemysl asked.

“Everybody bums cigarettes off me,” Jezek grumbled, but he gave the private one. Back just before the shooting started, Jan Dzurinda had scrounged a butt from him. Vaclav didn’t know where Dzurinda was now. Maybe he’d got killed when the Germans dropped everything and the kitchen sink on the Czech lines by the border. Or maybe he’d just bugged out. A hell of a lot of Slovaks had. The miserable rubes didn’t think this was their fight-or else they thought they were on the wrong side when they wore Czech brown.

“Tanks!” somebody shouted. Everyone who heard that yell grew fearfully alert. Without tanks, the Nazis would still be banging their heads against the Czech lines. But they had them, and they had more of them than Czechoslovakia did. Breakthrough machines, that’s what tanks were.

A machine gun chattered. That was wasted ammo. Machine-gun bullets wouldn’t pierce a panzer’s steel hide. Tanks could kill you, and you couldn’t kill the sons of bitches inside them. Was that fair?

Then Vaclav heard the bigger boom of an antitank rifle. Those fired heavy, large-caliber, armor-piercing bullets out of a long barrel that gave high muzzle velocity. They could get through…sometimes, anyhow. The rifles weigh a tonne and kicked like a jackass, but so what? They worked…again, sometimes.

One of the panzers up ahead stopped. Smoke poured from the engine compartment. The two-man crew bailed out. Vaclav didn’t think either Nazi in black coveralls made it to shelter. Too bad, he thought. Yeah. Toooo bad.

Avias and Messerschmitts dueled overhead. The German fighters were faster, but the Czech biplanes seemed more nimble. People cheered like maniacs when a 109 spun out of control and went down. It was like watching a football match, except you counted lives instead of goals. Score one for our side!

Trouble was, not many Avias were left. The Nazis kept pounding the airfields from which they flew. The Messerschmitts came out of Germany, of course. A few Czech air raids on German soil had made Hitler and Goebbels scream and squeal, but the Luftwaffe had a big edge there.

“Wish the French would push harder, take some pressure off us,” Private Prsemysl said.

“Yeah, me, too,” Jezek agreed. “Wish for the moon while you’re at it.” He supposed the Czechs had to count themselves lucky France had moved at all. Great. Some luck.

No sooner had that gloomy thought gone through his mind than cries of alarm came from the west. “They’re through! They’re through!” somebody howled, which sounded bad. Then someone else shouted, “They’re into Olomouc! Get away while you can!”

Otakar Prsemysl crossed himself. That looked like a good idea to Vaclav, so he did the same thing. It couldn’t hurt, anyhow.

“South and east! South and east!” That was an officer’s authoritative shout. “We pull back farther into Moravia and keep fighting. They haven’t whipped us yet, by God!”

No, but how much longer will it be? And what good will keeping up the fight do except get more of us killed? Still, Corporal Jezek had no better ideas. The only other choices were surrendering, which he couldn’t stomach, and dying in place, which also struck him as unattractive.

He got out of his foxhole and stumbled through the streets of Kopecek. To his surprise, trucks-mostly commandeered civilian jobs-waited on the southern edge of town. He piled into one of them. A moment later, he saw Otakar and pulled him into it, too. A moment after that, the truck rattled away.

“Where are we going?” Prsemysl asked.

“Beats me,” Vaclav answered. “But did you want to stay where we were?” The other man shook his head. This couldn’t be worse… Unless we get bombed, of course. One more thought Jezek could have done without.