The Big Switch

Chapter 3

The dreaded call didn’t always come with a knock on the door in the middle of the night. Lieutenant Anastas Mouradian was eating blintzes and drinking his breakfast tea when a hard-faced noncom carrying a submachine gun strode up to him in the officers’ mess and barked, “Comrade Lieutenant, Colonel Borisov requires your presence. Immediately!”

Across the table from Mouradian, his pilot looked horrified. Sergei Yaroslavsky had warned him again and again that he was too sarcastic, too skeptical, for his own good. Maybe Sergei’d been right all along.

Nothing showed on the Armenian’s swarthy face now. Never let them know you’re worried, Mouradian thought. And a whole fat lot of good that would do him if they’d already built a case with his name on it. If the powers that be wanted to give him a plot of earth two meters long, a meter wide, and two meters deep, they damn well would, and that was all there was to it.

He got to his feet. “I serve the Soviet Union!” he said in his throatily accented Russian, hoping it wasn’t for the last time.

Russians from Siberia talked about the whisper of stars: weather so cold that, when you exhaled, the moisture in your breath audibly froze. They claimed it never got that cold on this side of the Urals. Mouradian couldn’t have said one way or the other. He’d never heard the so-called whisper of stars, but maybe the Siberians were lying about it.

Even without it, the weather seemed plenty cold enough. He was glad for his flying suit of leather and fur, and for the thick felt valenki that kept his feet from freezing. The Russians were good at fighting winter-and they needed to be. He often wondered why so many men from the south, where the weather was mostly decent, came up here to make their careers. When it got this cold, he wondered why he’d ever wanted to leave Armenia himself.

But the answer was simple. Armenia and the rest of the Caucasus were only a little pond. If you wanted to see how good you were in the ocean, you came north and measured yourself against the swarms of Russians. It had worked out pretty well for Georgian-born Joseph Dzugashvili, who commonly went by the Russian handle of Stalin these days.

Of course, things that worked out well for Stalin had a way of working not so well for other people. Mouradian glanced over at the sergeant with the machine pistol. The son of a bitch looked depressingly alert. Were a couple of NKVD men waiting for Mouradian along with Colonel Borisov? Would they ship him off to Kolyma or some other garden spot so he could find out about the whisper of stars for himself?

He’d know soon. Here was the wing commander’s tent. The sergeant gestured with his weapon, telling Mouradian to go in. Sighing out fog but no stars, the copilot and bomb-aimer obeyed.

No NKVD men. Only Colonel Borisov, sitting behind a card table that held some papers and a tumbler full of clear liquid. Despite a brazier next to the table, water would have frozen in a hurry. But, knowing Borisov’s habits, Mouradian would have been astonished had the glass held water.

Saluting, the Armenian said, “Reporting as ordered, Comrade Colonel.”

“Yes.” Borisov looked and sounded bleary. Had he started drinking this early in the morning? Or had he been at it all night, so it wasn’t early for him? He stared at Mouradian out of pale eyes narrowed by a Tatar fold at the inner corners. “Are you capable of piloting an SB-2?”

“ Da, Comrade Colonel,” Mouradian answered. A copilot needed to be able to fly his plane. If anything happened to the pilot-a 20mm cannon shell from a Messerschmitt, say-bringing the bomber home would be up to him. Colonel Borisov should have known that. Chances were he did… when he was sober.

He took a slug from that tumbler and breathed antifreeze fumes into Mouradian’s face. “Good,” he said. “Very good, in fact.” He reached for a pencil-and missed. Not a bit put out, he tried again. This time, he captured it. He made a check mark on one of the papers. “Get your things. We’ll put you in a panje wagon and haul you off to the nearest railhead.”

“I serve the Soviet Union!” Mouradian said, and then, “Comrade Colonel, where am I going? What will I be doing when I get there?” It still might be Kolyma, despite the blather about whether he could fly the plane. Some Russians were sheeplike enough to report to the gulag even without guards to make sure they got there. If Borisov thought Mouradian grew that kind of wool, he would soon discover that men from the Caucasus weren’t so naive.

“You will report to Far Eastern Aviation. They’re screaming for pilots there,” Borisov told him. “I don’t know what you’ll be doing, but fuck your mother if it’s not likely to be dropping rocks on the little yellow monkeys’ heads.”

So it would be Siberia, then. But he’d go there as a free man, a soldier, not as a disgraced prisoner. Mouradian suddenly felt ten degrees warmer, even if Colonel Borisov’s tent remained cold as a hailstone. “I serve the Soviet Union!” he said yet again, this time gladly. “Ah, you have written orders for me?” Without them, he’d never get aboard the local train, let alone the Trans-Siberian Railway.

Borisov blinked owlishly. “Oh, sure. They’re here somewhere.” He fumbled through papers, then thrust one at Mouradian. “Here.”

Mouradian eyed it. “Sir, this is a scheme for winning at dice.”

“What? Give it back to me!” The wing commander snatched it out of his hand. He did some more shuffling. “This is the one you need.”

The other one, no doubt, was the one Borisov needed himself. Mouradian carefully examined the new document. Sure enough, it showed that Borisov was duly providing the pilot he’d been ordered to furnish. However… “Will you please put my name on it?”

“Oh, all right.” By the way Borisov sighed, Anastas was asking for the sun, the moon, and the stars. The colonel scribbled. Mouradian checked again. It would do. Borisov had remembered who he was.

He went out to collect his things. The submachine-gun-toting sergeant still accompanied him. Sergei was in the tent waiting for him. “What are they doing to you?” the pilot asked, alarm in his voice.

“Siberia,” Mouradian answered as he threw this, that, and the other thing into a duffel bag.

“Bozhemoi!” Yaroslavsky said. “I tried to tell you-”

“No, not the camps.” Anastas’ joke had worked almost too well. “Far Eastern Aviation. They’ll make me a pilot so the Japanese can shoot me down.”

“Oh.” Yaroslavsky kissed him on both cheeks and gave him a hug. “Well, stay as safe as you can, you crazy bastard. I hope I see you after the war.”

“That would be good. Or maybe we won’t have to wait so long. Who knows? Who knows anything nowadays?” Mouradian slung the duffel over his shoulder and went out into the cold again.

The stone-faced noncom drove the panje wagon, too. With its boatlike body and big wheels, the wagon could get through winter snow and spring and autumn mud that stymied fancier transport.

For a wonder, the Germans hadn’t hit the railway station. The young lieutenant who’d taken over for the civilian stationmaster gave Mouradian a seat in a second-class compartment. Mouradian shrugged. He could have got a hard bench instead. “You’ll go out at twenty-three minutes past nine,” the lieutenant told him.

He was impressed at the precision. The train actually rattled out of the station a little past noon. That left Mouradian and the other officers in the compartment resigned but hardly surprised. Only a fool or a German would expect a schedule and reality to have much to do with each other.

They shared bread and sausages and cigarettes and vodka. They told dirty jokes. Most of them were going on leave. They sent Mouradian pitying glances when they found out he wasn’t. “Siberia!” one of them said. “That’s a devil of a long way from here. From everywhere, in fact.”

“I serve the Soviet Union,” Mouradian said one more time. Here, the stock phrase meant I’m stuck with it.

“Don’t we all, pal? Don’t we all?” said a Red Army lieutenant who seemed to have more booze than he knew what to do with. So he shared with everyone else in the compartment. It was samogan -moonshine-but it was good samogan, as good as some of the legitimate (which is to say, taxed) firewater Mouradian had drunk. The army man was genially tipsy, too. He kept coming out with one funny, outrageous crack after another.

The rest of the passengers laughed like loons. Pretty soon, they were making their own outrageous cracks… all of them but Stas. Maybe the Red Army man was what he seemed to be: a fellow with plenty of hooch and a quick tongue. Then again, maybe his proper arm-of-service color was NKVD blue. Maybe he was looking to build some cases.

He wouldn’t build one against Anastas Mouradian. Despite what Sergei said, Mouradian didn’t run his mouth all the time, or in the company of people he feared were provocateurs. And vodka didn’t make him lose his caution. Some Soviet citizens ended up in the gulag for talking too much while they were drunk. But the USSR had even more drunks than camp inmates. Plastered or not, most drunks knew how to keep their big mouths shut. And if that wasn’t a judgment on the Soviet system, Mouradian didn’t know what would be.

Back when he was conscripted, Luc Harcourt had never imagined he would be proud of the two brown hash marks on his sleeve that proclaimed him a corporal. All he’d wanted to do was put in his time and get the hell out. He was a normal draftee, in other words.

Things looked different when you got into a war. The nasty boys in field-gray were doing their damnedest to overrun your country-and, not too incidentally, to murder you. What seemed a waste of time when he could have been working and chasing girls in the peacetime civilian world was suddenly a rather more important business.

He was proud of commanding a machine gun, too, and that his subordinates thought he was doing a good job of it. Joinville was a small, swarthy, excitable Gascon. They called Villehardouin Tiny. In fact, he was enormous: big and strong and blond and fair. He hardly said anything, at least in French-he was much more at home in Breton. Joinville had learned some of it, and Luc was starting to pick it up. It made a good language to swear in.

Joinville carried the Hotchkiss machine gun. Tiny Villehardouin toted the tripod, which weighed a couple of kilos more. Other soldiers-just who could vary-lugged crates full of the aluminum strips of bullets that fed the Hotchkiss gun. Luc, as befitted his exalted rank, carried nothing… except when they couldn’t dragoon any privates into hauling whatever needed hauling. Then Luc took care of it. He’d been a private not so long before. He didn’t have much dignity to stand on. That was one of the reasons the other men who served the machine gun thought he made a pretty fair leader.

So did Sergeant Demange, who’d given him the slot after the poor fellow who had it became a casualty. Demange’s approval was worth having, especially if he was set over you. He was a professional noncom. He’d fought in the last war, and been wounded. A Gitane always hung from one corner of his mouth. It didn’t keep him from being fluently profane. The milk of human kindness ran thin and curdled in him; he was the most cynical man Luc had ever met.

“You can really handle that motherfucker,” he told Luc after a skirmish in which the Hotchkiss helped send the Germans off unhappy. “You see? You’re not quite the stupid, gutless asshole you were when you got sucked into the army.”

“Thanks a bunch, Sergeant,” Luc said, in lieu of Why don’t you suck this? He’d come far enough in his military career that he could sass Demange every now and again. He had to pick his spots, though, or he’d end up in the hospital, and not on account of the Boches.

“Any time, kid.” Demange grinned, showing teeth all those smokes had stained a nasty yellow-brown-if they weren’t that shade to begin with. He had to know what Luc was thinking. Mere thinking couldn’t land you in trouble… unless Demange felt like putting you there.

Artillery rumbled, off to the east. Whatever the Nazis were after, it was nothing close by. Nobody Luc knew would get hurt when those shells came down. Sometimes that seemed to be the only thing that mattered. When you were in the middle of it, war could get very tribal.

“We should have pushed them back farther,” Luc said discontentedly.

“No shit!” Demange exclaimed, the cigarette jerking up and down. “We should’ve given ’em the bum’s rush, is what we should’ve done.”

“How come we haven’t?” Luc wondered.

Demange rolled his eyes, which were always tracked with red. It made him look angry, which he was-or, if he wasn’t, he could have taken his act on stage. “How come? I’ll fucking tell you how come. On account of the Germans scare half our generals shitless, and a big chunk of the other half want to hop into bed with ’em so we can all fight the cocksucking Bolsheviks together.”

“That’d screw things up, wouldn’t it?”

“Oh, just a little!” Demange spat out the butt, which was so short the coal almost singed his lips. He immediately took out the pack again. After he got a fresh one going, he grudgingly held out the pack to Luc.

“Thanks.” Luc took a smoke, then bent over and leaned close for a light. He was several centimeters taller than Demange, who intimidated the hell out of him even so. And no doubt the veteran noncom knew what he was talking about here. Every squad in the French army had a Communist or two in it. No matter what the right-wing generals-almost a redundancy-thought, the Reds wouldn’t be thrilled about fighting alongside the Nazis and against the fount of Marxism-Leninism.

Luc was no Communist. He didn’t want to fight alongside the Germans, either. They’d come too close to killing him too many times. They’d killed friends, and wounded others. He respected their skill; he didn’t think you could go up against Germans without quickly coming to respect it. All the same, as far as he was concerned, they made better enemies than allies.

Of course, a devil of a lot of generals felt that way about Russians. Sergeant Demange was right-they’d sooner go after the USSR than Germany. That, to Luc’s mind, was carrying things too far.

The wind wailed down off the North Sea. Snow swirled in it. It had been snowing in a halfhearted way all morning long. Now anything more than a few meters away vanished behind that thick white cloak. Luc shivered in his greatcoat. The wind didn’t seem to know it was there.

“Merde alors!” he shouted over that wailing. “How are we supposed to fight a war in such filthy weather? The Boches could bring up an armored division, but we’d never know it till the tanks started killing us.”

“It’s a cunt of a winter, all right,” Sergeant Demange shouted back. “To hell with me if I remember a worse one, and I go back a fuck of a lot further’n you do. But you know what else?”

“What?” Luc asked.

“Goddamn Nazis’re just as screwed up as we are. Two, three, five kilometers from here, some poor cocksucking Boche is sitting there shivering and scared to death our tanks are right outside his trench, getting ready to squash him into a blancmange. And he hates his generals and his politicians every fucking bit as much as we hate ours.”

“Oh, yeah?” Luc said, deeply skeptical. “Why would he? His generals halfway know what they’re doing. More than you can say about ours.”

“Why? I’ll tell you why.” And Demange proceeded to: “Because his generals tried to get Hitler but screwed it up, that’s why. Now nobody on the other side trusts anybody else. And when Nazis start not trusting each other, people end up dead.” He twisted his skinny, ratlike face into an exaggerated look of regret. “Breaks my heart, y’know?”

“I’ll bet,” Luc answered, which squeezed a wry chuckle out of the sergeant.

Demange lit another Gitane. He could have been in a hurricane, with winds of 250 kilometers an hour and rain coming down like Noah’s flood, and he still would have got his cigarette going. Cigarettes, after all, were important. “I’ve wasted enough time on you,” he said. “Now I’ll go waste it with some other sorry son of a bitch.”

“Love you, too, Sergeant,” Luc said. Laughing-and, of course, smoking-Demange ambled away. If the cold bothered him, he gave no sign.

“What was he going on about?” Joinville asked in his nasal accent after the sergeant was gone. He distrusted sergeants on general principles, as most privates did. Being a Gascon, he perhaps distrusted them more than most. He also hated the weather more than most. Before Luc could answer, the swarthy southerner added, “Whole German army’s liable to be waiting out there.”

Luc repeated what Demange had said about the Boches’ fearing the French army the same way.

“He said that?” Joinville asked. Luc nodded. Joinville grunted. “Well, he’s a prick, but I guess he’s not such a dumb prick.” By the way he eyed Luc, the same applied to him. Joinville might think Luc made a good commander for the machine gun, but he didn’t like authority of any sort. He made funny noises for Tiny, translating the talk into what passed for Breton. Villehardouin nodded to show he got it. They all crouched and waited for whatever happened next. Luc wished to God winter would finally give it up. Neither God nor winter seemed to be listening.

Corporal Arno Baatz had his knickers in a twist. Awful Arno often got his knickers in a twist, but for once he wasn’t pissing and moaning about Willi Dernen. Willi approved of that. He could handle the poilus who were trying to punch his ticket for him. But, as somebody famous must have said at one time or another, God deliver him from his so-called friends.

Awful Arno pointed southwest, toward the closest French foxholes. “For heaven’s sake, men, be careful as long as this damned blizzard lasts,” he said. “The frog-eaters could sneak a whole army corps past our pickets in weather like this.”

He went on like that every time a blizzard tried to bury the German positions in northeastern France under untold meters of snow. In this truly godawful winter, he said it and said it and said it some more. Willi was sick and tired of listening to him. (Of course, Willi had been sick and tired of listening to Awful Arno long before this winter rolled around, but that was another story.)

A soldier named Klaus Metzger said, “Hey, Corporal, don’t you figure the Frenchies are as worried about us as we are about them?” Exactly the same thought had gone through Willi’s mind, but he knew enough to keep his mouth shut. He didn’t feel like drawing Baatz’s fire today-life was too short. Metzger was a new replacement, and still naive about the ways of noncoms. Well, he’d find out.

And he did. Awful Arno swelled up like a puff adder about to strike. Willi didn’t think puff adders turned that unhealthy shade of purplish red, though. “Don’t you tell me what to figure! I tell you what to figure!” Baatz yelled. “Have you got that?”

“Sure, sure,” Metzger said with a placating little wave.

It failed to placate. Awful Arno went plum-colored: not a hue a human being was meant to have. He screamed the question again, right in Metzger’s face: “Have you got that?”

Memories of apoplectic drill sergeants in basic training must have come back to the luckless private. He stiffened to a rigor mortis-like attention. The heels of his boots crashed together. “Jawohl, Herr Unteroffizier!” he said. “Zu befehl, Herr Unteroffizier!”

Baatz went right on screaming at him. Baatz screamed at people for the fun of it. Willi didn’t think screaming at people was much fun, but he’d known plenty of noncoms who did. Awful Arno had the disease worse than most.

And he had the rank that gave him the right to be a pain in the ass. After he finally made Klaus Metzger eat enough crow to keep himself happy, he stomped off to inflict himself on soldiers farther down the trench.

Metzger stared after him. “Wow! That was fun,” the new fish said. “Is he always so bad?”

Willi shook his head. “Nah. Sometimes he’s worse.”

Awful Arno whirled. Willi’d forgotten he had rabbit ears. “What was that, Dernen?” he shouted.

“Nothing, Corporal.” Willi was ready to lie to save his own skin, or just to save himself grief.

“ Ja, ja. Tell me another one.” But Baatz must have picked up tone rather than words, because he left it there. Willi celebrated by lighting a Gitane from a pack he’d taken off a captured Frenchman.

“Can I have one of those?” Metzger asked.

“Sure. Steady your nerves now that he’s done fucking you over.” Willi gave him the smoke, and a light.

Metzger’s cheeks hollowed as he inhaled. Then he coughed. He eyed the Gitane with sudden wary respect. “What the hell do the Frenchies put in there? Tastes like I’m smoking barbed wire.”

“That’s real tobacco, kiddo, is what that is,” Willi answered. “We mix ours with God knows what to stretch it further. You taste the straight goods again, you’re not used to it any more. You forget how strong it can be.”

“Strong? I hope to shit! One of these things could win the Olympic weightlifting medal if they ever hold the Games again,” Metzger said.

“Not this year,” Willi said. “We’re playing a different game now.”

The other Landser nodded. “Isn’t that the sad and sorry truth?”

A mortar round came down a few meters in front of the trench. Willi hated mortars as much as anything in this different game. You could hear ordinary artillery coming, often soon enough to have a good chance to duck. If the shell didn’t land right on top of you, you were probably fine. But only a faint whistle betrayed a mortar bomb before it burst. And ducking after it burst was what the Tommies called tough shit.

Metzger stared when Willi threw himself flat. He didn’t know what to listen for yet. Come to that, Willi wasn’t consciously aware of why he hit the dirt. He only knew he needed to. The bang and the snarl and screech of fragments slicing by overhead filled in the wherefores.

A moment later, Klaus Metzger stretched out beside him. “You all right?” Willi asked. Metzger wasn’t screaming, but wounds didn’t always hurt right away.

“Ja,” the other soldier answered. “Took me by surprise. How’d you know it was coming?”

Willi shrugged horizontally. “There’s a little noise. You’ll get the hang of it pretty quick-especially if they keep this shit up.”

More French mortar bombs were falling on or near the German entrenchments. Down the trench, from the direction in which Corporal Baatz had gone, someone started squalling like a stuck shoat. Was it Awful Arno? Too much to hope for, Willi supposed.

“Be ready when they stop,” he shouted in between explosions. “That’s when the froggies’ll hit us on foot if they’re going to.”

“Right,” Metzger said. “With all this goddamn snow, they’ll be on top of us before we know they’re here.”

“More fun when a girl gets on top of you before you know she’s there,” Willi agreed. Klaus made a face at him. Willi went on, “Why d’you think they’d pick now to try it? I just hope like hell our machine gunners aren’t off playing skat or something.”

“You’re a funny fellow, aren’t you? Funny like the cholera, I mean,” Metzger said.

“That’s me,” Willi said, not without pride.

The mortar bombs quit dropping. Even before officers’ whistles shrilled, urging the men to their posts, Willi was up on a firing step, a round chambered and a fresh clip in his Mauser. Klaus Metzger stood beside him. Both men peered out into the snowstorm.

Was that motion there, or only Willi’s anxious imagination? He didn’t want to wait around and discover he’d made a mistake by getting killed. Nothing up ahead belonged to his own side-he was sure of that. Shoot first and ask questions later, then, just like a Western from America.

Klaus fired a split second after he did. Did the other Landser think he saw something, too. Or was he simply following Willi’s lead? One of their bullets-they never did know which-was rewarded with a scream of anguish. The French soldiers sneaking up under cover of the blizzard opened fire then. Willi shot back, working the Mauser’s bolt as fast as he could.

Other men along the line also banged away. The poilus weren’t close enough to throw grenades into the trenches. Another minute or two of sneaking and they would have been. Willi slapped a new magazine onto his rifle.

Then the Germans’ MG-34s opened up. The froggies cried out in despair. Machine guns put so many rounds in the air, they didn’t have to be either lucky or good to hit you. They just had to keep firing, keep traversing so their bullets didn’t all follow the same path, and sooner or later a man out in the open would stop one. Usually sooner.

The French attack petered out. Willi didn’t know how many casualties the men in the crested helmets and khaki took. The swirling snow kept him from seeing most of them and let the poilus bring them back in their withdrawal. He didn’t think this was a cheap little affair, though.

He turned to Klaus Metzger, who’d stayed steady as a veteran through it all. “You did good,” Willi said, and clapped him on the back. “Here. Take a knock of this.” He offered his canteen, which held some highly unofficial applejack.

“Whew!” Klaus said after drinking. “That’s got teeth, but it sure hits the spot.” They grinned at each other. Willi hoped he’d just made a friend.

Sergei Yaroslavsky wondered what to make of his new copilot and bomb-aimer. Vladimir Federov looked more like a sergeant-or a private first class-than a second lieutenant. He was short and squat and powerful, with a broad face, high cheekbones, and gray-blue eyes that showed nothing. He cropped his sandy hair close to the dome of his skull.

As an infantryman, he obviously would have been first-rate. As a flyer… Sergei wasn’t so sure. Anastas Mouradian talked too damn much. Stas thought too damn much. By all appearances, that wouldn’t be Federov’s problem. But Mouradian was outstanding in the cockpit. Sergei feared that wouldn’t be Federov’s problem, either.

A safe question first: “What’s your father’s name, Comrade Lieutenant?”

“Mikhail, Comrade Pilot.” By his accent, Federov came from somewhere near Moscow. Not from in the city, or Sergei didn’t think so, but also not from somewhere in the backwoods.

“All right, Vladimir Mikhailovich. I’m Sergei Valentinovich.” Maybe Vladimir would turn to Volodya, as Anastas had become Stas. Or maybe not. Yaroslavsky shrugged to himself. Time would tell.

“And our bomb-dropper is…?” Federov asked.

“Ivan Kuchkov. He’s a sergeant, a very strong man, and nothing scares him,” Sergei answered. “Of course, he has his quirks, but who doesn’t?”

“Nobody, I’m sure,” Federov agreed politely. “What are some of his?”

“Why don’t you see for yourself? You’ll meet him soon.” Sergei didn’t want to say that the bomb-aimer made the burly Federov svelte by comparison. He also didn’t want to say Sergeant Kuchkov was one of the hairiest men he’d ever seen, not just on his head but all over his body. People called Kuchkov the Chimp, but not where he could hear them do it: he had a habit of throwing men who used the nickname through windows, doors, walls…

And Sergei didn’t want to say that Ivan conversed almost entirely in mat, the Russian sublanguage of ingenious obscenity. Sergei didn’t even think the bomb-dropper had been a zek before the draft got him. If ever a man was made for mat, Ivan Kuchkov was that man.

Since he didn’t want to say any of those things, he asked, “How did you become a flyer?”

“Oh, the usual way,” Federov replied. “I was in Osoaviakhim when I was a kid, and I did well enough that they kept me at it after I got called up.”

Yaroslavsky nodded. His own story wasn’t much different. Nominally, Osoaviakhim was the national organization that trained civilian pilots. The skills a civilian pilot needed, of course, were the same as the ones flying a fighter or bomber required. No one ever said that out loud, which made it no less true. The Germans had used the same dodge to slide around the Treaty of Versailles’ ban on military aviation.

As Sergei had unpleasant reason to know, Luftwaffe pilots and bombardiers were mostly excellent. As he also had unpleasant reason to know, his own country’s standards were rather lower.

“How’s the plane?” Vladimir Federov asked. “This’ll be the first time I’ve been in an SB-2.”

That news disappointed Sergei without surprising him. Experienced copilots like Mouradian were getting planes of their own. Inexperienced men were getting experience instead. And what do I get? Yaroslavsky wondered. He silently answered his own question: I get to be a nursemaid, that’s what.

Aloud, he said, “When we supported the Spanish Republic, people called the SB-2 the fighting bomber-it was faster in the air than any of the fighters the Fascists were using.”

“Yes, I’ve heard that,” Federov answered.

“Well, forget it,” Sergei said bluntly. “It was true when we were going up against biplanes. It sure as hell isn’t true any more. German Messerschmitts are like sharks against mackerel. Even the Polish PZLs will out-fly us and outshoot us. What we do when fighters are around is, we run. Otherwise, it’s dos vidanya, Rodina. ”

“ ‘So long, Motherland,’ ” Federov echoed. “So when do we get bombers that can hold their own against enemy fighters?”

“Probably never,” Sergei replied, which made his new copilot give him a long, slow blink. He explained: “Bombers bomb. Fighters shoot bombers down. Sounds obvious, doesn’t it? But it’s not just obvious. It’s true. Bombers carry more weight, they’re less maneuverable, and they have fewer guns pointing forward. We do our best to hold off fighters, but we can’t play their game. We play our own game instead.”

Lieutenant Federov blinked again, the same way. It was an odd, stagy expression. Sergei wondered what lay behind it. Was Federov an NKVD man building a case against him because he had the gall to point out a plain truth? Too late to worry about it now.

“Come on,” Sergei said. “You want to see the plane? I’ll show you.”

The SB-2 sat in a revetment. A white sheet hid it from prying eyes-and from Nazi reconnaissance aircraft. In the shadow cast by the sheet, a mechanic worked on the starboard engine. He sketched a salute for Sergei and gave Vladimir Federov a curious look: word that Mouradian had been transferred hadn’t got to everybody.

Ivan Kuchkov was sitting in the pilot’s seat when Sergei led Federov into the cockpit. The two men who didn’t know each other stared. “Who are you?” Federov asked, at the same time as Kuchkov belligerently demanded, “Who the fuck are you?”

“That should be ‘Who the fuck are you, sir?’ ” Sergei said, and made the introductions. The Chimp looked at Federov as if to say Red Air Force standards were lower than he’d thought. The new copilot looked at Kuchkov as if to say he hadn’t expected to see one like this outside of a zoo. As meetings went, it wasn’t a success. Sergei could see that right off the bat.

Federov didn’t say anything much. Kuchkov muttered profanely under his breath, but not far enough under it. Sergei, and no doubt the new officer as well, learned that he thought Federov looked like a jerk and talked like a jerkoff. In point of fact, the Chimp expressed himself more frankly.

He expressed himself so frankly that Sergei leaned close to him. “Come on, Ivan,” he said quietly. “You can’t talk about a new crewmate like that.”

“Why the fuck not?” Ivan returned, still not bothering to hold his voice down. “We’re supposed to fly with that whistleass peckerhead? My dick we are! He’ll screw us over some kind of way-you wait and see.”

“How can you tell?” Sergei asked, clinically curious.

“ Bozhemoi! Just look at the motherfucker. Fuck me in the mouth if he’s not on the lam for something or other.”

Sergei didn’t think Vladimir Federov looked like a robber one jump in front of the law. To him, the new crewman seemed more like a would-be tough guy than the genuine article. Trying to explain that to Ivan would be pointless. It would also be hopeless, because the Chimp was no more inclined to listen than a veritable anthropoid would have been.

Disastrous introduction or not, they flew their first mission together three days later. They-and their squadron of SB-2s-bombed the train station in Bialystok to keep the Fascists from moving men and materiel through it. Federov seemed able to handle the instruments and calculations a bomb-aimer had to use. Sergei wasn’t sure the plane’s bombs hit the station, but they came as close as anyone else’s.

After the SB-2 came back to the airstrip, though, Ivan Kuchkov said, “See? I told you he was a useless cocksucker.” Sergei sighed. Weren’t the Nazis enough trouble? Plainly, Ivan didn’t think so.