The Big Switch

Chapter 8

Sergeant Hideki Fujita had been talking about prisoners of war not long before. Now here they were, thousands of them, maybe tens of thousands, crowded into barbed-wire corrals with Japanese machine-gun positions outside the wire to make sure they didn’t get any bright ideas about breaking out.

The Russians looked… well, they would have had to perk up to look miserable. They’d been disarmed and hastily plundered after they surrendered, but they weren’t plucked clean yet. Who could guess what goodies they hid under their dun-colored greatcoats? Those coats, and the hair-black, brown, yellow, once in a while startling red-sprouting in clumps on their faces, robbed them of their human outlines.

“Monkeys,” Fujita said as he strolled around the camp. “That’s what they look like. A bunch of monkeys.” He mimed scratching himself under the armpits.

Senior Private Hayashi smiled and nodded. If a sergeant made a joke, a senior private thought it was funny. “Have you seen the ones that go in the hot springs in the middle of winter? The Russians are so hairy, that’s just what they remind me of.” He made his own joke: “And they’re in hot water, too.”

“Hai. They sure are,” Fujita said. No matter what had happened during the last war between Russia and Japan, he couldn’t see his own countrymen wasting much food or care on prisoners of war, especially when there were so many of them.

He was soon proved right-even righter than he’d expected. The regimental commander, Colonel Watanabe, gathered his men together so he could harangue them: “Soldiers of Japan, we have got to deal with this Russian pestilence!”

Along with plenty of other men, Fujita nodded. Hearing the colonel like this was safe enough. Usually, if his eye fell on you, it was because you’d screwed up. He’d make you sorry, which was one of the things colonels were for.

“Our regiment has been chosen for a high honor!” Watanabe went on. Fujita had a good idea what that meant. It meant that, whatever came out of the colonel’s mouth next, they were stuck with it. Sure enough, Watanabe went on, “We have the privilege of removing many of the Russians from proximity to Vladivostok. That way, they can no longer endanger the city, which has become an integral part of the Japanese Empire.”

A murmur of “Hai” ran through the men. Again, Sergeant Fujita joined it, though he wasn’t quite sure what Watanabe was talking about. And then, suddenly, he was. They were going to guard the Russians while the prisoners went wherever Japanese officials had decided they should go.

Colonel Watanabe looked out at his men. “You must be severe. These prisoners have no honor left. Since they’ve surrendered, how could they? Some of them will realize this. Others will not care, and will act like the wild beasts they are. If they try to get away, you will dispose of them the way you would get rid of any other vermin. Do you understand me?”

“Hai,” the Japanese soldiers chorused once more. This time, Sergeant Fujita spoke firmly. He heard no hesitation from any of his comrades, either. It wasn’t as if Watanabe had told them anything they didn’t already know.

The colonel nodded to the regiment. “Good,” he said. “I knew you would hear me in the spirit of bushido. Do you have questions?” He pointed to a captain from another company. “Yes?”

“Please excuse me, Colonel- san, but what arrangements will be made for getting the prisoners food and water on the march?”

“They are prisoners,” Watanabe said, as if to an idiot. “They will get what bushido says they deserve. Is that clear enough?”

“Oh, yes, sir,” the captain said quickly. It was clear to Fujita, too. Bushido -the way of the warrior-said letting yourself get captured was the ultimate disgrace. A prisoner deserved nothing. Better he should have died.

As if reading his mind, Colonel Watanabe raised a hand in warning. “I have been told it is important that some of the captives reach the destination to which we are ordered to take them. They must not all fall along the way. So there will be food. There will be water.” He shrugged. “Not what everyone would want, perhaps, but it can’t be helped.”

After the colonel dismissed the regiment, Fujita went to watch the prisoners some more. He nodded to himself. Monkeys. That was just what they looked like, all right.

“I’m sorry, Sergeant- san, but you must not go too close to the wire.” The private who spoke to Fujita sounded nervous, and no wonder. Fujita outranked him. Persuading a superior to do what another superior had told you needed doing was liable to get you in trouble.

Not this time, though. “I’ll be careful,” the sergeant said. “I’ve never seen so many Westerners close up, that’s all.”

“Oh, no! Neither have I!” The private showed his teeth in a broad, relieved grin. “I never knew they were so ugly. Did you?”

“No. They look like they were taken out of the oven too soon. And all that hair! They might as well be Ainu, neh?”

“I don’t know, Sergeant- san. I’ve never seen an Ainu-I’m from Shikoku myself.” The private named the southernmost of the four main islands; the Ainu lived on Hokkaido, the most northerly. “All I know is what people say.”

What people said was also all Fujita knew about the Ainu. He wasn’t about to admit that to a no-account guard. He looked at the Russians. They stared back at him. Just as some of them had yellow or red hair instead of black, some had eyes of blue or green instead of brown. Were they really human?

They were humanly miserable. They stretched out their hands to him, palms up, like begging monkeys. Some of them knew a few Japanese words: “Food, please?” “Rice?” “Meat?” “Bread, sir?” “You have cigarettes?”

“You can ignore them,” the private said. “Just about everybody does.”

“Just about?” Even the qualification surprised Fujita.

“Some people are soft,” the private answered. “You know-the kind who feed stray dogs in the street.”

“Dogs are only animals. They do what they do because that’s what they do,” Fujita said harshly. “These Russians, they’re a different kind of dog. They chose to surrender. They could have done the honorable thing instead.”

“I would have,” the guard said. Fujita believed him. Any Japanese would have. If you killed yourself, everything was over. Your kin would be sad, but they would be proud. The enemy couldn’t humiliate you or torment you, and your spirit would find a refuge at the Yasukuni Shrine along with all the others who’d died well. What more could you want?

They got the prisoners moving three days later. Before they opened the gates to the enormous enclosure, a Japanese officer who spoke Russian talked to the captives with a microphone and PA system.

“I wonder what he’s saying,” Senior Private Hayashi remarked.

“You don’t know Russian?” Fujita asked.

“Sorry, Sergeant- san. Chinese, and I was starting to learn German, but I hadn’t taken much before I went into the Army.”

“Well, you don’t really need to know the language to work out what’s what here,” Fujita said. “It’s got to be something like ‘Behave yourselves and we won’t kill you-yet.’ What else would you say?”

“That should do it, all right,” Hayashi agreed.

After the gates swung wide, the Russians shambled out. They even smelled different from Japanese: harsher, stronger, ranker. Waves of that distinctive stench rose from them as they moved. Their officers and sergeants shouted at them. Obedient as so many cattle, they formed neat ranks.

A Japanese lieutenant at the head of the parade gestured with his sword. Following the wordless order, the Russians trudged off toward the northwest: toward what had been the border between the Soviet Union and Manchukuo. Now all this came under the Emperor’s purview.

Fujita couldn’t have been happier. No matter how much marching this new duty entailed, nobody would be shooting at him. He didn’t think the Red Air Force would try to bomb him, either. They’d blow up more of their own countrymen if they did. Any duty that involved only a small risk of getting killed looked mighty good to him.

Pretty soon, the rasputitsa would be over. Already, Poland wasn’t quite such a muddy place as it had been when things were at their worst. Hans-Ulrich Rudel could see that, before long, the ground would let panzers move and airplanes take off and land. When that happened, the front was liable to shift far and fast.

As long as it headed east-and he confidently expected it would-he approved of that. Why had they ordered him here, if not to push the front? And yet… And yet… He wouldn’t be happy leaving Bialystok behind.

Even Sergeant Dieselhorst teased him about his reasons: “Ha! That’s what you get for falling for a Jewish barmaid.”

“She’s only half Jewish,” Rudel answered with fussy precision.

“ Fuhrer wouldn’t care,” Dieselhorst said, which was as accurate as the Pythagorean Theorem. As a good National Socialist, Hans-Ulrich knew that perfectly well. And Dieselhorst went right on sassing him: “Besides, even if you go mooning after her like a poisoned pup-”

“I do not!” Hans-Ulrich broke in.

“Hell you don’t.” Again, Sergeant Dieselhorst deflated him with the truth. “Like I say, even if you go mooning after her, she hasn’t given you a tumble, has she?”

“I don’t have to put up with this-this Quatsch,” Rudel said with such dignity as he could muster. Dieselhorst’s laughter pursued him like antiaircraft fire.

He did have it bad. When his rear gunner wasn’t teasing him, he knew that for himself. Which didn’t stop him from going into Bialystok to find out if Sofia would give herself to him this time around.

“You again!” she said in mock surprise when he walked into the tavern. A couple of Germans who’d been regulars there longer than he had chuckled. He ignored them; they were foot soldiers, not flyers, so their opinions didn’t matter to him.

Sofia’s did. He sat down at a table, so she’d have to come over. If he’d perched on a stool at the bar, the bored-looking man behind it would have taken care of him. That was the last thing he wanted.

“Two bottles of vodka, right?” she said in Yiddish. She knew-she couldn’t very well not know-he steered clear of booze.

“Tea, please,” Hans-Ulrich said tightly. Ordering milk in a dive like this only made people laugh at you… more than they did anyhow. Besides, he’d found that milk you bought in Poland had at least a fifty-fifty chance of being sour.

“Tea.” Sofia rolled her eyes, but she didn’t laugh, not out loud. She came back a few minutes later with a glass-Poles drank tea Russian-style-and a pot that had probably come to Bialystok from England when Queen Victoria still sat on the throne disapproving of things. Hans-Ulrich, who disapproved of a good many things himself, felt more than a little sympathy for the late Queen.

But he didn’t disapprove of Sofia. On the contrary. As she poured the tea, he slipped an arm around her waist. She made as if to pour some in his lap. He let go, the feel of her still warm on his fingers.

She set the teapot on the table. “What is it with you, anyway?” she demanded.

“What do you think it is? You drive me crazy.”

“You must be crazy.” She followed his German well enough, but the word she used, meshuggeh, was one he’d had to figure out from context. She pointed to the Luftwaffe eagle on his chest-the eagle holding a swastika in its claws. “You’re wearing that, and you think I’d want anything to do with you? Maybe you don’t drink, but I bet you smoke an opium pipe.”

“I’m here-Germans are here-to defend Poland against the Reds,” Rudel said. “Is that so bad? Does it make me so awful?”

“That’s not so bad,” Sofia said. She pointed to the swastika-carrying eagle again. “ That makes you awful.”

“Would you rather see Russian commissars buying drinks here?”

“Or not buying drinks.” This time, she pointed to the teapot. “So you can quit hokking me a chynik about that.” One more Yiddish phrase he’d picked up-literally, banging on a teapot, but stretched to mean making a fuss in general. “The Russians wouldn’t come down on us because we were Jews. They’d just come down on us because we were here.”

“Is that better?” Hans-Ulrich asked. Only afterwards did he think to add, “We aren’t coming down on you. We’re being correct.” That was the best face he could put on it.

“It’s better,” Sofia answered. “In the last war, you people came here, too, and there were Jews in the Kaiser’s army. Where are they now?”

“They… don’t support the Fuhrer. ” Again, that was the best he could do.

“Can you blame them?” Sofia said.

“I don’t care about such things,” he said, which was a good long stretch from the truth. “All I care about is you.” He came closer to veracity there, at least for the moment.

Sofia spelled it out in words of one syllable: “All you want to do is lay me.”

“That’s not all I want to do. I mean-” Hans-Ulrich broke off in confusion.

“What else? Do I want to find out?” she said. Before he could answer-and probably dig himself in deeper-she stalked off to tend to the ground pounders and locals at some of the other tables.

But she came back. She kept coming back. Hans-Ulrich thought she had to have some interest in him. If she didn’t, she’d take his order, take his money, and ignore him the rest of the time. Or she really would pour hot tea on his crotch. He knew he was dense about such things, but that would get the message across.

“More tea?” she asked.

“Sure.”

“All right. If you won’t get in trouble because you had a Mischling bring you your teapot.” She knew the word the Party used to describe half- and quarter-Jews. Away she went.

Hans-Ulrich felt the question as if a round of flak had burst under his Ju-87. Even if Germans couldn’t treat Polish Jews the way they treated Jews back in the Reich, they weren’t supposed to go out of their way to be friendly. He didn’t just want to be friendly, either. He wanted to… But, as he’d told her, that wasn’t the only thing he wanted, which complicated things further.

Before this latest failed coup against the Fuhrer, he wouldn’t have worried about it so much. Everything was tighter now, though. People who’d done fine in the field had disappeared because the security organs didn’t think they were politically reliable. Rudel had always approved of that. Now he discovered the English poet’s bell tolling for him.

“Here you go.” Sofia plunked another teapot, steam rising from the spout, on the table.

“Thanks. You asked if I’d get in trouble for liking you.” That wasn’t exactly what she’d asked, but it was what she’d meant. “As far as I’m concerned, you’re worth taking the chance on.”

“Maybe you’re brave. More likely, you’re just stupid,” Sofia said, which was a shrewd guess on both ends.

“What’s so stupid about liking you?” Hans-Ulrich said plaintively.

That plaintiveness finally reached her. She’d started to turn away, but she swung back with a sharp gesture. “Wait a minute,” she said, suspicious and wary as a cat. “When you say you like me, you don’t just mean you want to go to bed with me. You mean you really like me.” She might have been accusing him of some horrible perversion. For all he knew, she was.

He nodded anyway. His heart hadn’t thumped like this when he was diving on panzers with his experimental guns to win the Ritterkreuz. The French might have killed him, but they wouldn’t have left him alive and embarrassed. “That’s right,” he said.

“You are stupid,” she said. Then she bent down and gave him a kiss that would have melted all the wax in his mustache if only he’d worn one. The German infantrymen whooped. Before he could grab her and pull her down onto his lap, she skipped back with a dancer’s grace. “Be careful what you wish for. You’re liable to get it.”

And wasn’t that the truth? All through the mud time, he’d wanted the chance to hit back at the Russians. Now he’d got it. The front would roll east. And when and how would he get back to Bialystok to see Sofia again?

There was a joke they told even in the God-fighting Soviet Union. It had to do with the atheist’s funeral. There he lay, all dressed up with no place to go. It wasn’t a very good joke, but when did that ever stop people?

Anastas Mouradian felt like that atheist in his coffin. He’d crossed the whole vast breadth of the USSR. He’d flown a couple of missions against the Japanese besieging Vladivostok. And now the city had surrendered. The war against Japan wasn’t over, but the little yellow men had what they wanted. Now it was up to the Red Army and Air Force to take it back… if they could.

If Japan were the Soviet Union’s only enemy, Stalin likely would have massed an army and an air fleet up around Khabarovsk for a drive down the line of the Trans-Siberian Railway toward Vladivostok. How was he supposed to do that, though, when the war with the Hitlerites was about to heat up ten thousand kilometers to the west?

“They’ll send us back when the balloon goes up!” Nikolai Chernenko seemed excited at the prospect.

Whether he was or not, Stas wasn’t. “That’ll be halfway around the world for me, just to get back where I started.”

His copilot didn’t want to listen to him-no surprise, not when Chernenko was as young as he was. “Are the Germans better in the air than the Japs?” the kid asked.

Germans intimidated Russians in a way the Japanese couldn’t come close to matching. Mouradian felt some of that himself. “They’re very good,” he said. “You can’t get foolish or sloppy against them, or you’ll end up dead before you’ve got any notion why.”

“What do you mean?” Chernenko might have flown combat missions, but he was still a virgin in some important ways.

That thought told Mouradian how to go on. “Remember what it was like the first time you kissed a girl?”

“I sure do!” The enthusiasm heating the younger man’s voice said he hadn’t made the discovery very long ago-maybe the night before he left his parents’ apartment or his collective farm to report to the Soviet military.

Was I ever that young? Stas wondered. In some important ways, he doubted it. Southerners took for granted things that shocked most Russians. But that was neither here nor there. Gently, the Armenian said, “Fine. Could anybody have explained what kissing a girl was like before you went and did it?”

Chernenko emphatically shook his head. “I don’t think so!”

“ Khorosho. For what it’s worth to you, I don’t think so, either. Well, fighting the Germans is kind of like that, only you can’t try to take their bra off afterwards. You’ll find out, if that’s what the people with the rank want you to do. Then this will make more sense to you, if you happen to remember it.”

The youngster frowned, with luck in wisdom. His spotty face dead serious, he asked, “Why do German fighter pilots wear brassieres? Does it help them against G forces or something?”

“Oh, Kolya, Kolya, Kolya.” Mouradian gave up. They might both use Russian, but they didn’t speak the same language. One of these days, raw Second Lieutenant Chernenko might turn into First Lieutenant or even Captain Chernenko. He’d grow up. It happened fast when people were shooting at each other. When that day came, he and Mouradian might be able to talk outside the line of duty and make sense to each other. Stranger things had happened. They must have, even if Stas couldn’t think of any right this minute.

Meanwhile, even if Vladivostok had fallen, the war against Japan sputtered on. In Stalin’s place, Mouradian would have patched up a peace with Japan so he could square off against Hitler undistracted. Maybe he was working on that. Maybe Foreign Commissar Litvinov was in Tokyo right now, making a face-saving deal.

But if he was, Radio Moscow wasn’t saying anything about it. Radio Moscow had said as little as it could about losing Vladivostok. All it said was that the garrison commander had yielded the city against orders. If soldiers and civilians were starving, if there was no hope of rescue-and Mouradian knew all too well there wasn’t-what could the general do but give up? That was how it looked to him. Radio Moscow saw things differently. And you didn’t argue with what Radio Moscow said, except perhaps within the privacy of your own mind. Even then, you had to be careful lest your face betray you.

SB-2s flying out of the base near Khabarovsk bombed towns in northern Manchukuo. They flew across the Tartar Strait and bombed Karafuto. That was what the Japanese called the southern half of Sakhalin Island, which they’d taken in the aftermath of the Russo-Japanese War. The bombers also flew patrols over the Tartar Strait and down into the Sea of Japan. Orders on those missions were to attack and sink any warships they spotted.

German Stukas were ugly, ungainly planes. But Mouradian had been on the receiving end of their dives, and knew how accurately they could place their bombs. SB-2s weren’t made for work like that. Stas was willing to try, but a long way from optimistic about the results.

Come to that, he was a long way from optimistic about finding warships, much less hitting them. This was the first time he’d ever seen the ocean, any ocean. It was as illimitably vast as the Russian steppe he’d traveled to get to Siberia. How were you supposed to find anything as small as a ship in all that wave-chopped gray-green sea? Clouds inconsiderately drifting across it didn’t help, either.

Damned if they didn’t, though. Nikolai Chernenko whooped like a savage. “There!” he said, pointing a dramatic forefinger. “A fucking battleship!”

Stas didn’t know if it was a battleship or only a destroyer. He was no connoisseur of warships. But he knew damn well a warship it was. It bristled with guns and turrets, and its hull arrogantly knifed through the water. In these parts, it could only be Japanese.

“We’ll go in low,” he declared. The SB-2 was no Stuka, but maybe it could impersonate one in the cinema.

Chernenko frowned. “We have no orders to do that, Comrade Pilot.”

He was a Russian, all right. And he was a New Soviet Man. Anything without orders was right up there with doubting Marxism-Leninism in the USSR’s catalogue of heresies. But Mouradian answered, “We have no orders not to do it. And it gives us the best chance for a hit.”

He watched his copilot and bomb-aimer chew. If he had to, he vowed to make the attack run himself, his way. But Chernenko’s face cleared. Stas had shown himself to be orthodox, or at least not unorthodox. “I serve the Soviet Union!” Chernenko exclaimed.

Mouradian spoke into the voice tube to the bomb bay so Sergeant Suslov would know what was going on. “Just tell me when,” Suslov said. “I’ll drop ’em right down the whore’s cunt.” He even talked like the Chimp.

Shove the stick forward. Watch the nose drop. Not too steep, or you’d never pull out again. This wasn’t a dive-bomber. When the airframe groaned, you needed to listen to it.

The ship swelled from bathtub toy to full-sized fearsomeness much too fast. Blue-clad Japanese sailors ran every which way like angry ants. Antiaircraft guns started filling the sky around the SB-2 with puffs of black smoke with fire at their heart.

“Five degrees to the left, Comrade Pilot. I say again, five degrees left.” With business to attend to, Chernenko was a competent professional. Mouradian obeyed without question. “Da,” Chernenko said. “That’ll do it.” Stas thought so, too-they’d pass over the ship from bow to stern. A near miss from a shell shook the SB-2. The copilot ignored it, calling through the tube, “Be ready, Innokenty! At my order!”

“Ready, Comrade Bomb-Aimer! Let’s fuck ’em!” Suslov answered.

“Now!” Chernenko shouted.

As soon as the bombs fell free, Mouradian pulled back sharply on the stick, climbing away from the antiaircraft fire. He heard soggy thumps when the bombs went off. When he could see the ship again, smoke rose from the stern. “We did something to it, anyhow,” he said, although it was still steaming.

“We should have done more.” Chernenko sounded absurdly disappointed. “I wanted to sink the son of a bitch.”

“We’ll have more chances.” Mouradian was just glad they’d got away in once piece. He’d never dreamt a ship could throw that many shells. It almost tempted him to go after the next one from several thousand meters up. Almost.

Colonel Otto Griehl looked out at the men of his black-clad regiment. The black-clad panzer crewmen stood waiting. Theo Hossbach absentmindedly scratched an itch. Next to him, Adi Stoss puffed on a cigarette. Nobody seemed very excited. They all-even Theo-had a good idea of what was coming next.

Griehl scratched, too, at a scar on his chin. He was lean, almost hawk-faced, with hollow cheeks and close-cropped gray hair. Like his men, he wore pink-piped black collar patches with a silver Totentkopf in each one. The skull and crossbones had been the panzer emblem for as long as Germany’d had armored fighting vehicles.

“Well, boys, it’s time,” Griehl said. “We came into this fight by dribs and drabs, and then we had to put up with the worst winter even an old man like me can remember.” Theo wasn’t sure the colonel’s face had room for a grin, but it did. It made him look years younger-though still old, of course. It didn’t last long. He sobered as he went on, “But now we’re here in the East in proper force, and now the ground and the weather… aren’t too bad.” That was as much praise as he would dole out to Polish conditions. “And so-it’s time to show the Ivans what we can do.”

A low hum ran through the Panzertruppen. Here and there, men nodded: Adi did, and so did Sergeant Witt. Theo just stood, listening. He was ready, but he wasn’t eager. He knew what could happen when things went wrong. If he was ever tempted to forget, the missing joints on his ring finger reminded him.

“We’re going to drive them out of Poland,” Griehl said matter-of-factly. “Once we take care of that-well, we’ll see. I don’t know what the Fuhrer and the High Command will want us to do then. One thing at a time, though. Let’s talk about our immediate objectives.”

And he did, detailing the routes the regiment would take as it pushed east and north from the vicinity of Bialystok. He talked about artillery and air support, and about the infantry who would move forward with the panzers.

“Most of them are Polish units,” he said. “Remember that, for God’s sake, and don’t shoot them by mistake. They wear a darker, greener khaki than the Russians, and their helmet is almost like the Czech pot-it doesn’t have a brim like the Russian model.”

“Tell us something we didn’t know,” Adi muttered. Theo heard him, and maybe Witt did, too, but nobody else. Theo was patient with these lectures. One reason you walked barefoot through the obvious was that people did forget, especially when other people were trying to kill them.

“Give the Poles a hand where you can,” Griehl said. “They’re good troops. They’re brave troops. The only thing that’s really wrong with them is, they don’t have as many toys as we do. Infantry, machine guns-they’ve got those. But they’re light on artillery and panzers and planes. That’s why they called us in to help against the Reds. So we’ll do it.” He grinned again. “It’s not like the Fuhrer hasn’t got his own reasons for going after Russia. If you’ve read Mein Kampf, you’ll know that.”

He got more nods. Hitler’s book was Holy Writ to the Party. Theo had looked at it, found it bombastic and badly written, and put it aside. But you didn’t have to have gone through page by page to know he talked about Russia as Germany’s Lebensraum. Stalin doubtless had a different view of that, which didn’t bother the Fuhrer.

“We go at 0430 tomorrow,” the colonel finished. “Good luck to every one of you. Believe you me, Ivan will never know what hit him.”

When the big push in the West started a little before Christmas 1938, officers promised men the showgirls and bars of Paris. They didn’t quite deliver; Theo lost the end of that finger in the last failed effort at a breakthrough. Maybe this time everything would work out the way Colonel Griehl said. Theo had his doubts. He didn’t voice them. For one thing, what was the point? For another, he hardly ever voiced anything.

He was in the panzer before the appointed hour. He squeezed meat paste from a tinfoil tube onto a chunk of black bread. Not the kind of breakfast he’d eaten before conscription called, but he didn’t raise his voice to complain, either. And that meat paste was one of the best rations the Germans had. Tommies on patrol stole tubes of it from dead Landsers.

Where he sat, he couldn’t see what was going on. All he could see were his radio set, the machine pistol next to it, and the panzer commander’s behind and legs. He didn’t care. He had his own little world. He heard the order to go forward, and relayed it to Hermann Witt. And, through the Panzer II’s armor and through his earphones, he heard the thunder of the German artillery as it pounded Soviet positions to the east. Stukas would be screaming out of the sky to take out strongpoints too tough for artillery. Theo couldn’t hear them, but he knew how an attack worked.

No. He knew how an attack should work. Things always went wrong. Neither side had really known what it was doing when the Wehrmacht drove into Czechoslovakia. A good thing the Czechs were as thumb-fingered as the Germans, or that one might have failed. On the Western front, they’d tried to go too far too fast. Looking back, he could see that. At the time, it seemed easy-until, all of a sudden, it didn’t any more.

Now… The Panzer II squashed barbed wire under its tracks. Foot soldiers, whether in Feldgrau or dark Polish khaki, would be able to follow. Sergeant Witt sprayed short bursts of machine-gun fire ahead of the panzer. If the Russians had to keep their heads down, the infantrymen with the German armor would have an easier time disposing of them.

Rat-a-tat-tat! Except is wasn’t rat-a-tat-tat!, or not exactly. It was clangety-clangety-clang!, as if somebody were attacking the panzer with a rivet gun. Machine gunners couldn’t resist panzers. They also couldn’t hurt them, if you didn’t count scaring the crew half to death.

“Panzer halt!” Witt shouted. Adalbert Stoss obediently hit the brakes. The panzer commander fired a three-round burst from the 20mm main armament. “All right,” he said. “Drive on!”

Forward they went, with a whine of protest from the overstrained engine. A moving target was harder to hit, and the Panzer II’s armor, especially on the sides, wouldn’t keep out anything more than small-arms fire. Theo knew from experience what happened when something got through. His crewmates didn’t, and he hoped like hell they didn’t find out. He’d got away from his murdered first panzer in one piece. Too many guys weren’t so lucky. If he never smelled that thick reek of burnt pork…

“Enemy panzers ahead-two o’clock!” Witt shouted. Theo’s balls crawled up into his belly, not that that would save them. From what he’d seen, Russian panzer gunners weren’t very good, but they only had to be competent, or even lucky, once to slaughter a crew. But then Witt shouted again, in glad surprise: “Cancel that! They’re ours-Czech machines!”

No one but Theo heard his own sigh of relief. Of course the Wehrmacht had commandeered all the surviving Czech panzers it could. They were better than German Panzer Is and IIs, if not up to the standards of the new IIIs and IVs. But the new German panzers were still in short supply. Military administrators had got the Skoda works up and running again, turning out more of the Czech models for the Reich.

And if you were looking for the enemy, you’d see him whether he was there or not. Theo was happy Witt hadn’t opened up. One of war’s dirty little secrets that nobody liked to talk about was that you could kill friends as easily as foes. Friends could kill you, too. They’d be sorry afterwards, not that that did you a hell of a lot of good.

There were Russian panzers up ahead. Theo got the word on the radio, and relayed it to Witt. Then he heard the fearsome clang! of a round from a cannon smashing through hardened steel. It wasn’t his panzer, which was the only good thing he could say about it. That crew would never be the same.

“Panzer halt!” the commander ordered. Halt it did. He fired another three-round burst from the 20mm gun. “Got the fucker!” he yelled. “Drive on!”

On they went. Theo tried to figure out what was happening from the endless stream of radio reports he heard. They made up for not being able to see out. Everything seemed to be moving according to plan. Germans and Poles stormed forward. Russians fell back or died. Germans and Poles were dying, too. Theo knew that, but the radio didn’t talk about it.