Two Fronts

Chapter 15

Across the border lay Belgium. Aristide Demange had only contempt for the Belgians. Demange had plenty of that for the whole human race, but his reasons for scorning the Belgians were different. Like some Swiss and Canadians, they had the gall to speak French without being part of France.

And they were weak sisters. The Germans had overrun them in short order twice now in this century. They’d overrun them, and then they’d occupied them, and the Belgians had rolled over with their bellies in the air and accepted occupation. So it seemed to him, anyhow. And, this time around, the Belgian Fascists helped the Nazis every way they could.

Walloons-the Belgians who spoke French-blamed the collaboration on the Flemings, the ones who spoke Dutch and could play as if they were Aryans. But there were Walloon would-be Nazis, too. A character named Leon Degrelle had formed a Walloon Legion that fought for Hitler in Russia. Degrelle had got wounded and won himself a Knight’s Cross. These days, the Walloon Legion was back here in the West, ready to fight against “the forces of Jewish plutocrat capitalism”-France and England, in other words.

That really disgusted Demange. If the Belgians didn’t want to be liberated, why spend money and men on the job? Because orders were orders, that was why. But he’d heard somewhere that Hitler had said that, if he’d had a son, he would have wanted him to be like Leon goddamn Degrelle. If that wouldn’t gag a maggot …

As far as Demange knew, only authentic Boches, not homemade copies, crouched in the muddy trenches on the far side of the mined and wired border. For the Germans he had solid professional respect. For their Belgian imitators? If you came up against those cons, how many prisoners would you bother to take?

More and more planes-English with their red-white-and-blue roundels red at the center and blue on the outside, French with the same colors reversed-flew from west to east night after night to drop their loads of hate on Belgium, Holland, and Germany. The Luftwaffe returned the compliment, though not so often.

French guns started shelling German positions inside Belgium. Young Francois got all hot and bothered-it looked as if the big attack was on at last. Then the Boches fired back. He didn’t like that so much. Who would have?

France had started the war with great swarms of quick-firing 75s left over from the go a generation earlier. Thanks to Versailles, the Germans had had to rebuild their artillery from scratch. Their 105s had outclassed the older French guns: bigger shells, longer range. Now France had enough 105s of her own to compete on even terms. And it only took us four years. Isn’t that grand? Demange thought cheerfully.

Orders came for a probe into Belgium. The Germans had attacked with everything they had in the winter of 1938. Attacking with everything you had didn’t seem to belong in the French vocabulary.

At the officers’ assemblage where the orders were announced, Demange asked, “A probe? Isn’t that what the doctors shove up your ass when your piles get impacted or whatever the hell piles do?” He didn’t care what he said. What was the worst thing they could do to him? Bust him down to sergeant again? He’d kiss them on both cheeks. Bust him down to private? He wouldn’t mind too much, unless he had some real salaud of a sergeant (one, say, like him) telling him what to do. Ship him to the front? He was already here.

His frankness made majors and lieutenant colonels and other such Important Personages wince. His own superior, a young captain named Marcel Gagne, was used to him by now-and stuck with him, too. “We’re trying to shove it up the Boches’ ass,” he said mildly.

“If we’re gonna shove, we oughta shove,” Demange insisted. “You don’t give it to your girlfriend halfway, do you?”

Eyeing the officers, he figured some of them gave it to their boyfriends instead. If he came out with that, though, they would find something worse than demotion to do to him. All too often, the exact truth was the worst thing you could use.

Instead, he found a different question to ask: “Will we have any armor support?” If the answer turned out to be no, he hoped he wouldn’t get too badly damaged before the stretcher-bearers carried him to an aid station.

But the Most Important Personage-a brigadier general, no less-nodded. “We will,” he said, beaming as much as a big shot was ever likely to. “Some American chars we have purchased, and some of our own as well.”

“How about that?” Demange said in glad surprise. New French tanks had a gunner instead of making the commander fire the main armament. They all carried radios, too. The designers had swiped both notions from the Germans, but so what? They were good ones. The American tanks, though they carried radios, too, were like some of the older French models. They mounted a small gun in the turret and a bigger one in a hull sponson. But they were faster than the old French machines, and the Americans manufactured stuff in quantities other countries could only dream about.

Demange was actually optimistic when French guns hammered the Nazis’ front lines. The sensation felt so strange, he had trouble recognizing it. Even the gloomy, drizzly weather didn’t dampen his spirits. The last time he’d felt this way was in the autumn of 1918, when the Kaiser’s boys realized they couldn’t hold out any more. And they couldn’t-but they’d gone and shot him before they folded up for good.

Whistles shrilled, up and down the French trenches. “Come on, you bastards!” Demange yelled to the men he led. “We’ll get ’em!” For a few minutes, he even believed what he told them.

Then the German guns came back to life. No, the French barrage hadn’t silenced them-that would have been too much to hope for. Shells started falling amidst the advancing men in khaki. One came down right on some poor cochon. When the smoke and flame cleared, nothing was left of him but one boot. Machine guns spat death and mutilation. Concrete firing positions weren’t easy for artillery to take out. Tanks could do it, though.

The tanks did take out some of the machine-gun nests. And German 88s posted a bit farther back took out some of the tanks. Neither the American chars nor the French ones could stand up against those massive AP rounds. As far as Demange knew, no tanks could, not even the monsters the Russians built.

Here and there, Germans surrendered when French troops overran their positions. “Kamerad!” they would shout, or, if they spoke some French, “Ami!” And sometimes they got the chance to go back into a POW camp, and sometimes they didn’t: Monte Carlo, only played with human lives.

Those tanks that survived smashed lanes through the iron bramble fields of wire. French soldiers who had to dive when gunfire opened up nearby often clambered to their feet swearing and bleeding. Demange did himself. Much of the wire was old and rusty. He tried to remember the last time he’d got tetanus antitoxin.

He couldn’t. He didn’t waste time worrying about it. Of all the things he expected to die from, lockjaw came low on the list.

One of the American-built tanks hit a mine not far in front of him. The beast stopped short with a thrown track. The tank crew bailed out and hotfooted it to the rear, using their machine’s carcass to help cover them from enemy fire. No more than half a minute after they escaped, an 88 hit the char and set it ablaze. A tank that wouldn’t go was a tank waiting to die. Most of the time, it didn’t have long to wait, either.

Here came Marcel and Jean. The tall Red and the short one looked as filthy and as scared as any other soldiers where things got hot. “Here’s your Riviera, dearies!” Demange called to them. “See, there’s Stalin over on the next beach towel. Why don’t you wave?”

They gave him identical horrible looks. Sometimes what you’d asked for was the worst thing you could get.

Little by little, the French attack bogged down. Demange hadn’t looked for anything else, not after those rose-colored first few minutes. In fact, they’d pushed farther than he’d thought they could. Some of them settled down in German trenches. The Boches built finer field fortifications than anybody. He’d seen that in the last war. It remained true this time. The Russians used better camouflage, but they cared nothing for their soldiers’ comfort. The Germans did.

They also cared about pushing the French back to the border. Their artillery banged away all through the long night. Of course they had the range to their own former front line. A burst not far from Demange killed two of his men and sent three more off to the butchers in masks. One of the poilus was in bad shape. If they slapped an ether cone over his face and let him die, they might be doing him a favor.

But the advance went on the next morning. That surprised Demange-astonished him, in fact. Maybe the fat old fools in Paris meant it after all. Who would have thought so? Demange still wasn’t sure he did.

This wasn’t the first time Alistair Walsh had found himself in Calais. It wasn’t the second time, either. That had been back in late 1938, when the British Expeditionary Force crossed to the Continent in alleged support of Czechoslovakia. Czechoslovakia went down the drain several hundred miles away. The BEF fired not a shot till long after Prague was occupied and Slovakia had detached itself from the Czecho part and declared its Nazi-sponsored independence.

If you had to be somewhere not fighting, there were worse places than Calais. It wasn’t England, but you could-literally-see Blighty from there. Most of the shopkeepers and waiters and barmaids spoke English. The bars weren’t pubs, but they came close. The beer and cider were both good, and Calvados … There was a hell of a lot to be said for Calvados.

To his regret, Walsh didn’t get to linger in Calais this time, not the way he had four years earlier. He got off the ferry that hauled him across the Channel, walked down the dock, and climbed into the back of an enormous lorry from out of Detroit. Almost before he knew it, he was bouncing down a narrow, badly paved road heading east.

The lorry-truck was the Yankee word, but he had no truck with it-had a canvas canopy of brownish green. That kept him from peering anxiously up at the sky. If Stukas screamed down on this column of lorries … He’d been through that when the Fritzes made their big push into France. He didn’t care to repeat the experience.

He knew too well the Germans didn’t care about what he cared to do. He couldn’t hear much over the bang and rattle of tires on potholed asphalt, the engine’s steady grunting, and the chatter of the other soldiers who filled the big passenger compartment.

Most of them were young enough to be his children. They shared fags and pipe tobacco. A couple had flasks full of one kind of distilled lightning or another. None of it was as good as Calvados, but Walsh didn’t fuss. A knock of anything strong made him worry a bit less about whatever might be flying overhead.

“If they’re Stukas, you’ll hear the Jericho Trumpets-the sirens they’ve got fixed to their landing gear,” he said. “Whoever thought those up, I’d like to wring his neck like a pullet, bugger me blind if I wouldn’t. The Fritzes want to scare you so much that you piss yourself, and the bastards know how to get what they want, too.”

“Blimey, don’t they ’arf!” said a younger man, a lance-corporal. “I went and did it first time they screamed down and bombed me, and I’m not ashamed to say so.” He wore the ribbon for the Military Medal; no one was likely to call him yellow.

“Anybody who’s seen combat and says he hasn’t had to change his drawers once or twice-well, maybe he’s telling the truth, but he’s got himself one tight arsehole if he is,” Walsh said.

None of the others commented on that. More than one, though, looked up at the canvas stretched over steel hoops as if thinking rather loudly. Walsh had been through enough to let him come out with things others knew but would sooner not have said.

In due course, the unstrafed string of lorries stopped. The soldiers piled out. Walsh already had a round chambered in his Sten gun. That involved a certain amount of risk: the safety on the nasty little submachine gun was no more reliable than any other piece of the botched-together weapon. If the Sten wasn’t the ugliest piece of armament in the world, Walsh had no idea what would be. But it did the job-if the job was something like house-to-house fighting. For longer ranges, a rifle beat it all hollow. But it fired much faster than a rifle could.

They were closer to the sea than Walsh had been in 1938. Gulls wheeled and screeched overhead. They were worse scroungers than soldiers, if such a thing was possible. The breeze came off the water, and smelled of salt and sand. Pretty soon, if the guns pounding up ahead were any indication, the breeze would start stinking of blood and shit and death. Walsh savored the clean smell while he could.

Before he went forward and won the chance to pick up one more wound (or worse, but no one ever wanted to think about worse) for King and country, regimental HQ had to find a slot for him. A bespectacled subaltern in a tent diplomatically distant from the gun pits-as safe a slot as a man in a front-line regiment could find-clicked his tongue between his teeth.

The fellow was about to post him somewhere when a runner came in and set a scrap of paper on the folding table he was using for a desk. The young second lieutenant glanced at the paper and said, “Bloody hell!” He looked up to Walsh. “Can you handle a company for a few days, Staff Sergeant? I realize it’s a deal to ask, but Lieutenant Ormesby just copped one. He was a friend of mine: a year ahead of me at Sandhurst.” He touched the bit of paper. “Doesn’t sound good.”

“Sorry to hear it, sir,” Walsh said. “Always hard when a mate gets hurt.” He knew that too well himself. “I’ll have a go at the company if you want me to, but aren’t there any other officers besides Lieutenant, uh, Ormesby?”

“Not in that company,” the subaltern said. “If you can handle personnel matters, I’ll take that Sten off your hands and go forward myself.”

Walsh liked him better after that. He wasn’t back here only because he didn’t want to get any closer to the action, then. Truthfully, the sergeant answered, “I’d do more good up there. You wouldn’t care to see the balls-up I’d make of your work.”

“Right. Well, off you go, then.” The junior officer explained to Walsh how to find his new post, adding, “Mind how you move up from the apple orchard. The Fritzes throw mortar bombs at you if they see you.”

“Thanks for the heads-up.” Walsh ducked out of the tent and waved to the men serving the 105s. Even in this chilly weather, they worked stripped to the waist. Up he went. Teams of aid men with Red Cross armbands brought back a steady stream of wounded. One of them might have been the unfortunate Lieutenant Ormesby, but Walsh didn’t pause to inquire.

The subaltern’s apple orchard had been pretty well torn up. Walsh might not have recognized it if he hadn’t been looking for it. He stuck some twigs into the strip of inner tube he’d put on his tin hat just above the brim. That might help break up his outline. Or nothing might help. The craters in the field ahead argued that the Germans were much too alert.

Well, all he could do was his best. He dashed forward, dodging like a rugby half who smelled a try. He’d got almost all the way to the battered village past the field before the boys in Feldgrau lobbed a couple of mortar rounds his way. Both fell a good hundred yards behind him.

“ ’Oo the ’ell are you?” asked a grimy, unshaven Tommy in a uniform he hadn’t changed for a long time. The way he curled his lip made Walsh ashamed of his smooth chin and clean clothes.

He gave his name and rank regardless, finishing, “They sent me up to take charge of things till they can find an officer for the company.”

“ ‘Appy bleedin’ dye.” The Tommy curbed his enthusiasm very well. Suspiciously, he asked, “You ever smell smokeless powder before?”

“You weren’t even a gleam in your pa’s eye the first time I got shot,” Walsh answered. “The last time was this past summer. I’m just back to duty after the wound healed.”

“Hrm.” A grunt. The soldier rubbed his bristly chin. “Well, you may do, then.” He still sounded anything but sure.

“You can tell me where to head in later, if you still want to,” Walsh said. “In the meanwhile, don’t you think we’d better dig these holes deeper?” He grabbed his own entrenching tool so the other man could see that we was no figure of speech.

“Bugger me blind! You do know what you’re about.” Now the Tommy spoke in tones of deep and genuine astonishment. In minutes, dirt was flying from shovels all over what was left of the village.

As Hans-Ulrich Rudel scrambled out of his Stuka and the groundcrew men covered the revetment with camouflage netting, he breathed out a long, weary sigh. His breath smoked. Sergeant Dieselhorst lit a cigarette. “Another one down,” Dieselhorst said, his cheeks hollowing.

“That’s about the size of it,” Hans-Ulrich agreed. He hurried out of the revetment. He usually relished the smells of gasoline and motor oil and hot metal that clung to his Ju-87. Not today, for some reason. He needed fresh air-and Dieselhorst’s nasty cigarette sure didn’t help.

It was cool and cloudy, but it wasn’t raining and it wasn’t freezing. Not all the fields around the airstrip had gone yellow and lifeless, the way they would have in Russia with winter nearly here. Some still showed green. Half a kilometer away, past the barbed wire, a Belgian farmer in overalls puttered around in one of them.

Sergeant Dieselhorst came up beside Rudel. The pilot smelled the cigarette smoke even before he noticed the other man’s footfalls. Nodding out toward the Belgian, Hans-Ulrich remarked, “I wonder what that clown’s doing-know what I mean?”

“You mean you wonder if he’s keeping an eye on us,” Dieselhorst said.

Hans-Ulrich nodded. “Right the first time.”

The sergeant chuckled harshly. “Well, in Russia you wouldn’t’ve needed to wonder. He damn well would have been.” Another chuckle, even dryer than the first. “Of course, in Russia we would’ve shot any Ivan who got that close to one of our bases.”

“Belgium’s a more crowded place,” Hans-Ulrich said, which was putting it mildly. After a moment, he added a wistful coda: “And some of the Belgians like us, too.”

“There is that.” Sergeant Dieselhorst softened the concurrence with a coda of his own: “Some of the Russians liked us, too. Of course, their other choice was Stalin. He could make damn near anybody look good by comparison.”

“Naughty.” Hans-Ulrich wagged a finger at him. “Are you trying to get me to report you to the Sicherheitsdienst?”

“Nah.” Dieselhorst shook his head as he ground out the cigarette under his boot. “If you were gonna do it, you would’ve done it by now.”

One more thing the veteran was right about. Some of what Dieselhorst said about National Socialism and about what it did to the Reich’s foreign policy went far beyond what was safe. But how many times had the rear gunner and radioman saved Hans-Ulrich’s one and only neck? More than he cared to remember. He hoped he understood what gratitude was. The sergeant might not care for the people who ran Germany. He’d served the country well for a long time, though. Didn’t that matter more?

The SD and the Gestapo would have said no. Sometimes, you needed not to listen to what certain other people were saying, no matter how loudly they happened to be saying it.

Instead, Hans-Ulrich listened to the distant rumble of artillery. It was so easy to listen to, he wished it were more distant still. Recognizing the German guns was easy. The others … He’d been away from this front too long. “Are those French cannon or English?” he asked.

Albert Dieselhorst cocked his head to one side, considering. “French, sir, I think,” he said at last. “The 75s are, for sure. I don’t know about the 105s. They sound like a new mark to me, so I can’t tell who made them. Any which way, 105s are bad news.”

In the last war, foot soldiers had hung all kinds of nicknames on the shells their guns fired and on the ones the enemy aimed at them. Boys playing at war after the shooting ended naturally used the names they got from their fathers and uncles and older brothers. Hans-Ulrich knew them as well as any Frontschwein in the Kaiser’s army. The kids shooting at one another with toy guns in 1950 would probably need some new names for their imaginary shellbursts.

When Rudel spoke that conceit aloud, he startled a laugh out of Dieselhorst. “I never would have wondered about that in a million years, sir,” the older man said. “Must be a reason you’re an Oberleutnant and I’m just a dumb Feldwebel.”

“I’ll tell you what you are,” Hans-Ulrich said. Sergeant Dieselhorst gave forth with a questioning grunt. Rudel told him: “You’re a sand-bagger, that’s what.”

The sergeant laughed some more. He wagged a still-gloved finger in Hans-Ulrich’s face. “And where did the likes of you learn about card players’ wicked habits … sir?”

Rudel’s ears heated. If there was one thing he hated, it was getting ragged for being a minister’s son. He hated it all the more because he was one. “Playing cards isn’t against my religion,” he said stiffly.

“Then how come you don’t do it more?” Dieselhorst probed.

“Because I’m lousy, and losing money’s against my religion.” Hans-Ulrich jabbed at himself before his crewmate could do it: “And hey, I’m not even a Jew.”

“I bet that’s not what you told your girl in Bialystok.” Sergeant Dieselhorst did his own revising this time: “No, it wouldn’t’ve mattered, would it? Unless you got yourself a clip job I don’t know about, she’d have worked that out-or worked it in-for herself.”

“Give it a rest, why don’t you?” Hans-Ulrich answered, not rising to the lewd suggestion. He missed Sofia more than he’d thought he would when the squadron came back to the West. She wasn’t just an amusement for when he got some leave. She’d lodged in the crevices of his mind the way a piece of gristle could lodge between the teeth. His thoughts worried at her as his tongue would have worried at the gristle. He needed some mental floss to get her out of there, but didn’t know where to find it.

“That’s what she said, right?” Sergeant Dieselhorst’s grin was perfectly filthy. It was also perfectly friendly. If it hadn’t been, Hans-Ulrich might have tried to deck him. He also might have got a rude surprise for his trouble-a thought that had crossed his mind before. He had size and youth and speed on his radioman/rear gunner. When it came to experience …

So it didn’t turn into a fight or anything close to a fight, especially when Dieselhorst’s smile was friendly. Instead, Hans-Ulrich said, as much to himself as to his crewmate, “Maybe I’ll write her a letter. Find out how she’s doing, y’know? Find out if she misses me even a little bit.” If she didn’t, maybe he could stop missing her.

But the sergeant’s grin disappeared. “You sure that’s a good idea, sir?” he asked, in tones that couldn’t mean anything but You out of your expurgated mind, sir?

You could screw a woman who was a Mischling first class. You could have a fine old time doing it, too, as Hans-Ulrich had reason to know. If she was a Polish national, and so not subject to the laws against German Jews and half-breeds, so much the better. But if you showed signs that you’d been rash enough to fall in love with her, well, that would give the SD something to think about, sure as the devil it would. Not even the most loyal, most naive fighting man (and Rudel won top marks on both counts) looked forward to that.

“Mm, well, maybe not,” Hans-Ulrich allowed.

“There you go.” Now Dieselhorst’s features showed nothing but relief. “When you find yourself a Belgian honey, you can forget all about the other one.”

“Sure.” Hans-Ulrich didn’t want to make the older man worry about him. He didn’t argue or quarrel or make a fuss. He just said, “Let’s go get debriefed, ja? We’ve wasted enough time gabbing.”

Off they went, to report on what they’d seen and done over the border in northeastern France. And if Hans-Ulrich wrote a letter in his tent that night, Sergeant Dieselhorst didn’t need to know about it. Chances were Sofia wouldn’t answer anyhow. She hadn’t answered any of the letters he’d sent her from Russia. She knew it wasn’t a good idea. Hans-Ulrich, on the other hand …

Ivan Kuchkov sprawled in the mud, eyeing the woods ahead. “Is that a motherfucking white flag?” he called to Sasha Davidov. “Or do my cocksucking eyes need rifling so they’ll carry farther?”

“It’s a white flag, Comrade Sergeant,” the point man answered.

“Da. It fucking is. Now-next question. Can we trust the khokhol cunts showing it?” Kuchkov generally trusted Ukrainians as far as he could throw them. He trusted Ukrainian nationalist fighters even less. Some of them were out-and-out Nazis. Some of them hated the Red Army a lot worse than the Nazis did. (That they might have good reason to hate it bothered him not a bit. Nobody had good reason to want to kill him, not as far as he was concerned.)

“I can’t answer that one, Comrade Sergeant,” Davidov said. “You’ve got to make up your own mind.”

“Fuck,” Kuchkov muttered. He knew he wasn’t the brightest candle on the altar (not a good Soviet comparison, but a good Russian one).

But his choices here seemed stark. He could get into a bigger fight than he really wanted or he could treat with the guys who used a stupid-looking blue-and-yellow flag and an even dumber-looking trident to show they weren’t Soviets or even Russians. Swearing some more under his breath, he got to his feet and waved a dirty snotrag: the biggest piece of white cloth he had.

“Don’t shoot, you whores!” he yelled toward the woods. “We’ll parley!”

If they had a machine gun in there, they could cut him in half. A drunken rifleman could have blown out his kidneys. Standing here waving that stupid hanky, he knew it much too well. He felt naked, with a bull’s-eye painted on his chest.

“Well, come on,” someone in amongst the trees shouted back. The bastard’s Russian had a Ukrainian accent thick enough to slice, but it was Russian of a sort. Sensibly, the nationalist didn’t show himself. He went on, “We won’t shoot you till after we talk.”

“Hot shit,” Ivan muttered, but not loud enough to let the Ukrainians hear him. As he started for the woods, he told Davidov, “Give me a fucking hour. If those bitches haven’t turned me loose, yell once. After that, get your cocks in gear and clean ’em out. You hear?”

“Da, Comrade Sergeant,” the Jew answered. He had to understand as well as Kuchkov did that that would be unfortunate for the sergeant.

“Put down your piece,” a Ukrainian with a PPD of his own said when Ivan got to the edge of the wood. Kuchkov set the submachine gun on the ground. He still had a pistol in an inside pocket of his padded jacket. He said nothing about it, or about the knife sheathed at the small of his back. He didn’t plan on using either one, but he had them.

The nationalists wore a motley mix of peasant clothes and bits of uniform pilfered from Red Army men and Nazis who didn’t need them any more. One fellow had a tobacco-brown tunic he must have got off a Romanian. A khaki patch kept a bullet hole from letting in cold air.

Kuchkov was going to ask who the Ukrainians’ boss was, but realized he didn’t have to. A guy with a cloth cap, a gingery beard, and wire-framed glasses-damned if he didn’t look like Trotsky’s kid brother-ran their show. “Say your say,” he told Ivan. “If we don’t like it, we’ll make you sorry.”

“I’m already fucking sorry,” Kuchkov said. Baby Trotsky’s smile didn’t get to his eyes. A good thing, too, because the Red Army sergeant went on, “But you pricks’ll be a lot sorrier if you don’t listen up.”

They growled. Some of them hefted their weapons: like their clothes, a crazy mix of Soviet and Fascist designs. They didn’t have the mindless discipline both Germany and the USSR thumped into their troops. If one of them felt like killing Ivan, he was liable to go ahead and do it.

Their leader gestured. That calmed them-a little. He nodded to Kuchkov: not a friendly nod, but one that did allow the Russian to exist a while longer, anyhow. “Go on. We’re listening.”

“I’m here to tell you you should all get lost,” Ivan said. “The Nazi cunts, they’re falling back in the Ukraine. You fuckers aren’t too dumb to see that for yourselves. And fuck all your mothers if you can’t work out what it means. Pretty soon, the Red Army won’t have to worry about those Fascist turds any more. Oh, no-they’ll worry about you shits instead. And they’ll land on you with both feet if you’re still around to be landed on.”

“We aren’t afraid of the Red Army,” Baby Trotsky said. His followers’ heads bobbed up and down.

“You scared of the NKVD pricks? You scared of the fucking camps?” Ivan demanded. “You assholes’re out here playing soldier in the woods. You scared of your wives and your sisters getting gangbanged back in the villages?”

“Fuck you in the mouth, Russian pig,” one of the nationalists said. That was a woman’s voice. Her German tunic was enough too big to mask her boobs. And she was as rough-skinned and dirty as any of her comrades, if less hairy. She was also as ugly as any of them.

Even Kuchkov could tell saying that wasn’t smart. “Get lost,” he repeated. “We need these fucking woods. The whole corps is moving up. We’re damn well gonna give it to the Hitlerites, and we’ll give it to any other cocksuckers who get in our way, too. But if you, like, go and disappear, I don’t know who the fuck you are. I don’t give a shit, either.”

“Then what?” their leader asked bitterly. “Chekists? Commissars? How many have they already murdered down here?”

You pricks had it coming. Ivan didn’t say that, either. “You fight my guys, you’ll fucking lose,” he did say. “You can’t whip us without the Nazi pricks, and they can’t whip us even with you assholes.”

That drew more growls from the Ukrainian nationalists. “We ought to kill you just for coming out with such shit,” Baby Trotsky told him.

“Chance I took when I came over here,” Ivan answered with a shrug. “But if you do, my thieves are coming after me, and they won’t put down their machine pistols when you tell ’em to. They’ll fuck you all in the mouth with them, fuck your mothers if they won’t. I left a smart kike in charge of them. He’ll take care of all that shit-you bet he will.”

The nationalists’ leader spat on the muddy ground. “Kikes! They’re Christ-killers and they’re Reds. Say what you want about Hitler, but he’s got the right idea on them.”

“I don’t wag my dick at any of that political bullshit,” Kuchkov said, more or less truthfully. “So listen up, fuckers. You can shoot me, and then you can fight my guys. Or you can clear out and give somebody else shit later. What’s it gonna be?”

Baby Trotsky couldn’t just issue orders like a proper officer. No, the Ukrainians had to put their heads together and hash things out. When they did, they used their own language. Ivan could follow maybe one word in four. Some of them wanted to do for him; he was pretty sure of that.

But their leader didn’t. At last, his view prevailed, even if some of the other bandits looked disgusted. Returning to Russian, Baby Trotsky said, “All right, you can have these goddamn woods. Give us two hours to withdraw.”

“That’s what you told her, too, I bet,” Ivan said. The ginger-bearded guy snorted. Kuchkov went on, “You got a fucking deal.”

“That’s just the kind of deal I think we have,” the nationalist said bleakly. He pointed in the direction from which Kuchkov had come. “Go on. Get lost. Two hours, remember. Move sooner and we’ll shoot at you.”

“You don’t need to stick your cock in my ear. I heard you.” Ivan headed back to his own men. The Ukrainians hadn’t swiped his PPD, as he’d at least half expected.

“Good to see you in one piece,” Sasha Davidov said. “Time was getting low. What’s the deal. Is there one?”

“Two hours for them to fuck off. Then the woods are ours,” Kuchkov said. To his amazement, the Red Army men raised a cheer for him. He couldn’t remember the last time anything-well, anything but pussy-made him feel so good.