Two Fronts

Chapter 16

Wehrmacht quartermasters doled out winter clothing as if they’d had to pay for it themselves. Wearing chevrons on his left sleeve helped Willi Dernen acquire some for himself. The padded jacket he got reversed from white to blotchy camouflage. So did his quilted trousers. And his felt-and-leather overboots were almost as good as Russian valenki.

He whitewashed his helmet, too. “Could be worse,” he allowed. “Our first winter in Russia, we had to make do with ordinary uniforms and whatever we could steal from the Ivans.”

“I remember,” Adam Pfaff said. “Snow smocks made from bed sheets-that kind of crap.”

“Oh, yeah.” Willi rolled his eyes. “And the nails in the regular marching boots that sucked cold right up into your feet.”

“Jesus Christ! Don’t you jokers ever do anything but piss and moan?” Arno Baatz said. “We’ve got this good stuff now. Why do you want to keep bitching about the old days? We made it through, didn’t we?”

“Some of us did, anyway,” Willi said darkly. “Some of us froze to death.”

Awful Arno glared at him. “Quit pissing and moaning, I told you!”

“No, you didn’t, Herr Unteroffizier. You asked me if we ever did anything else. We do: we kill Ivans.”

Baatz opened his mouth. Then he shut it again without saying anything. He stomped off, his own winter gear slung over his left arm. “He’ll make you pay for that,” Adam Pfaff predicted.

“I’ve been paying since I put on the goddamn uniform,” Willi said. “Some units have good corporals and sergeants. Just by the law of averages and dumb luck, they’re bound to. But me, I’ve been dealing with Awful Arno Baatz since 1938. Where’s the justice in that?”

“Justice? Ha!” Pfaff sad. “Count your blessings he hasn’t screwed you over worse than he has.”

“If those are blessings, the anti-sin cannon”-Landser slang for chaplains-“shoot more shit than the quartermasters do,” Willi replied.

“That’s how it looks to me, sure as hell. Most of what the chaplains come out with is pure shit.” Pfaff looked back over his shoulder to make sure he hadn’t said that loud enough for Awful Arno to overhear. Baatz had all the usual small-town, small-soul pieties, and expected everyone else to come equipped with them, too.

Something off in the distance, almost too faint and too low to hear … Willi’s head swung that way, as a dog’s would have. “Those are panzers,” he said-not quite the worst thing he could think of (the worst thing he could think of would have been a volley of the Russians’ screaming rockets-Stalin’s Organ, soldiers called them), but close enough.

Adam Pfaff brought it closer yet: “Those are Russian panzers.”

Willi nodded glumly. For one thing, they were coming out of the east, where the Wehrmacht had no panzers. For another, the Ivans’ diesels sounded different from the gasoline engines his own country used. To Willi, they sounded more sinister, more evil, but he would have admitted he was prejudiced.

Awful Arno’s face was a study. He wanted to deny that there were panzers in the neighborhood. If he couldn’t do that, he wanted to deny that they belonged to the Red Army. If he couldn’t even do that … Well, no wonder his ugly, overfed mug was a study.

He yelled for the radioman. That worthy couldn’t come quickly, not with his set and the batteries that powered it in a heavy pack on his back. Awful Arno wasn’t just yelling by the time he did arrive. The underofficer was screaming: “Get us an 88! Schnell! Call the regiment! Call the division! Call your granny if you want to-I don’t care who you call! It doesn’t matter if you pull that 88 out of your asshole! Just get it here! On the double!”

Pfaff giggled helplessly. Willi found himself doing the same thing. He was much too likely to get killed in the next few minutes, but here he was, laughing like a fool. If you had to go, he supposed there were worse ways. He didn’t want to go, but he was unpleasantly aware he might not get a choice.

Well, there was always a choice. You could run away. But it wasn’t much of a choice, not here, not now. No guarantee the T-34s wouldn’t catch up with you anyway. No guarantee the guys on your own side wouldn’t shoot you in the back for bolting. And the certain sour knowledge that you’d be letting your buddies down. That carried more weight than either of the others.

The radioman gabbled into his microphone or telephone or whatever the hell you called it. He fiddled with the set-switching frequencies? Then he talked some more, louder and more urgently.

Willi didn’t hang around to find out how that particular story wound up. He ran for his foxhole. The Ivans had learned better than to send panzers forward without infantry support (so had the Wehrmacht). He couldn’t do much against thirty tonnes of steel with a scope-sighted Mauser. But he could make the luckless ground-pounders who slogged along with the Russian panzers good and miserable.

Horizons and landscapes in Russia seemed ridiculously wide. They did if you’d grown up in the more confined spaces of Western Europe, anyhow. There were the T-34s: tiny as mice at the moment, but getting bigger all the time as they clattered forward. And those little bugs scuttling along between them and behind them, those bugs were the Red Army foot soldiers from the slings and arrows and grenades and Molotov cocktails of outrageous Landsers.

They didn’t look like bugs through his scope’s crosshairs. They were men then, by God-men in the almost-Swiss-pattern helmets the Russians stamped out, men carrying rifles that might not be quite so good as his but that were plenty good enough for most murderous purposes. If he didn’t do for them, they would damn well do for him. Even if he did do for some of them, the rest-or those panzers-might finish him all the same.

He fired. One of the Ivans spun and toppled. He was proud of himself. Even with a sniper rifle, he couldn’t hit out past a kilometer every time. Nope, not even close, especially on a moving target. But there was one Red Army man who wouldn’t come any farther forward.

Not far away, a mortar team opened up with their 81mm stovepipe. The Germans had started the war with a smaller, shorter-ranged mortar. Seeing how useful this caliber was to the Red Army made Wehrmacht designers imitate it. Why don’t they do that with the goddamn T-34? Willi wondered.

The mortar team got lucky. One of their bombs came down right on top of an advancing Russian panzer. The big machine went up in a spectacular display of fireworks. The crew couldn’t have had any idea of what hit them. There were plenty of worse ways to go. Willi’d seen too many of them, and hoped not to meet any of them in person.

He also hoped the explosion would make the other panzer crews think the 88 was here. It could kill them from farther away than they could reach it. No such luck, though. The Ivans came on. Pretty soon, they stopped, but only so they could shell the Germans in front of them. They didn’t shoot especially well, not by German standards. Splinters whistled past Willi. They shot too well to suit him.

Hauled by a half-track, an 88 arrived in the nick of time, like the cavalry in an American Western. The comparison fit, not least because the Germans called their foes Indians. The Ivans fought like savages, that was for sure. Willi didn’t even know the gun was behind him till it blasted two T-34s in quick succession.

The surviving enemy panzers turned their fire on the 88. If they could smash it or kill its crew before it got done murdering them … In that case, this movie wouldn’t have the happy ending the director and the screenwriters should have come up with.

Willi popped up out of his hole like a jack-in-the-box, squeezing off shots at the oncoming Russian foot soldiers. As with his first round, some he was sure he hit. Some who went down might have been diving for cover after bullets cracked close to them. You might not want to miss, but you did when you were short on time to aim.

Up he popped again. He got an Ivan in his sights. And another Ivan got him. A Stahlhelm stopped splinters. A rifle round? Not a chance. He knew an instant’s surprise, nothing more. Yes, there were worse ways to go, not that he knew anything about that any more, either.

Sarah had gone to a lot of trouble remembering to sign her married name. She’d written Goldman only a couple of times after Isidor put the ring on her finger. Bruck flowed from her pen, at first with a mental discipline her father would have admired and then, as she got used to it, more naturally.

Officially, Bruck she remained. Without Isidor beside her, though, without his parents, without the bakery (and, thanks to the Nazis, without whatever the bakery had been worth), she didn’t feel like a Bruck any more. She was back with her own parents, having nowhere else to go. Didn’t that turn her into a Goldman again?

“If you want to think so, then it does-for you,” her father said when she asked him about it.

“You’ll always be our baby, no matter what you call yourself,” Mother added, which helped and didn’t help at the same time.

Samuel Goldman went on, “Even if you’re Sarah Goldman in your head, you’d better stay Sarah Bruck on paper. If you turn into somebody else, what will happen? Some Party functionary at the Rathaus who can’t count to eleven without taking off his shoes will wonder what’s going on. Is a dirty Jew trying to pull a fast one? You don’t need that kind of tsuris.”

He dropped the Yiddish word into his professorial German the way he might have used a Greek or Latin terminus technicus into a lecture when he was still allowed to teach at the university. He used it for the same reasons he would have trotted out the classical languages, too: because it said something with no precise German equivalent, and to show the world he knew such things.

“More tsuris I need like a hole in the head. I’ve got plenty already,” Sarah agreed. Father rarely used Yiddish. He looked down on it-it was the jargon Ostjuden spoke. Jews from Eastern Europe, with their beards and caftans and long dresses, had seemed as alien to him on German soil as they did to his Aryan neighbors. He’d hoped their odd look and habits were what fueled the Nazis’ anti-Semitism. He’d hoped … in vain. The Nazis hated Jews because they were Jews, and that was the long and short of it.

He sighed now, and made a small production out of rolling a cigarette from dog-end tobacco and a scrap of newspaper. It was a big, fat cigarette; his butt-scrounging must have gone well on his shift in the labor gang. The match he scraped alight filled the kitchen with a nasty reek. A moment later, the smoldering newspaper and tobacco filled it with another one. He smiled as he inhaled all the same.

“We’re still here,” he said. “That puts us ahead of a lot of people.”

“Samuel!” Reproach filled Hanna Goldman’s voice.

“What?” Father said. Then he got it. He grimaced. “I’m sorry, Sarah. Sorry for what happened, and sorry for reminding you of it like a shlemiel.” There was another bit of Yiddish with no exact German equivalent.

“It’s all right,” Sarah answered, which was at least approximately true. “Sometimes it hurts like you wouldn’t believe. Sometimes … Sometimes it hardly feels like I was married at all. I know that’s a terrible thing to say, but it’s true. It’s one of the reasons I feel like a Goldman again.”

“You weren’t married very long, poor thing,” Mother said gently.

“And wartime marriages can be crazy things,” Father added. “I saw that the last time around. Some of the girls the men I fought with married … Well, the ones who lived fixed things afterwards. Or, a couple of times, they made it work when I didn’t think they had a prayer. You never can tell.” He blew smoke toward the ceiling and left things there.

How had he felt about her marrying a baker’s son? However he’d felt, he hadn’t said much. He must have realized he couldn’t do anything to change what she’d decided to do. When you couldn’t change something, keeping your mouth shut about it wasn’t the worst idea in the world.

She thought she and Isidor would have been able to work through the rough spots life threw at them. They’d done pretty well in the little while they were together. But life threw more rough spots at Jews in Germany than ordinary married couples faced all over the rest of the world.

Come to that, life threw more rough spots at everyone in Germany than people in most of the world had to worry about: the RAF, for instance. Sarah had hoped the RAF would blow every Nazi in the Reich to the moon. When it killed her husband and in-laws instead … What was she supposed to think about it then?

She’d asked herself the same question ever since British bombs fell on the bakery. Now she asked it out loud.

Her father and mother looked at each other. Neither said anything for a little while. At last, Mother said, “They weren’t trying to kill the Brucks. They were trying to kill the Germans who were trying to kill them.”

“I know that,” Sarah replied with a touch of impatience. “If I didn’t, I would hate them.”

“During the last war, sometimes our guns would tear up the French farms and the like when we were going after their soldiers,” Father said slowly. “It wasn’t anybody’s fault, not after the war got rolling. The farmers … just got in the way.”

“Like the Brucks?”

“Like the Brucks,” he agreed. “If you want to blame somebody, blame the people who started the war, not the ones who got stuck in the middle.”

He didn’t say who he thought had started the war. They still weren’t sure their house wasn’t wired for sound, even if the Gestapo had never given any sign it was listening. Sarah could draw her own conclusions. Yes, that Czech, that Jaroslaw Stribny, had assassinated Konrad Henlein. But it wasn’t as if Henlein, the Sudeten German leader, hadn’t been doing his best to tear Czechoslovakia to pieces.

Henlein wouldn’t have done that if it weren’t for Hitler and the German Nazis. He would have gone right on teaching gymnastics in his little provincial town. He probably still would have been a German nationalist. But, before 1933, nationalists had been a minority among Sudeten Germans. And, before 1933, they were a peaceful political movement, one of many peaceful political movements in a democratic country made up of a crazy quilt of different national groups.

After Hitler brought the Nazis to power, all that changed. Hitler heated the fire. Hitler stirred the pot and set it seething. Konrad Henlein paid with his life. Jaroslaw Stribny paid with his, too. The whole world paid with … how many millions of lives?

“Heil Hitler!” Sarah whispered.

Her parents looked at each other again. She wanted to clap her hands over her mouth. Neither of them had ever said that, not that she remembered, not even ironically or sarcastically. No, that wasn’t quite true. Father had, in jokes he told. But that felt different from this.

As if reading her mind, Father said, “Don’t worry about it, sweetheart. We know what you mean.”

Mother nodded. “Oh, yes.”

Sarah started to cry. She’d done that all the time right after Isidor and his parents got killed, but she hadn’t for a while. Now all the pain flooded back at once. She felt ambushed; she hadn’t believed that could happen to her. Getting taken by surprise only made it worse.

When Mother put an arm around her, Sarah pushed her away and cried harder than ever. “Let her be,” Father said. “She’ll feel better once she gets it out of her system. Sometimes things come to a head, that’s all, and you have to lance them like a big old boil.”

While Sarah wept, she didn’t believe she’d ever feel better. Once she’d cried herself out, she found she did. This was an ordinary rough spot. The next night, the RAF bombed Munster again. Sarah hoped nothing fell on anyone who didn’t deserve it. Too much to hope for, she knew, but she did it anyway.

“You know something?” Vaclav Jezek said.

“I know all kinds of things,” Benjamin Halevy answered, which was certainly true enough. “Whether one of them is your something, though”-he shrugged-“that, I don’t know.”

“Right,” Vaclav said. “Y’know, sometimes you’re too fucking cute for your own good.”

“Jdi do prdele,” the Jew answered sweetly. “There. Is that plain enough for you?”

It meant something like Up your ass. It could be an invitation to fight, but not the way Halevy said it. “Same to you,” Jezek said. “Now where was I going before you derailed my train of thought? I can’t remember.”

“Why am I not surprised?” Halevy said.

This time, Vaclav came out with, “Jdi do prdele.” He snapped his fingers. “Oh, yeah. I’ve got it. Going on leave sucks-sucks hard.”

“We’re in the army,” Halevy pointed out, “or as much of an army as the Republic’s got-and that didn’t go to France. Everything sucks. That’s how armies are supposed to work.”

He almost always said interesting things. That one might keep Vaclav thinking for days. But it wasn’t what the Czech sniper wanted to talk about. “Going on leave sucks,” he repeated stubbornly. “When we get back to Madrid, all we can do is drink like pigs and screw whores.”

“What else would you want to do when you’re on leave?” Halevy asked reasonably. “What else is there?”

But Vaclav had an answer for him: “I want to go back to Prague, God damn it to hell. I want to see my family. Christ, I want to see if I’ve still got a family. I want to talk Czech with somebody besides this bunch of jerks.”

He waited. If Halevy laughed at him, he really might feel like brawling. But the corners of the Jew’s mouth turned down. “Oh, you poor bastard. You poor, sorry bastard,” he said, more sympathetically than Jezek would have imagined he could. “I don’t know what to tell you. You sound like you’ve got it bad.”

“ ’Fraid so,” Vaclav admitted. “I’ve been away too goddamn long. I’ve almost got my cock shot off too goddamn many times. And for years now the Nazis have been fucking the shit out of my country.”

It wasn’t Halevy’s country, or not exactly: not so much because Halevy’s parents were Jews, but because he’d been born in Paris. He spoke perfect Czech. He’d stayed with the government-in-exile’s forces when he could have bailed out of the war altogether. He might even have had better reasons to hate the Nazis than Vaclav did, and that wasn’t easy. But Czechoslovakia itself didn’t have the same hold on him as it did for the other men in this muddy stretch of entrenchments.

He sighed now. His breath smoked. Winter could get very respectably cold on the plateaus of central Spain. “I don’t know what to tell you. You can’t buy a ticket at the train station and just go,” he said.

“Don’t I know it!” Vaclav exclaimed. “I can’t even write to anybody back there. It’s like all of Central Europe is a hole in the map.”

“Have you tried writing through the Red Cross in Switzerland?” Halevy asked. “I don’t know for sure, but they might be able to get letters back and forth. Censored and all, sure, but still.”

“Huh!” Jezek said in surprise. “You know, I never thought of that.”

“Like I said, I don’t know-I haven’t had to worry about it,” Benjamin Halevy said. “But if you try and you don’t get an answer back, how are you worse off?”

There was another good question. Vaclav had to scrounge paper and a pencil off the Jew. He scribbled a note to his father. None of the Czechs had an envelope, let alone a Republican stamp. He got those from Chaim Weinberg, the American International whose Yiddish he could more or less follow.

“I write to my folks every now and then, so I’ve got that kind of shit,” Weinberg explained. “My old man thinks I’m meshiggeh for being here, but so what? We’re still family, y’know?”

“He thinks you’re what?” Vaclav’s German wasn’t perfect, and he didn’t know that word, or even if it was German.

“Some people say meshuggeh.” Weinberg tried to be helpful, but didn’t succeed. Then he spun his right forefinger by his right ear.

“Oh.” Vaclav got that, all right. He sometimes thought the Americans was nuts, too, though for reasons no doubt different from the ones Weinberg’s father had.

He addressed the envelope in care of the International Red Cross in Geneva and sent it off. He had no idea whether the Red Cross would answer him or his folks would or nobody would. He was inclined to bet on the last. But, as Halevy said, how was he worse off if that happened?

He did get a card from the Red Cross-the first mail he’d had since he couldn’t remember when. It was printed in German (which he could read) and French and English (which he couldn’t). The German said We are attempting delivery of your letter. We cannot guarantee acceptance. Presumably, the message in the other languages was the same.

In the meantime, the fighting ground on. The war in Spain was going on seven years old now. By all the signs, it might last forever. The Republicans advanced bit by bit. They’d gain a couple of kilometers. A Fascist counterattack three days later would throw them back one and a half. They’d regroup and push another thousand meters north and west. Sanjurjo’s men would recapture half of that.

Almost every morning before dawn, Vaclav would sling his antitank rifle, crawl out into no-man’s-land, find somewhere to hide, and wait to see what kind of bastards in yellowish khaki he could pot. His work was so regular, he felt as if he ought to punch a time clock when he went out and came back.

He felt proud of himself when he blew the head off another German officer trying to teach the Nationalists how to fight more like the Wehrmacht: shoveling shit against the tide, in other words. He almost pitied the German as he pulled the trigger. That didn’t stop him from killing the man, but did leave him thoughtful.

Spaniards were brave. No way around that. Both Spanish Republican troops and their Nationalist foes attacked and defended with a ferocity Vaclav admired and didn’t want to imitate. But attacks went in late. They didn’t always go in where they were supposed to. Artillery support was haphazard at best, and sometimes didn’t come at all.

Vaclav had fought the Wehrmacht. Czechoslovakia had built its armed forces on the German model, of which it had far more experience than people here did. Men in Feldgrau didn’t fuck up the way the Spaniards did. They were human, sure. They goofed. But their besetting sins were different, and didn’t include sloppiness. If that bastard from the Legion Kondor hadn’t gone out and got smashed every night … Well, he’d never have the chance now.

Whenever Vaclav punctuated someone more than usually prominent, he threw Marshal Sanjurjo’s side into a tizzy. The Nationalists started shooting off machine guns and letting fly with mortars and banging away with their 77mm guns and 105s. None of the Fascist hate came anywhere near him. No one in the enemy trenches must have spied his muzzle flash. That was nice. He might even get another shot from this hiding place.

And he did, toward afternoon, at a fat Spaniard who had to be at least a colonel. To his vast disgust, he missed. The Spaniard dove for the deck; he didn’t topple bonelessly, the way he would have if that muscular bullet had pulled the plug on his drain. You couldn’t win them all. Jezek got pissed off whenever he didn’t, though.

This time, the enemy machine guns probed more accurately. He flattened himself against the dirt as the rounds cracked past not far enough overhead. It would get dark pretty soon, but not nearly soon enough to suit him.

After the sun went down, a Czech picket almost shot him when he didn’t come out with the day’s word fast enough. Factory workers sometimes went through tough days, too. They had shorter hours and better pay, though, and most of them weren’t lousy. Vaclav dropped down into the trenches and lit a cigarette.

When Anastas Mouradian exhaled, his breath puffed out in a big white cloud. He’d been in colder places. In Siberia, this would have been a mild winter’s day. In Siberia, it could get cold enough that the water in your breath instantly turned to ice crystals when you let it out. It made a noise when it did: the whispers of stars, they called it there.

Stas had never heard the whisper of stars. He’d heard enough different people talk about it to believe it was real, though. This wasn’t anywhere near that cold. But it was cold enough to freeze the ground so planes could fly again. The fall rasputitsa was over.

Lieutenant Colonel Tomashevsky explained the mission in the simplest possible terms: “We’re going to knock the Fascist hyenas’ cocks off. If they want to fuck around with the Rodina, we’ll make the cunts pay.” Even Mouradian, for whom Russian was a second language, knew a mixed metaphor when he heard one regardless of whether it was laced with mat. A composition teacher would have left angry red scrawls all over the squadron commander’s paper.

Real life didn’t grade things the same way. The assembled flyers-most of them Russians-laughed and whooped. One or two of them pumped their fists in the air. Mat had started out as the slang of hoodlums and lowlifes. The camps and the war were like wicks through which it soaked into the wider Russian world.

“Seriously, though,” Tomashevsky went on, “the Hitlerites are getting new tanks that are giving our boys grief. If we blast the stuffing out of the railroad lines and the train stations, the tanks’ll have a tougher time coming forward. So that’s what we’ll do.”

He stabbed at a map on a folding stand with a pointer. “Bobruisk today,” he said. One corner of his mouth twisted upwards. “A different bombardment unit has been given the honor of heroically attacking the railroad yards at Minsk.”

Stas didn’t let out a big sigh of relief, but several flyers did. Minsk lay farther west than Bobruisk, which meant a longer flight over German-occupied territory. Minsk was a bigger, more important place, too. The flak above it would be fiercer. The Pe-2s would be more likely to meet up with Messerschmitts over Minsk.

Let someone else sweat out the tough mission today, Mouradian thought. I’ve had my share of those and then some. If he could help defeat the Hitlerites by flying a milk run for a change, he’d gladly do that.

The squadron commander whacked the map with the pointer. “We’ll make our approach from the southeast and escape in the same direction,” he said. “Word is that the Nazis have emplaced some new batteries north of the yards.”

Some Party member or Jew had probably risked his life to bring that word to the Soviet authorities. Or maybe it was some Russian peasant whose sister had been raped by a squad of Germans. Hitler’s men hadn’t gone out of their way to endear themselves to the population on the land they’d seized. Just the opposite, in fact. The frightening thing was how many Soviet citizens collaborated with them anyhow. What that said about the glorious wisdom of General Secretary Stalin …

What that said about the glorious wisdom of General Secretary Stalin was not for the likes of Anastas Mouradian to judge. All he had to do was bomb the stuffing out of Bobruisk and try to get back in one piece so he could go bomb some other Fascist-held town tomorrow or the day after.

Sergeant Mechnikov, who would actually yank the levers that let the bombs fall from the plane, had had his own briefing-or maybe, like a lot of sergeants, he knew things without needing to be told. “Bobruisk,” he announced when Stas and Isa Mogamedov met him by the Pe-2.

“That’s right,” Stas said.

“Beats the snot out of Minsk,” the bombardier declared. He’d been plucked off a kolkhoz for the military and stuck in the fuselage of a bomber because he had the muscles to do the job. He didn’t care what he said. He came right out with what Stas only thought. Maybe he’d end up in a camp on account of that. Or maybe he was NKVD, and trying to pull something unpatriotic out of the officers he flew with. You never could tell in the USSR. No wonder so many people didn’t see the Hitlerites as worse than what they already knew.…

He won’t pull that out of me, Stas thought as armorers trundled bombs across the frozen airstrip toward the Pe-2 on four-wheeled carts. Having such thoughts to begin with was dangerous. Letting anyone else know you had them was suicidal.

Stas ran through the mechanical checks on the Pe-2 with his usual care. Young Lieutenant Mogamedov had leaned toward sloppiness on such details till he found Stas wouldn’t stand for it. More often than not polite as a cat, Stas didn’t go around saying things like you stupid, thumb-fingered Azeri. Mogamedov, to his credit, didn’t want Stas even thinking things like that.

So many things in war you couldn’t control. If something you could watch out for upped and bit you because you got careless … You’d curse yourself as you hit the silk-if you got the chance to hit the silk.

It all looked good today. The Pe-2 picked up speed as it jounced along the strip. It climbed into the air when Mouradian pulled back on the stick. He spiraled up into the sky and found his place in the formation. The other bombers’ guns would help cover his machine. He would do the same for his comrades. It might even help, a little.

A few scattered tracers rose up at them as they crossed the fighting front. German? Soviet? Both? Both was the best bet. The slim, graceful Pe-2s looked more like Luftwaffe aircraft than most in the Red Air Force’s inventory. Red Army men commonly tried to shoot down anything they had doubts about. None of the flak troubled the squadron.

“Do you think the Fascists will let their air defenses farther west know we’re on the way?” Mogamedov asked.

“Of course they will,” Mouradian answered. In the Soviet Union, such attention to detail was anything but guaranteed. The Germans made most of their mistakes by being too precise, too complicated-and, fairly often, by taking it for granted that their foes would show the same kind of automatic competence they did themselves.

Lieutenant Colonel Tomashevsky led the squadron by a zigzag path, dodging in and out of clouds whenever he could. Stas approved of not making life easy for anyone trying to track them. Somebody would be, sure as the devil’s auntie.

A railroad line, straight as a stretched string across snow-dappled ground, guided them to Bobruisk over the last few kilometers. Something in the town was burning, obscuring the railroad yards. No, Stas realized: more likely, the Fritzes had got word the bombers were on the way and had sent up smoke screens to make things hard on them. Hitler’s minions were much too good at that.

Their flak was heavy and accurate, too. The 88s that tank crews hated so much could also fling destruction kilometers into the sky. Tracer rounds and black bursts with fiery hearts told the gunners where to send their following volleys. Stas was into his bombing run, and had to fly straight for the yards. The Pe-2 bucked in the air from near misses like a horse ridden for the first time.

The plane just ahead of him in the formation took a hit that tore off half its right wing. Burning terribly, it tumbled toward the ground. Stas hoped the crew could bail out. He had to fly his own machine, and couldn’t look down to see. Sometimes distraction was a blessing: not a Marxist-Leninist thought, but a true one.

“Drop the bombs!” Mogamedov shouted into the voice tube. Away they went. Mouradian swung the Pe-2 around, hard, and jammed down the throttles as he streaked away to the southeast. Another bomber fell out of formation with one engine smoking badly and the prop feathered.

The wounded plane lasted no longer than a lame elk would have among wolves. Messerschmitts tore into it. Down it went, and the German fighters roared after its brethren. But the Pe-2 did have a good turn of speed. The Germans caught only one. Stas thanked the God in Whom he officially didn’t believe that it wasn’t his.