Two Fronts

Chapter 3

Winter on the Barents Sea. There was a handful of words to chill the heart, however you chose to take them. The wind had knives in it, and seemed to take a running start from the North Pole. Waves slapped the U-30, one after another. The submarine rolled, recovered, and rolled again, over and over.

All the same, Lieutenant Julius Lemp was happier to have chugged out of Narvik on patrol than he would have been to stay at the Kriegsmarine’s U-boat base in northern Norway any longer. To say his soldiers had worn out their welcome there was to belabor the obvious.

Port authorities thought his crew were a gang of hooligans. His men thought Narvik was as dull as embalming-about the worst thing a liberty port could be. As usual in such arguments, both sides had a point.

The southern sky glowed pink. In a little while, the sun would actually creep over the horizon for a little while. They were well past the solstice now, on the way toward the vernal equinox. Old Sol was heading north again. Darkness didn’t reign supreme here all through the day, as it had a little while ago.

But it wouldn’t stay light very long. England loved this season of the year. This was the time when convoys bound for Murmansk and Arkhangelsk had the best chance of sneaking past German patrol planes and U-boats from Norway. You couldn’t sink or bomb what you couldn’t find. Darkness was the freighter’s friend.

Another wave, bigger than most, slammed into the U-30 portside. Frigid seawater splashed over the conning tower. Lemp and the ratings up there with him wore oilskins over their peacoats and wide-brimmed waterproof hats strapped under their chins to keep that raw north wind from stealing them. They got wet anyhow. When you got wet in these latitudes, you got cold. No-you got colder.

“Scheisse!” Lemp said, most sincerely.

One of the petty officers nodded. “We’ll all end up with pneumonia,” he predicted, his voice gloomy.

Lemp would have argued, if only he could. The one thing worse than getting splashed up here was going into the drink. You wouldn’t last longer than a few minutes before the sea sucked all the warmth from your body and killed you. People said freezing to death was an easy way to go. Lemp didn’t want to find out for himself if those people were right.

He tried to clean the salt water off the lenses of his Zeiss binoculars. How were you supposed to look into the distance when everything seemed blurry and smeared? Simple-you couldn’t.

“In the summer,” the rating said wistfully, “it’s daylight all the time.”

“And we can see them, and they can see us,” Lemp replied. “Downsides to everything. No sneaking away from the destroyers under cover of night then.”

Another big wave smacked the U-30. More icy water cascaded over the conning tower. More poured down the hatch, too. As if spawned by the law of equal and opposite reactions, hot language came out of the hatchway. Some of the water would get pumped out of the boat. Some, yes, but not all. Take any U-boat ever made, and she always had water in her bilges. And the water soaked up and redistributed all the manifold stinks that accumulated in a submarine.

Lemp sighed. Spillage from the heads? Puke? Rotting bits of sausage and tinned herring in mustard sauce? The thick animal fug of a boat full of poorly washed seamen? Diesel exhaust? Lubricating oil? They were all there, along with assorted other sordid but not so easily nameable stenches.

Pretty soon, the skipper’s watch would end. He’d have to lay below. The air out here was bloody cold, but it was clean and fresh-none cleaner and fresher, in fact. People talked about air like wine. This wasn’t wine: it was more like vodka straight out of the icebox, just as chilly, just as smooth, and just as potent.

And then he’d go down the hatch, back into the collection of reeks that put your average city rubbish tip to shame. They said you stopped noticing smells once you were stuck in them for a while. They said all kinds of things. Some of them were true. Some were crap. You might not smell the interior of a U-boat so much after a while, but you never had any doubts about where you were, even if you woke up with your eyes still shut.

Every time the boat came in from a patrol, it got cleaned up along with refueling and taking on fresh eels to shoot at enemy shipping and food both fresh and canned. Thanks to the bilgewater, though, getting rid of the stinks was and always would be a losing fight. The only way to do the trick would be to melt the submarine down to raw steel and start over. Even then, cleanliness would last only until the first clumsy sailor spilled something into the bilges.

In due course, Gerhart Beilharz emerged from the smelly steel tube. “I relieve you, Skipper,” the engineering officer said. He smiled broadly as he inhaled. “My turn to breathe the good stuff for a while.”

“Well, so it is. Enjoy it,” Lemp said. “You get to take off your Stahlhelm, too.”

Beilharz’s grin got wider yet. “I sure do!” He was two meters tall. He didn’t fit well into a U-boat’s cramped confines. Men shorter than he was banged their noggins on overhead pipes and valves and spigots.

With a sigh, Julius Lemp descended. It was twilight outside, and twilight in the pressure hull as well. The bulbs in here were dim and orange, to help keep light from leaking out when the hatches were open at night. And the smell was … what it was. It didn’t make Lemp’s stomach want to turn over, the way it did with some men.

“Beast behaving, Paul?” he asked the helmsman.

“No worries, Skipper,” the senior rating said.

“Good. That’s what I want to hear,” Lemp said. If Paul wasn’t worried, there was nothing to worry about.

Lemp’s tiny cabin held-barely-a desk, a steel chair, a cot, and the safe where he stashed codebooks and other secure publications. That made it far and away the roomiest accommodation on the boat. With the canvas curtain pulled shut, he had as much privacy as anyone here could: which is to say, not a great deal.

He filled his fountain pen and wrote in the log. His script was small, even cramped, and very precise. There wasn’t a lot to record: course, speed, fuel consumed. No ships or airplanes sighted, either from his own side or the enemy. No disciplinary problems among his men, either, nor had there been since the patrol began. The crew weren’t rowdies while on the job, and they weren’t especially rowdy in any port even halfway equipped to show off-duty sailors a good time.

Would any of that matter to his superiors? The U-30’s sailors had torn Narvik to pieces twice now. Things wouldn’t go well for them if they tried it a third time. And they were liable to, as Lemp knew full well.

He could listen to what went on in the boat without drawing notice to himself: another advantage of the curtain. Even when he couldn’t make out conversations, he could pick up tone. Everything sounded the way it should. If the men were plotting anything, they were doing it out of his earshot-and there weren’t many places out of his earshot in the U-boat.

After Lieutenant Beilharz came off his watch, he paused outside the tiny cabin and said, “Talk to you for a minute or two, Skipper?”

“Sure. Come on in,” Lemp answered.

Beilharz did, ducking under the curtain rod. He had the Stahlhelm on again. Lemp waved for him to sit down on the cot. Had something gone wrong with the Schnorkel? They were surfaced in the gloom, so they didn’t need the gadget now. But when Beilharz spoke in a low voice, what he said had nothing to do with his specialty: “Sir, what do we do when the politics start boiling over again?”

That wasn’t what Lemp wanted to hear, even if it was a damn good question. Plenty of high-ranking officers couldn’t be happy to watch the Reich pulled into a full-scale war on two fronts. Some of them had already tried more than once to overthrow the Fuhrer. The ones who had were mostly dead now, which might not stop their successors from taking another shot at it.

“Best thing we can do,” Lemp said slowly, “is hope we’re out on patrol when the boiling starts.”

“Ja,” Beilharz agreed. “But if we’re not?”

Now Lemp spoke as firmly as he could: “I’m not going to borrow trouble. I’m going to do my job for the Reich. You do the same. Now get the hell out of here.”

Gerhart Beilharz got. Lemp took a bottle of schnapps out of his desk and swallowed a good slug. He didn’t think Beilharz was trying to trap him into saying anything disloyal about the Reich’s current leader. He didn’t think so, no, but he couldn’t be sure. After a moment, he tilted the bottle back again.

“Look out, you lug. Here comes the Chimp.” Several soldiers made dice and rubles disappear as if they’d never existed.

Ivan Kuchkov wasn’t sure which one of them had used the nickname he hated so much. The sergeant hated it not least because it fit so well. He was short and squat and dark and hairy. Nobody would ever call him handsome. But he could break most men in half, and he wasn’t shy about brawling. They must have figured he couldn’t hear them.

He didn’t want to tear into all of them at once. Well, part of him did, but he knew it wasn’t a good idea. He wasn’t worried about losing; that never crossed his mind. But he might get into trouble for leaving a fair part of his section unfit to fight the Fascists.

“Come on, you needle dicks,” he growled. “We’re supposed to go out and check what those Nazi cocksuckers are up to.”

“All of us?” one of them yipped in dismay.

“Every fucking one,” Kuchkov said. He raised his voice: “Sasha! Where are you hiding your clapped-out cunt?”

“I’m here, Comrade Sergeant.” Sasha Davidov seemed to appear out of thin air. The skinny little Jew had a knack for that, as he did for most forms of self-preservation.

“Good. You take point. I’m leading these bitches out on patrol.” His wave encompassed the dejected gamblers. He didn’t have anything in particular against Davidov for being a Christ-killing kike. No-he really wanted him along, because Sasha was far and away the best point man in the company, probably in the regiment. With him out front, they all had a better chance to come back in one piece.

It was cold. The Ukraine didn’t get as cold as Russia did (Kuchkov thought with a sort of masochistic patriotism), but it got plenty cold enough. Snow crunched under Kuchkov’s valenki. He wore a snow smock over his greatcoat, and a whitewashed helmet. His mittens had slits through which he could fire his PPD-34 submachine gun at need. He held the slits closed when he didn’t need them.

The Germans, of course, would be similarly swaddled. If his patrol ran into one of theirs, things could get interesting fast, depending on who first figured out the other bunch of sad, sorry, shivering assholes belonged to the wrong side. And, of course, there were the Ukrainians, who had trouble deciding whether they hated Stalin worse than Hitler or the other way round.

Artillery rumbled off to the west. Kuchkov cocked his head to one side, listening. Yes, those were Hitlerite 105s. The shells thudded down somewhere not close enough to worry about. A few minutes later, Red Army cannon answered. “Ha!” Kuchkov said. “Let the butchers blow the balls off each other.” He hated big guns. What infantryman didn’t? You hardly ever got the chance to shoot artillerymen, but they had all kinds of chances at you.

Kuchkov had started the war as a bombardier. He’d dropped plenty on the damned gunners’ heads. The bastards had their revenge on him, though: they shot him down. He’d literally parachuted into the Red Army.

He tried to look every which way at once. You never could tell where the goddamn Germans would pop up. They weren’t as good as Russians, or even Ukrainians, when it came to coping with winters in these parts, but they were getting better. The ones who couldn’t learn got shallow graves marked by helmets hung on bayoneted rifles. Red Army men desecrated those graves whenever they ran the Fascists back a few kilometers.

“Gruk! Gruk! Gruk!” It was only a raven, flying along looking for dead soldiers who hadn’t got buried yet. All the Soviet soldiers aimed their weapons at it, then sheepishly lowered them once more.

Sasha shook his head. “Anything moves, anything makes a noise, I want to kill it. If I live through the stinking war, I’ll be ruined as a civilian. Any time somebody drops a plate, I’ll dive under the table.”

He must’ve had a wide streak of that before the war started. He wouldn’t have made such a good point man if he hadn’t. “You don’t shoot any fucking thing that moves, you don’t dive for cover when anybody farts, you won’t need to worry about living through this cunt of a war,” Kuchkov said. He was surprised he’d lasted as long as he had.

They tramped on. It started to snow, which cut visibility. Kuchkov hung on tight to his submachine gun. If they stumbled over the Nazis, he’d need to spray death around as fast as he could. The rest of the guys in the patrol, except for Davidov, carried rifles. A rifle could kill people out much farther than a PPD could. But so what, when you had to trip over the Hitlerites before you know they were there?

The wind blew harder. The noise it made would also mask approaching enemies. Ivan had to remind himself it would also mask his approach from the Germans.

Sasha Davidov suddenly stopped short. He waved one mittened hand behind him, so no one in the direction he was going could see the motion. Then he flattened out in the snow.

Kuchkov flopped down, too. He was on his belly before he had any notion how he’d got there. The other Red Army men went down, too. They might have been a fraction slower, but no more than a fraction. The really slow fools, the really stupid ones, died fast. Kuchkov had never heard of Charles Darwin, which didn’t mean natural selection failed to operate on the battlefield.

For several breaths, Kuchkov saw nothing through the swirling snow. Was Sasha imagining shit again? Every so often, he did. It was the price you paid for having somebody out front who wouldn’t miss any of the trouble that really was there.

But no. It wasn’t imaginary this time. Out of the snow came a Nazi patrol. They were close enough that Kuchkov had no doubt who they were. Their helmets might be whitewashed, but no one would ever mistake one of those coal scuttles for a Red Army pot. The Fritzes even walked differently from Russians. Ivan couldn’t have said how, but they did.

The wind blew their words his way. German was just ugly noise to him. The Russian word for Germans, Nemtsi, meant something like babblers. But their tone was the same as his would have been: halfway between resigned and nervous. They peered around, looking for Red Army men … but not spotting any.

Pilots always said the trick in aerial combat was getting close before you opened up. Then you couldn’t miss, and the other bastard never had a prayer. It didn’t always work like that on the ground. You had to respect machine guns. Try and close with them and you’d end up dinner for crows and foxes. Here, though …

Kuchkov’s PPD already pointed in the right direction. He squeezed off a short burst, then another and another. The PPD pulled high and to the right if you just let it rip. The other Russian soldiers opened up, too.

Down went the Fritzes, tumbling like ninepins. Their dying shrieks rang through the stuttering thunder of gunfire. One of the Germans wasn’t dead, though. He’d lain down in the snow and was shooting back. Finely machined Schmeissers didn’t always like the cold. They’d freeze up when a German needed them most. Not this one, though. Maybe the guy used Russian gun oil.

Whatever he used, it didn’t help him long. The Red Army soldiers spread out and went after him, staying as low as they could. He soon lay bleeding and lifeless like his buddies.

Sasha looked worriedly toward the west. Would the racket from the firefight draw more Nazis? Kuchkov was worried about that, too, but he also had other things on his mind. He bent down by a dead Fritz and fumbled through his belt pouches. “Fuck me!” he said in delight. The German had not one, not two, but three tinfoil tubes of liver paste-the best damn ration anybody’s army issued. Kuchkov shoved them into a greatcoat pocket. The other Russians plundered the rest of the corpses. Then the patrol moved out again.

Anastas Mouradian and Isa Mogamedov eyed each other in what would have been loathing if they’d had the nerve to show it. “Well, well,” Mouradian said in Russian. “Someone in the personnel office is having a little joke on us.”

“Very likely, Comrade Pilot,” his new copilot and bomb-aimer agreed in the same language. “Or else a sergeant with too much to do grabbed the first cards that came up … and here we are.”

“Here we are, all right,” Stas agreed dryly. Speaking Russian helped ease things a little. It was also the only language an Armenian and an Azeri were likely to have in common.

Armenians had lived in Armenia forever, or as near as made no difference. Azeris had lived next door to them-and occasionally (or sometimes not so occasionally) tried to overrun them-for the past 900 years or so. They used different tongues. They followed different faiths. Given a choice, Mouradian and Mogamedov would either have icily ignored each other or gone for each other’s throats.

They got no choice. Brute Soviet force overrode their petty nationalisms, their different religions, their different tongues. They would work together-or the KGB would make them both sorrier than either could hope to make the other. That wasn’t exactly the way Stalin’s New Soviet Men were supposed to be forged, which wasn’t to say it didn’t work.

Of course, Stalin was a Georgian. Beria, who ran the KGB, was a Mingrelian. They both sprang from the Caucasus themselves. They understood the local feuds as no Russians-onlookers from outside-could ever hope to do. They understood the force required to supersede them. They understood … and they used it.

If a Red Air Force Pe-2 had an Armenian in one cockpit chair and an Azeri in the other, their superiors might indeed think it was funny, but wouldn’t care past that-unless the two men in the cockpit showed they couldn’t fight the Nazis. That, their superiors would care about. And Mouradian and Mogamedov would both regret making them care.

Business, then. In the air, they would have to try to keep each other (and their bombardier, a bad-tempered Russian sergeant named Fyodor Mechnikov) alive. On the ground … On the ground, Stas intended to have as little to do with his new crewman as he could.

“How much experience in the plane have you had?” he asked now.

“Fifteen missions,” Mogamedov answered. “A 109 shot us down. I managed to get out. My pilot stopped a 20mm with his face.”

“Something like that happened to me, too, when I was in an old SB-2,” Mouradian said. “I’m surprised they didn’t give you a plane of your own.”

The other flyer shrugged. He was a little swarthier than Mouradian, his eyes a little narrower. To a Russian, all men from the Caucasus looked alike: in their charming way, the Russians labeled them black-asses. Men who were from the Caucasus knew better, not that Russians bothered to listen to them. “They put me in with you instead, Comrade Pilot,” Mogamedov said, and not another word.

More words would have been wasted anyhow. Mouradian did waste a few: “We’ll do our damnedest to give the Nazis grief, then.” He wanted to sound loyal-and to be heard to sound loyal.

“Da,” Mogamedov agreed. Mouradian needed a new copilot because his old one, Ivan Kulkaanen, had been rash enough to intimate that the USSR wasn’t running the war so well as it might have. He’d tried to run when the Chekists came after him. He was a Karelian. He knew everything there was to know about snow. The secret police hunted him down anyway.

Right now, the new Caucasian cockpit crew wasn’t going anywhere. Snow blanketed the airstrip. The clouds that dropped it weren’t much higher than the treetops. Flying would have been suicidal. Such details didn’t always stop the men with the fancy rank marks on their sleeves. Today, they sufficed.

Mouradian got a glass of tea and some bread and sausage in the officers’ tent the next morning. When a bottle came along, he swigged before he passed it. He didn’t drink like a Russian-he had but one liver to give for his country-but he drank. In weather like this, vodka made good antifreeze. It also helped you not notice the long, dull hours crawling by.

Lieutenant Mogamedov ducked into the tent not long after he did. The Azeri made a beeline for the samovar. As he gulped hot, sweet tea, he shivered theatrically. “Cold out there!”

Azeri and Armenian could agree on something. The Russian and Ukrainian flyers who made up the majority only hooted at a southerner’s discomfort. They started telling stories about really cold weather. Stas had flown against the Japanese in Siberia. He’d been through plenty worse than this himself. That didn’t mean he enjoyed it.

Mogamedov tore at the coarse black bread with his teeth. He ignored the sausage. Stas realized after a minute that the cheap, fatty stuff was bound to be mostly pork. His new copilot didn’t drink any of the free-flowing vodka, either.

That was interesting. Mogamedov might not be a pious Muslim-you couldn’t very well be a pious anything and a New Soviet Man at the same time-but he didn’t go out of the way to flout the tenets of his ancestral faith.

If I want to, chances are I can use that against him, Stas thought. All he had to do was whisper in an informer’s ear, and Mogamedov would find Chekists crawling over him like lice. And all Stas had to do after that was look at himself in the mirror for the rest of his life.

One of his bristly eyebrows quirked. If only he didn’t despise people who did such things. But he did. He knew exactly what he thought of people who sold out their friends and neighbors and acquaintances so they could move up themselves. No Russian, not even the filthiest mat, could describe the blackness of such treachery. For that, you needed Armenian.

Proof of how strongly he felt about it was that he wouldn’t give an Azeri to the KGB. If Mogamedov did himself in by avoiding pork and alcohol, then he did. Stas wouldn’t be especially sorry. But he wouldn’t grease the skids-even with lard.

That thought, perhaps aided by the vodka he’d knocked back, made him chuckle to himself. Isa Mogamedov noticed. Unlike most of the men eating breakfast, he wasn’t drinking part of it, so he noticed things they might have missed. “What’s funny, Comrade Pilot?”

“I was just remembering a joke somebody told me,” Mouradian answered-a lie, but a polite lie.

But the Russian sitting next to him gave him a nudge and said, “Well, tell it, then. I could use a laugh.” By his slurred speech, he’d drunk more of his breakfast than Stas had.

Mouradian couldn’t even shoot him a resentful look. Mogamedov might notice that, too. Instead, he really had to remember a joke, and he had to come out with it. He chose a long, complicated story about a pretty girl in Moscow who wanted to record a message for her grandmother in far-off Irkutsk but couldn’t afford it, and about the lecherous fellow who ran the recording shop and saw a chance to take it out in trade. “So there she is, on her knees in front of him, holding it”-Stas illustrated with appropriate lewd gestures-“and he says, ‘Well? Go ahead!’ And she leans forward, and she says, ‘Hello? Granny?’ ”

The Russian officer bellowed laughter. Tears leaked from the corners of his eyes. “That’s good! Bozhemoi, that’s good!” he spluttered, and laughed some more.

Mogamedov laughed, too, even if not quite so much. Everybody who’d listened laughed. You couldn’t hear that joke without laughing-at least, Stas had never run into anybody who could.

Another vodka bottle came around. He swigged from it. No, vodka wasn’t against his religion, even if he’d drunk wine more often before the Red Air Force pulled him out of Armenia. Wine tasted good, too. As far as he could see, vodka had only one purpose: knocking you on your ass. The stuff was damn good at it, too. He offered the bottle to the Russian who’d made him come up with the joke.

That worthy poured it down as if he never expected to see any more. He almost emptied the bottle. The guy beside him did kill it. Others were going round, though. Before long, one got to Isa Mogamedov. Polite as a cat, he passed it on. “More for the rest of us!” said the Russian he gave it to. That got almost as big a laugh as Stas’ joke.

Theo Hossbach was a curiosity in the Wehrmacht: a panzer radioman who didn’t like to talk. He doled out words as if somebody were charging him a half a Reichsmark for each and every one. The radioman in a Panzer III sat next to the driver, and also handled the bow machine gun. Theo’d liked his place in the old Panzer II better. He’d been in back of the turret, and most of the time nobody bothered him at all.

Only one problem there: the Panzer II was well on the way from obsolescent to obsolete. Its armor was useless against anything more than small-arms fire, while its 20mm main armament could pop away from now till doomsday without doing anything a KV-1 or a T-34 would notice. Panzer IIs soldiered on in the east. They still made decent reconnaissance vehicles-they could go places armored cars couldn’t-but they weren’t fighting panzers any more.

For that matter, a Panzer III’s 37mm gun was only a door-knocker against a KV-1’s or a T-34’s front armor. It did have a chance of punching through their steel sides or into the engine. But German panzers were badly outgunned these days.

In weather like this, just getting German panzers to run was an adventure. The winter before, the Panzertruppen had often kept fires going through the night under their machines’ engine compartments so they’d start up in the morning. The extra-strength antifreeze and winter lubricants were better this year. All the same, everybody who wore the black coveralls and death’s-head panzer emblem envied the T-34’s diesel motor. It seemed immune to cold and snow and ice.

Somewhere up ahead lay victory, if they could find it. Across the radio set from Theo, Adi Stoss grinned cynically. “Next stop Smolensk, right?” the driver said.

“Right,” Theo said: fifty pfennigs expended. Adi’s grin got wider, but no less cynical. The summer’s campaign had been aimed at Smolensk, the great fortress on the road to Moscow. It wasn’t summer any more. It wasn’t 1941 any more, either. Smolensk was still in Russian hands.

The Panzer III clattered across the snowy landscape. Ostketten-wide tracks made for the mud and snow in these parts-helped it keep going. Even with Ostketten, it couldn’t match a T-34’s cross-country performance.

Other panzers advanced alongside Theo’s. Landsers accompanied them on foot and in armored personnel carriers. Those were nice machines. They took infantry to where it needed to fight and kept it from getting killed on the way … unless, of course, something really nasty happened, which it always could. The personnel carriers also let infantry keep up with the panzers, always a problem. They would have done even better had the Reich had more of them.

Everything would have been better had the Reich had more of it. Sitting up here, Theo could see out. He missed his iron nest in the Panzer II. Seeing out, he was forcibly reminded how vast this country was. It made even the Wehrmacht seem undersized and overstretched. You overran villages and towns. You shelled and machine-gunned the Ivans who tried to stop you. You went on. And what lay ahead? Always more villages and towns. Always more Ivans, too.

Somewhere up ahead here-probably not very far up ahead, either-more Russians waited. Theo cherished every moment of peace and relative quiet. He knew how precious such moments were.

Hermann Witt’s voice came out of the speaking tube from the turret: “Panzer halt!”

“Halting,” Adi said, and hit the brakes. “What’s up?” he added. “I don’t see anything.”

Peering through his vision slits, Theo didn’t see anything, either. It didn’t prove much, not when he had little chance of seeing things while restricted by the slits. Like any good panzer commander, Sergeant Witt rode with head and shoulders out of the turret when bullets weren’t flying, and sometimes even when they were. Somebody in the panzer needed a good view of the wider world.

“I’m not quite sure,” Witt answered. “But take a look over about two o’clock. Something’s not right there.” As if to underscore the words, he traversed the turret, presumably toward two o’clock. Through the rumble of the idling engine, Theo heard him tell Lothar Eckhardt, “Give it a round of HE there.”

Theo still didn’t see anything funny. “One round of HE,” the gunner agreed. The main armament bellowed. Inside the panzer, the noise wasn’t too bad. The cartridge case clattered down onto the bottom of the fighting compartment. The harsh, familiar stink of smokeless powder made Theo cough.

The 37mm shell burst in what seemed no more than the middle of a snowdrift-till it came in. Then everything happened at once. How many Russians, how many panzers, had sheltered behind that tall, concealing drift? They all boiled out now, and they were spoiling for a fight.

“Get moving, Adi!” Hermann Witt yelled.

Adi was already gunning the Panzer III. He knew as well as Witt that you didn’t want to be a sitting duck for a T-34. (Theo didn’t want to be anywhere within a hundred kilometers of a T-34, but that was a different story.) The Soviet panzer’s big drawback was that the commander also served as gunner-the French made the same mistake. That left the poor bastard as busy as a one-armed paper hanger with hives. Most Russians weren’t good shots, either.

But T-34s carried 76mm cannon. If a round hit you, it was going to kill you. You didn’t want to give those overworked, poorly trained sons of bitches a good shot at you.

A rifle bullet spanged off the panzer. The Russian infantry could shoot from now till doomsday without hurting it, but they were trouble for the Landsers with the German armor. Theo sprayed fire from his MG-34. He wasn’t aiming at anyone in particular. As long as he made the Red Army men dive into the snow, he’d be happy. If he did let the air out of one or two of them, he’d be overjoyed.

“Panzer halt!” Witt ordered. Even as Adi Stoss braked, the panzer commander spoke to the loader: “Armor-piercing this time.”

“AP. Right,” Kurt Poske said, and slammed a shell with a black tip into the breech.

No more than a second and a half later, Eckhardt fired. Everybody in the Panzer III screamed “Hit!” at the same time. But the AP round glanced off the T-34’s cleverly sloped armor. It didn’t get through. And the enemy monster’s Big Bertha of a gun swung toward them.

This time, Adi goosed the panzer without waiting for orders. Maybe that threw the Ivan’s aim off just enough. Theo got to watch that big gun belch flame and smoke. He braced himself, as if bracing would do any good. He didn’t know where the enemy round hit. He did know it didn’t slam through the Panzer III’s frontal armor-or through him. As long as he knew that, nothing else mattered.

“Panzer halt!” Hermann Witt ordered again. Adi swore, but obeyed. The 37mm roared twice in quick succession. The first round bounced off like the one before it. The second buried itself almost to the drive bands, but didn’t get through. “Forward!” Witt yelled again.

Forward Adi went. When would Ivan take another shot at them? Yes, he had to do it all himself, but … An AP round from some other German panzer got through his side armor. His ammunition store went up, blowing an enormous, perfect smoke ring out the turret hatch.

Adi let out a war whoop. He sounded like an Indian himself, even if that was what German soldiers called their foes. Then he said, “It’s nice to have friends.”

“Ja,” Theo agreed, and said not another word. A raised eyebrow and a small tilt of the head did his talking for him.

Even in the gloomy confines of the panzer, he could watch Adi redden. The driver would never have a lot of friends, and would of necessity trust the ones he did have with his life. Every panzer man did that to a degree, of course, but Adi’s degree was bigger than most. “You know what I mean,” he muttered.

Theo nodded. He didn’t need to spend any speech on that. He peered through the machine gun’s sight. It didn’t look as if any of the Russian panzer crew had managed to bail out. He knew a moment’s sympathy for the poor damned Ivans, though he would have done his best to cut them down had they escaped. He’d had to flee two wrecked panzers, and all he’d lost on account of it was half a finger off his left hand. That was luck, too, nothing else but.