Bombs Away

14

Back in the black days of October 1941, the Soviet Union had chosen Kuibishev, on the Volga just west of the Urals, as the capital in case the Nazis took Moscow. There’d been a panic and a skedaddle out of Moscow that October, when it looked as if the Hitlerites would do exactly that. These days, people talked about the skedaddle in whispers when they talked about it at all.

Boris Gribkov understood why they whispered, and why they didn’t like to speak at all. That was called a working sense of self-preservation. Underlying the reticence was the question of whether anyone would have paid attention to Stalin had he tried to give orders from a provincial town dusty in the summer and frozen in the winter. The Soviet Union was lucky: it hadn’t had to find out.

But Kuibishev was now what it had been intended to be then: the alternative capital of the USSR. Jackbooted SS men didn’t goose-step through Moscow’s streets. Atomic fire, though, had burnt too many of those streets out of existence. Too many commissars and generals were burnt out of existence, too.

So the authorities hadn’t brought Boris and his bomber crew to Moscow to congratulate them on dealing a similar blow to Seattle. No, they’d pinned Hero of the Soviet Union medals on them here in Kuibishev. They’d photographed them for Pravda and Izvestia and Red Star. And, after that, they hadn’t seemed sure what to do with them next.

“You know what really bothers me?” Leonid Tsederbaum said quietly as he and Gribkov walked from their barracks to the mess hall at the Red Air Force base where they were being kept. Confined, Gribkov judged-and hoped-was too strong a word.

“No. What really bothers you, Leonid Abramovich?” the pilot asked. It wasn’t as if he didn’t also have a list of things that really bothered him. Tsederbaum was a clever Zhid. He might be bothered by some things that hadn’t even occurred to Gribkov.

“What really bothers me,” he said, pausing to light a papiros and blow a stream of smoke up toward the watery sky, “is that, as far as I can tell, we’re the only Tu-4 crew that bombed America they’re making propaganda about.”

“Oh.” Gribkov felt vaguely disappointed. “That crossed my mind, too.” He nodded to himself, admiring the understatement. “Even so, though, considering what we all did, you have to say the rodina got a good return on its investment.”

“How capitalist!” Tsederbaum exclaimed. Boris eyed him. In the USSR, a man could disappear without ditching in the Pacific or having the Americans shoot him down. A Hero of the Soviet Union could become a nobody in nothing flat. But the navigator didn’t look like someone getting ready to report him to the MGB. He just looked like somebody cracking wise. Of course, what somebody looked like didn’t mean a thing.

“Have you heard anything about our next assignment?” Gribkov asked. Being a clever Zhid, Tsederbaum was liable to have connections in all kinds of interesting places.

Just because he was liable to didn’t mean he did. He shook his head. “Not a word. Since you’re the pilot, I was hoping you could tell me.”

“Sorry,” Gribkov said. “I serve the Soviet Union, but they haven’t told me how they want me to serve it next.”

He wondered how much Soviet Union would be left to serve by the time the war ended. The Red Army was still advancing in Germany, at least if you believed Radio Moscow. Here, Gribkov did. He knew the signs a newsreader used when he was hedging-or, for that matter, when he was just lying. He hadn’t noticed any of those in the reports.

Even if the advance stopped, even if the Americans and their Western European lackeys somehow turned the tide and fought their way through Russia’s allies in Eastern Europe and invaded the USSR, they wouldn’t be able to conquer and occupy it. Boris was sure of that. If Hitler hadn’t been able to, nobody could.

Which might not have anything to do with anything. He knew what the bomb his Tu-4 had dropped did to Seattle. How many of those bombs had fallen on the Soviet Union? How many holes did you need to blow in the fabric of a country before it was more holes than fabric? Boris Gribkov didn’t know, but he did know the experiment was going on right this minute, both here and in America.

He and Tsederbaum walked up three wooden steps to the mess hall. His nose twitched as soon as he opened the door. A cook with a ladle stood next to an enormous cauldron of borscht. Another stood next to an equally enormous cauldron of shchi. Beet soup or cabbage soup? That had been the Russian question for as long as there’d been Russians. The cauldron of kasha-buckwheat groats-was smaller but still formidable. There was also black bread and peppery sausage coiled like rope.

Gribkov loaded up his tray. So did Tsederbaum. They both took twenty or twenty-five centimeters’ worth of sausage. The stuff was bound to have pork in it. Gribkov couldn’t imagine a Soviet military kitchen worrying about kosher food. To Russian military cooks, the meals they turned out were like gasoline: fuel for the body, nothing more.

He didn’t say anything about it to Leonid Tsederbaum. The Jew had to know what kind of meat went into the sausage-and the shchi, and the borscht-as well as he did. If Tsederbaum didn’t care, that was the navigator’s business.

Glasses of tea from a samovar completed the meal. Gribkov and Tsederbaum spooned in sugar, then sat down on one of the long benches and ate. It wasn’t the kind of meal anyone would go looking for in a restaurant. All the same, Gribkov knew he was getting more food and better food than most civilians did.

“What now?” Tsederbaum asked after they put their dishes in a basin and their trays on a mountainous stack.

“I don’t know. What now?” Gribkov answered. “We spent all that time getting ready to fly the mission. Then we went and flew it. And we didn’t just fly it-we came back from it.”

“And now they have no idea what to do with us,” Tsederbaum continued for him.

“And now they have no idea what to do with us,” Gribkov agreed. “So we wait around till they make up their minds.”

“Let’s go outside,” Tsederbaum said. When they couldn’t be easily overheard, he went on, “Do you want to bomb Paris or London or Rome?”

“I serve the Soviet Union!” Gribkov said, which was never the wrong answer. But it wasn’t always enough of the right answer. After a moment, he went on, “Do I want to? Of course not. Who in his right mind could? Will I, if they give me the order? I will, because I do serve the Soviet Union. And I’ll worry about what I want some other time.”

Leonid Tsederbaum opened his mouth, then closed it again. Whatever went on behind his eyes, Gribkov couldn’t read it. A couple of seconds later, he tried again: “That’s a good answer, Comrade Pilot.”

“How about you?” Gribkov wasn’t happy about the way the navigator had put him on the spot. “What would you do if they gave us an order like that?”

“Oh, I’d get the plane where it was supposed to go,” Tsederbaum replied. “After all, I’ve already done it once. And I’m a great coward.”

“I don’t think so!” Whatever Gribkov had expected, that wasn’t it.

“Oh, but I am,” Tsederbaum said. “If my choice is between a bullet in the back of the neck now and generations yet unborn spitting on my name later, they can spit all they please.”

“It isn’t like that,” Gribkov insisted. “We’d be doing it for the proletarian cause, for the socialist cause.”

“If you say so.”

“We would!”

“Even if we would, do you think anyone would be glad to remember us for melting the Eiffel Tower down to a stump about this high?” Tsederbaum drew a line across his own belly, just above his navel.

Gribkov winced. He couldn’t help it. Even so, he said, “That didn’t stop the Americans from hammering the Kremlin. If they’re hard, we have to be hard, too.”

“I understand that, Comrade Pilot. Just because I understand it doesn’t mean I like it,” Tsederbaum said. “And do you think for a minute that those American pilots don’t have bad dreams, too?”

The too was what pierced Gribkov to the root. He hadn’t told anybody about his fiery dreams. He most assuredly hadn’t told Leonid Abramovich Tsederbaum. Yet the Jew knew. He knew much too well.

–

The Yanks were back at the Owl and Unicorn! So were the RAF men who flew out of Sculthorpe with them. Daisy Baxter cared more about the Americans. April would indeed have been the cruellest month without them. Her own countrymen were a thrifty lot, keeping tabs on every ha’penny and turning loose of it only when it was forcibly extracted, as if by a dentist’s grippers.

Americans, though…Americans spent as if there was no tomorrow. The base remained on high alert. The people who gave orders, though, discovered that the men who carried them out were human beings, and needed an escape valve to relieve the pressure of what they did. Except perhaps for a brothel, a pub was the best escape valve around.

“You gotta make that getaway turn as quick as you can, you know?” an American said, his accent sharp and hard. He used his hands to show what he meant, continuing, “If you don’t, if the blast wave catches you when you’re halfway through it, it’ll flip you around like a leaf in a breeze.”

“That happens to you, you’re lucky-damn lucky-if you ever pull out again, too,” another Yank said.

Working the tap, trying to keep up with their orders for bitter, listening with no more than half an ear, Daisy needed longer than she might have to realize they were talking about the blast wave from an atomic explosion. No wonder they spent as if there was no tomorrow! For the people they visited, there wasn’t.

A man at a slaughterhouse could knock cattle or sheep over the head day after day for years and years without ever thinking about what he was doing. Back in bygone times, executioners had hanged people the same way. But you needed imagination to be a good flyer. And if you had it, how could you help thinking about what you were doing?

An American first lieutenant she hadn’t seen before asked her for a pint. She drew it for him. He gave her a crown. When she started to return his change, he waved it away. “All funny money anyhow,” he said.

“Well, thanks very much.” She wondered if he knew how much he was overpaying. A lot of Americans, used to decimal coinage, had trouble with Britain’s more arcane system. If he did know, he didn’t care.

“Mud in your eye.” He raised the pint in salute, then started to take a long pull. But he stopped in surprise before it was well begun. He stared at the deep-amber liquid in the mug with sudden, astonished admiration and blurted, “This is good beer!”

“Glad you like it.” Daisy hid a smile. She’d seen that reaction before from Americans downing their first pint of best bitter.

This Yank had more enthusiasm than most. “I mean to tell you, Miss, this is good beer,” he said again. “The stuff you get in bottles in America, it tastes like they strain it through the kidneys of a horse-a sick horse, too. Draft beer’s a little better, but only a little. This here, though, this is great.” By the way he finished the pint, he meant every word of that.

“We aim to please.” Now Daisy did smile. She couldn’t help it, not with such an enthusiastic customer.

“Sweetheart, you hit the bull’s-eye.” She’d gone from Miss to Sweetheart in a couple of sentences. Well, beer and enthusiasm could do that. Having mentioned a bull’s-eye, the American waved toward the dartboard down at the end of the snug. Pete Huntington, a local man, was matched with an American sergeant. The Yank had some idea of what he was about. That put him ahead of most of his countrymen, who thought of darts as nothing more than a silly lark. But Pete was taking him to the cleaners just the same. No one would have told the sergeant his foe won tournaments all over East Anglia. The U.S. Air Force man standing in front of Daisy said, “Let me have another glass of this…what do you call it?”

He didn’t even know that. He was a new fish, all right. “Best bitter,” Daisy said patiently.

“You got that right!” He grinned and nodded. “It is the best-you better believe it!” He slid another fat silver coin at Daisy. “Big old coin,” he remarked, eyeing it. “Bigger than a cartwheel.”

“Cartwheel?” Whatever that Americanism meant, Daisy hadn’t run into it before, at least not where it had to do with money.

“Silver dollar,” the Yank explained. “They haven’t made ’em since the Depression-they just make halves, and use dollar bills instead.”

“Notes, we say.”

“Do you? How about that? Anyway, though, I’m from California, and there’s still lots of silver dollars around out West.”

She took one more stab at not gypping him: “Let me give you your change, please.”

He shook his head. “Nah, don’t bother. Way things look, I’m not likely to live long enough to care what I’ve got in my pockets when I go down.”

What has he got in his pocketses? Memories of some children’s book flickered in Daisy’s mind. Where did that line come from? As the Yank had, she also shook her head. The title wouldn’t come back to her. Letting it go, she said, “Well, your next couple are on the house, then.”

He touched the patent-leather brim of his officer’s cap. “Much obliged, dear, but you don’t have to do that.”

“I’m not doing it because I have to. I’m doing it because I want to,” Daisy said, in lieu of something like You’ve already bought them anyhow, you silly twit. He wouldn’t have paid any attention to that unless it made him mad.

“Well, that’s mighty nice of you.” He touched his cap again, coming closer to a real salute this time. “What’s your name?”

“I’m Daisy Baxter. I run the Owl and Unicorn.”

“Mighty pleased to meet you, Daisy. My name’s Bruce-Bruce McNulty.” He eyed her. “You run this joint? For real?”

“That’s right.” She nodded. “Why?”

“I just figured they hired you to tend bar on account of you’re so pretty-they figured you’d draw guys the way sugar draws ants.”

She chuckled. She’d heard more lines than she could remember; that was better than most. As was her habit, she replied as if he hadn’t been strewing compliments around: “No, the pub’s mine. It’s been mine since a little before the war-the last war, I should say-ended. My husband was fighting in Germany, and he didn’t come home.”

“Oh. I’m mighty sorry to hear it. I was there myself-I was flying a B-25 then. Just dumb luck I came back in one piece. The krauts, they sure did their best to see that I didn’t.”

She would have guessed him for a year or two younger than she was. Probably not, though, not if he’d fought in World War II. “What do you fly now?” she asked him.

“One of the Superforts down the road,” he said, which surprised her not at all. “Guys who were in the B-25 and B-26 kind of have a head start on the big bird, since they all come with nose wheels. A little harder when you’re used to tilting up because you were in a B-17 or some other plane with a tailwheel.”

“I hadn’t thought of that,” she said, which was true enough.

Bruce McNulty wagged his hand, as if to say it didn’t matter one way or the other. “Enough about me,” he said, so earnestly that she could tell the best bitter was doing some of the talking. “What I want to know is how come a pretty gal like you never found another fella.”

Daisy would have retired rich long since if she’d had a quid for every lecherous flyboy who asked her that. For another fella, they always meant me. Now she shrugged. “At first, I wasn’t at all interested, which I’m sure you’ll understand. Since the worst of the grief passed away, I haven’t met anyone who suited me.”

She waited for this McNulty to volunteer his services. That was what they did. Except he didn’t. He just said, “Well, I hope you do one of these days.” Such restraint so amazed her, she drew him another pint on the house. Why not? She was still far ahead of the game.

–

Gustav Hozzel didn’t know exactly where he was. Somewhere between Frankenberg and Arnsberg-he knew that much. Along with the Amis-and with Max Bachman, who also remained lucky-he was still retreating to the north and west. And the Red Army was still coming on. Not much seemed to have changed from the last war, in other words.

He was filthy. He couldn’t remember the last time he’d bathed. He couldn’t remember the last time he’d shaved, either. His beard had streaks of gray on the chin that hadn’t been there the last time he went to war. But he wasn’t lousy, which he surely would have been then. A couple of weeks earlier, an American aid man had sprayed him with DDT. He had no idea what went into DDT. Whatever it was, it did to lice and fleas and ticks and other little pests what Zyklon-B had done to Jews.

Russian mortar bombs whispered in and blew up with sudden, startling bangs. After one of those bangs, someone started shrieking for his mother-in English, so he was an American. You felt bad when somebody screamed liked that. No human being who wasn’t desperately hurt could make such horrible noises. Gustav would have felt a trifle worse had the wounded man been a fellow German.

Then he blinked and whipped his head around. That noise like a giant tearing heavy canvas was a blast from the past in the most literal sense of the words. That couldn’t be anything but a German MG42-no other machine gun in the world had such a high rate of fire. Whoever was shooting it had found enough 7.92mm cartridges to satisfy its appetite for ammo.

Some of the Russians knew what it was. They cried out in alarm. They’d hated and feared the MG42 from the moment the Germans started using it. It spat death at rates unmatched. Because of that and because of the noise it made, they called it Hitler’s saw. The Amis and the Tommies hadn’t loved it, either.

Most Russian private soldiers, like their American counterparts in this fight, would be too young to have heard it before. The old sweats, the corporals and sergeants and officers from captain’s rank on up, would have to warn the kids what they were facing.

I bet the Amis are glad it’s not shooting at them this time, Gustav thought. He crawled toward the snarling gun. That noise brought back happy memories to him, memories of Russian soldiers falling over and Russian soldiers running away.

He wanted to find the crew that had brought such an excellent weapon out of retirement. If they needed him to help serve the gun, he would gladly do that. He could handle it. By the end of the war, each German squad had centered on an MG42 (or, occasionally, an older, more finicky, MG34). The riflemen were there more to protect the machine gun than for the sake of their puny firepower. Everybody learned to handle the piece in case the regular guys got hurt.

Gustav looked for a detachment of emergency militiamen, figuring only Germans could properly appreciate the wonders of the MG42. But the men serving the machine gun-and doing it with the same unflustered competence Landsers would have shown in the western Ukraine in 1944-were Yankees, jabbering away in English.

Gustav hadn’t worried about English during the Second World War. He’d picked up tiny bits in the years since. Because Fulda lay so close to the border with the Russian zone, it had swarmed with American soldiers. The Amis had run the town till they finally let it elect its own Burgomeister. Gustav and Max had printed for them, in English as well as German. So he had those bits. Max, now, Max could really use it.

He waited for the crew to notice him, and to make sure he wasn’t a Russian but wore pretty much the same uniform they did. Then he pointed at the MG42 and asked, “Where find?”

As soon as they figured out he was one of the gun’s original users, they burst out laughing. One of them spoke better German than Gustav did English. “We found it in a warehouse,” he said, his speech painfully correct, like a clever schoolboy’s. “We found some friends who knew where cases of cartridges were kept. It uses a great many cartridges.”

“You’ve sure as hell got that right,” Gustav said. Then he said it again, more slowly. The Ami didn’t understand what he heard very well. He must have studied German in school and forgotten it till he came over here.

“It’s a wonderful gun, though,” another American said, in English. He added “Wunderbar!” in case Gustav hadn’t got it.

But Gustav nodded-he had. “Do you change the barrel often?” he asked the fellow who had a little Deutsch. Because the MG42 put so many rounds through the barrel so fast, it heated up in a hurry. The Wehrmacht had issued an asbestos mitt to handle the hot metal. With it, you could take off the old barrel and swap in a new, cool one in seconds.

The Americans didn’t have an asbestos mitt. Stowing those along with the machine gun would have stretched even German efficiency. But they did have a folded-up wool blanket that now showed scorch marks. The Ami showed it to Gustav to let him know they weren’t burning out the barrels. He nodded again. People said Americans were good at improvising.

Russians, on the other hand…Russians were good at muddling through, at keeping at it when anyone sane would have given up. “Urra! Urra!” the infantrymen shouted, a sound to make the hair of anyone who’d heard it before want to stand on end. They were nerving themselves for a charge.

“Urra! Urra!” Here they came, a great khaki flood of them.

For a bad fraction of a second, Gustav thought he was back in the other war, trying to hold a position in Poland or, later, in eastern Germany. Then the flashback, the nightmare, merged with reality, and reality was just as bad. Armed with the Russian PPSh, he had to sit tight as the Ivans rushed forward. Some of them still wore billowing greatcoats; it might be spring, but it wasn’t warm. His submachine gun was just a peashooter-it couldn’t reach them yet.

Some of them tripped in holes in the ground or over hastily laid barbed wire. A few stepped on land mines. One must have set off a big charge, because he and two of his neighbors vanished into scarlet mist. But the rest of the Red Army men closed ranks, linked arms, and came on. They were as impervious to doubt or damage as they had been on the Ostfront a few years before. Vodka and fear of their own secret police both had to play a part in that.

Rrrriiiippp! Rrrriiiippp! The MG42 cut loose. The Amis fired short bursts to keep from overheating the barrel as best they could. They traversed it so the stream of bullets knocked down Russians across a broad stretch of the line. Riflemen and Yankees with grease guns-which fired heavier cartridges than the PPSh-also took a toll. That khaki wave was liable to roll over these defenses anyhow.

An American took another belt of ammo out of a wooden crate and fed it into the MG42’s insatiable maw. The old crate had an eagle with a swastika in its claws burned onto its side. That emblem was illegal in the new Germany the Allies had made and then broken. It was mighty welcome to Gustav just the same.

Bullets snapped past the machine gunners. Some of the Ivans were shooting as they ran. It wasn’t aimed fire, or anything like it. With enough bullets flying, that didn’t matter. Gustav started shooting back from behind a large chunk of broken brickwork. The Ivans were close enough for him to have a decent chance of hitting them with the PPSh-not a good sign.

Then another machine gun opened up. Its bass stutter put even the MG42’s growl to shame. During the last war, Gustav hadn’t had to face the Americans’.50-caliber machine gun. He counted himself goddamn lucky he wasn’t facing it now. Those big, heavy slugs didn’t just drop the Russians they hit in their tracks. They threw the poor, sorry bastards every which way, like crumpled wastepaper.

Flesh and blood, even vodka-numbed flesh and blood, had their limits. Between them, the MG42 and that heavy monster not only reached but exceeded those limits. Instead of rushing forward, the Russians still on their feet turned and ran away. They wouldn’t break through on this stretch of the line.

One of the Americans on the MG42 tossed Gustav a pack of Camels. “Danke,” Gustav said. His hands trembled when he stuck a cigarette in his mouth. He needed three tries before he could light it. The Amis didn’t laugh at him. They were having the same trouble themselves. They’d lived through a nasty firefight. The shakes came with the territory.

–

Tibor Nagy had a bandage on his right thigh, under his dirty trousers. He had another one on his ribs. Both wounds were just grazes. They’d bled. They’d hurt. They’d left him with horrendous bruises, too. Try as he would, he couldn’t find a comfortable way to sleep.

People kept telling him he was lucky. If they meant he was lucky not to be dead, they were right. As far as he was concerned, though, real luck would have involved not getting hit at all or getting wounded badly enough to have to leave the front without getting crippled.

Instead, he crouched in a muddy hole in the ground. Artillery fire burst not nearly far enough away. Shell fragments screeched and whined by overhead. Pretty soon, the Russians would tell the Hungarian People’s Army to attack the Americans again.

No matter what the Russians told him, Tibor didn’t want to fight Americans. He didn’t want to fight anybody, but he really didn’t want to fight Americans. If you were on a schoolyard playground, did you poke the biggest kid in the eye, especially when he came from the richest family in town? Not unless you were out of your mind, you didn’t.

Or unless the mean kid at school told you he’d wallop the snot out of you unless you took a poke at the big, rich kid. That was what had happened to everybody in the Hungarian People’s Army. No matter what its soldiers thought, Stalin didn’t give them much choice. As a matter of fact, he gave them none.

“Come on, you sorry dingleberries,” Sergeant Gergely called. “Like it or not, we’re going up to the front. Move forward through the communications trenches.”

Reluctantly, Tibor came out of his foxhole. Like any other young Hungarian man, he recognized communications trenches when he saw them. He was too young to have used them during the last war, though Gergely surely would have. But the nomenclature of trench warfare was second nature to him. Everybody in Hungary had a father or grandfather who’d done his time in the trenches when the Kingdom of Hungary (much larger than the current Hungarian People’s Republic) went into World War I along with the rest of the defunct Empire of Austria-Hungary.

Tibor zigzagged along the trench. You didn’t dig them in a straight line; that would have invited one bullet or shell fragment to knock down a whole file of men. Even this trench had fewer kinks than a persnickety military engineer would have liked. It was also punctuated here and there by shell craters. Two burnt-out tank carcasses, one Russian, one American, sat no more than fifty meters apart. Tibor wondered whether they’d fired at each other at the same time.

Whether they had or not didn’t matter. The fighting around here had been rugged any which way. Those steel hulks said as much. So did the shell holes. And so did the faint but unmistakable death stink in the air. Not all the men who’d died in the past few weeks-or all the pieces of them, anyhow-had gone into the ground the way they would have in a well-ordered world.

Isztvan Szolovits trotted along behind Tibor. Both of them hunched forward to make sure they didn’t show themselves above the lip of the trench. “Well, here we go,” the Jew said in a low voice.

“Some fun, huh?” Tibor answered.

“Fun? That’s one word, I guess,” Szolovits said. “We’ve got to be nuts, even trying this.”

Since the same thought had gone through Tibor’s mind not long before, he couldn’t tell Szolovits he was full of crap. He did say, “If you have a better idea, I’d love to hear it.”

“What we ought to do is give up the first chance we get,” Szolovits replied, even more quietly than before-he wanted to make sure no one else heard.

“That’s desertion,” Tibor said automatically. “You know what they do to people who try to bug out on them.”

“That’s if we don’t make it convincing,” Szolovits said. “They’re sending us up there to fight. Wouldn’t you rather spend the rest of the war in a POW camp than in some scratched-out grave? Do you give a shit for Stalin and our fraternal socialist allies? C’mon!”

“If Gergely hears you, you’re dead meat. He’ll take care of that personally,” Tibor said.

“If you rat on me, I am. Otherwise? Maybe not,” the Jew returned. “You think Gergely doesn’t want to live, too? You think he isn’t figuring the angles? He’s so crooked, he can look down the crack of his own ass.”

Tibor snorted-not because Szolovits was wrong but because he was right. Anyone who could serve both the Arrow Cross and the Communist Party figured the angles better than a pool shark. If Tibor did rat on his fellow soldier, Szolovits would get it in the neck. And then? Then they’d commend Tibor and send him forward so he could get it in the neck, too. The Americans would give it to him, not his own people, but what difference did that make?

His heart sank when he saw soldiers in the forward trenches: Russians, dammit. A lieutenant came over to Sergeant Gergely and spoke to him in slow, accented German: “Half an hour from now, after artillery, we advance. You understand?”

Tibor hoped the sergeant would do as he’d done farther back, and pretend not to understand the only language a Magyar and a Russian were likely to have in common. But Gergely saluted, nodded, and said, “Zu Befehl, mein Herr!” He might have fallen straight out of Franz Joseph’s time.

“Gut, gut,” the young Soviet officer said. “You tell your men, so they know what to do.”

“Jawohl!” Gergely said, with another precise salute. He did everything but click his heels. Then he spoke in Magyar: “We go in in half an hour, after they shell the Americans. Good luck, boys! Stay as safe as you can.”

The Russian lieutenant sent him a fishy stare. Few who weren’t Hungarians learned Magyar. It had no close cousins in Europe. But that lieutenant might have understood more than he let on. Well, even if he did, Sergeant Gergely hadn’t said anything to upset him. You weren’t going to tell the soldiers you led to go out and get themselves killed as fast as they could.

Freight-train noises in the air, thunder on the ground: big shells flying in to tear at the Americans’ lines. From things Sergeant Gergely had said, the Red Army had always been strong in artillery. This wasn’t a crush-everything barrage. It was just designed to knock the Americans back on their heels. The infantry would do the hard work.

That Russian junior officer stuck a brass whistle in his mouth and blew a long, shrill blast. He yelled something in his own language and shouted “Forward!” in German for the Magyars’ benefit. Then he scrambled out of the trench and ran toward the Americans’ holes. His men followed. So did Tibor and his countrymen.

Bullets cracked past him. He clamped down on his bladder and his anus as hard as he could. Not five meters from him, Gyula Pusztai went down with a bubbling wail, clutching at his midsection. The big man thrashed like a cat hit by a car. He was no great brain, but how smart did you need to be to know you were dying in agony?

Tibor yanked the pin from a grenade and chucked it into the foxhole ahead of him. A Yank in there screamed just the way poor Gyula had. Tibor felt terrible. He’d been thinking about giving himself up to the Americans, not killing them.

That didn’t mean they weren’t still thinking about killing him. Their semiautomatic rifles fired faster than the bolt-action pieces he and his friends carried. A few of the Russians had submachine guns or assault rifles, which put still more rounds in the air, but only a few.

An American popped out from behind a bullet-pocked freezer. What the hell was that doing in the middle of a battlefield? Tibor swung his Mosin-Nagant toward the man in olive drab. The American fired first: three bullets, one right after another. Two caught Tibor in the chest. It hurt like hell, but only for a few seconds. Then merciful blackness swept down forever.