Bombs Away

8

For once, Gustav Hozzel was sleeping like a rock. Nothing bothered him-not lumps in the mattress, and not nightmares going back to his days on the Eastern Front. He simply lay there, forgetting the world and by the world forgot.

At five o’clock in the morning, the world remembered him-and everybody else anywhere close to the border between the western and eastern parts of Germany. For a few confused seconds, he thought a thunderstorm was hitting Fulda. But no rain drummed on the roof, and all the noise came out of the east.

Beside him in the warm, soft bed, Luisa sleepily said, “Gustav? What’s going on?”

“The Russians are coming.” His own voice sounded like the tolling of an iron bell. “You’d better get down to the cellar, dear.”

“What? They’re kilometers away from here. Even if those are guns, nothing’s going to happen here for a while.” His wife had woken up enough to think straight, anyhow.

Straight, maybe, but not straight enough. “The shells can’t get us yet, no,” Gustav answered. “And the Amis will fight hard to keep the Russians from breaking through here. This is one of the key places where they stand a chance of doing that. But the bombers should be here any minute.”

“Bombers?” Luisa started to scramble to her feet. “You don’t mean dropping one of those atomic things, do you?”

“No, or I don’t think so,” Gustav answered. “They want to go through Fulda, not make it so nobody can. But that doesn’t mean they won’t shoot up the place or drop regular explosives on it. So get moving!” He smacked her on the backside, hard enough to make her jump and yip. The noise sounded like a rifle crack-if you’d never heard a rifle crack.

For a wonder, Luisa didn’t argue with him. She just threw her hands in the air and hurried downstairs. Gustav put on dungarees, a sturdy wool shirt with lots of pockets, and the stoutest shoes he owned. They weren’t marching boots-no hobnails in the soles or anything-but they would have to do.

He started down the stairs himself. He hadn’t got to the ground floor before American antiaircraft guns started their percussive hammering. Through the quick-firing guns’ racket, he heard a rising roar of aircraft engines. Sure as the devil, the Russians were coming to town.

A split second later, he recognized which aircraft engines those were. They were Il-2s or, more likely, Il-10s: Shturmoviks. Just the sound made his balls want to crawl up into his belly. The attack planes’ Russian designers called them Flying Tanks. Fearful Landsers tagged them with names like the Meatgrinder and the Black Death. The Shturmovik was heavily armored and carried much too much forward-facing firepower. Though it wasn’t very maneuverable, all that steel plating made it a bitch and a half to shoot down.

Explosions rocked the outskirts of Fulda, marching closer and closer. Shturmoviks carried bombs, too. They’d zoom in just above the treetops or roofs, shoot and bomb everything in sight, and get the hell out.

Cannon rattled in the air. More bombs burst. The upstairs windows shattered. A noise like a car hitting a wall and a cloud of plaster dust pouring down the stairs after Gustav said a round from one of those airplanes had ventilated the bedroom.

“Go on!” he shouted at Luisa, who still hesitated near the top of the cellar stairs. “You want the next one to tear through you?”

“What are you going to do?” she asked-he showed no signs of taking shelter with her.

“Whatever the Americans let me. Whatever I can,” he answered with a shrug. “Remember, sweetheart, I know how to play this game. I had to quit in 1945, but it looks like things have started up again.”

“They’ll kill you!” Luisa said.

Gustav shrugged again. “If they do break through here, we’ll have to live under them. That’s not living. You don’t believe me, ask the Poles or the Czechs or the Hungarians. Ask the Germans in their zone. Now go on down there. Stay safe. I love you.” He hurried out the front door, not looking back to see whether she did what he told her to.

Out in the street, the air smelled of more plaster dust, of woodsmoke, and of high explosives. It also smelled of shit, and of the sour sweat of human fear. Gustav nodded to himself. It smelled like a battlefield, all right.

Another Shturmovik buzzed past, guns blazing. Gustav threw himself down behind a chimney that hadn’t been lying in the middle of the alley half an hour earlier. A bullet spanged off the bricks, struck sparks, and whined away. He laughed as he picked himself up again. Damned if his reflexes didn’t still work.

American jeeps and halftracks added the familiar note of exhaust fumes to the symphony of stinks. They were heading east, toward the fighting, not bugging out. That was good. Gustav supposed it was, anyhow. At least they meant what they said about keeping this part of Germany out of Soviet hands.

Gustav didn’t speak more than fragments of English. He’d picked up some Russian during the war-no, during the last war-but didn’t think that would do him any good. In fact, it seemed more likely to get him shot.

He went looking for Max Bachman. Max could palaver with the Amis for both of them. And he found his boss and friend sooner than he’d expected. The printer was heading toward his house.

“Here we go.” Max sounded surprisingly chipper. “Takes me back, it does, to hear the Iron Gustavs buzzing in.”

That was another German nickname for Shturmoviks. Gustav had got into a brawl about it when a Dummkopf in his section tried to pin it on him. From Max, he didn’t mind hearing it. And he felt surprisingly chipper himself. “Same here,” he agreed. “Come on. Let’s see if the Americans will give us guns for that militia thing.”

“Guns and uniforms.” Max wore the same kind of clothes Gustav did. “If the Russians catch us armed and we’re dressed like this-” He made a death-rattle noise. Of course, the Ivans might do in prisoners even in uniform. It was one of the things that happened. Gustav knew it had happened a good bit in the Wehrmacht. They played for keeps in the east. And what the Waffen-SS had done…

Battle brought new noises now. Jet fighters bansheed overhead. Some, with the American white star, went after the Shturmoviks. Others, with the Soviet red star, did their best to keep the Americans off the attack planes. The American and Russian jets tangled with one another, too. Gustav pumped a fist when a MiG fell out of the sky trailing smoke and with a big chunk of one wing bitten out. The crash had a dreadfully final sound. A plume of fire and greasy black smoke marked the fighter pilot’s pyre.

“Hey! You Yanks!” Max shouted to a couple of Americans going by in a jeep.

He made them stop, anyway. One of them said something to him. He answered in English. He sounded fluent to Gustav, but what did Gustav know? Max and the Ami went back and forth. Then the guy driving the jeep put it in gear and roared away.

“What did he say?” Gustav asked.

“They’re passing out rifles and jackets with armbands and helmets over by the Rathaus,” Max told him. “We have to promise to give the stuff back when the emergency’s over. They’ll use us, but they still don’t trust us very far.”

“I don’t care,” Gustav said. “No matter how bad the Americans are, Stalin will be worse.” Max nodded. They hurried over to the town hall.

Pom-pom guns in the square did their best to hold marauding Shturmoviks at bay. The rifles a grizzled American sergeant doled out were bolt-action Springfields, not the semiautomatic M-1s his countrymen carried. Gustav didn’t fuss. They were close cousins to the Mauser he’d lugged for so long. The jackets stank of mothballs. They’d probably been in storage somewhere since 1945. Again, so what? The band on the left sleeve read German Emergency Volunteer. Volkssturm men had worn such armbands the last time around. Sometimes they helped, sometimes not. The helmet was an American pot with a separate fiber liner, not a German coal-scuttle. Gustav didn’t think it covered enough of his noodle, but, like the rifle, it was better than nothing.

And he was soldiering again. All he needed was a tinfoil tube of liver paste to convince him he’d never been a civilian, not even for a minute.

–

“Walk!” the MGB man barked, the snap of accustomed command in his voice.

“Tak. I’m walking, Comrade, I’m walking.” Ihor Shevchenko took a calculated risk when he said yes in Ukrainian rather than using the Russian da. He spoke Russian fine. But he wanted the Chekist to think of him as a dim country bumpkin. And if he exaggerated his limp…Well, his mother hadn’t raised him to be a fool.

Maybe he laid the limp on too thick. “Come over here!” the MGB man ordered. “Let’s have a look at that leg, dammit.”

“Tak,” Ihor repeated. He remembered not to lose the limp as he walked over to the unwelcome visitor to the kolkhoz.

When he pulled up his trouser leg, the MGB man’s face changed a little. It was an ugly wound, with a scar like a crab’s spread claws and with a good-sized cavity in the muscle where the surgeon had taken out flesh so it wouldn’t rot and poison him. “Put yourself in order,” the fellow said grudgingly. “You really did stop something there, didn’t you?”

“Afraid I did.” Ihor wanted to ask him, And what did you do in the Great Patriotic War, pussy? Odds were the bastard had spent his time in a heated office a thousand kilometers from the front. His only worry would have been whether he could scare the pretty file clerk into sucking him off. But you couldn’t remind him of that, or he’d make you sorry. He had as many ways as beer had bubbles.

“All right,” he said now, and made a tickmark on a sheet of paper in his clipboard. “We’ll leave you here, then. I don’t think that leg will let you go back into the infantry.”

“I serve the Soviet Union, Comrade!” That one never let you down. Here, it meant Whatever you say is fine with me. Ihor was lying through his teeth, of course. Had the Chekist tried to recall him, he would have done his level best to arrange an accident for the man before they left the collective farm.

As things were, the son of a bitch was taking four men from the kolkhoz. Radio Moscow bragged about Soviet victory after Soviet victory, but how many men were going into the sausage machine to win those victories (if they were victories)? Enough so the Red Army needed more bodies. That was as much as Ihor could say.

Would the authorities adjust the collective farm’s production norms to take into account the workers it suddenly didn’t have? That was so funny, Ihor almost burst out laughing. They would pretend it had as many workers as ever. After all, they had their larger, oblast-wide production norms to consider.

The chances that the kolkhoz’s crops would be as large with fewer people to tend them were slim and none. The chances that anyone would get in trouble for failing to meet production norms, though, were also slim and none. Somehow or other, the norms would be met…on paper, anyway. If the actual grain brought in from the actual fields didn’t quite match what got set down on paper, well, what could you expect in a world full of unreliable human beings?

On paper, the USSR set production records every year. People in the actual world went hungry? Chances were they were socially unreliable elements. How could you get excited about riffraff like that? No one had got excited when Stalin starved the Ukraine into submission. Ihor knew that only too well. No one had cared at all, no one except the Ukrainians. And they were too busy starving to give the matter their full attention.

“Volodymyr was a good fellow,” Anya whispered when she and Ihor were in bed together-one of the few places they could talk without much risk of being spied upon.

“They were all good fellows,” he whispered back. “We won’t be the same without them. You know it. I know it. Everybody knows it. Even the pricks in the MGB know it.”

“The pricks in the MGB don’t know anything,” his wife said.

He shook his head, there in the darkness. She’d feel the motion even if she couldn’t see it. “They know. Oh, they know, all right. You bet they know. Those sons of bitches know damn near everything. Knowing isn’t the trouble. The trouble is, they don’t care.”

“That’s worse,” Anya said, still in a voice no one farther than thirty centimeters from her head could have heard.

“I guess it is. But what can anybody do about it? Not a stinking thing.” Ihor was no louder. You learned the tricks that kept you alive when you were small, and you got better and better at using them as time went by. He continued, “Why, darling, the MGB even knows if I do this.” He slid a hand under her flannel nightgown.

Her squeak was a little louder than the whispers she’d been using, but not a lot louder. She didn’t slap the hand away, either. She turned toward him instead. After all, he was still there to be turned toward. There were MGB men and MGB men. A really nasty one, or one who didn’t think he could make his own quota any other way, would have hauled him back into the army in spite of his wound. Unless he could have come up with one of those convenient “accidents” for the Chekist, he would have had to go, too. His other choices would have been worse.

So he fell asleep happy, and he woke up the next morning pretty happy, too. By the way Anya had snuggled up against him, she was also happy. That was good. If you weren’t happy with the person you’d married, you’d married the wrong person. And you would start looking for fun somewhere else, which meant you weren’t likely to stay married.

He stayed happy halfway through his first glass of sugared breakfast tea from the communal samovar. Then someone turned on the radio, just in time to catch Yuri Levitan going, “Attention, Moscow is speaking.” He was on in the morning. He was on at night. Did he ever sleep? Ihor would have wondered whether every male broadcaster on Radio Moscow called himself Yuri Levitan, only the man’s voice was so distinctive, it could have come from but one throat.

“What’s gone wrong in the world now?” Ihor said. He assumed something must have. What else was the news but stories about things that had gone wrong somewhere in the world?

After further reports about Soviet triumphs ever deeper in Germany, Levitan went on in grave tones: “In their frantic and futile efforts to interfere with the inexorable advance of the ever-victorious Red Army and its socialist allies, imperialist forces have struck again at the homelands of the workers and peasants’ vanguards on the march. American bombers with ordinary explosives hit Warsaw and Krakow, Prague and Bratislava, and Budapest last night, the evening of the twenty-fourth.”

He paused. An ordinary human being would have taken a sip of water or tea or vodka, or a drag from his cigarette. Machinelike Yuri Levitan was probably having his neck oiled or something. When he spoke again, he sounded more somber yet: “And the imperialists also struck at the heartland of the proletarian revolution. American conventional bombs fell on hero city Leningrad, on Minsk in the Byelorussian SSR, on Rovno in the Ukrainian SSR, and on Vladivostok in the Soviet Far East.”

Another pause from the broadcaster. Ihor listened for the squeak of the oilcan, but didn’t hear it. “Civilian casualties from these terror bombings have been heavy,” Levitan said when he resumed. “They include innocent children playing in a park in Leningrad. Comrade Stalin has vowed that repayment will be heavy.”

What were innocent children doing, playing in a park in the middle of a nighttime air raid? You could ask yourself questions like that. If you asked them of anyone else, you put yourself in deadly danger. Ihor knew better. He knew better even than to look as if such questions might occur to him. That was dangerous, too. Me? Just a dumb Ukrainian peasant, that’s all. There lay safety.

Maskirovka. It was all maskirovka. He drank more tea.

–

Tibor Nagy hadn’t hated Americans. He hadn’t hated Germans, either. He’d been a kid when they fought in Hungary. They were ragged and weary and knew they were losing, but when they had any food to spare they shared it. He’d seen Russians as the enemy-till he found that their soldiers didn’t act much different from anybody else. People were people, he’d decided. Not profound, maybe, but it suited him.

By the time he got drafted, Hungary had been transformed into the Hungarian People’s Republic. He wasn’t thrilled about that, but what could you do? If you complained, you could find out all about the MGB and its Hungarian counterparts-that was what. Better to nod when anybody praised Joseph Stalin (whose name was always spelled Sztalin in Magyar, to make it sound right), and to try to get on with the rest of your life.

After he got drafted, political officers talked his ear off, and the ears of all the other conscripts. They shouted that the Germans had been Fascists, which they had. They shouted that Hungary’s Arrow Cross regime had been Fascists, which they had. They insisted that Admiral Horthy had been a Fascist. Nobody was dumb enough to stand up and tell them they were full of it.

Americans, as far as the political indoctrinators were concerned, weren’t quite Fascists. But they were imperialists and reactionaries and class enemies. They were capitalist oppressors of the proletariat, too. So were the English.

Maybe they were. Maybe they weren’t. Again, telling the political officers it was all a pack of rubbish was a long walk off a short pier. You nodded. You gave back the slogans. You tried to go along. You figured being a soldier couldn’t last forever, no matter how much it seemed to while you did it.

Then the war broke out. The Russians didn’t trust the Hungarians-or think they were strong enough-to break through the enemy defenses. But, no matter how many Russians there were, there weren’t enough to do all the fighting they needed to do and to hold down the land they’d overrun.

They figured the Hungarians were good enough for that. And so Tibor and his company found themselves occupying Schweinfurt while the Russians tried to break through at Fulda, farther north and west.

They made ball-bearings in Schweinfurt. Because they did, the Americans had bombed the hell out of the town in the big war. No doubt Stalin had cheered them on when they did, too. Now the Red Army’s planes and tanks had flattened a lot of what the Germans worked so hard to rebuild during the war and after it.

“No fraternizing with the locals!” Sergeant Gergely shouted, again and again. “You can’t trust them. Anything you say to them is liable to go straight to the enemy’s ears. Or some of the bastards who learned their trade with the Nazis may try and blow your head off.”

Bastards like you? Tibor wondered, but that was one more thing you didn’t say.

They’d already had trouble with sniping. Some of the Germans wore almost-uniforms and armbands that proclaimed them part of the emergency militia. Orders were not to kill those guys out of hand, but to capture them if possible and hand them over to the Red Army. What the Russians would end up doing with them or to them…was anybody’s guess.

Other Germans just had rifles or pistols or grenades and a sense of determination. Somebody would toss a grenade at a truck or shoot from a third-floor window or from behind a burnt-out auto. The Magyars took casualties, and couldn’t always catch the sons of bitches who caused them.

Hungarian authorities dealt with that problem the same way the Germans had in two world wars before them. They seized and shot large numbers of hostages. Tibor hated firing-squad duty. You couldn’t shoot to miss, though. You’d land in worse trouble if you did.

To his surprise, Isztvan Szolovits hated it even worse than he did. “They’re Germans,” Tibor said to him after an execution. “Don’t you want to get even with them for what they did to your people?”

“I don’t want to kill people up against a post,” the Jew answered. “The SS did shit like that. And I don’t know that the people we’re shooting did anything to anybody during the war. If I have to fight, I want to fight, where the other guys have guns, too. Killing blindfolded people with their hands tied isn’t war. It’s murder.”

“You might as well be a fighter pilot, huh?” Tibor said.

“That would be funny, except it isn’t funny,” Szolovits said.

His syntax might be twisted, but Tibor knew what he meant. American fighters-jets and prop jobs-often flew low over Schweinfurt on their way to shoot up Red Army units on the move inside the Russian zone of Germany. If they saw a truck column or a few tanks or even some soldiers bunched together, they would open up with their machine guns or fire some of the rockets they carried under their wings.

You couldn’t shoot them down, not if you were a rifleman on the ground. You could fire a few rounds at them, but they went by too fast for you to lead them the way you needed to. The slam of your piece against your shoulder might make you feel better, but you had to understand you were only wasting ammunition.

What happened when a rocket hit a truck, on the other hand…Tibor dragged a burning man out of the wreckage. The soldier’s clothes weren’t on fire. He was. Tibor rolled on top of him, careless that his own uniform and flesh were getting singed. Then two men rushed up with a big pail of water and dumped it over both of them.

They took the badly burned soldier away. Tibor got some ointment to smear on his scorches. He also got, for the first time ever, Sergeant Gergely’s genuine respect. “Good job, kid,” the veteran said. “Not everybody’d lay his balls on the line for his buddy.”

“He’s not my buddy,” Tibor said; his own burns were starting to sting in spite of the ointment. “I don’t even know who he is. And I didn’t think about taking chances. I just ran over and grabbed him. If I’d taken the time to think, I bet I would’ve stood there with my thumb up my ass.”

“That’s how it works most of the time,” Gergely told him. “But how you did it doesn’t matter. What matters is, you did it. Next time we’ve got a slot for a lance-corporal, now I know who to fill it with.”

Tibor cared about becoming a lance-corporal no more than he cared about being elected Pope. But Sergeant Gergely’s good opinion of him meant something-meant quite a bit, in fact. It hadn’t while the army was on a peacetime footing. Then he’d wanted to stay out of trouble and to keep the sergeant out of his hair. Past that, Gergely could have gone and hanged himself for all Tibor cared. Tibor might have hoisted one if he had, to tell the truth.

War was different, though. War was different all kinds of ways. You found out why they drilled so many things into you in peacetime training. It wasn’t only to kill time or to wear you out. When the bullets and rockets and shells started flying, you needed to obey orders without wasting an instant. You needed to know how to dig a foxhole and how to keep your rifle clean. And you needed to know when to hit the dirt a split second before you had any conscious reason to.

Even second-line soldiering, which was all the Red Army demanded from its none too eager Hungarian, Polish, and Czechoslovakian allies, taught you those things in a hurry. And, though Tibor wouldn’t have been in Schweinfurt if not for the Russians, they weren’t trying to kill him here.

The Americans were. He might not have hated them before he started trying to hold down the city. When they did things like blowing up that truck, though, whatever kindness he’d felt toward them melted away as if it were snow in a hot oven.

A hot oven…The sight of burning flesh was horrible. The smell was even worse. His stomach wanted to turn over. He sternly told it it would do no such thing. To his relief, it decided to listen to him.

American bombers came over that night. They pounded Schweinfurt as if it were the Second World War all over again. “Why don’t they hit the Russians?” Szolovits complained from his foxhole near Tibor’s. “We didn’t do anything to them.”

“We’re here,” Sergeant Gergely said flatly, and that did seem to be as much answer as anyone needed.

–

We’re here, Cade Curtis thought. The Korean with him punched him softly on the shoulder to wish him luck, the way an American might have. The man whispered something in his own language, touched him again, and slipped away to the north in the darkness, back toward his own village.

He’s gone about as far as he can go. Cade’s mind played with the song from Oklahoma! He hadn’t gone as far as he had to go himself. The lines the Red Chinese and North Koreans held lay just ahead, between him and the American trenches he needed to reach.

Here and there, he could see faint red glows among the Communist positions. Some of those, the ones that brightened and faded, would be cigarettes. Others were more constant. If you put kerosene or fat in the bottom of a can and added a wick, you had a lamp or even a puny stove. The soldiers wouldn’t need to be so careful about hiding the lights from behind as they were from ahead.

Not much shooting was going on. For one thing, it was 0130. Men on both sides would be at the low ebb of energy and alertness. For another, the Korean War had turned into a backwater fight. It had dominated the world’s attention all through its first six months. But then the atom bombs started falling. The big brawl broke out in Europe. And with that donnybrook in full swing-which was about as much as Cade knew about it-the Americans, if not the Chinese, wouldn’t worry so much about things here.

If Cade was ever going to do this, he had to go forward. He walked straight down the muddy dirt track that led to the front here. He’d given the U.S. Army parka to his Korean buddies. He’d hacked off his beard. In quilted jacket and fur hat, with a Russian submachine gun in his hands, he looked like somebody who belonged here till you got close enough to see his nose. He hoped like hell nobody would.

If the Reds caught him, they could shoot him for wearing their clothes. Of course, if they caught him, they could shoot him for the fun of it. They probably would, too.

He didn’t worry about it. Whatever happened would happen, that was all. He’d been on the run ever since things went sour south of the Chosin Reservoir. He wondered how many other dogfaces had managed to get away. Not a lot. He was sure of that.

When he started getting close to those red glows, he stepped off the path and began to crawl. Some snow still lay on the ground. He wondered whether Korea was ever free of it. He knew which way he’d bet.

Here and there, snores rose from foxholes. Cade was glad to hear them; they kept him from making what would be his last dumb mistake. A couple of men talked quietly in singsong Chinese. Now he could tell the difference between that language and Korean from only a handful of syllables. He sure hadn’t been able to when the fighting here started. He still didn’t speak more than a few words of either tongue. Even that little was more than he’d looked for.

The front here wasn’t multiple rows of trenches on both sides, the way it had been in France during World War I. Cade gathered it was like that on some stretches of the line. His guide had brought him here because things were looser in these parts.

Somebody called out something. A challenge? Whatever it was, Cade froze-not hard to do in this weather. The Red Chinese soldier called out again. This time, Cade heard, or thought he heard, a questioning note in the man’s voice.

Nobody fired off a flare to light up the landscape. Nobody started spraying bullets around as if from a garden hose. After fifteen motionless minutes, Cade slithered forward once more. His thumb hit a pebble. It clicked when it caromed off a bigger rock. He froze again.

Then, to his vast relief, a dog started barking not far away. The beast probably stayed near the soldiers to eat whatever they threw away. It took its chances, though. It would have been safer with the Americans. With these guys, it could end up simmering over one of those makeshift stoves.

But if they went after the dog, they wouldn’t stumble over him…unless they found him by accident while they were hunting it. Bite your tongue, he thought. He did. It hurt. He was still alive, then. He wanted to stay that way.

On he crawled. His hand hit a metal post. Both sides used them to anchor their belts of barbed wire. He had a wire cutter. He got to work with it. The strands parted with twangs he would have thought you could hear in Guam, if not in Honolulu. No flares hissed out over no-man’s-land, though. No machine guns started chattering, either.

A barb on the wire skewered his finger. He howled and swore-inside his own mind. The stuff was bound to be filthy and rusty. His last tetanus shot, just before he went into action, had left him miserable and feverish for a couple of days. Now he was damn glad that bored Army doc had stuck him.

Crawl. Snip. Crawl. Snip. Crawl. Freeze. What was that? Oh-they were going after the dog. Crawl. Snip. Crawl.

Suddenly, no more wire to snip. He’d made it through the Reds’ belt. If he kept going, he’d find the American entanglements pretty soon. How jumpy were the GIs on the far side? Would they open up with everything they had when they heard him coming?

He dreaded that more than anything else. He’d made it all this way, dodged the enemy’s hunters down most of the peninsula. Now, at last, he could see rescue, see safety. How cruel would the irony be if his own side ventilated him, thinking him a Red?

He discovered the American wire with his forehead. The blood trickling down his cheek was warm. He hoped the gash wouldn’t leave a nasty scar. Your face usually healed up pretty well, but usually wasn’t always.

Crawl. Snip. Crawl. Snip. He moved as quietly as he could. He heard low voices ahead of him. They were speaking English. Not Chinese, not Korean, not even mangled Latin. English!

He cut one more strand and crawled forward again. He didn’t come up against any more wire. He was through! Nothing at all stood between him and his own countrymen-except their fear when they finally heard him coming. The only thing we have to fear is fear itself. That had been FDR, back when Cade was a baby. He’d been way too little to remember it himself, but it was the kind of thing you heard all the time.

“Hey!” he called. Why not? The Reds were several hundred yards behind him. “Don’t shoot! I’m an American!” Sweet Jesus! English felt strange in his own mouth, it had been so long since he’d used it.

Sudden silence slammed down ahead, silence mixed with scrambling noises. No, they’d had no idea he was out here. If he’d been a Chinese raiding party, a lot of these guys would be talking to their undertaker.

Somebody chambered a round. The sharp snick! was much too audible. Then somebody else did. “Don’t shoot!” Cade repeated, more urgently than before. “Honest to God, I’m an American.”

Through the silence, someone called, “Okay, asshole, who played in the Series last year?”

They’d asked the same kind of question to trip up English-speaking Japs in the last war. Cade thanked heaven he was a fan. “Yanks and Phillies,” he answered. “Yankees swept.”

After a pause, that same voice said, “Okay. Come on. We won’t plug you till you get here, anyway.”

Cade came. He remembered to leave his Russian submachine gun behind. It wouldn’t create the impression he wanted. He tumbled into a foxhole. A GI lit him up with a flicked Zippo. The flame was dazzling.

“Fuck me,” the dogface said. “He is an American-I think. Scrawny SOB, whatever he is.” The casual scorn was the most wonderful thing Cade had ever heard.