Coup d'Etat

Chapter 24

Narvik again. Julius Lemp was not a happy man. Namsos would have been better. Wilhelmshaven would have been wonderful. But it was Narvik, so the U-30 could get back up to the Barents Sea as soon as possible. More fuel for the diesels, more eels for the tubes, more food for the crew, and away they’d go again.

He’d already complained to the powers that be here about Narvik’s shortcomings as a liberty port. His crew had already tried to take the place apart-and they weren’t the only gang of U-boat sailors to join the rising against authority.

Predictably, authority didn’t forget. When the U-30 tied up, she was greeted at the pier by a squad of shore patrolmen, all of them wearing Stahlhelms and all of them carrying Schmeissers.

“Well, this is a fine crock of herrings,” Lemp growled at the chief petty officer in charge of the squad. “You’d think we’d put in at Aberdeen by mistake.” He shook his head. “No, by God! The Royal Navy’d give us a better hello than this, to hell with me if it wouldn’t.”

The steel helmet’s beetling brim only made the CPO’s features seem even more wooden than they would have otherwise. He saluted stiffly. “Sir, I have my orders,” he said. “No one is going to tear Narvik up again-that’s what the people here have in mind.”

Daylight was already leaking out of the sky, though it was only midafternoon. Before long, arctic night would fall: Narvik lay north of the Arctic Circle. “Disgraceful,” Lemp snarled.

“Sir, if you didn’t lead such a pack of hooligans, there wouldn’t be a problem,” the shore patrolman answered in a gruff monotone.

“If this place weren’t a morgue-” But Lemp could see this was an argument he’d lose. The shore patrol didn’t just have the firepower. The bastards had the backing of the bigger bastards here, the ones with all the gold stripes on their sleeves.

His crewmen had been glaring at their natural foes. They reminded him of cats snarling at sheep dogs. Then one of them tipped him a wink. Did that mean they’d stay out of trouble or that they’d dive into it headfirst? Lemp didn’t know, not for sure, but he was afraid he could guess.

He let the shore patrolmen lead the U-boat sailors off to whatever passed for fun in Narvik. Then the mechanics fell on his submarine. He was glad to see them. Unlike either the high command or the shore patrol, they seemed to be on the same side as the men who actually did the fighting.

He thought about staying away from the officers’ club in sympathy for the way his men were being treated. He didn’t think about it long, though. The alternative was staying cooped up in his tiny, curtained-off cabin in the stinking, claustrophobic pressure hull.

He did make a point of repairing to the club in his grimy working togs instead of putting on a proper uniform. No one there said a word about it, though. The shorebound officers were evidently used to U-boat skippers’ eccentric ways.

Those shorebound men did let him know that plans actually were in the works for an officers’ brothel, and one ratings could patronize as well. That plans were in the works didn’t mean the brothels were working yet. Lemp thought that was a damn shame. He was a few years older than the men he commanded. He didn’t burn quite so hot as most of them. But that didn’t mean he didn’t burn at all. Oh, no-nowhere close. He would have welcomed a grapple with a nice, warm girl, even if it was purely a business transaction.

Since he couldn’t screw, he drank. He’d got to the bottom of his third stiff schnapps, hoping they would improve his attitude. All they succeeded in doing was making him dizzy. They were strong, and he was tired; they hit him hard. Only later did he stop and wonder what would happen when the U-30’s ratings started drinking. That was when he remembered the one sailor’s wink. As such things have a way of being, that was also just exactly too late.

A burst of submachine-gun fire brought silence smashing down in the officers’ club. A moment later, another burst rang out. “Good God!” somebody said. “Have the Royal Marines landed, or what?”

There was a cheerful thought. If English raiders were swooping down on Narvik, they could do a hell of a lot of damage. Most of the German forces here belonged to the Kriegsmarine. The only reason they were here at all was to go after convoys bound for Russia. Shore patrolmen wouldn’t stand much of a chance against cold-blooded professionals.

One of those shore patrolmen rushed into the officers’ club. He looked around wildly before his gaze fixed on Lemp. “Come quick,” he shouted, “before those maniacs of yours tear this whole base to shreds!”

Just what it deserves, Lemp thought. The words almost came out-such were the dangers of three strong drinks. But he managed to stifle them. Instead, he said, “If they had more ways to blow off steam without getting in trouble, they’d do that. They wouldn’t brawl.”

“They’re a pack of criminals, nothing else but,” the shore patrolman retorted. “If you don’t calm them down, they’ll get courts-martial for making a mutiny. That’s a capital crime.” By the way he spoke, he thought the U-30’s men deserved no better than a blindfold and a cigarette.

“Take me to them,” Lemp said. He had to pay close attention to where he put his feet when he followed the shore patrolman out of the officers’ club.

It was cold outside, cold and dark. The northern lights’ wavering curtains danced in the sky, now red, now gold. Lemp spared the aurora a glance, no more. It wasn’t as if he didn’t see it on a lot of frigid winter nights.

He could have found the fighting without his guide. Men were yelling and screaming. Whistles blew frantically. Things broke-often, by the sound of it, over somebody’s head. Two shore patrolmen dragged a wounded buddy from the fray. “Making a mutiny,” the man with Lemp repeated grimly.

“They’re just drunk and disorderly, and they hate this miserable place,” the U-boat skipper answered, hoping he was right. If the lads had got the bit too far between their teeth, they’d be in big trouble in spite of anything he could do. To try to convince himself things were as he wanted them to be, he added, “I do, too. Who wouldn’t?”

“You weren’t smashing up the officers’ club when I found you, though… sir,” the shore patrolman said. Lemp judged a discreet silence the best response to that.

From out of the gloom ahead came a shout: “Halt! Who comes? Friend or foe?”

It wasn’t the kind of challenge the shore patrol would issue. Not only that, Lemp recognized the voice of the rating doing the shouting. “It’s me, Willi-the skipper,” he called back. “Playtime’s over. You boys have had your fun-and you’ve made your point, too.”

He waited. If Willi and the other sailors rejected his authority, they really were on their way to military courts and the brig, if not worse. Several men up there argued back and forth. When the chain of command broke, you had to figure out who had authority. At last, Willi said, “Well, come ahead, sir. You can help us pick up the pieces.”

“Enough is enough,” Lemp said as he advanced, trying to pour oil on troubled waters.

“Enough is too much,” the shore patrolman beside him put in, trying to make a bad situation worse. Lemp contrived to step on the man’s foot.

As had been true the last time things went arsey-varsey, not all the brawling sailors came from the U-30. But the rioters had done a more thorough job of tearing Narvik to pieces this time around. They weren’t brawling for the fun of it; they were brawling because they were furious about what passed for a base up here in the frozen north. Lemp did sympathize, but he had to hope very hard that they hadn’t got themselves in too deep.

“If you give it up now, you probably won’t land in too much trouble. You’re good fighting men, and the Reich needs you for the war effort,” he told them. “But if you push it even a centimeter further, they’ll land on you hard. You haven’t just pissed them off this time. You’ve scared them, and that’s worse.”

“They treat us like shit when we come in from a patrol, they’d better be scared,” growled a sailor from another U-boat. But the fight had gone out of the men. They’d made their point. There wasn’t much else they could do, not here at the frigid end of nowhere. They gave it up. Lemp headed back toward the officers’ club, hoping the argument he’d used with the sailors would also work on their superiors-and his.

Hideki Fujita loved being a sergeant again. He was meant to have two stars on each collar tab-he thought so, anyhow. And Unit 113 was a much smaller outfit than Unit 731 had been. That made him seem a much bigger frog.

Unit 113 was also a much less experimental place than Unit 731 had been. Here, they went out and did things. That suited Fujita fine, too. He was no big brain, and knew he never would be. But when somebody pointed him at a job, he would take care of it.

Not only that, he had a knack for getting the most out of the men under him. He’d knock them around when they deserved it, but he didn’t give them bruises for no better reason than to show his cock was bigger than theirs. As long as they hopped to it, they didn’t need to worry about him.

They went on spreading disease through Yunnan Province. If the Chinese died from the plague and from cholera, they wouldn’t be able to do so much with the military equipment England sent them. Even more to the point, if the Chinese feared they would die from those dreadful diseases, their panic helped Japan at least as much as real illness would.

Major Hataba assembled the men in the unit to say, “We have received an official commendation from the Imperial War Ministry in Tokyo for our contributions to victory in China. Banzai for the Emperor!”

“Banzai!” the soldiers shouted, Fujita loud among them. “Banzai!”

Hataba did not remind the men of Unit 113 that he’d also wanted to use bacteria against the English in India. No doubt he was doing his very best to forget all about that. Fujita remembered it, but not very often. It hadn’t happened, so it didn’t matter. Everyone was better off not remembering a plan that hadn’t come to fruition.

It wasn’t as if the Japanese didn’t have other things to think about. Fujita came from Hiroshima, in the south. Winters in Mongolia, Siberia, and Manchukuo had left him horrified and amazed. What was alleged to be the approach of winter in Burma left him horrified and amazed, too, but not the same way.

“Eee!” he said to another sergeant. They were drinking warm beer together; there was no other kind of beer to drink. “I thought I knew everything there was to know about hot, sticky weather. But this makes the worst August in Hiroshima feel like February.”

“Hai.” The other man nodded. His name was Ichiro Hirabayashi. He was a career noncom; he’d spent his whole adult life in the Imperial Army. Nothing seemed to faze him much. “Your clothes rot. Your boots rot. You start to rot, too. I’ve learned more about ringworm and jock itch and athlete’s foot and all that crap than I ever wanted to know since I got here.”

“You aren’t the only one,” Fujita said dolefully. “I had jock itch so bad, I thought I’d got a dose from one of the comfort women in Myitkina.”

Hirabayashi laughed at that. Fujita didn’t think it was so funny. A medical assistant had given him some nasty-smelling ointment to smear on his privates. It helped some. It wasn’t a cure, though. He still itched in all kinds of places where he couldn’t scratch without being crude.

The other sergeant drank more beer. In reflective tones, he said, “I hate this miserable place, you know? I hate the weather. I hate the rot. I hate the bugs. I hate the sicknesses. I hate the Burmese, too.”

“What’s wrong with the Burmese?” Fujita asked. He could see why Sergeant Hirabayashi hated everything else about Burma.

“They’re lazy. They’re shiftless. They’re thieving. They don’t talk any language a civilized man can understand.” Hirabayashi spoke with great conviction. A British colonial administrator pouring down gin and tonics in Mandalay a year earlier might have said the same thing, even if he would have said it in English rather than Japanese.

“Well, besides that?” Fujita said.

He set Hirabayashi laughing again. “You’re a funny fellow, aren’t you?” the older man said. “That’s good. You get up into Burma’s asshole the way we are and there’s not a hell of a lot to laugh about.”

“It’s war. Shigata ga nai, neh?” Fujita said.

Sergeant Hirabayashi nodded. “No, you can’t do a damn thing about it-except drink when you get the chance.” He suited action to word.

So did Fujita, who said, “One good thing, anyhow. At least the RAF doesn’t bomb us here. When I fought the Russians in Siberia, they were always trying to drop stuff on our heads. That wasn’t a whole lot of fun. Can’t say I miss it.”

“All right. There’s something,” Hirabayashi admitted. “But I’ll tell you, it’s not much.”

“I won’t argue.” Fujita poured himself another mug of beer and downed it, and then another one after that.

He woke the next morning with a headache that pounded behind his eyes like a piledriver. Strong tea did next to nothing to fix it. One more mug of beer helped some. The headache dulled, even if it didn’t disappear. Shouting at conscript privates let him work off more of his discomfort. He wasn’t especially proud to remember that the next day, but consoled himself with the thought that he hadn’t slugged anybody.

Odds were Sergeant Hirabayashi wouldn’t have been so fussy. Noncoms like Hirabayashi would have led Japanese troops into action in the Sino-Japanese and Russo-Japanese Wars. Back in samurai days, men like him would have been loyal retainers to their overlords, even if they wouldn’t have worn collar tabs back then.

If I stay in the Army as long as he has, will I end up like that? Fujita wondered. He didn’t want to be a career noncom. He wanted to go back to the family farm and spend the rest of his days there. If he never saw another rifle or another porcelain bomb casing full of germs, that suited him fine.

No matter what he wanted, though, the Army wouldn’t turn him loose till the war ended, if it ever ended. And even after he escaped its clutches, he sometimes wondered uneasily how he would fit down on the farm. He wasn’t the person he had been before conscription got him. He was harder, tougher, less patient. He’d seen more of the world than he’d even imagined while he was still a civilian. He didn’t like a lot of what he’d seen, but that wasn’t the point. The point was, his horizons had broadened. A farm off in the middle of nowhere was likely to seem a farm off in the middle of nowhere, not an unquestioned home for the rest of his life.

He didn’t know what he could do about that. No, actually he did know; he couldn’t do anything about it. Now that he’d seen the wider world, he couldn’t very well forget about it, even if he wished he could.

His father had carried a rifle in the Russo-Japanese War. Had he felt some of the same thing after he came home again? If he had, he’d managed to stifle it. Or maybe he’d just never talked about it with his family. He must have realized they wouldn’t understand.

I do now, Fujita thought. Young men all over Japan would understand after the war. The country would be different then, because they’d changed. How it would be different, Fujita wasn’t sure. But it would be.

Of course, not all of Japan’s young men in uniform would go home again. Fujita wasn’t thinking about the ones who would die in battle. Their spirits would return to the Home Islands, to live forever at the Yasukuni Shrine. But, after the war was done, how many soldiers would Japan need to protect her conquests in China and Russia and the Pacific islands and Southeast Asia and the East Indies?

Did Japan have that many soldiers? Could she maintain them without ruining herself? Fujita was tempted to laugh at himself. How could he know, when he was just an ignorant peasant bumped up to sergeant? He was surprised even the question had occurred to him.

Then he wondered if it had occurred to the people who were supposed to worry about such things. That, though, was another kind of question altogether.

Sarah Bruck soon settled into the routine of marriage and of bakery work. If not much time seemed available for romance, well, she was usually too busy to miss it. And romance during wartime, at least for a Jew in the Reich, was a pallid, harried thing to begin with.

She did eat better than she had when she was living with her parents. But, when she wasn’t too tired, she missed the talk at their house. All the Brucks ever talked about was baking. Sarah treasured the weekend visits she and Isidor made. She was glad they intrigued her husband, too. He sensed a wider, deeper world there than the one he was used to at home.

She didn’t treasure the air raids. As nights got longer, the RAF came over Germany more and more often. Munster, in the far northwest near the Dutch border, took more than its share of pounding: it lay within easy range of England, and bombers didn’t need to fly through French airspace to reach it. Sarah could have done without the honor.

Fear iced through her every time the sirens’ screams jerked her headlong out of sleep. The Brucks had no proper shelter to go to, no more than her parents or any other German Jews did. They-and Sarah-huddled downstairs, between their shop counter and the ovens. That gave them some protection if a bomb hit above them. If one blew up in the street outside, though… She resolutely refused to worry about that. If it happened, odds were she’d be too dead to do any more worrying, anyhow.

Her father gave forth with a gravedigger’s good cheer when she and Isidor visited after a raid. “Here for a while I thought they were going to throw me off the labor gang for lack of work,” Samuel Goldman said, his eyes twinkling even though he had dark bags under them. “But we’ve had plenty to do lately.”

“I’ll bet you have!” Sarah exclaimed. “It’s been terrible.”

“An awful lot of houses knocked to smithereens,” Isidor agreed.

“Well, so there are.” Sarah’s father didn’t sound so cheery when he said that. He paused to light a cigarette. For a moment, Sarah took that for granted-but only for a moment. He didn’t roll the smoke himself, with newspaper for a wrapper and tobacco scrounged from other people’s dog-ends. No: this one was machine-made, whole and new. Seeing her stare, he nodded. “We clear the wreckage, you know. Whatever we find that we can carry away, we keep. I’m not what you’d call proud of it, but I do it just like everybody else.”

“Good for you!” Isidor answered before Sarah could. “If that’s the only choice you’ve got, you have to take it.”

“That’s what I tell myself.” Samuel Goldman nodded again. “I scavenged the same way in the trenches when we went forward. The French and the Tommies always had so much more than we did. We ate better after every advance. Mother and I are eating a little better now, too. But it feels different when you’re scavenging from the neighbors, not the enemy.”

“What else can you do?” Sarah asked sympathetically.

“I could do nothing. Then we’d starve. This is better-I suppose.” Father’s cheeks hollowed as he sucked in smoke. He looked up toward the ceiling, or maybe toward whatever lay a mile beyond the moon, as he continued, “A lot of the time, we’re the ones who pull the bodies out of the rubble, too. I didn’t mind bodies much, you know, when they wore horizon-blue or khaki. I even got used to bodies in Feldgrau. Lord knows we saw enough of them. But bodies in pajamas or nightgowns? That’s a lot harder.”

Sarah and Isidor looked at each other. Neither of them seemed to know what to say to that. At last, Sarah asked, “Have you… found anyone you know? Uh, I guess I mean knew?”

“I’m afraid so,” he said. “You remember Friedrich Lauterbach?”

“Sure. He studied under you. He’s in the Wehrmacht now, isn’t he?” Sarah left it there. Had the world gone down a different path, she might have been more likely to marry him than the husband she had now. He’d stayed decent even after the Nazis took over, getting Father money for writing articles that would see print under his byline rather than a Jew’s. Sarah hoped he hadn’t stopped anything.

Her father nodded. “That’s the fellow. His older brother was a doctor here. Was.” He repeated the past tense. Something in the way his jaw set made Sarah fight shy of asking just what had happened to the luckless Dr. Lauterbach.

Isidor yawned. “I’m sorry, but I don’t think we’ll stay very late,” he said. “You have air raids two or three days in a row, you get so sleepy you can’t see straight.”

“That’s the truth!” Sarah’s mother exclaimed; she hadn’t had much to say till then. “And the horrible ersatz coffee and tea you can get nowadays don’t have any kick in them at all.” Everybody nodded at that. People grumbled about it all the time.

“They make pills for pilots and other people who’ve got to stay awake,” Father said. “Not the stuff that goes into coffee, but the real strong stuff, benzedrine and the like. Plenty of times I’ve wished I could get my hands on some of those. I could use them, believe me.”

“Who couldn’t?” Isidor said. “Dr. What’s-his-name-Lauterbach-didn’t have any at his house?”

“If he did, somebody else beat me to them. What can you do?” Samuel Goldman spread his hands. Sarah remembered when they were soft and smooth and impeccably manicured, with only a writer’s callus on one middle finger. Now they were scarred and battered, with filthy nails and with hard yellowed ridges across the palms. Well, her own hands were a lot harder than they had been, too.

She and Isidor got back to the flat over the bakery well before curfew. In lieu of benzedrine pills, they went to bed early. Sarah thought she could sleep the clock around if she got the chance. Tired by bad food and nighttime air raids, she wanted to hibernate like a dormouse.

She didn’t get the chance that night. The RAF came over again, a little before midnight. The sirens wailed like damned souls. Sarah and Isidor and the older Brucks did some heartfelt damning of their own as they stumbled down the stairs in darkness absolute.

Then the bombs whistled down. As soon as Sarah heard them, her terror redoubled. They sounded louder and closer than they ever had before. She tried to burrow into the floor when they started going off.

It sounded as if one hit right across the street. The window in the front of the bakery had survived the whole war. It didn’t survive this: it fell in on itself with a tinkling crash. “Scheisse!” Isidor’s father said loudly, and then, “I beg your pardon.”

“Don’t worry about it,” Sarah said as the building shook from other hits only a little farther away. Now she understood why her own father still sometimes called bomber pilots air pirates even though the name came straight out of Dr. Goebbels’ Propaganda Ministry. If they were trying to kill you, they weren’t your friends.

After forty-five eternal minutes, the bombers droned away. “That was awful,” Isidor said. Sarah couldn’t have put it better herself. She shivered, not just from fear but also because the shattered front window was letting in cold air.

It was letting in light, too. The grocery across the street was on fire. Isidor’s father started to go out to see if he could help. Stepping on broken glass made him change his mind in a hurry.

There wasn’t much water pressure when a fire engine finally clanged up. What had the bombs done to the pipes under Munster? Nothing good-that was plain. Firemen in what looked like Stahlhelms with crests did the best they could with what they had.

“He’s going to lose everything,” David Bruck said gloomily. “I just hope he’s alive. He’s a goy, but he’s a mensh. The two shops have been across the street from each other as long as I can remember.”

“It’s terrible,” Sarah said.

“It’s worse than that,” her father-in-law answered. “For him and for us. I know I won’t be able to get glass to fix that window. Heaven only knows if they’ll even give me wood scraps. I’ve got to have something, or people will just come in and steal. How am I supposed to stay in business?”

When Sarah decided to marry Isidor, she’d figured that getting into a baker’s family would at least mean she had enough to eat. Now even that wasn’t obvious any more. She suddenly hated the RAF almost as if she were a genuine German after all.

Anastas Mouradian lay in his tent, trying to sleep. He had his flying suit of fur and leather, and long underwear below it. He had two thick, scratchy woolen blankets. He had a cot that kept him off the ground. The tent itself held off the worst of the wind. He was miserably cold even so.

Russian infantrymen learned to sleep in the snow, shrouded by no more than their uniform and greatcoat. Stas was no foot soldier; he was a flyer. He was no Russian, either. He knew what good weather was all about. When it got this frigid, his teeth chattered like castanets.

Then the tent flap flew open. A blast of air straight from the North Pole rushed inside. So did a human shape-no more than a lumpy outline in the darkness. “What the devil-?” Stas said, groping for his service pistol.

“You’ve got to hide me!”

The voice was familiar. Stas stopped feeling for the automatic. “What do you mean, hide you, Ivan? Hide you from whom?” he asked. Having learned Russian as a second language, he was often more precise in his grammar than men who’d spoken it from birth.

But Ivan Kulkaanen wasn’t a native Russian-speaker, either. “Hide me from the Chekists! They’re after me!” The Karelian’s voice wasn’t just familiar. It was desperate. He panted like a hunted animal worn down after a long chase.

Now the ice that ran up Mouradian’s back had nothing to do with the arctic air rapidly filling the tent. “Bozhemoi!” he burst out. “What did you do? What do they think you did?” The questions were related, but not necessarily identical. And the second was the one that really mattered. If the NKVD decided you’d done something, you might as well have, because they’d hang it on you anyway.

“I wrote in a letter to my cousin that the war wasn’t going as well as it ought to be,” Kulkaanen answered miserably.

“Bozhemoi!” Stas repeated. This time, his tone was hopeless. “You wrote that?” He didn’t ask How could you be such an idiot? It had already occurred to him that his copilot and bomb-aimer might be playing a part. The NKVD might be building a case against him and using Kulkaanen as a provocateur. It struck him as unlikely-if the Chekists wanted you, more often than not they just grabbed you-but it was possible.

“I wrote it,” Ivan agreed. “I wrote it in Finnish. I didn’t think they’d ever be able to read it. But they did, and I’m fucked.” Karelia lay in the far north, next to the Finnish border. A lot of Finns thought it belonged to them by rights, not least because the only differences between Finns and Karelians were the names and where they happened to live.

Of course the NKVD would have men who read Finnish, just as the Chekists had men who read Armenian and Georgian (hell, Stalin could do that) and Azerbaijani and Kazakh and Lithuanian and every other language under the Soviet sun. The NKVD probably had men who read Sanskrit, for Christ’s sake. Hey, you never could tell when a professor of the ancient languages of India might turn wrecker on you.

“Hide me!” Kulkaanen said again, even more urgently than before. “If I can count on anybody, it’s you!”

There was a compliment Stas appreciated-and one he could have done without. “Hide you where?” he asked, doing his best to sound like the voice of sweet reason. “What do you want me to do with you, Ivan? Stick you in my back pocket?” Kulkaanen was both taller and thicker through the shoulders than he was himself.

“There’s got to be somewhere!” the Karelian said.

“Under my cot, maybe? That should fool the NKVD for a good second and a half-two if you’re lucky,” Stas said.

Kulkaanen groaned. “I’m fucked,” he said once more: an observation all too likely to be accurate. With yet another groan-or maybe this one was better called a moan-he fled out into the night.

Stas felt like groaning and moaning, too. Now he didn’t have to worry about whether the cold would keep him awake. Adrenaline would handle the job just fine. He lay there, trying without much luck to relax, heart thuttering in his throat.

He didn’t get to lie there long. Not fifteen minutes after Ivan Kulkaanen disappeared, someone shone an electric torch full in his face and shouted, “Answer, in the name of the Soviet Union!”

Stas answered, all right: “Turn that goddamn thing off, you stupid motherfucking jackass! Do you want to bring Nazi bombers down on us?” If you were going to deal with the NKVD, any moral advantage you could grab was precious.

The torch winked off. Except for a wavering purple-green afterimage, Stas could see nothing at all for a little while. The Chekist demanded, “Did the anti-Soviet criminal Ivan Kulkaanen come here?”

“Ivan came here, yes,” Stas answered. No matter what Kulkaanen was dumb enough to put in a letter, Mouradian was sure he’d harmed the Hitlerites far more than this blustering Russian ever would. It wouldn’t help him, of course, but it was true.

“What did he want? What did you tell him?” the NKVD man barked.

“He wanted me to hide him. I said I couldn’t.” Stas gave back the exact truth. It couldn’t land poor Ivan in any more trouble.

“What did he do then?”

“He ran away. You don’t see him here, do you?”

“Never mind what I see,” the intruder snapped. “Why didn’t you instantly report his treasonous behavior?”

“Because he only just now came and went.” That was a lie, but only a tiny one. “And because it’s bloody cold out there.” Truth again. “And because I expected you people would be on his trail.” One more truth.

“Where did he go?” the NKVD man asked, so even a Chekist could see the sense in his response.

“Comrade Investigator, I have no idea,” Mouradian said, which was also true. “But wherever he is, he can’t have got far.”

“Ha! You’re right about that. And when we catch him, he’ll be sorry he didn’t run off to Venus or Mars.”

The NKVD man ducked out of Stas’ tent and let the flap fall. He shouted obscenity-filled orders to whatever friends he had out there. They’d comb the grounds around the airstrip. Were they moronic enough to turn on their torches while they did it? They probably were. Who was going to tell Chekists they couldn’t do something? You could wind up in a camp yourself if you tried.

I did it. I got away with it, too, Stas thought, not without pride. He was still cold-colder now, in fact, with all the icy air his visitors had let into the tent. He huddled under the blankets. Sleep was hopeless. He’d be pouring down tea tomorrow to keep his eyes open, or coffee if they had any.

Or maybe not. He’d need a replacement copilot if he was going to fly. Could they deliver somebody soon enough to do him any good? He’d have to see.

Out at the edge of the encampment, somebody yelled. A moment later, someone fired a long burst from a machine pistol. A moment after that, somebody let out a horrible scream. Was that Kulkaanen? Or were the NKVD brutes mowing one another down? Stas knew where his hopes lay.

As a Karelian, Kulkaanen probably knew even more about snow than the Russians coming after him did. Maybe he could get away. It still didn’t seem likely, but it was possible.

It was possible, but it didn’t happen. They brought him in near daybreak. They’d beaten the snot out of him for making them work so hard. Odds were he had worse coming. If they didn’t execute him, they’d give him twenty-five years in the gulag. They wouldn’t bother hanging a mere tenner on him, not after he’d gone and pissed them off.

And the war would grind on, whether run well or badly. Why couldn’t he have seen that? Any which way, no matter what he told his cousin, the goddamn war would grind on.