Fallout

22

A tank clanked past Gustav Hozzel. He looked at it with faint, or not so faint, contempt. He hadn’t seen many Shermans on the Eastern Front. The Ivans got some as Lend-Lease from America, but German panzer crews worried about them much less than about the far more common T-34s. They did make trouble for German ground-pounders when no Wehrmacht panzers were around to knock them out. As the Ostfront slowly came to pieces, that happened ever more often.

His first thought on seeing this one was that it stood an even worse chance against modern Russian armor than it would have against a Panzer IV or a Panther. His second thought…“I’ll be fucked!” he exclaimed.

“I wouldn’t mind that myself about now,” Rolf said with a lewd grin.

“Oh, shut up,” Gustav told him. He pointed at the Sherman. “What do you see?”

“When I was in the Battle of the Bulge, we called them Tommy cookers,” Rolf answered. “One good hit and they’d burn like blazes.” His chuckle showed he meant that for a joke. It was as much of a sense of humor as he ever showed.

“Ja, ja,” Gustav said impatiently. “But look at the recognition mark on the side of the turret.”

Rolf looked. His jaw dropped. “Donnerwetter,” he muttered. Had he been a Catholic, he might have crossed himself.

“Uh-huh.” Gustav nodded. The mark wasn’t the white American star or the blue-and-white roundel the English were using these days. It was a white-edged black cross, as familiar to Gustav as the scar on the back of his left hand. “We’ve got our own panzers again! Panzers with Germans in them! See how the Russians like that!”

Max Bachman had less nationalistic fervor than Gustav (to say nothing of Rolf), and more hard common sense. “They’re only Shermans,” he said. “Ivan will like it fine. The Germans in those Shermans? Maybe not so much. It’s murder to send them out against T-54s.”

“Probably just what the Americans have in mind,” Rolf said. “What do you want to bet? Plenty of us have been yelling to get a chance in panzers again. So they give us what we say we want-and they get rid of our panzer crews as fast as we can train ’em. These are what we’ve got left, they’ll say. Take ’em or leave ’em. Of course we take ’em. And of course we pay the price.”

That was the most ridiculous thing Gustav had ever heard…till he thought about it for a little while. The more he did, the more of a certain kind of sense it made. Germans these days, like children growing away from the dark times of the Third Reich, did want to do as much for themselves as they could. How could the Americans help but worry that their allies would get too big for their britches and see that they were the strongest power in Western Europe even now?

Panzers? You need panzers? Here, we’ll give you some Shermans. They weren’t much good in the last war. They wouldn’t have been any good at all if we hadn’t made a million of ’em. But we did, and so we’ve still got a bunch in storage. Go ahead, use ’em. And if your crews die like ants at an anteaters’ picnic, well, just remember, you asked for it.

Max’s face said he was going through similar mental contortions. After a few seconds, he said, “I don’t believe it.”

“Why the hell not?” Rolf demanded. “The Fuhrer would have done it. Stalin would do it. Christ, Stalin is doing it. The Poles and the Czechs and the Hungarians, their shit isn’t near as good as what the Russians use. You think that’s an accident?”

“No. But I spent five years in Fulda dealing with the Amis,” Max answered. “They don’t play that kind of deep game. It’s hard to get them to worry about day after tomorrow, let alone about what they do now will mean ten years down the road.”

“What about the Marshall Plan?” Gustav said.

“Mm, there is that,” Max admitted. “The Marshall Plan’s about as long-term as anything a good Communist would do. Most of the time, though, the Yankees are plenty good at tactics and not so hot with strategy.”

Another German Sherman rattled by the shell hole the soldiers shared. The commander rode head and shoulders out of the cupola, the way the man in charge of a panzer should have. He looked no more than twenty years old, and as proud of himself as if he’d invented the machine he rode in.

Nodding in his direction, Gustav said, “Max, I’d find it easier to go along with you if that guy were an old sweat like us. But a Feld who was in charge of a Panzer IV the last time would know better than to climb into that motorized herring tin now.”

“You’re right,” Rolf said. That wasn’t the kind of encouragement Gustav wanted, but he had it whether he wanted it or not.

A sergeant trotted along with the panzers. He scowled at the soldiers sitting in the hole in the ground with cigarettes in their mouths. “Come on, darlings!” he called shrilly, and blew them a kiss. “You’re invited to the dance, too.”

“If somebody hadn’t invited his mother to the dance, she wouldn’t’ve got knocked up and had him,” Gustav muttered. But he didn’t pitch his voice loud enough for the noncom to hear. Instead, he yanked back the AK-47’s charging handle to chamber the first round from a fresh magazine. Then he climbed out of the shell hole and moved forward.

Max and Rolf came, too. Not much went on for a little while. They moved forward several hundred meters. There was only light fire, and none of it close enough to tempt them to hit the deck. Gustav saw a couple of dead Russians, but no live ones. He approved. If he never saw another live Russian as long as he lived, he wouldn’t be sorry.

Rolf pointed toward a bump behind a swell of ground up in front of them. “Watch out! That’s a-”

Before he could say panzer turret, the T-54 hiding back there showed exactly what it was. Its 100mm gun spat fire. There was a horrible rending crash, a noise somewhere between an accident on the Autobahn and one in a factory. A Sherman ahead of Gustav and to his right brewed up. Smoke and flame belched from every hatch. None of the crewmen got out. Machine-gun ammo made cheerful popping noises as it cooked off.

The Shermans all started shooting at the T-54. The American panzer came in two flavors. One carried a 75mm gun useful only as a door-knocker. The other came with a longer 76mm gun that fired a heavier shell with better muzzle velocity. That weapon was about as good as the long 75mm gun Panzer IVs had mounted: pretty much adequate for the last war, pretty much hopeless in this one.

For all Gustav knew, some of the rounds the Shermans fired hit their target. If they did, they surely scared the men inside the T-54. But scaring them wasn’t the name of the game. Killing them was, and the Shermans couldn’t begin to do it.

The T-54 found another target. Its big, nasty gun fired again. This AP round caught a Sherman in the turret. All the shells in there went off at once. Still burning, the turret slid back over the engine compartment and fell to the ground behind the chassis.

“Christ have mercy on their souls,” Max said. Gustav nodded.

Another Sherman went up in flames before the surviving crews realized this wouldn’t be their day. They used the smoke mortars on their turret roofs to make a screen behind which they could escape. Maybe they’d run into Russian infantry without armor support somewhere else.

To discourage the German infantry from moving up under cover of the smoke, the T-54 lobbed HE shells almost at random. Gustav hit the ground when one kicked up a dirt fountain a hundred meters off to his left. He was just reaching for his entrenching tool when another shell screamed in. This one seemed as if it would burst right on top

–

An American walked into the Hungarian POWs’ barracks. Istvan Szolovits couldn’t have said how he knew at once that the newcomer was an American. He wore the same uniform as the French camp guards. He could have been a Frenchman as far as looks went. He had a thin, dark, intelligent face, with brown hair beginning to fall back at the temples.

But he wasn’t French. Maybe it was the way he carried himself: as if nothing could possibly go wrong. He had German confidence, but not the same arrogance.

Miklos spotted him, too. “Here comes trouble,” the ex-Arrow Cross man said.

He didn’t bother keeping his voice down. Like most Magyars, he assumed no foreigners spoke or understood his language. That wasn’t chauvinism; it was what experience taught. Istvan assumed the same thing.

Which only went to show you couldn’t always trust your assumptions. The American came over to Miklos and Istvan. “Why do you think I’m trouble?” he asked in Magyar as clear as theirs. He didn’t even have the old-timey, backwoods accent Istvan had heard from other Magyar-speaking Yanks. He might have left Budapest week before last.

Whatever he was, he didn’t faze Miklos, who answered, “You wouldn’t be here if you weren’t trouble.”

“I love you, too,” the American said. “I’m Imre Kovacs. Who’re you?” He waited while Miklos rattled off his name and pay number. Then he nodded to Istvan. “How about you?” Istvan did the same as Miklos had. Kovacs gave him a once-over. “Rootless cosmopolite, are you?”

“He doesn’t have to answer that,” Miklos said before Istvan could even open his mouth.

“You, sticking up for him?” The American hoisted an eyebrow. “Don’t get your bowels in an uproar, though. I’m one myself.”

“Maybe I should stick up for Miklos, in that case,” Istvan said.

“Nobody’s got to stick up for anybody. Nothing horrible will happen to either one of you. I’m just going to take you back to the administrative building. I’ll talk with one of you. Another guy who knows your lingo will talk to the other one.”

“We don’t have to answer any questions,” Miklos said. How many times had he been interrogated? By whom? And for what? Istvan suspected he might be better off not knowing the answers to those questions.

“The only things you have to do is come with me to the administrative building,” Imre Kovacs said. “After that, we’ll play it by ear, all right?”

By the look on Miklos’ scarred face, it was a long way from all right. But Kovacs didn’t give him anything on which to hang an objection. The Hungarian-American Jew was too obliging.

“It’ll be fine,” Istvan said.

“Szar az elet,” Miklos answered morosely. Istvan had no good reply to that. Since he’d got dragooned into the Hungarian People’s Army, he’d seen that all too often life was shit.

Maybe it wasn’t if you were American. “C’mon,” Kovacs said, as if inviting them to the corner eatery for a plate of stewed pork and Vienna-style coffee with whipped cream.

They came. Istvan saw no other choice. Miklos looked as if he would rather have fought, but even he could work out that that wasn’t a great plan. If Miklos could work it out, it had to be true.

The Polish football side was practicing on one side of the pitch, the East Germans on the other. Istvan would rather have stopped to watch them than gone on. The Poles had a match against the Hungarian side come Saturday. The East Germans would play the Czechoslovakians on Sunday. Neither encounter was likely to be what the sporting papers called a friendly.

“Here we are,” Kovacs said, as if the POWs didn’t know what the prefab building with the guards out front was.

As promised, another American who spoke Magyar waited inside. He was fluent, but he’d plainly learned it as a foreign language. That made him far more unusual than someone like Kovacs, who’d grown up with it. The other fellow led Miklos into a small room and closed the door behind them. Kovacs took Istvan into another one on the opposite side of the hallway.

His first question was “How’d you get an Arrow Cross thug for a buddy?”

“About the way you’d expect,” Istvan said. “I beat the crap out of him.” He explained how he and Miklos had become acquainted.

“Well, that’s one way to do it, I guess,” Kovacs said. “Other interesting thing is, how come the Reds didn’t purge him?”

“He’s a weapon, the same as a rifle is,” Istvan answered. “Point him at something and he’ll kill it for you. Szalasi’s boys saw that. So did the ones the Russians give orders to. Armies need that kind of people.”

“You’re right. They do.” Imre Kovacs nodded. “What’s your rank, by the way? Even the Geneva Convention says I can ask you that.”

“Me? I’m just a private. My sergeant said he’d make me a lance-corporal when he had the chance, but I got captured before he did it. Can I ask you what yours is?”

Kovacs tapped the two joined silver bars on his collar. “These show I’m a captain.” He eyed Istvan. “You’re smarter than most privates.”

Istvan shrugged. “What about it? It doesn’t mean anything. It doesn’t even keep you alive, or not very much. It just leaves you scared all the damn time.” He hesitated. “Can I ask you something?”

“Sure. Go ahead.”

“Thanks. Are you smarter than most American captains? I bet you are.”

“I won’t even try to answer that. You had it straight-it doesn’t matter any which way,” Kovacs said. “So tell me, how do you feel about the proletarian world revolution and the victory of the masses over their capitalist oppressors?”

Had a Russian officer asked him that, Istvan would have known what to say. But would an American captain really believe himself to be fighting on behalf of those capitalist oppressors? Istvan didn’t know enough about America to be sure. Cautiously, he answered with something close to the truth: “I don’t know. It wasn’t my fight, you understand. But when they give you a uniform and a rifle and throw you at the guys on the other side, what are you gonna do? If you don’t shoot at them, you get killed even quicker.”

Imre Kovacs scribbled in a notebook. Was he writing in Magyar or in English? That didn’t matter, either. He’d have to know English, or he wouldn’t be a captain. Closing the book, he said, “If I had a forint for every Magyar POW who told me a story like that, I’d be one of those capitalist oppressors myself.”

“I think you just called me something I’m not, or not exactly,” Istvan said.

“Oh, a Magyar?” Captain Kovacs didn’t pretend to misunderstand him. “If I said ‘every POW from Hungary,’ would you be happier?”

“Happier? Nah, not so you’d notice. I can’t do anything about what I am. But you’d be more, mm, accurate.” Istvan hesitated. “Can I ask you something else?”

“Be my guest.”

“What’s it like for Jews in America?”

Kovacs pursed his lips. “It isn’t perfect. It isn’t perfect for us anywhere, even in Israel. I’m sure of that. But it’s not so bad. There are people who don’t like us, but there aren’t any laws against us.” He smiled a sardonic smile. “It’s not like we’re niggers, after all.”

The key word came out in English. “Like we’re what?” Istvan asked.

“Colored people,” the captain explained. “What Europeans do to Jews, Americans do to them. Everybody does it to somebody, believe me.”

Istvan did, too. He found a different question: “What’s going to happen to me here?”

“You’ll play football on Saturday,” Kovacs answered. “After that, who knows? We may talk some more. Or we may not.” And with that Istvan had to be not especially content.

–

Red Chinese 105s howled in. Cade Curtis crouched in his dugout and hoped one of them wouldn’t come down right where he happened to be. He’d begun to hate just about everything that had anything to do with war, but he hated getting shelled worse than most things. No matter what Einstein said, this was God rolling dice with the universe. Whether you lived or died had nothing to do with you. Luck ruled, luck good or bad.

You were just as dead if you stopped a rifle bullet with your ear. You were just as maimed if you stopped one with your leg. At least someone had aimed the rifle at you, though. Shells came down like rain or snow.

If you lived through a bombardment, you really had to worry when the shells stopped falling. That was when the enemy would try to take advantage while he had you discombobulated.

Better to discombobu late than never, Cade thought vaguely. He wondered if he had combat fatigue. He was sure as hell tired of fighting. The brass insisted that wasn’t the same thing, but when in the whole history of the world had the brass known its ass from third base?

Somebody down the trench was screaming for a medic. Cade bit his lip till he tasted blood. Luck, good or bad.

Then, except for the screams, it was quiet. “Out!” Cade yelled. “Out and up onto the firing step! Be ready!”

He hoped he was giving the right order. The Chinks were sneaky bastards. Sometimes they’d stop the artillery fire, wait till you emerged to repel infantry, and then start shelling you again. They had more tricks than a trained circus monkey.

They weren’t trying that particular one today. Even before Cade got to the firing step, two American machine guns had started raking the ground in front of the trenches. There had been three sandbagged machine-gun positions that should have been banging away, but one was silent. Cade feared he knew what that meant. One of those 105mm rounds, or maybe more than one, had smashed through the protection. There’d be casualties besides the poor guy who was still screaming his head off.

Here came the Reds. It wasn’t a human wave like the ones that had swamped the UN forces by the Chosin Reservoir. Mao’s commanders understood they had to spend men to advance, because they had less materiel to spend than the Americans did. But they wasted fewer soldiers than they had at the end of 1950. They’d learned how to do fire-and-move rather than thundering forward in a mob to get chopped down.

Cade fired a short burst from his PPSh. The diagonally cut end of the barrel jacket made a compensator of sorts, so the submachine gun didn’t pull up and to the right as much as it would have otherwise. But it still would if you went through a magazine at a time, so Cade tried not to. When he remembered. When panic didn’t jam his finger to the trigger. Fire discipline, they called that. Like a lot of disciplines, it was more easily preached than practiced.

He ducked down behind the parapet and came up again a few feet away for another quick burst. The Red Chinese soldiers shrieked just like white men when bullets slammed into them.

Howard Sturgis sported a first lieutenant’s silver bar now, not the gold one he’d worn before. He still carried a Garand like an enlisted man, though: no faggy officer’s M-1 carbine or Russian piece for him. “Ain’t this fun?” he said.

“Now that you mention it, no,” Cade answered. “If you want to ask me whether it’s better than getting killed and having buzzards and stray dogs squabbling over your carcass, I may tell you something different.”

“I wish we had some tanks,” Sturgis said.

“Wish for the moon while you’re at it,” Cade advised. “And keep on wishing Stalin doesn’t decide to send the Chinks some more. Wish hard on that one.”

“Bet your ass, sir.” Sturgis fired a couple of shots of his own. The clip on his rifle went dry and popped out with a distinctive ping. He slammed a new one into place.

Another soldier on Cade’s right squeezed off a few rounds of his own. “There you go, Jimmy!” Curtis said. “Give ’em hell.”

“Bet your ass, sir,” Jimmy said, echoing Howard Sturgis. The soldier formerly known as Chun Wong-un was as foulmouthed as any American GI. More and more, Cade thought of him as if he were an American GI. The longer he stayed with the regiment, the more he acted like one.

Jimmy soaked up English like a sponge. He’d been a soldier of sorts even under a son of a bitch like Captain Pak Ho-san. Now, except for his flat face and narrow eyes, he made a near-perfect copy of a dogface.

Oh, there was one other difference. Most dogfaces wanted as little to do with officers as they could finagle. Jimmy thought the sun rose and set on Captain Cade Curtis. Cade had thought of rescuing him as adopting a puppy. Now he had a full-grown companion, but one who still didn’t want to leave his side.

Sturgis didn’t think of it the same way. “You know what he is?” the veteran said. “He’s our Hiwi.”

“Our what?” Cade didn’t know the term.

“Our Hiwi,” Sturgis repeated. “Some of the krauts we faced in France, especially the outfits that came from the Eastern Front, they had these Russians attached to them, doing the cooking and the horseshoeing and the driving and anything else you can think of. Hiwis, they called ’em-it was their slang for volunteers. Sure, some of the Russians joined up to keep from starving to death in POW camps. But the rest were just like Jimmy. They weren’t supposed to fight, but some of ’em sure as hell did that, too.”

“But they were on the other side before, right?” Cade said. “Jimmy was on our team.”

“Yeah. Or I guess so,” Sturgis said. “You ask him how he liked it, though, he’s gonna tell you it wasn’t so hot.”

Cade intended to do no such thing. Jimmy was working as hard as he could to forget the days when he was Chun Won-ung. If he could have turned his eyes blue to seem more American, he would have done it in a flash. In a way, that flattered the United States. In another way, it left the adoptive GI with a problem, one he might not have worried about yet.

“One of these days,” Cade said, “this war’ll be over and done with.”

“You hope!” Sturgis said.

“Fuckin’-A, I hope,” Cade agreed. “It’ll be over, and we’ll go home. Jimmy’s not coming with us, not unless we stencil MEDICAL SUPPLIES on his forehead or something.”

Sturgis chuckled. He also fired out at the Red Chinese before answering, “Maybe we can smuggle him into the States. Who the hell knows? Or maybe we can pass him on to some new Americans. There’ll be some, bet your ass. We’re gonna occupy this place like we did with Germany.”

“Uh-huh. And look how great that turned out,” Cade said.

“Captain,” Sturgis said earnestly, “as soon as the troopship taking me away from here gets over the horizon, they can blow this whole motherfucking peninsula off the map, north and south together, an’ I won’t shed me one single goddamn tear.” He jumped up onto the firing step, squeezed off two more rounds, and hopped down again.

Cade suspected most surviving Americans held a similar view. He didn’t love Korea or Koreans himself; he was faintly embarrassed that at least one Korean loved him. But his view of the place would be forever tempered by remembering that this was where he’d gone from boy to man in any number of ways.

He took a few shots at the Red Chinese himself. They were already falling back toward their own holes and trenches. They’d shelled, they’d probed, they’d seen they weren’t going to break through. They’d try something else somewhere else, or they’d wait a while and try something else here. They were getting to be pros.

Kaeryong was gone. Cade didn’t know what had happened to Pak Ho-san, or care very much. He just wanted to hang on until America remembered a war was still cooking here and put in enough men and machines to win it. He had no idea how long that would take. Sure as hell, Jimmy might die of old age before he had to fret about getting separated from the regiment.

–

Another Jurassic tank park. Another tank-park sergeant smiling a smarmy, apologetic smile. Another dinosaur of a T-34/85. “Yob tvoyu mat’,” Konstantin Morozov said, and the way he said it warned he was ready to take the tank-park sergeant apart. “I ought to tear your head off and piss in the hole.”

“You shouldn’t talk that way,” said the tank-park sergeant, who’d obviously heard obscene suggestions from other tank commanders before Konstantin. “It’s a fine machine, and-”

“I don’t see you in the fucking antique,” Morozov broke in. “Some other chancreface gave us one before, and it got killed out from under us in nothing flat. Just lucky the bazooka hit the engine compartment, or we’d be pushing up daisies right now-and you’d give this cunt to some other dumb prick.”

“I don’t know what you want me to do-”

“I want you to give us a real tank, not a kiddy car. The Hitlerites built better tanks than this, and that was years ago.”

“Do you want to tell that to an officer, Comrade Sergeant?”

The question had cowed Morozov once. Not twice. “Bet your pussy I do, you assfucking whore.” Konstantin didn’t care what he said. Nothing a lieutenant or a captain could do to him was likely to be worse than sticking him in a T-34/85 again.

Biting his lip, the tank-park sergeant stomped away. When he came back, he came back not with a company-grade officer but with a gray-haired lieutenant colonel. Morozov’s crewmen looked ready to let the dirt swallow them. He didn’t worry about it. The man wasn’t going to shoot him on the spot.

“So what are you giving Ninel a hard time about?” the senior officer demanded.

Ninel! The tank-park sergeant had had good Red parents. In the aftermath of the glorious proletarian revolution, quite a few Soviet babies got tagged with Lenin’s name spelled backward. As far as Konstantin was concerned, though, it sounded precious if not swishy. And it had nothing to do with the price of sausage.

He spoke to what did: “What for, Comrade Colonel? Because my men and I don’t deserve to die in this hunk of junk, that’s what. Like I told your Ninel, we already had one of them smashed with us in it. I fought through the last war, sir. You want to see my scars? I had T-34/85s killed by the Hitlerites with tanks not half as good as what the enemy uses now. We go back into this clunker, it’s murder, nothing else but….Sir.”

The lieutenant colonel glowered. “I can have you court-martialed and shot inside of fifteen minutes, Sergeant.”

“Go ahead, sir. Whatever the pricks with the rifles do, it won’t be as bad as when a Pershing slams a round through my glacis plate. And the round will get through, too, because that armor might as well be tinfoil. It can’t keep anything out.”

“What makes you deserve a T-54 and not somebody else?”

“I’m a damn good tank commander, Comrade Colonel, that’s what. I’ve got a damn good crew. Give us a damn good tank so we have the chance to serve the Soviet Union the best way we can.”

“You’re living on borrowed time, Sergeant,” the officer rumbled.

“Tell me something I didn’t know, sir,” Konstantin replied with a laugh. “The Nazis have blown me up. So have the Americans. If I’d been any closer to an A-bomb, I wouldn’t be arguing with you now. But if you stuff me into this tin can”-he spat at the T-34/85-“all I’ve borrowed gets paid back right now.”

He wondered if he’d overplayed his hand. By the way Vazgen Sarkisyan’s eyes-and Demyan Belitsky’s, too-bugged out of their heads, they were sure he had. The lieutenant colonel studied him. The burn scar on the side of the man’s neck said he’d seen action himself, and probably been lucky to get out of a blazing tank.

He nodded to himself with the air of a man who’d made up his mind. “Ninel!”

“Yes, Comrade Colonel?” By the eager way the tank-park sergeant said it, he expected the next order to be Place these men under arrest! Konstantin more than half expected the same thing.

But the gray-haired lieutenant colonel said, “Put these men in a T-54. They won’t need the bow gunner. We’ll find a crew short a man for him.”

Ninel stared as if he couldn’t believe his ears. “Comrade Colonel?”

“You heard me. Do it.” The officer waited.

“I serve the Soviet Union!” the tank-park sergeant choked out.

Konstantin clapped Ilya Goledod on the back. “Good luck, pal,” he said.

“Thanks,” Goledod said. “You, too.”

They squeezed each other. Goledod said his good-byes to the other men in the crew. Konstantin rounded on the tank-park sergeant. “Come on, Ninel. Give us something that may keep us alive for twenty minutes.”

“Take them to the one with Za Stalina! painted on the turret,” the lieutenant colonel said. Ninel’s face fell. If he’d planned to stick them with a lemon, he wouldn’t get the chance now.

The T-54 was…a T-54. It wasn’t new. Konstantin’s nose told him another crew had been in there before his-had, in fact, been killed in there. Kerosene smelled better than spoiling flesh and blood.

Juris Eigims peered through the magnifying gunsight. “Well, this is more like it,” he said. “I’ve got a chance of hitting what I aim at.”

“You never did get a shot off in the old sow, did you?” Konstantin said.

“Nyet.” The gunner shook his head. But then he held up a hand. “Wait! I was going to say, the rocket hit us before I could. But I did blast that guy who shot us on the way to the regiment. I didn’t fire at any enemy tanks, though.”

“Oh, yeah, the other asshole with the bazooka. I forgot about him. How did I do that?” But Morozov knew too well how he’d done it. He’d been in so many tight spots, he couldn’t keep track of them all any more. That had to be a bad sign. If it didn’t mean death was gaining on him, he couldn’t imagine what it would signify. Shaking his head, he used the intercom: “Fire this bastard up, Demyan.”

“I’ll do it, Comrade Sergeant,” Belitsky answered. That told Konstantin the system worked, which was more than it had in the T-34/85. The big diesel behind the fighting compartment started right away. It sounded smoother than the relic’s motor had. That was good, anyhow.

Morozov stuck his head out of the cupola. Ninel still stood beside the tank, looking as if he’d just swallowed a big swig of vinegar. “Where do we find regimental HQ?” Konstantin asked him. He had to shout; the engine’s blatting seemed louder when thick steel didn’t shield him from it.

“Eight or ten kilometers up the road, in Dassel,” the tank-park sergeant shouted back, pointing to show the way.

“Spasibo,” Konstantin said. He relayed the instructions to Belitsky. The T-54 got moving. It occurred to Morozov that dear Ninel might be lying. But if a tank couldn’t take care of itself, what in this world could?

Dassel wouldn’t have been anything much before the Red Army overran it. It was even less now. The defenders had fought fiercely to keep Soviet troops out, the Russians just as ferociously to break in. It looked to have been bombed and strafed a few times, too. Only a handful of scrawny Fritzes skulked along the rubble-strewn streets.

But the headquarters did lie at the western edge of the shattered town. The CO seemed glad to see Konstantin, and even gladder to see his T-54. He was a major named Genrikh Zhuk. He’d likely been a junior lieutenant last time around. “Do you come from the tank park off to the east?” he asked.

“Yes, sir,” Morozov said. “Why?”

“How did you pry a real machine out of them instead of a retread?”

“I made a perfect son of a bitch out of myself, Comrade Major,” Konstantin answered. “I’ve been in one of those old crocks this war. Two would’ve been too many.”

“Sergeant, you’re my kind of man,” Zhuk said. “The more sons of bitches we’ve got, the better we’ll do.” They nodded to each other, both of them smiling.