Fallout

4

Boris Gribkov and the rest of the Tu-4’s crew had lingered in western Germany much longer than he’d ever expected they would. Having your navigator blow out the back of his head would do that to you.

They could have flown back to an airfield in the eastern zone or in Poland or Czechoslovakia. They could have done a little hop like that without a navigator, or with Alexander Lavrov, the bombardier, filling in for poor, dead Tsederbaum. It would have been safe enough.

But no one who outranked Gribkov thought for a moment of letting them get away without interrogation. First came the men from the MGB, the Ministry of State Security. “Did Lieutenant Tsederbaum show any sign of disaffection before committing suicide?” a Chekist with a double chin asked Gribkov.

Of course he did, you dumb prick, Gribkov thought. His face, though, showed nothing of what went on behind his eyes. In the USSR, you learned not to give yourself away…or you gave yourself away and paid the price for it.

You also learned not to give anyone else away if you could possibly help it. His voice as wooden as his features, the pilot said, “Never that I noticed, Comrade.” They couldn’t do anything to Leonid, not now. They could build a dossier against his relatives. Gribkov didn’t care to lend them a hand.

“Before his act, was he in any way unsatisfactory in the performance of his duties?” the MGB man persisted. Yes, they were trying to make a case, all right.

“He wouldn’t have won a Hero of the Soviet Union medal if he had been,” Gribkov said, shaking his head. “We struck Seattle. We struck Bordeaux. We struck Paris. We couldn’t have hit our targets without the best navigation.”

“Then why did he do it?” the fat fool demanded.

He did it because we struck Seattle and Bordeaux and Paris, Boris thought. Tsederbaum made the mistake of seeing enemies as human beings. For a fighting man, that could be fatal. For the thoughtful Jew, it damn well had been.

Try explaining as much to a Chekist, though. To the men who’d been headquartered at the Lubyanka till the Americans turned it into radioactive fallout, enemies were always enemies. Even friends were sometimes enemies.

This fellow badgered Gribkov awhile longer, then gave up and left him alone. But he and his pals also had to interrogate the rest of the crew. They took their time about it. Boris didn’t ask if anyone told them more than he had. The less you asked, the less you could get in trouble for later.

He got questioned again two days after the session with the MGB man. The fellow who grilled him this time wore the uniform of a Red Army major. Gribkov rapidly began to doubt that that was what he was, or that it was all of what he was. Everyone knew about the MGB. Hardly anyone heard more than whispers about the GRU, the Main Intelligence Directorate. It was the military’s intelligence branch, aimed at the parts of the world that didn’t belong to the Soviet Union.

“Did anyone get to Tsederbaum?” the major asked. “Did he talk to or listen to people he shouldn’t have?”

“I don’t think so, sir,” Gribkov answered truthfully. “As far as I know, he spent just about all of his time with us and with other Soviet flyers and soldiers.”

The major grunted. He’d introduced himself as Ivan Ivanov, a name so ordinary it couldn’t be real. “Did he ever talk with foreigners? When you flew your plane in here, did he go out and find a German popsy to screw?”

“No, Comrade Major.” Again, Gribkov told the truth. “Remember, he was a Jew. He liked Germans even less than Russians do, and that’s not easy.”

Another grunt from “Ivanov.” “He was a rootless cosmopolite, you mean,” he said, which was what the Party line called Jews when they were out of favor. “Who knows what those people really think? They’re masters of mystification. It’s part of what makes them so dangerous.” Like the MGB man before him, he was working to build a case against the late Leonid Abramovich Tsederbaum.

As with the MGB man before him, Gribkov didn’t want to help. “Sir, as far as I know, the only people he was dangerous to were the Soviet Union’s enemies. Thanks to him, my bombs hit America once and France twice. How many other crews have done so well?”

“Ivanov” didn’t answer, which was in itself an answer of sorts. The likely GRU man did say, “If he was such a stalwart in the service of the working class, why did he shoot himself like a plutocrat after a stock-market crash?”

“Comrade Major, the only person who could have told you that was Tsederbaum, and he isn’t here to do it any more,” Gribkov said.

“We don’t need-we don’t want-weaklings in important military positions,” “Ivanov” said fretfully. “I have to get to the bottom of this, no matter how long it takes.”

“You can’t mean we won’t fly any more missions till you do!” Boris said. There was a kick in the head for you! As far as the pilot could see, Tsederbaum had stuck the pistol in his mouth and pulled the trigger because he couldn’t stand the missions the Tu-4 was flying. Now, because he had, it wouldn’t fly them?

Was that irony? No, madness! And Boris knew that if he burst out laughing he’d never be able to explain it to the GRU man, any more than he would have been able to with the Chekist. People who served the Soviet Union in those ways had their sense of humor cut out of them as part of the initiation process, probably without anesthetic.

In any case, Major “Ivanov”-though his rank might be as fictitious as his name-shook his head. He wasn’t so porky as the MGB man had been, but he’d never gone hungry for long. “No, no, Comrade, no. We will furnish you with a new navigator so you can keep on carrying the action to the imperialist warmongers. But the investigation will continue until we reach the truth concerning the late Lieutenant Tsederbaum.”

“I serve the Soviet Union!” Gribkov said, which here meant something like I’m stuck with whatever you tell me.

The new navigator was a round-faced first lieutenant named Yefim Vladimirovich Arzhanov. Boris put him through his paces at the navigator’s station, which lay directly behind his own but was separated from it by a bulkhead. As any pilot had to, Gribkov knew a little something about the art of navigation: enough to tell someone who also knew from a clown running a bluff. Arzhanov had a sleepy look to him, but he passed the tests the pilot gave him without needing to wake up all the way.

“You’ll do,” Gribkov said.

“Thank you, sir,” Arzhanov said. “Did you think they were trying to stick a rotten egg in your crew?”

“Of course not,” Boris answered, which, to anyone with ears to hear, meant You bet! “I just wanted to see how you run.”

“Like a stopped clock, Comrade Pilot-I’m sure to be right twice a day,” Arzhanov answered with a grin that made him look no more than fourteen.

His voice didn’t sound like Tsederbaum’s. He looked nothing like the Jew: he looked like the Russian he was. But it was a crack the dead man might have come out with. Gribkov shook his head. “I think the factory that makes navigators stamps them out crazy.”

“That’s me, sir. Just another spare part, at your service.” Yefim Arzhanov came to attention, clacked his heels together, and saluted as if he were flying for Austria-Hungary in what was now the big war before last.

“You’ll do, all right,” Gribkov said. “Just what you’ll do, I’m afraid to ask, but we’ll all find out, won’t we?”

The first thing Arzhanov did for the Tu-4 was guide the heavy bomber back to an airfield outside of Prague. As the dry run had given Boris confidence he would, he handled the short flight with unflustered competence.

Just getting away from the place where Leonid Tsederbaum decided the weight he carried was too much for his narrow shoulders came as a relief. Now they could get on with the war.

–

It was the middle of the night, moonless, cloudy, with spatters of warm July drizzle coming down every so often. It was dark as the inside of a concentration camp guard’s heart, except when guns and rocket launchers going off lit the clouds’ underside with brief, red, hellish glows.

It was, in other words, the perfect time for Gustav Hozzel to pull a sneak. He crawled through the shattered streets of Wesel, away from the blocks on the west side of town that the Germans and Americans still held and toward the Red Army’s positions. He didn’t tell his friends where he was going. He most especially didn’t tell his company CO. Max and Rolf would have tried to talk him out of it. Captain Nowak would have ordered him not to try such a harebrained stunt. What they didn’t know wouldn’t hurt them.

A snake wouldn’t have lifted any higher off the ground than he did. He could feel the buttons on his tunic front scraping the asphalt as he wriggled along. The humid air stank of smoke-most of it the nasty, toxic kind that came from burnt paint and motor oil and fuel-and of death. Except during the coldest stretches of Russian winter, that spoiled-meat reek walked hand-in-hand with war.

More rain dripped from the heavens. That was good, and it was bad. The Ivans would have a harder time spotting him. But he might not hear or see approaching trouble till it arrived. Every few meters, he paused to look and listen before moving on. He wasn’t in a hurry. He just wanted to get back.

He had a bayonet in his right hand, a wire-cutter in his left. He hadn’t brought his PPSh. Firing it would be nothing but a kind of suicide. He’d scream to the whole world, or all of it that mattered, Here I am! Kill me!

The really scary thing was, he’d done worse sneaks than this. That one through the snow in southern Poland during the last winter of the old war…He’d come back with a fifteen-kilo ham, enough to let him and his buddies gorge for a couple of days instead of starving. He’d been a hero in his section-till the Russian steamroller started rolling again, anyhow.

He wouldn’t make his buddies fat this time. He did aim to make them jealous. Back and to the side of…was it this shattered building? Yes, sure enough-the apothecary’s shop.

Gustav started to go round the corner, then froze. Somebody was already crouching over what he craved. If another man from his own side had beaten him to it, more power to the sneaky bastard.

But that wasn’t somebody from his own side. Even as he watched, the Russian soldier started to drag his countryman’s corpse back toward the part of town the Reds held securely. Silent as a hunting hawk, Gustav set down the wire-cutter and eased up into a crouch. Then he sprang on the unsuspecting Ivan’s back.

His left palm covered the enemy soldier’s mouth. His strong left arm pulled the Russian’s head back. And the bayonet still in his right hand cut the man’s throat. The Russian gurgled desperately for most of a minute. He thrashed with ebbing strength till he went limp. Gustav held that hand over his mouth for an extra little while anyway. You didn’t get to be an old soldier by taking chances you didn’t have to.

So the Ivan was beyond doubt dead when Gustav slid him to the ground. He wasn’t what the German was after. The body he’d wanted to recover was. The afternoon before, Gustav had seen that that guy’d bought a plot in spite of his AK-47. Gustav had wanted one for a long time. This was his chance to get hold of one.

Part of the stock was still wet from the blood of the Ivan he’d just disposed of. Swearing silently, he wiped his hand on his trouser leg. But it wouldn’t be the first piece he’d carried that was bloodied in the literal sense of the word.

He frisked both dead Russians, and came up with five magazines for the assault rifle. They held thirty rounds apiece. That would keep him going for a little while, anyhow. If he couldn’t get more, he’d go back to the PPSh. He wouldn’t toss it just yet. He also discovered that one of the Ivans’ canteens was full of vodka. That was worth having, too.

“Now,” he said, shaping the words but not putting any sound behind them, “let’s get the hell out of here.”

Sometimes you got careless on the way back after you pulled a stunt like this. When you did, chances were you paid for it. Gustav took even more pains on his way back to his side’s chunk of Wesel than he had on his foray into the Red Army’s part of town.

The live Russians didn’t know he’d been and gone. Neither did the German pickets. That amused and worried him at the same time. What he’d done, some enterprising Ivan could imitate.

He curled up in his blanket and shelter half and went to sleep. He’d snored through plenty worse than this on-and-off drizzle. He slept so hard, Rolf had to shake him awake once it got light. As soon as he uncocooned himself, the ex-LAH man saw his new toy. “Where’d you get that?” he demanded.

“Came in one of the cans from my last K-ration,” Gustav said, deadpan.

Rolf cussed him out in German, Russian, and what was probably Magyar. Then he calmed down. His gaze sharpened. “First one I’ve seen close up,” he said. “It looks just like a Sturmgewehr, doesn’t it? Except for the crappy wood stock, I mean. Even that banana-shaped magazine’s the same.”

Gustav had seen only a few of the German assault rifles during the last war. They were made from stamped metal and plastic: no wood at all. “You know how the Russians copy shit,” he said. “Monkey see, monkey do.” He pulled off the receiver. “Are the guts the same, too?”

Rolf bent over to examine the Soviet rifle’s working parts. He whistled softly between his teeth. “No. Not even close,” he said, his admiration grudging but real. “Our piece was a lot more complicated. This…This is about as simple as it can get and still work, looks like.”

“It does, yeah. Makes it easy to take care of, anyway. I like that,” Gustav said. The PPSh was the same way. It was far less elegant than a German Schmeisser, but much more robust. Come to think of it, you could say the same thing about the T-34 when you set it in the scales against German panzers.

“You’ve got blood on you,” Rolf remarked.

“It isn’t mine. There’d be more if God wasn’t pissing on us last night,” Gustav said.

“Ganz gut.” Rolf had heard enough to satisfy him. The only thing the Waffen-SS cared about was spilling the other guy’s blood.

Instead of eating K-rations for breakfast, they got last night’s stew reheated in a Goulaschkanone-Landser slang for a field kitchen. Barley, turnips, carrots, and bits of meat went down easy and put plenty of daub on the wattle of your ribcage.

They did if you got to finish them, anyhow. The Russians started early that morning, raining Katyushas down on the part of Wesel they hadn’t seized before Gustav had more than half-emptied his mess kit. He let the little tin basin and spoon fly any which way as he dove for the nearest muddy foxhole. Those rockets screaming in always made him want to piss his pants. The first Germans at whom the Ivans had aimed Katyushas ran like rabbits-the ones the bombardment didn’t kill, anyhow. If you wanted to flatten a square kilometer, a couple of launch racks’ worth of Katyushas were the next best thing to an A-bomb.

The Ivans didn’t have the advantage of surprise any more, though. Gustav huddled in his hole, waiting for the rockets to stop. If they didn’t kill him, he’d have to fight them. They didn’t. He did. He rapidly developed a deep affection for the Soviet assault rifle he’d killed to acquire. It beat the snot out of the PPSh.

But there were too many Russians, too many tanks. He thought he’d fallen back to the black days of 1945, when there were always too many tanks and too many Russians. He scrambled out of the foxhole to join the retreat. It was that or die.

He saw his mess tin, lying on the pavement. A fragment from a Katyusha had torn it almost in half. One more war casualty, he thought. He trotted northwest, toward the new defensive line the Germans and Amis were trying to set up.

–

“Give them the machine gun, Juris!” Konstantin Morozov shouted.

“I’m doing it, Comrade Sergeant,” Juris Eigims replied. The gunner used the weapon coaxial with the T-54’s cannon to spray the luckless enemy soldiers-Englishmen, Konstantin thought they were from the shape of their helmets-who had the bad luck to show themselves just as the tank chugged out from behind a burnt-out church.

Some of the Tommies fell over. Some ran back to the stone fence that had protected them till they came out from behind it. Others made pickup on their wounded and dead mates. The machine gun bit some of those guys, too. It didn’t care that they were brave and wanted to save their comrades. It only cared that they were there, where it could reach them.

Morozov said, “Why don’t you hit that fence with a round or two of HE? Then send in another one and smash whatever’s right in back of it.”

“Right, Comrade Sergeant.” Eigims barked an order to Vazgen Sarkisyan. The loader slammed a 100mm shell into the breech and banged it closed. The Baltic gunner fired. Inside the turret, the roar wasn’t too bad. Had he been out in the open air, Konstantin would have thought it took his head off.

Hit by fifteen kilos of speeding metal and high explosives, several meters of the stone fence abruptly ceased to be. So did a good many enemy soldiers behind those meters. The blasted bits of stone made more murderous shrapnel than anything the most fiendish shell-builder would pack into a casing.

“Want me to hit the wall again, Comrade Sergeant? We got good results from that last round.” Eigims did understand that killing enemy troops was his own best chance of staying alive. While they were in action, he didn’t go out of his way to undercut the tank commander.

Coughing on propellant fumes, Morozov nodded. “Da. Say, fifteen or twenty meters to the left of the last one.”

“Got you.” As Sarkisyan loaded another HE shell into the gun, Eigims traversed the turret. The cannon bellowed again. Another stretch of stone fence turned to deadly fragments. Another swath of Englishmen huddling behind it turned to sausage meat.

“Good shot!” Morozov said. “Now one more, through a gap.”

“You want it to burst just behind there?” the gunner asked.

“That’s right. That’s just right!” Konstantin reached down and thumped Eigims on the shoulder, a liberty he hadn’t taken till now. “Now we’ll do for the ones the first two rounds only scared.”

“Khorosho.” Juris Eigims ordered another HE shell from the loader. As soon as Sarkisyan manhandled it into place and closed the breech, the gunner fired. The cartridge case clanged on the floor of the fighting compartment. The shell burst sent bodies cartwheeling through the air, high enough so Morozov could see them above the top of the battered stone fence. Eigims glanced up at him. “Shall I send one more?”

Not without regret, Konstantin shook his head. “I don’t want to get greedy. We stay out here in the open too long, they’ll give it to us.” He spoke over the intercom to Vladislav Kalyakin, who sat all alone at the front of the T-54’s hull: “Back us up behind the church again, Vladislav. Some people who don’t like us very much will start throwing things at us in a minute.”

“You’ve got it, Comrade Sergeant.” Gears ground as the driver put the tank into reverse. The T-54’s transmission wasn’t what anybody would call smooth. But it beat hell out of the T-34’s. In the older tank, the driver always kept a heavy mallet where he could grab it in a hurry when he needed to persuade the beast to engage the top gear.

The Americans in their fancy Pershings would laugh at that. During the Great Patriotic War, Germans in their fancy Tigers and Panthers would have laughed, too…for a while. Then the front stopped moving east and rolled west, west, inexorably west, all the way to Berlin. After a while, the fucking Fritzes started laughing out of the other side of their mouths.

Now the front was rolling west again. Pretty soon, the Americans-and the English, and the French, and the Nazi retreads who fought alongside them-would be laughing out of the other side of their mouths, too.

Juris Eigims tapped Konstantin on the leg of his coveralls. When the tank commander glanced down, Eigims said, “You know what you’re doing, hey, Comrade Sergeant?”

From him, Morozov would never get higher praise. Konstantin knew it, but tried not to make too much of it. “Well, maybe a little bit,” he answered. “It’s not like I’m a virgin inside a tank, you know.”

“Captain Lapshin said that, yeah,” the gunner replied. “But some people, you put ’em in charge of something and they start thinking they’re little tin gods. You aren’t like that.”

By some people, he was bound to mean some Russians or perhaps lots of Russians. He wasn’t even wrong, as Morozov knew too well. Some Russians, perhaps lots of Russians, were like that. No doubt some Latvians and Lithuanians were, too. But in a world where there were swarms of Russians and a handful of Balts, the Latvians and Lithuanians rarely got the chance to show it off.

“Look, all I want to do is get through this mess in one piece,” Konstantin said. “We’ve got to fight. Nobody says we’ve got to be stupid while we do it.” He paused to light a papiros and suck in smoke. Then he asked, “How’s that sound to you?”

“I’ve heard things I liked worse.” Eigims paused, too, weighing his words. “As long as you’re like this, it doesn’t matter so much that I didn’t get the tank.”

The cigarette gave Konstantin the excuse to waste another few seconds before he replied, “You can swing one. You know what to do. If we stay alive, you’ll get your chance.”

“Maybe. Or maybe not. I’m not what you’d call a socially reliable element.” Eigims didn’t bother hiding his bitterness.

“In a war, being able to do the job counts for more,” Konstantin said.

“Easy for you to tell me that. You’re a Russian.”

“I’ve been in the army since halfway through the Great Patriotic War. I’m a sergeant. By the time they make me a lieutenant, I’ll be dead of old age.” Morozov had no great hankering to wear an officer’s shoulder boards. But that was beside the point he was trying to make.

Eigims grunted. Konstantin let it alone, but he was confident he had it right. If you could do the job and they didn’t blow you up, you would make sergeant and command a tank. Russian? Karelian? Armenian? Lithuanian? Uzbek? Chukchi from the far reaches of Siberia? He’d seen sergeants from all those peoples, and more besides, in the armored divisions that smashed the Hitlerites. They were still in the Red Army, too.

It wasn’t quite the same when you talked about officers. Then Slavs and Armenians and Georgians (Stalin was one, after all) had an edge on the other tribes, mostly because they’d shown themselves to be more trustworthy.

Morozov’s musing cut off when Kalyakin asked him, “Comrade Sergeant, what do you want me to do now? Stay here and wait for the enemy or for reinforcements?”

“No, no. Back it up some more. Let’s not come out at them the same way. We’ll go around to the far side. Juris, swing the turret around so you can fire as soon as you see the chance. Slap a round of AP in there for that. If we need it, we’ll need it bad.”

“I’ll do it,” Eigims said. Actually, Sarkisyan would, but it amounted to the same thing. And they did need it. The first thing Konstantin saw when they came around the other side of the church was a Centurion. But it had its main armament aimed at where he had been, not where he was.

“Fire!” he yelled as the English tank’s turret started a desperate traverse. Eigims did, and he hit with the first shot. The Centurion exploded in smoke and flame. Konstantin ordered the T-54 back behind the church again. He’d given the Tommies something to stew over, all right.

–

Somewhere-maybe off a dead Russian officer-Sergeant Gergely had found himself a big, shiny brass whistle. He wore it around his neck on a leather bootlace, and he was as happy with it as a three-year-old would have been with a toy drum. He always had liked to make noise. What sergeant didn’t?

He blew it now. It was loud and shrill. “Come on, you lugs! Get moving! It’s been a while, but now we’re starting to put the capitalist imperialist warmongers on the run!” he said, and blew it again.

Istvan Szolovits didn’t giggle. Not giggling took some effort, but he managed. During the last war, Gergely would have shouted Hitler’s slogans, and Admiral Horthy’s, and those of Ferenc Szalasi, the Magyar Fascist Hitler installed after he stopped Horthy from making a separate peace with Russia.

Now Gergely yelled what Stalin wanted him to yell. He sounded as if he meant every word of what he said, too. Szolovits was sure he’d sounded just as sincere when he bellowed Hitler’s slogans, and Horthy’s, and Szalasi’s.

And he must have sounded even more sincere when he explained to the Chekists or the Hungarian secret police how he’d been lying through his teeth when he made noises for Hitler and Horthy and Szalasi. He’d made them believe him, or give him the benefit of the doubt when there should have been no doubt.

He’d been a noncom for the Fascists. Now he was a noncom for the Communists. If the world turned on its axis yet again and Hungary found itself a satellite of the USA rather than the USSR, Istvan would have bet anything he had that Gergely’d wind up a noncom for the capitalists. Whoever was in charge needed good noncoms, and the sergeant damn well was one.

Which didn’t mean Istvan was eager to follow Gergely as the veteran loped forward. An American machine gun was stuttering dangerously up ahead. A man could get hurt if he got close, or even closer, to it.

But the Hungarians weren’t the only ones moving to the attack. They had Poles to their left and Russians to their right. The Russians, richer in equipment than their fraternal socialist brethren, had a couple of SU-100 self-propelled guns with them. Those were tank destroyers from the last war. Following the Nazis’ lead, Stalin’s designers put a 100mm gun in a non-traversing mount on a T-34 chassis with some extra frontal armor. Tanks could do more things, but guns like that were cheaper and easier to make-and when they hit, they hit hard.

Those big mobile guns wouldn’t destroy just tanks, either. They were also lovely for knocking even concrete machine-gun nests to smithereens. One of these SU-100s did exactly that. When the nasty machine gun shut up, Istvan let out a whoop like a Red Indian in a Karl May Western.

Andras Orban laughed. “You tell ’em, Jewboy!” the Magyar said.

“Suck my dick, Andras,” Istvan answered. Why didn’t the Yankees knock you over before the self-propelled gun got ’em? he wondered. Most Magyars didn’t jump up and down about Jews. Szolovits had no trouble coping with that. But Andras was one of the minority who, had he been born a German, would have wanted to shove Jews into the gas chambers at Auschwitz.

You couldn’t say out loud that you hoped he’d get killed. He and you were allegedly on the same side. But not even the MGB had yet figured out a way to read what you were thinking.

Only a few strands of barbed wire protected the American lines. The men hadn’t been here long. They hadn’t had time to run up the thick belts that stymied every kind of attack except one spearheaded by heavy tracked vehicles. Some of the wires were already cut. Istvan twanged through others with the cutter he wore on his belt. A bullet cracked by above his head. He was already down on his back, reaching up to work on the wire. He exposed himself as little as he could.

Then he was past the obstacle and rolling down into a trench. A Yank lay there, half his face blown off. Istvan had seen horrors before, but he was still new enough not to be hardened to them. His stomach did a slow lurch, like a fighter pilot’s in a power dive.

That didn’t stop him from rifling the dead man’s pockets and belt pouches for cigarettes, food, and the morphine syrette from his aid kit. Americans were as rich as people said they were, sure as the devil. He’d never seen soldiers with gear as fine as the U.S. Army gave its men. Not even the Germans had come close. Of course, the end-of-the-war Germans he remembered were the ones who’d taken a beating for the past few years. But he didn’t think even the victorious Germans of Blitzkrieg fame made war as extravagantly as the Americans did.

Sergeant Gergely blew his stupid goddamn whistle again. “Keep moving!” he shouted. “We’ve got to drive them while we can!”

One of the Red Army SU-100s obliterated another machine-gun nest. An American with a bazooka obliterated the other self-propelled gun. It burned and burned, sending up its own stinking smoke screen. How long had the men in there lived after the rocket slammed into their machine? Long enough to know how screwed they were? Long enough to scream? If they had, the SU-100’s armor didn’t let their cries escape. More imaginative than he wished he were, Istvan had no trouble hearing those shrieks inside his head anyway.

He scrambled up and out of the foremost trench, rolled across the dirt between it and the next, and flopped down into that one. He found himself not ten meters from two live Yanks.

One of them started to bring up his rifle. Istvan shot first, by sheer reflex, from the hip. His round caught the American three centimeters above the bridge of his nose. The man groaned and crumpled like a dropped sack of flour.

That was nothing but dumb luck, but only Istvan knew it. He felt terrible about it. He didn’t want to kill Americans. But he was also the only one who knew that.

The dead GI’s buddy certainly didn’t. He didn’t see a scared Hungarian Jewish conscript fighting not to heave. He saw a fierce, straight-shooting Communist warrior whose rifle now bore on him. He threw down his own M-1, raised his hands, and gabbled something in English that had to mean I give up!

Istvan frisked him, quickly and clumsily. The American handed him his wallet and wristwatch. Istvan took them, though he cared more about smokes and food and medicine. Then he gestured back toward the rear. Off the new POW went, hands still held high.

He had no guarantee, of course, that some other trigger-happy soldier of the Hungarian People’s Army wouldn’t plug him for the fun of it or because he had nothing left worth stealing. But that was his problem, not Istvan’s. Istvan also did a quick job of plundering the soldier he’d killed. The dead man’s identity disk said he was Walter Hoblitzel.

“I’m sorry, Walter,” Istvan muttered. He meant it. He would rather things had worked out so he could surrender to an American, not the other way around. You got what you got, though, not what you wanted.

“What are you doing there?” someone asked. Istvan turned. It was Andras Orban.

“What do you think I’m doing, you stupid chancre?” Istvan answered. The best way to treat Andras was like the asshole he was. “I killed him, so I’m getting his tobacco and his ration tins.”

“Can I have some cigarettes? I’m almost out,” Orban said.

“Kill your own American, hero,” Istvan told him, and headed west again. He was lucky-Andras didn’t shoot him in the back.

When he caught up with Sergeant Gergely, he did give him some of the tobacco he’d taken from the Yanks. He didn’t like Gergely much, but he had an odd respect for him. Gergely nodded back. “Thanks, kid,” he said. “This beats the shit out of retreat, y’know?”

“Does it?” Istvan didn’t.

“Bet your ass it does,” the sergeant said. “Hope you don’t find out, that’s all.” Not knowing how to answer that, Istvan kept his mouth shut.