Hitler's war

Chapter 4

The night was cool and damp. Most nights were, as October moved toward November. Willi Dernen peered at the Frenchmen who’d nipped off a few square kilometers of German soil.

They were warmer than he was. They’d started a fire and sat around it. From 300 meters, he could have potted them easily. Orders were not to piss them off, no matter what. If they wanted to sit on their asses as if they hadn’t crossed the border, they were welcome to.

If they’d really come loaded for bear…

Willi’s shiver had nothing to do with the weather. He was a blond, stolid watchmaker’s son from Breslau, all the way over on the other side of the Reich. He could hardly follow the German they spoke here, and the locals had trouble with his accent, too. But he’d been on the Westwall since France and England declared war. He knew what would have happened had the French put some muscle into a push instead of tiptoeing over the border.

They would have smashed the Westwall as if they were made of cardboard. Not a Landser here thought any differently. The Westwall was Goebbels’ joke on the democracies. On paper, and on the radio, it was as formidable as the Maginot Line. For real, construction gangs were still frantically building forts and obstructions. And the Westwall didn’t have nearly enough troops to man what was already built.

Most of the Wehrmacht had gone off to kick Czechoslovakia’s ass. What was left…the French outnumbered somewhere between three and five to one. That was the bad news. The good news was, they didn’t seem to know it.

One of the Frenchmen pulled out a concertina and began to play. The thin, plaintive notes made Willi shake his head. How could the guys on the other side listen to crap like that? Horns, drums, fiddles- that was music.

Beside Dernen, Wolfgang Storch whispered, “We ought to plug him just so he’ll shut up, you know?”

Trust Wolfgang to come up with something like that, Willi thought. He whispered back: “Damn you, you almost made me laugh out loud. That wouldn’t be so good.”

“Why not?” Storch said. “Probably make the Frenchmen piss themselves.”

Willi did snort then, not because Wolfgang was wrong but because he was right. Willi had come that close to pissing himself when he was part of a firefight right after the French came over the border. The guy next to him took one right in the belly. The noises Klaus made…You didn’t want to remember things like that, but you couldn’t very well forget them. When Willi went to sleep, he heard Klaus shrieking in his nightmares. He smelled the other man’s blood, like hot iron-and his shit, too.

One of the Frenchmen looked up. The guy with the concertina stopped playing. All of the men in khaki looked around. Willi pretended he wasn’t there as hard as he could. It must have worked, because none of the enemy soldiers got to his feet or anything. Tiny in the distance, one of them shrugged a comically French shrug. The concertina player started up again.

“Let’s head back and report in,” Wolfgang said.

“Now you’re talking. You and your stupid jokes.” It was hard to stay really mad when you were whispering in a tiny voice, but Willi gave it his best shot. “We wouldn’t’ve got in a jam if you weren’t such a damn smartass.”

“Your mother,” Wolfgang answered sweetly.

Both Germans drew back as softly as they could. The French soldier with the concertina went on playing. Willi took that as a good sign. Maybe the Frenchmen were using the noise as cover. That would be a smart thing to do. It would also be an aggressive thing to do. The French might be smart. They’d shown no sign of aggressiveness.

All the same, Willi wanted no part of a nasty surprise. All it would take was a sergeant who’d been through the mill the last time around. Willi’s father was a guy like that. When he and his buddies got together and drank some beer, they’d start telling stories. Like any kid, Willi listened. There probably weren’t a lot of guys his age who hadn’t heard stories like that. Some veterans, though, didn’t care to talk. Willi hadn’t understood that, not till Klaus got it. He did now.

They’d gone about half a kilometer when a no-doubt-about-it German voice challenged them: “Halt! Who goes there?”

“Two German soldiers: Dernen and Storch,” Willi answered. He and Wolfgang were out in the middle of a field. The Landser who owned that voice might have been…anywhere.

“Give the password,” the man said.

“Sonnenschein,” Willi and Wolfgang chorused. A Frenchman poking around could have picked it up from them, but the French didn’t do much of that kind of poking.

“Pass on,” the sentry said.

They did. The Germans were ready for anything. The French didn’t seem to be. They didn’t have to be, either-they had numbers, and the Wehrmacht didn’t. But they acted as if that would go on forever. And it wouldn’t.

Willi got a glimpse of just how true that was when he and Wolfgang finished making their report. They ducked out of Colonel Bauer’s tent and found themselves in the middle of chaos. Soldiers were jumping down from trucks whose headlights were cut down to slits by masking tape. Some of the belching, farting monsters there weren’t trucks at all. They were panzers.

Both Willi and Wolfgang gaped at them. Willi hadn’t seen a panzer up till now in all the time he’d spent on the Western Front. He supposed there were a few, in case the French decided they were serious about attacking here. But he sure hadn’t seen any.

“It must be all over in Czechoslovakia,” he said.

“Ja.” Wolfgang nodded. “Took longer than it should have, too.”

“Everything takes longer than it’s supposed to,” Willi said. “No matter how smart the generals are, the bastards on the other side have generals, too.”

Wolfgang laughed at him. “Generals? Smart? What have you been drinking? Whatever it is, I want some, too.”

“Oh, come on. You know what I mean. If the guys with the red stripes on their trousers”-Willi meant the General Staff-“don’t end up smarter than the generals on the other side, we’re in trouble.”

“But everybody knows the generals on the other side are a bunch of jerks,” Wolfgang said. “So how smart do our fellows need to be?”

Before Willi could answer, more panzers rumbled up. Shouting sergeants ordered them under such trees as there were. Not all of them would fit there. Soldiers spread camouflage netting over the ones that had to stay out in the open. Not many French reconnaissance planes came over, but the Wehrmacht didn’t believe in taking chances when it didn’t have to.

Wolfgang Storch pointed back toward the French soldiers they’d been watching. “Hope those assholes don’t hear the racket and start wondering what’s up.”

“Don’t worry about it,” Willi told him. They laughed. Why not? Their side was doing things. The enemy was sitting around. If the French had no stomach for a fight but one came to them anyway…

* * *

“Burn everything,” Sergeant Demange said. “When we pull back into France, we want the Germans to remember we were here.” The cigarette in the corner of his mouth jerked up and down as he spoke.

One of the guys in Luc Harcourt’s squad splashed kerosene against the side of a barn. Luc grabbed a burning stick from the cookfire and touched it to a wet place. He had to jump back, or the flames might have got him. The barn sent a black plume of smoke into the leaden sky.

Other soldiers were torching the farmhouse near the barn. “Hey, Sergeant?” Luc called.

Demange eyed him as if he were a chancre on humanity’s scrotum. But then, Demange looked at everybody and everything that way. “What do you want, kid?” he said. Make it good, or else lurked menacingly under the words.

“If we’re doing everything we can to hurt the Boches, how come we’re pulling out, not going forward?” As far as Luc could see, the whole halfhearted invasion was nothing but a sad, unfunny joke. Now it was ending without even a punch line.

“Well, we went in to give the Czechs a hand, oui?” the sergeant said.

“Sure,” Harcourt answered. “So?”

“So now there’s no more Czechoslovakia, so what’s the point of hanging around any longer? That’s how I heard it from the lieutenant, so that’s what the brass is saying.” Demange looked around to make sure no officers were in earshot. Satisfied, he went on, “You ask me what the real story is, we’re scared green.”

Maybe Demange would end up in trouble for defeatism if somebody reported him to the lieutenant. More likely, he’d eat the platoon commander without salt. And what he said made an unpleasant amount of sense. “We haven’t fought enough to see how tough the Nazis really are,” Luc said.

“You know that. I know that. You think the old men in the fancy kepis know that?” Demange made as if to wipe his ass, presumably with the collected wisdom of the French General Staff. “Come on, get moving!” the underofficer added. “I think you just want to stand around and gab instead of working.”

Luc liked work no better than anyone else in his right mind. Even standing around with thirty-odd kilos on his back wasn’t his idea of fun. But the fire warmed the chilly morning. He sighed as he trudged away. Pretty soon, tramping along under all that weight would warm him up, too, but not so pleasantly.

Every once in a while, somebody off in the distance would fire a rifle or squeeze off a burst from a machine gun. For the most part, though, the Germans seemed content to let the French leave if they wanted to.

Here and there, the retreating French troops passed men warily waiting in foxholes and sandbagged machine-gun nests. The rear guard would give the Boches a hard time if they were inclined to get frisky. The soldiers Luc could see looked serious about their job. They probably thought they were saving the French army from destruction. And maybe they were right.

Maybe. But it didn’t look that way now.

Luc’s company marched out of Germany at almost exactly the place where they’d gone in a month earlier. Luc eyed the customs post, now wrecked, that marked the frontier. Men had suffered there. And for what? Maybe the important people, the people who ran things, understood. Luc had no idea.

“It’s the capitalists who are making us pull out,” Jacques Vallat said. He’d been drafted out of an army factory in Lyon, and was as Red as Sergeant Demange’s eyes. “The fools are more afraid of Stalin than they are of Hitler.”

“Shut your yap, Vallat,” the sergeant said without much heat. “Just keep picking ‘em up and laying ‘em down. When you get to be a general, then you can talk politics.”

“If I get to be a general, France has more trouble than she knows what to do with,” Vallat replied.

“You said it. I didn’t.” Demange might have come out of an auto factory in Lyon himself. He showed no weariness, or even strain. By the way he marched, he could have tramped across France with no more than some gasoline and an oil change or two.

Luc wished he had that endless, effortless endurance. He was a lot harder than he had been when he got drafted, but he knew he couldn’t match the sergeant. Demange was a professional, a mercenary in the service of his own country. With a white kepi on his head, he wouldn’t have been out of place in the Foreign Legion.

“Back in France,” Paul Renouvin said. “Funny-it doesn’t look any different. Doesn’t feel any different, either.”

“Oh, some, maybe,” Luc said. “When I camp tonight, I won’t have the feeling some bastard’s watching me from the bushes.”

“No, huh? You don’t think the Germans’ll sneak after us?” Paul said.

“Merde!” Luc hadn’t thought of that. He’d figured that, once the French pulled back from Germany, the Boches would leave them alone. Why not? The Germans had pretty much left them alone while they were inside Germany.

“We’re going to pay for this,” Jacques Vallat predicted. “We had our chance, and we didn’t grab it. Now they’re done in Czechoslovakia. Where do they go next?”

“Didn’t I tell you once to shut up?” Sergeant Demange’s voice stayed flat, but now it held a certain edge. “You want to go pissing and moaning, go piss and moan to the captain.”

“He’d throw me in the stockade,” Vallat said with gloomy certainty.

“You’d deserve it, too,” Demange said. “Running your mouth when you don’t know shit…But if you’re in the stockade, you can’t do anything useful. Tonight, you fill up everybody’s canteen.”

Jacques’ sigh was martyred. Everyone took turns at the different fatigue duties. That one was more fatiguing than most. And the men had already been marching all day. Not that the day was very long. Darkness came early, and with it rain. Luc’s helmet kept the water off his head, and the greatcoat let him stay pretty dry, but marching through rain and deepening twilight wasn’t his cup of tea.

But tents and hot food and strong coffee waited for the soldiers who’d withdrawn from Germany. It wasn’t as good as ending up in bed with a pretty girl-but what was? Nobody was shooting at him. He had a full belly, and he was warm. When you were a soldier, that seemed better than good enough.

* * *

Peggy Druce had hot food, even if most of it was boiled potatoes and turnips. She had coffee. The Germans insisted it was the same stuff they drank. If it was, she pitied them. Nobody was shooting at her. She’d never thought she would have to worry about that…till the day she did.

She was a neutral, which meant the Germans treated her better than the English and French they’d also caught at Marianske Lazne. She got plenty of potatoes and turnips and godawful coffee. They had enough to keep body and soul together, but not much more. And if she were a Jew…

Till the war started, she’d looked down her snub nose at Jews. If you weren’t one, you did. She’d taken it for granted, the same way she’d taken for granted that nothing bad could ever happen to her. She was an American. She had money. She had looks.

Shells didn’t care. Neither did machine-gun bullets. She’d seen things at Marianske Lazne she wouldn’t forget as long as she lived. (And she wouldn’t call the place Marienbad any more, even if that was easier to say. The Germans used the old name anew. If they did, she wouldn’t.)

Not all of what she wished she could forget came during the bombardment, or when she was bandaging wounded afterwards.

Quite a few Jews had been stuck in the resort with everybody else. The ones who were foreign nationals aimed their passports at the Nazis the way you’d aim a crucifix at a vampire. Peggy had no idea whether crucifixes worked; in that part of Europe, some people might. But the passports did. By their growls, the German soldiers and the SS men who followed them into Marianske Lazne might have been Dobermans brought up short by their chains. However much they growled, though, they treated Jews who weren’t from Czechoslovakia no worse than any other foreign nationals they’d nabbed.

Jews who were from Czechoslovakia…Peggy shuddered at the memories. Jews from Czechoslovakia were basically fair game. It wasn’t so much that the Blackshirts kicked some of them around for the fun of it. It wasn’t even that the soldiers set others to scrubbing sidewalks with toothbrushes.

No. It was the way the Germans grinned when they did it. Peggy had had the misfortune to watch several SS men surround a plump, dignified, bearded, middle-aged Jew. The Jew wore ghetto attire: black trousers, long black coat, broad-brimmed black hat. In color, his clothes matched the Nazis’ uniforms.

Which did him less than no good at all. One of the Blackshirts grabbed his hat and scaled it. He might have been a nasty kid on a schoolyard flinging another boy’s cap. He might have been, yes, if he and his buddies didn’t carry pistols and have the might of a mechanized army behind them. A schoolboy could punch another schoolboy in the nose. The Jew would have been committing suicide if he tried.

He just stood there, hoping they’d go away now that they’d had their sport. No such luck. A different SS man pulled out a big pair of pinking shears. He went to work on the Jew’s beard. If he got some cheek or nose or ear while he did his barbering, that was part of the fun.

And the Jew just went on standing there. The look in his eyes was a million years old. It said his ancestors had been through this before, again and again. It said he hadn’t done anything to deserve it, but deserving had nothing to do with anything. It said…It said Father, forgive them; for they know not what they do. Yes, that was from the New Testament, but so what? After all, what was Jesus to the Romans? Just another goddamn Jew.

Later, Peggy wondered why she didn’t charge the SS bastards. I should have, she thought bitterly. Most of the time, she was somebody who went ahead first and worried about it later. Here, she only stood and watched. Maybe horror froze her. Maybe it was sheer disbelief. Could this really be happening right here before her eyes, here in Europe, cradle and beacon of civilization, here near the middle of the twentieth century?

It could. It was.

The Jew didn’t say a word as he was shorn. He didn’t flinch-much-whenever the shears drew blood. He just…looked at the SS men with those ancient, pain-filled eyes. And that didn’t do him any good, either. When the barber was satisfied with his handiwork, he hauled off and slapped the Jew, hard enough to turn his head around. Another Nazi kicked the man in the ass. That got a groan from him and doubled him over.

“Enough for now,” said the SS noncom with the shears.

“ Ja. Let’s find a fresh kike,” another Blackshirt replied.

Peggy didn’t speak a lot of German-her French was much better. She understood them, though. Off they went, laughing and joking. The worst of it was, they didn’t act like men who’d just done something evil and cruel. As far as they were concerned, this was what they’d come to Czechoslovakia to do, the same way she’d come here to take the waters.

God help them, she thought. God help us all. But God didn’t seem to be listening. Maybe He was out taking the waters somewhere Himself, or maybe He was off playing golf in Florida. He could do whatever He pleased. His Chosen People didn’t look to be so lucky.

Even after the SS men went away, Peggy’d needed all of her nerve to go up to the poor Jew they’d abused. “Can I help you?” she’d asked hesitantly-in French, thinking more German was the last thing the man would want to hear then.

He’d straightened when she spoke to him. She remembered that, and the way he’d reached up to touch the brim of his hat, only to discover it wasn’t there. Where blood running down his face and dripping from one ear didn’t, the missing hat made him grimace.

Sadly, he’d answered, “Madame, do you truly imagine anyone could help me now?” His French was gutturally accented, but at least as fluent as hers.

She hadn’t answered him. What could she have said? Yes would have been a lie, no too bitter to bear. She’d turned away instead.

And then, poor devil, he’d tried to comfort her. “When you are of my folk, Madame, you learn to expect such things now and again,” he’d said.

Again, she hadn’t answered. If he was right, that only made things worse. If he was wrong…But he wasn’t wrong, dammit. You didn’t have to like Jews-and Peggy didn’t, not especially-to know they’d been getting the shitty end of the stick for the past 2,000 years. Had they ever got so much of it as the Nazis seemed to want to dish out, though?

People here in this camp claimed the Luftwaffe made a point of pounding Jewish districts in Prague and Brno and other Czech cities. Others said that was a bunch of hooey-nothing but stale propaganda. Peggy didn’t know for sure; she hadn’t been in any of those places while German bombers flew overhead. But she had no doubts at all about which way she’d bet.

One day, a uniformed German official-was there any other kind these days?-assembled the interned neutrals and harangued them in his language. Even though Peggy spoke some German, she couldn’t follow word one. The big, beefy fellow had an accent she’d never heard before and hoped she never heard again.

“He has to come from somewhere near the Swiss border,” a man standing near Peggy said to his wife. Peggy had guessed they were Belgians, but maybe they were from the French-speaking part of Switzerland.

Then the official switched to French. He had a devil of an accent there, too, but Peggy could understand him: he slowed down to speak a language foreign to him. “Now that the fighting is over, we are arranging transport to neutral destinations for you all. There will be railroad service into Romania in the near future, as soon as lines through Slovakia are repaired.”

Quite a few people looked happy: Romanians, Bulgarians, Yugoslavs, Greeks. A lot of wealthy Balkans types came up to Czechoslovakia for the waters. It was the kind of thing their parents would have done in 1914. Some of those parents would have been citizens of Austria-Hungary Even the ones who weren’t, even the ones who hated it, would have been cultural satellites of the Hapsburg empire. That ramshackle state was twenty years dead now, carved up like a Christmas goose. But its influence lingered even though it was gone.

The Nazi official started over one more time, in what he fondly imagined to be English. Peggy raised her hand, then waved it. “Question, please!” she called in French.

“Yes?” The German didn’t looked pleased at being interrupted.

“Suppose we don’t want to go to Romania?”

“It is being arranged that you should go there,” he replied, as if her desires were as distant and unimportant as the canals of Mars.

“But I don’t want to.” Peggy never liked it when anybody tried to arrange her life for her. One reason she loved her husband was that he had sense enough to stay out of her way. She went on, “I’m an American. I want to go up to Poland or Sweden or Norway, where it’s easier to find a ship for the United States.”

“If the Fuhrer ’ s government has arranged that you should go to Romania, to Romania you will go.” The German official might have said, Sunrise tomorrow is at half past seven. He would have sounded no more certain about that.

Which only proved he’d never had anything to do with Peggy Druce. “No,” she said.

Had he worn a monocle, it would have fallen out. His eyes opened that wide. “Who do you think you are, to challenge the carefully arranged”-he liked that word-“plans of the Reich?”

“I’m an American citizen,” Peggy said. St. Paul could have sounded no prouder proclaiming that he was a citizen of Rome. If the Germans didn’t worry about doughboys coming Over There-well, Over Here-they’d forgotten about 1918.

Maybe Mr. Beefy had. “You are not in America now,” he reminded her. “We are obliged to repatriate you as we can. We are not obliged to be convenient for you.” By the way he said it, he would drive fifty miles out of his way to be inconvenient for her.

“You won’t even let me buy a train ticket for somewhere I want to go? You won’t even let me spend my own money?” Peggy had trouble believing that. People always wanted you to spend your money. That had been her experience for as long as she’d had money to spend.

But the Nazi’s nasty smile said he was going to tell her no. It also made Peggy give back an even nastier smile: the bastard had some of the worst teeth she’d ever seen. “You will go where we want you to go when we want you to go there. We will tell you how to go. This is to prevent espionage, you understand. We are at war.”

“Certainement,” Peggy replied. “If I told you where to go and how to get there, you would need to pack for a mighty warm climate. You can count on that.”

The German official looked puzzled. So did her fellow internees. None of the handful of other Americans seemed to speak French well enough to understand what she’d just told him. The Europeans, most of whom knew French at least as well as she did, didn’t get the American idiom. Bound to be just as well.

Romania! She threw up her hands. If she’d wanted to visit Romania, she would have gone there. Or she’d thought so, anyhow. Now she looked to be on her way whether she wanted to go or not.

* * *

Back in the Ussr. Sergei Yaroslavsky didn’t realize how lucky he was to have got out of Czechoslovakia in one piece till he found out how many aircrews and bombers hadn’t. The Nazis had far better planes, and far more of them, than they’d shown in Spain.

Even trying to learn what had happened to the fellows you didn’t see at the airstrip near Kamenets-Podolsk was risky. Ask too many questions, or the wrong questions, or even the right questions of the wrong people, and you’d end up in a camp. Over the past couple of years, generals-marshals!-had disappeared or been shot for treason after show trials. The NKVD wouldn’t blink at gobbling up a junior officer.

The Fascists could kill you. So could your own side. With the Fascists, it wasn’t personal. You were just an enemy. To your own side, you were a traitor. They’d put you over a slow fire and make you suffer.

Most of what Sergei knew about the missing crews, he knew because of Anastas Mouradian. Sergei still didn’t like people from the Caucasus for beans, but they had their uses. In a Soviet Union dominated by Russians (and by Jews, Yaroslavsky added to himself), the southern peoples had to stick together to survive, much less get ahead. They had their own built-in underground, so to speak.

And so the copilot knew to whom he could talk and how much he could say. He had reasonable confidence what he said wouldn’t go past the person he said it to. And Armenians and Georgians and such folk were like Jews: they…knew things. You never could tell how they knew, but they did.

One bomber had crash-landed in Poland. The pilot saved his crew, though the Poles interned them. Had the story ended there, Sergei would have been glad to hear it. If your plane had battle damage or mechanical failure, you just hoped you could walk away from the landing. But things took an ugly turn.

In a low voice, Mouradian said, “The families…” and shook his head.

Sergei needed no more than that to understand what was going on. “Camps?” he asked, dismally sure he knew the answer.

“Da.” Anastas Mouradian looked faintly pained that the pilot even needed to say the word. To Russians, Armenians and Georgians seemed sneaky, subtle, devious bastards. You never could trust them. Till now, Sergei had never wondered how he might seem to Anastas. Like a dim backwoods bumpkin? He wouldn’t have been surprised.

He wasn’t surprised to hear the aircrew’s families had been seized, either. If you didn’t come back to the Rodina -the motherland-the NKVD would figure you didn’t want to. Battle damage? Mechanical failure? The secret police wouldn’t give a rat’s ass about any of that. They’d scent treason whether it was there or not. And everybody knew treason was contagious. Whether the bomber crew caught it from their families or spread it to them, the families would have to be cauterized.

NKVD men got paid to think like that. Ordinary Soviet citizens had to, if they wanted to stay…well, not safe-nobody was safe-but somewhere close, anyhow.

“Bozhemoi,” Sergei muttered. “You’re sure?”

Mouradian’s dark, bushy eyebrows leapt reproachfully. “If I say something happened, it happened.” His voice went hard and flat. “Yob tvoyu mat’,” he added-literally, I fuck your mother. As always, tone and emphasis were everything when you said something like that. Said another way, it would have started a fight. But he meant something more like I shit you not.

“All right, all right. I believe you,” Yaroslavsky said. “It just…gets to you sometimes, you know?”

“Nichevo,” Anastas answered. Everybody in the USSR, Russian or not, used and understood that word. What can you do? or It can’t be helped fit too many Soviet scenarios, as it had in the days of the Tsars. Somebody once said Russian peasants ran on cabbage, vodka, and nichevo.

At a pinch, Sergei supposed you could do without cabbage.

As he had before, Mouradian looked around again. His voice dropped again: “You don’t want to tell this to the Chimp. He used to drink with the bombardier on the plane that went down.”

“He drank with everybody,” Sergei said. Sure as hell, Ivan Kuchkov ran on vodka.

“Just keep quiet. He may find out about it anyway, but better he doesn’t find out from you,” Anastas Mouradian said.

“Right.” Sergei nodded. If Ivan found out his drinking buddy was interned and the man’s family off to the gulag, he’d want to break something…or somebody. He’d get drunk, which wouldn’t make him any cheerier. And he’d babble about where he got the news. All of that could easily add up to trouble. Maybe changing the subject was a good idea: “Hear anything about when we’ll start flying again?”

“Not supposed to be too long,” the copilot said. “But who knows what that means?”

“Right,” Yaroslavsky repeated. Like old Russia, the new USSR always ran late. Five-Year Plans were trying to drag the Soviet Union into a consciousness of time like that in the West. Clocks sprouted everywhere, like toadstools. But with a language where the verb to be had no present tense, how far could the apparatchiks go with their changes?

Sergei thanked the God in Whom he wasn’t supposed to believe that that was somebody else’s worry. He just had to follow orders and not think too much. He was sure he could manage that.

A corporal in the groundcrew came over to him. “Sir, Captain Kuznetsov wants to see you right away.”

“I’m coming.” Yaroslavsky couldn’t suppress a nasty twinge of fear. “Did he say why?” he asked. Was he bound for Siberia? Did Kuznetsov get a command to take him out and shoot him? Sometimes following your own orders and not thinking too much wouldn’t save you. Sometimes nothing would.

But the corporal shook his head. “No, sir. Only that he wants to see you.”

“I serve the Soviet Union!” Sergei hurried off toward the captain’s tent. Anastas Mouradian nodded to him as he went. Something glinted in the Armenian’s dark eyes. Sympathy? Anastas was no fool. He knew all the things that could happen. He knew they could happen to him, too. The corporal, by contrast, was too dumb and too stolid ever to get in trouble.

When Sergei ducked into the tent, he was relieved to see no uniformed strangers standing next to Captain Kuznetsov, who sat at a rickety table doing paperwork by the light of a kerosene lamp. Kuznetsov looked up and set down his pen. “Ah. Yaroslavsky.” His tone could have meant anything-or nothing.

Sergei saluted. “Reporting as ordered, sir.” If he was going down, he’d go down with style. Not that that would do him any goddamn good, either.

“Da,” Kuznetsov said, again with nothing special in his voice. Then he went on, “Make sure you and your airplane are ready to fly out of here first thing tomorrow morning.”

“Yes, sir!” Sergei couldn’t keep the relief from his voice. An order that was a real order! “Uh, sir…Where are we flying to?”

“To Drisa, northwest of Polotsk,” Captain Kuznetsov answered. “It’s right near the Polish and Lithuanian borders-and it’s about as close to East Prussia as we can get while we stay in the Rodina.”

“I see.” Yaroslavsky wondered if he did. “Will we be flying against Germany again, then, sir?”

“We have no orders for that at the present time,” his superior said. He didn’t go on to say whether he thought it was likely or unlikely. Sergei didn’t presume to press him, either. If you gave an opinion that turned out to be wrong, somebody would make you pay for it. If you kept your mouth shut, no one could pin anything on you.

Along with the rest of the SB-2s in the squadron (except for one grounded by bad hydraulics), Sergei’s flew out at first light the next morning. Ivan Kuchkov was badly hung over. Yaroslavsky wouldn’t have wanted to fly like that, not with the two big engines throbbing and growling away. Nothing the bombardier could do about it, though, not unless he wanted to try his luck with the stockade-or, more likely, the NKVD. If Kuchkov complained, the engines’ thrum kept anybody else from hearing him.

Russia scrolled along below the bomber: farmland and forest and swamp, with here and there a town looking all but lost in the vastness of the landscape. Puddles in the Pripet Marshes reflected the gray sky. Mouradian minded the map and made sure the bomber didn’t stray too far west and end up in Polish airspace. Sergei wasn’t afraid of what the Poles would do to him. They flew nothing close to the deadly German Messerschmitts. But what his own superiors would do to him for screwing up didn’t bear thinking about.

“Drisa’s in Byelorussia, yes?” Mouradian asked.

“Yes,” Sergei agreed.

The Armenian sighed. “They’ll talk like the Devil’s uncle, then.”

Russians didn’t have any trouble following Byelorussian. Russians could follow Ukrainian, which differed more from their language. And of course Byelorussians and Ukrainians had to understand Russian. But Anastas Mouradian had learned it in school. He spoke well, and understood standard Russian well. Its cousins, though, weren’t open books to him, the way they were to Sergei.

North of the Pripet Marshes, patches of snow started showing up on the ground. It would be colder here. Sergei suspected he would spend a lot of time in his flight suit. Leather and fleece that could keep out the cold at 8,000 meters could do the same against even the Russian winter.

He landed the SB-2 on a dirt strip outside of Drisa-an unprepossessing place if ever there was one. His teeth clicked together when the plane touched down. The runway was anything but smooth. He didn’t bite his tongue, though. And the SB-2 was built to take it. As he brought the bomber to a stop, he wondered how much it would have to take, and how soon.